{"id":769,"date":"2026-09-15T20:10:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/?p=769"},"modified":"2026-09-23T19:47:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T19:47:27","slug":"the-seven-or-eight-deaths-of-stella-fortuna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/?p=769","title":{"rendered":"The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna"},"content":{"rendered":"
Advisory: this passage contains abusive language and a dream sequence with an imagined sexual assault.<\/pre>\n
from The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna<\/em><\/h3>\n
Youth (The Fifth Death)<\/p>\n
by Juliet Grames<\/p>\n
THE\u00a0 FIFTH DEATH BEGAN IN A DREAM.<\/p>\n
One July morning in 1941, in the hanging lavender of predawn, Stella Fortuna rose from the bed she shared with Tina, leaving her sister to her last minutes of wet late-sleep snoring before their grueling day in the tobacco fields.<\/p>\n
Stella took their ceramic washbasin to the kitchen, filled it with warm water, and brought it back to their nightstand. This was the girls’ beauty area, safe from the hectic imperialism of the boys’ barging and odors. This morning in her dream-for this was a dream-Stella watched her own face in the scuffed blue mirror nailed to the wall above the basin as she guided her washcloth over the areas that needed the most attention. She didn’t recognize herself, but that didn’t seem strange.<\/p>\n
She only realized the man had entered her room when she heard the door tick closed. At first she was annoyed; she wrapped one arm across her breasts and cupped the washcloth between her legs, waiting for the man to apologize and depart. He did not-he stood solidly, his outstretched arms creating a cage between Stella and the door. In that moment, she understood he was not in her room by accident.<\/p>\n
Stella called out, “Tina!” The tenement walls, so permeable when her brothers were shouting, seemed to absorb her voice. “Tina!” But Tina was not there-something that would only ever happen in a dream.<\/p>\n
The man lifted a finger to his lips. He was a gray shadow in the stingy light, but his black irises were shiny. Stella felt a cool ripple under the skin of her buttocks, where his gaze had fixed. She was helplessly exposed.<\/p>\n
Racked by trembles of revulsion, her naked dream body buckled uncontrollably. (In the real world, her sleeping self spasmed, kicking Tina hard in the thigh.) The man crossed the floorboards that separated them, his calloused palms encasing her. The touch was sickening but sensual; Stella felt a tingle of response in her flesh. At the same time, her stomach began to throb, low and tight behind the suture scars. No man with a calloused hand had ever touched her skin like that. How did her dream self know what that touch felt like?<\/p>\n
He gripped her shoulder, turning her toward him. She tried to resist, but her limbs were sleep-paralyzed, disobedient. She mashed her concealing arm so tightly against her chest that one of her breasts was forced out from under it. In sickened dismay she saw her areola spring free, her frightened nipple curling inward.<\/p>\n
Her fear rallied her. Not bothering to hide her nudity anymore, she shoved him away with all her might. There was nowhere else to go, so she climbed into the window frame. She parted her legs for the shortest possible interval, then quickly crouched into herself, enduring the unfamiliar sensation of air sweeping over her most private skin. The man was shaking his head, stepping toward her again. Everything was wrong, so wrong, perversely wrong. His hands closed around her arm.<\/p>\n
Her vision was whited out by panic. She struck out and lost her balance, felt herself tumble sideways. Her chin hit the floor and her jaw jammed up into her skull, teeth singing with the reverberation. The hands tightened, arid she screamed. The world was invisible; she could only feel\u2014hands on her arms, then her leg, the beads of blood rising, the bruises beginning to form. The dream shattered. She was awake.<\/p>\n
The dim early morning in the bedroom was the exact same lavender\u00a0it had been in her dream; Stella’s senses stuttered. “Tina!” <\/em>Her father’s bellow. “What the hell are you doing ?'” <\/em>Above her, curling rags ringing her sister’s swollen face. The fallen rod on the floor by her legs; one blue cotton curtain threaded through the two sisters’ arms.<\/p>\n
Stella felt her shoulder muscles constrict around the pain in her socket. She realized the hands clenching her arm were not the dream-rapist’s but her sister’s, gripping so fiercely she left white ovals in the shiny pink of Stella’s burn scar. Stella reached up to touch her jaw, and the skin leapt with fiery tenderness.<\/p>\n
Her father’s silhouette crossed the shadowy room. “You little bitch.” He hooked his elbow around Tina’s neck and Tina went careening toward the wall, catching herself against the bed just in time to receive the back of his hand across her face. “Little whore. What the hell were you thinking?”<\/p>\n
Tina sobbed, incoherent. Stella lay dazed on the floor by the window, her body surveying its various pains: the bruises on her arm, her tailbone, her cheek; the bleeding open skin in her gums; the torn feeling in her.shoulder. Their father loomed, enraged as ever, waiting, exhaling wet, irregular breaths into his mustache. Long seconds passed as Tina gasped and coughed into her nightgown. She was not going to answer.<\/p>\n
Antonio turned on Stella. “What the hell is going on?”<\/p>\n
Stella pushed herself up to feel the flat safety of the wall against her <\/strong>back. She tasted blood, and located with her tongue the fissures where teeth had been.<\/p>\n
“She tried to push you out the window?”<\/p>\n
Tina’s head popped up, and she lifted an arm to protect her teary face. “No, Papa, she was trying to jump out the window. She was going to kill herself. I was just-”<\/p>\n
“You shut up!” Antonio was leonine, roaring, his curling hair wild in shadowy silhouette. “Stella, I asked you did she try to push you out the window? You were fighting?”<\/p>\n
Stella’s stomach rippled, a residue of the trapped feeling from her dream. “No.” Speaking was difficult; her mouth was swelling fast. “No, Papa, it was a dream.”<\/p>\n
“A dream? A dream?”<\/em><\/p>\n
Stella swallowed a mouthful of blood. “A bad dream.” She felt the burly arms closing around her naked rib cage again. “There was a … a bad man, and I was trying to get away.”<\/p>\n
“She was going to jump out the window, and I stopped her,” Tina put in. “She was about to fall, and I pulled her back down.”<\/p>\n
From Antonio’s disgusted expression, Stella could tell he didn’t quite believe them. “What kind of idiot are you, Stella?” he said finally, still loud enough to be heard clown the hall. “You going to kill yourself over a bad dream?”<\/p>\n
A sunflower of yellow fury burst in her mind, and she blurted, “A man came into this room to rape me, Papa.” The word “rape” had the effect she intended; Antonio’s forehead tightened in a fur of eyebrows. She stood, pulling down her nightgown and rubbing her sore shoulder.<\/p>\n
“I was scared to death. I have a right to get away from a man who’s trying to rape me.”<\/p>\n
Stella could see that Antonio was turning this over. She forced herself to meet his eye steadily.<\/p>\n
“Ah, mannaggia.” <\/em>If he was swearing, the violence was over. “What was all the screaming?”<\/p>\n
“That was Stella,” Tina said. “That’s what woke me up, thanks to God, or I wouldn’t have seen her about to fall out the window.”<\/p>\n
Assunta came into the tiny bedroom then; her field kerchief already knotted over her hair. “What’s happening? What’s the matter?”<\/p>\n
Tina had conquered her tears. “Stella dreamed she got raped, Ma. She tried to jump out the window.”<\/p>\n
“Raped?” Her mother’s voice was shrill enough to cut through Stella’s nausea.<\/p>\n
“It was a dream, Ma.”<\/p>\n
“Who was it?” Assunta was patting Stella on her shoulder and breasts, verifying she was still intact. “Yes, who was it?” Tina echoed.<\/p>\n
The sisters’ eyes caught like magnets. The sparkle in Tina’s eyes struck Stella as lascivious. She averted her gaze, stared into her lap at the bruised heel of her left hand. This was the kind of conversation that could escape her control.<\/p>\n
“Who was it?” Tina said again. She had never been artful in her voyeurism. “Was it a colored man?”<\/p>\n
At the words “colored man” the dream appeared again in Stella’s mind’s eye. She saw the rapist’s dark eyes flashing, the stretch of flannel over his shoulders. And the words were right there; it was so easy to deflect the truth, she did what so many other Italian Americans before and after her have done: she blamed a black man. “Yes,” she said. “A colored man.”<\/p>\n
“Who?” Excited, Tina knelt beside Stella, clasping her shoulders.<\/p>\n
“Was it the delivery man from the shop?”<\/p>\n
“Was it one of the Jamaicans from the truck?” her mother suggested.<\/p>\n
“Was it that man Donny?”<\/p>\n
“No.” Stella felt sick enough already from this ordeal; she didn’t want to think about what would happen if her mother and sister fixed on a name for the imaginary culprit. “Just some regular colored man.”<\/p>\n
Antonio began to shout again. “You’re never to talk to colored men. If I catch-”<\/p>\n
“Papa!” <\/em>The room fell silent at her shout, and Stella was relieved. She was on the verge of vomiting. “Get out of our room. We have to get ready for work now, or we’ll miss the truck.”<\/p>\n
For a moment, Antonio looked like he might raise his hand to show her what speaking like that to her father got her. Instead he turned for the door, and Assunta followed, sniffling faithfully. As Tina closed the door behind them, their father called, “I’m gonna nail that window shut.”<\/p>\n
As the sisters stood near the blue mirror, Tina dabbing at the cut on Stella’s cheek with the wet washcloth, Tina whispered, “Tell me the truth, Stella. Who was it? Was it Donny?”<\/p>\n
“I don’t know who it was, Tina,” Stella lied. “Stop asking.”<\/p>\n
She dressed as quickly as possible, trying not to feel the rapist’s eyes on her naked back. What she didn’t tell Tina was that the man in the dream\u2014a dream she would relive again and again over the next decade, a dream that would terrorize her sleeping patterns and haunt her waking relationships\u2014the man in that dream who had pinned her naked in the bedroom window hadn’t been a colored man at all. It had been her father.<\/p>\n
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\nTHAT WAS THE FIFTH TIME Stella Fortuna almost died\u2014that was the time she almost committed suicide by jumping out of a third-story window.<\/p>\n
The first time Stella had the nightmare was in the summer of 1941, eighteen months after she arrived in Hartford. Those eighteen months had been the easiest and the hardest of Stella’s life.<\/p>\n
Tony Fortuna, as he was known here, lived in a tenement apartment in downtown Hartford, not the house he had promised his wife. The apartment consisted of a living room; a kitchen with a gas stove, which had to be explained; and three narrow bedrooms. There was no garden anywhere on the street\u2014nowhere to grow tomatoes. Assunta had to buy them from the peddlers who parked their wooden carts along Front Street.<\/p>\n
Tony said the tenement arrangement was temporary. There was a house he was going to buy on Bedford Street, in a nicer part of the Italian East Side. The owner, an old Napolitano, had promised to give Antonio two years to save up the agreed-upon two thousand dollars. “He likes me,” Antonio said. “He trusts me.”<\/p>\n
In some ways America was better than Ievoli, even if it wasn’t what Stella had been imagining. In the bathroom was a toilet with a flush; water was somehow pumped all the way up to the third floor and swirled everything away. They ate meat twice a week\u2014Tony insisted. Assunta had no experience with cooking meat; she had never eaten beef in her life before arriving in America. Pina Cardamone, Zu Tony’s wife, accompanied the Fortuna women to the frightening huge grocery store and showed them how to pick from the pink and red orgy of dead flesh at the butcher counter. Za Pina taught Assunta and Tina how to pan-fry a beefsteak and oven-fry pounded chicken cutlets. At first the meat menus were nerve-racking\u2014one small mistake would ruin the whole expensive piece, and Assunta cooked in fear of Tony taking the strap to her. But she acclimated. She was an excellent cook, because she liked to eat and knew how to taste. Tina was another natural cook and would make some man a good wife\u2014Za Pina liked to repeat that, especially and pointedly in Stella’s hearing. Stella smiled and waved Za Pina off\u2014she didn’t let the teasing get to her. But she wasn’t going to fry a beefsteak no matter how many blood vessels Za Pina burst trying to teach her.<\/p>\n
The other zia <\/em>who came over to give them lessons was Filomena Nicotera. She tried to coach the Fortunas through her U.S.- citizenship handbook; she and her husband, Zu Aldo, ran a delivery service and their English was very good. She was frequently accompanied by her daughter, Carolina, who was sixteen. Carolina Nicotera had a pointy chin and flashing dark eyes, which she rolled in an American fashion at her pushy mother. Carolina bundled Stella and Tina up in woolly scarves and took them on excursions along Front Street, teaching them the rules. She brought them a bottle of nail polish and showed them how to cut their cuticles.<\/p>\n
Luigi was enrolled in an American school. Schooling was mandatory here until age sixteen\u2014Stella couldn’t even imagine what children could study for that long. Lui was so small that it was months before he realized he was two years older than most of his second-grade classmates. He was “Louis Fortuna” now, but in American, the nickname “Louie” sounded just like what they had always called him anyway.<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
THE WINTER IN HARTFORD was like nothing Stella had ever imagined. It snowed almost every day, fat white clusters so heavy-looking, Stella couldn’t understand why it took them so long to fall out of the sky. From their drafty bedroom the girls watched a burly ragged man with a plywood board sweep snow off the buckling roofs of the shanties in the back lot.<\/p>\n
Closed off in the dingy little apartment, Stella sought distractions from her intense homesickness. She was cold and miserable and she missed her grandmother, her ciucciu, <\/em>her sweet little house on the top of the mountain. Her chest ached with longing\u2014sometimes her throbbing heart felt so sore she would have to lie down to catch her breath. But she couldn’t let her mother or siblings know. If she didn’t hold it together, none of the others would be able to, and she’d be blunting their progress into their new life. She corralled her brothers into playing card games at the kitchen table, where it was warmer than the sitting room. She organized Assunta and Tina into crocheting blankets with her to supplement the meager cotton ones Tony had on the beds. She tried to keep them all chatting so their minds wouldn’t dwell on what they’d left behind; when she couldn’t think of anything to talk about, she sang songs Nonna Maria had taught her, hoping her mother and sister would join in; if her throat was too constricted to sing, she hummed.<\/p>\n
The cold was unrelenting, and noses were always running. Stella learned about the unrelievable misery of chapped nostrils, endemic in Hartford in February and March. The air was not the same air she had breathed in Ievoli\u2014it pierced her lungs and her throat when she inhaled. It carried illnesses the Fortunas had never suffered before\u2014coughing that sounded like the barking of a dog; sweating fevers that lasted for four days, head-clouding pain behind the eyes. Strangers coughed their diseases into the air at church, on the bus, in the streets, filling the wind with the malice of their individual suffering.<\/p>\n
None of the Fortuna children owned clothing that was warm enough. Their first month, January 1940, was a parade of visits from cousins and paesan, <\/em>people Tony knew from Sacred Heart Church and the Italian Society. Women brought bags of old clothes, coats, mittens, sweaters. Wearing secondhand dresses made Stella concentrate on how much her life had changed. The fabrics had been stitched together by machines, sized to fit someone else; they were tight around the shoulders or long in the arms. They were old, something someone else had thrown away, but they were still nicer than anything she had owned.<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
IN THE NINE YEARS SINCE the Fortunas had last seen Tony, Assunta and her children had been poor but free; now they were prisoners of his will and whims. Tony had all the money; he was the only one who could speak English; he controlled every aspect of their lives.<\/p>\n
Stella had never taken to being controlled by anyone, ever since she was a little girl and had told her Za Violetta she didn’t respect her. Stella Fortuna was a grown-up woman now but clung to the same basic beliefs about who was worth her respect. Her father did not meet the\u00a0requirements. He drank, he shouted, he was secretive about his comings and goings.<\/p>\n
“What did you bring us here for?” Stella would shout at her father during their many rows. She fought back her fear of him and gave him lip whenever she could, for the sake of morale. “You lock us up all day like prisoners. You took us away from our home, our paese, <\/em>our nonna, <\/em>our relatives and friends, why? What was it all for?”<\/p>\n
Antonio never answered her question. He would smack her face or her ass and tell her to shut up. Or he would say offhandedly, “If you like it so much better there, why don’t you go back?” But of course that wasn’t an option. Italy was at war; the Fortunas had escaped just in time.<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
TONY’S PRESENCE MADE THEM ALL NERVOUS. Assunta would crack her children on the behind with her fat wooden spoon if they broke one of her rules, but it was dispassionate justice and they always knew they deserved it. Tony’s justice was mystical and anything but dispassionate, especially when he was drinking.<\/p>\n
There was relief on the two nights a week, on average, that Tony didn’t come home at all.<\/p>\n
The first time was in late January, when Assunta and her children had been living in Hartford for four weeks. Assunta had fixed sup-per and they’d waited for Tony. When he hadn’t come home by nine o’clock, Assunta gave up and served the cooled pasta. The children ate quickly. When the boys had cleaned their plates, Stella sent them to bed. Normally Giuseppe would have made trouble, but tonight they just filed out, taking the kitchen radio with them.<\/p>\n
“Where’s Papa?” Tina asked again when the boys were gone\u2014she had asked four times already, as if Stella knew anything more than she did.<\/p>\n
She suppressed her irritation with her sister. This wasn’t Tina’s fault.<\/p>\n
“Don’t worry about Papa,” Stella said.\u00a0 I’m sure he’s fine. He’s a big man.” She watched her mother eat the last pieces of macaroni. Assunta’s cheeks were wet, but her eyes were small and angry. Stella picked at her ugly memory from the summer when she was nine years old\u2014watching as her father mounted her mother from behind, grunting like an animal. She shut the memory off before it could run its full course. How had this man, with such manly appetites, made do in the decade he’d spent away from his wife? The thing Stella must have already known in the back of her mind clicked into place, and any sense of worry vanished.<\/p>\n
Tina was looking at her with that willfully stupid expression. She was waiting for Stella to tell her what to think, how to feel.<\/p>\n
Stella stood. “Tina, why don’t you go wash the plates now?”<\/p>\n
“But what about Papa?”<\/p>\n
“Papa can feed himself when he gets home.” Stella squeezed past her father’s empty chair. “Never mind, stay there. Sit,” she warned her mother, who had started to rise. Stella had an idea.<\/p>\n
Shivering with nerves\u2014she had never done something like this before\u2014she went into the kitchen and took down three short glasses from the cupboard and the jug of her father’s wine from the sideboard. She set the glasses on the dining room table and filled them nearly to the brim.<\/p>\n
“There,” she said.<\/p>\n
Her sister and her mother were looking at her expectantly. She knew what they were thinking\u2014What is this? We don’t do <\/em>this\u2014<\/em>because this was what men did, drinking after dinner, like smoking a pipe. Stella passed a glass to Tina and took one for herself. “Salut’,<\/em>” she said. She waited until the other women lifted their glasses, still watching her with misgiving. “Salut’,” <\/em>Stella said again, and took as large a swallow as she could. Almost immediately she felt better, as if the wine were a calming medicine.<\/p>\n
“Salut’,” <\/em>Assunta echoed, and took her own large gulp. With no reason left not to, Tina followed suit.<\/p>\n
Late into the night the women drank and played briscola. <\/em>The tension eased as the wine opened up their respective angers and affections. Stella noted the feeling of the drunkenness setting in, reveling in it as the cards became harder to count and their mistakes became increasingly funny. The dining room had ceased to feel uncomfortably cold; she now appreciated the draft, which rippled sensuously up her arms. So this is why they drink, she thought. This happy softness.<\/p>\n
“I don’t care if he wants to go see a puttana,” <\/em>Assunta said between deals. She hadn’t cried since they started on the wine. “Oh, Madonn’, you think I’m jealous of what some other woman is having done to her?”<\/p>\n
Stella would never have been able to say the words sober, but here they were, tumbling out of her mouth: “What’s it like, Mamma? When he does the job to you?”<\/p>\n
Assunta waved her hand, dispelling the unpleasant thought. “Oh, just a big hassle, you know? Part of being a wife. You gotta be there for him when he wants to do it, doesn’t matter how you’re feeling, and then sometimes it makes a baby.” Assunta was staring at the table, her eyes glazed, but she kept speaking, candidly\u2014Stella tried not to move a muscle, afraid that any disruption would make her mother clam up. “And even if you think to yourself, we have enough babies, I don’t want to be pregnant again, you can’t say no to your husband.”<\/p>\n
The candle on the table between them flickered. Stella’s heart was racing. Her imagination was damply alive with the alcohol and she couldn’t stop a progression of visions, putting herself in her mother’s place.<\/p>\n
Tina was watching her mother with wide eyes. “Does it hurt?” she blurted.<\/p>\n
“No, it doesn’t hurt,” Assunta said. “Not all the time. Only when you really don’t want to. Or sometimes it hurts when he drinks too much, or if it takes a long time.” Stella’s mother wrinkled her chapped nose. “The best husbands are the ones who finish the job fast, and whose pistola <\/em>isn’t so big, so they don’t hurt as much.” She shrugged, her sheepishness overtaking her alcoholic immunity. “But you can’t know that before you get married. You just have to take your chances.”<\/p>\n
Stella gulped down a glass of wine. She hoped she’d already taken all the chances she was going to have to in her life.<\/p>\n
By the time they finished the bottle, they were too drunk to play cards anymore. It was one in the morning and Antonio still hadn’t come home. Stella and Tina helped their mother, giggling sleepily, to her bed, then huddled together in their own\u2014the cold had seeped in again through the filmy wine-warmth. The girls whispered to each other in the dark. Tina’s breath was sweet and sour and thick; Stella wondered if her own was the same. Would Antonio beat them when he found out what they’d done? Why had he left to be with a puttana <\/em>when his wife was right here? Should Stella be happy he wasn’t bothering Assunta, or offended he had broken God’s law and chosen another woman over his wife? How grotesque, to know your husband was also doing grotesque things to another woman. Did that other woman also have his children for him?<\/p>\n
Stella thought about the money Tony must spend to keep a puttana. <\/em>How much sooner might he have brought his family to America if he had saved that money\u2014if he’d really wanted them there?<\/p>\n
The darkness shrank and bulged around her. Stella was full of the memory of that hot summer night in Ievoli, of Antonio’s naked ass thumping into Assunta’s pushed-up skirts. She felt the pinch in her groin, the blood rising under her father’s fingernails. Stella felt sick to her stomach\u2014a mixture of the wine, the memory itself, the indignity her sweet mother had endured because she owed her obedience to a brute . . . . Stella realized her thighs were throbbing; she was clenching them tightly together. That was never going to happen to her. Never.<\/p>\n
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SPRING BROKE ON 1940. Along the Fortunas’ walk to and from mass, the trees were still naked, but gray, dry bushes burst into yellow flowers, root to tip. Forsythia\u2014they were everywhere, living wildly roadside or manicured into thick, square hedges that separated the houses. Stella would learn that forsythia was how you knew winter was over in Connecticut. The spring air was still colder than Christmas back home, and Stella couldn’t believe the flowers didn’t die. But they didn’t, and they were followed by more.<\/p>\n
Home in Ievoli, Stella thought, the camellias and the daffodils would be blooming. She hoped someone picked a bouquet for Nonna Maria, who loved their smell.<\/p>\n
THERE WAS A PROBLEM WITH THE HOUSE Antonio was going to buy on Bedford Street. Although he’d been promised a terrific deal, there was no way he would ever have the two thousand dollars he needed. He made no mention of money he’d already saved before bringing his family to Hartford; Stella was certain no such money ex-isted. He made eighteen dollars a week working his construction job. The rent on the Front Street tenement was six dollars a week; one dollar went into the church basket at mass. Five dollars went into the grocery jar on the kitchen counter. Even if Antonio was putting the remaining six dollars in the bank, which Stella doubted, he would only be able to save three hundred dollars a year.<\/p>\n
His wife and children would have to find jobs.<\/p>\n
This was how Assunta, Stella, Tina, and Giuseppe found their way to the tobacco farm in the summer of 1940. Antonio’s friend Vito Aiello had worked there when he’d first arrived in the country, tenting and harvesting large-leaf shade tobacco, the kind they use for fancy cigar wrappers. In April, Antonio brought Zu Vito over for dinner to explain how it would work. They’d catch a truck on Farmington Avenue and it would take them to and from the farm, which was outside Hartford in the countryside. The tobacco season ran from May through August. Anyone could show up for fieldwork; as long as you did a good job your first day, they let you come back again.<\/p>\n
Tina cried in bed that night, little hiccupping sobs. Stella was swimming through her own confusion and dismay, thinking of the oranges she would be harvesting back home. She let Tina cry for a while, imagining the tears were tapering off, but they never did. Finally, tamping down her own nasty thoughts, Stella stroked Tina’s long hair and said, “Don’t be upset, little bug. Come on, stop crying. You’ll wear yourself out.”<\/p>\n
Tina coughed to clear her teary throat. “I thought we were going to live real nice here,” she said. “We were going to live in a nice house, have nice clothes. But instead he made us give up our own house and come live where we have to share with other people, and he made us give up our own land and come work on someone else’s farm like cafoni.” <\/em><\/p>\n
This was all true. Stella stroked her sister’s hair quietly for a few\u00a0 minutes. Don’t waste sadness on the problem, she scolded herself. Sadness is weak. Think of how to fix the problem, instead.<\/p>\n
“We’re not cafoni,” <\/em>Stella said. “It’s the opposite. Anyone can own land here in America. Yes, we’re going to work in a field, but then we’ll have money to buy our own house. All right? Forget Papa. We’re going to work hard and buy a house for Mamma.”<\/p>\n
Tina’s blubbering had stopped. Stella guessed what her sister must be thinking\u2014how surprising, the idea that girls like them, Tina and Stella, could buy a house. They had worked for chestnuts and olive oil, but they had never worked for money before.<\/p>\n
“You really think we can buy a house?” Tina said eventually. “We’re going to work really hard,” Stella said. “You know how good we are at working hard, little bug. We can do it.”<\/p>\n
“We can do it, Stella,” Tina repeated. “We’ll buy Mamma a house.”<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
EACH DAY, IN THE TWILIGHT BEFORE DAWN, Assunta, Stella, Tina, and Giuseppe walked down to Farmington Avenue and waited\u00a0with the other day laborers until the tobacco truck came; then everyone climbed up the metal steps to the flatbed and sat thigh to thigh on the splintering benches, clinging to their neighbors. The truck carried them out of Hartford on a wide, painted highway, then along narrower streets lined with magnificent houses, one after another, as if everyone here were some kind of minor nobility. And then on to the shade-leaf tobacco farms, acres of thin cotton tenting stretched between eight-foot-high stakes. In the summer breeze, the dark green leaves, wide as your hand, beat gently against the cloth cage, dancing shadows you could see from the road.<\/p>\n
The sun would just be rising as the laborers were sorted into field hands and stitchers. The fieldwork involved pulling weeds, mending tents, and harvesting mature leaves, ten hours under the beating summer sun. The air was heavier and wetter here than it had been in Ievoli, and amplified the discomfort of the heat. The shade under the tobacco tents was no relief, it was so stifling and humid. Stella’s and Tina’s smooth pink cheeks burned so badly the skin cracked and peeled off in itchy sheets. Stella learned to look out for little green snakes in the dirt and for thin-legged brown spiders, sometimes as big as her palm, nesting near the holes in the netting, where the bug hunting was best.<\/p>\n
In the barns, the leaf-stitching team sorted through the baskets brought in for drying and separated the leaves by size. Each leaf was strung into a graduated stack that would later roll into a single cigar. The foreman, who was courteous to the older ladies, never selected Assunta to do fieldwork, which was a blessing, what with her varicose veins.<\/p>\n
Everyone else waiting for the truck in the morning was black. Stella was scared almost out of her wits the first day to be surrounded by black people, and none of the Fortunas would have gotten on the truck if Vito hadn’t been there with them.<\/p>\n
“Just keep your hands and your eyes to yourself and they won’t bother you,” Vito told them. “Joe, you can take care of your mother and sisters, right?”<\/p>\n
“Yes, sir,” Giuseppe said, although he was more of a symbolic chaperone. He was seventeen and still boyishly slender.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, many of the black people were women, which was much less worrisome than being surrounded by black men, whom An-tonio had warned his wife and daughters to be very afraid of, although Stella thought if it had really been so important to her father that their virtue not be subjected to strange men, maybe he shouldn’t have made them go to work in the fields in the first place. Many of the women were friendly and tried to chat with Assunta and the girls. Some of the black ladies were not Americans, either, Stella learned. They were Jamaicans, from an island they said was hotter than the hottest day of Connecticut summer.<\/p>\n
“You make test?” Stella asked two of the ladies in the English Za Filomena had taught her. She never learned their names. “For sitizen-<\/em>scippu?”<\/em><\/p>\n
They shook their heads. They were only in America for the summer. When the tobacco season was over, they’d go back to their hot island. “That’s home, and we love it.”<\/p>\n
Stella indulged in a short, jealous fantasy in which she would sail home to Ievoli at the end of the tobacco season. “Then why you come here? If you just go back home.”<\/p>\n
The ladies laughed. “Money, girl,” the thinner one said. “Same as you.”<\/p>\n
The money in question was sixty cents a day per person, two quar-ters and a dime. The foreman paid them as they boarded the truck at the end of the day. Zu Vito had warned them they’d be easy robbery targets when they got off the truck in Hartford at sunset, obviously coming home from day labor, so they walked quickly and kept their eyes down. When they’d made it safely to the Front Street tenement, they filed through the kitchen and dropped their coins into a washed-out bean can on the narrow shelf where Assunta had perched the photo of the first Stella. When all the Fortunas had made their daily deposit in the bean bank, Stella counted up the total, making a tally mark for each accrued dollar on a paper ledger she tucked in the can. She kept the can where they could all see it to inspire them; she maintained the ledger as ostentatiously as she did so that Giuseppe\u2014or Joey, as he was going by now\u2014would know he couldn’t steal from it for candy or cigarettes.<\/p>\n
On Friday night after dinner, Stella and Tina stacked the week’s quarters and dimes and rolled them into the paper wrappers the bank gave out. There were forty quarters in a ten-dollar deposit roll, and every week the Fortunas made at least one such roll. Five-dollar rolls of dimes were rarer accomplishments, a roll every other week. On Saturdays, while her children worked a sixth day at the tobacco farm, Assunta went to the bank to make the weekly deposit in their house savings account.<\/p>\n
The whole cycle should have been miserable, toiling away in the sun to save money for the house they’d thought their father had already bought them. But … no. That sound of the coins echoing hollowly in the empty can, less and less hollowly as the can filled\u2014it had become Stella’s favorite sound. Assunta and her children were buying them-selves their own house. They were a little army led by a haphazard but lovable general, and together they were taking care of business.<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
START TO FINISH, the tobacco season lasted four months, and by the beginning of September there was no more work. Then Stella and Tina were back to being stuck in the Front Street apartment all day.<\/p>\n
To make matters worse, the news that Nonna Maria had died finally reached Hartford. It came in a letter from Antonio’s younger brother Zu Egidio, who wrote to relate his intentions to emigrate to Australia, and who in passing offered condolences. Maria must have died months earlier; Za Violetta had not gotten around to sending them a letter.<\/p>\n
As one would expect, the news was debilitating for Assunta. She had been sure that by leaving Ievoli she had written her mother’s death sentence, and now her guilt was irrefutable. She vacillated between silent, sobbing prayer and hysterical anger. In her grief, Assunta’s awe of her husband vanished. She blamed Tony for snatching her away in a time of need. She shouted into his face, and when he struck her to silence her she shouted more. The neighbors downstairs banged on their ceiling when the fighting got too loud; the blond-bunned woman who lived on the other side of the third-floor landing came over armed with a rolling pin to say she’d appreciate it if “you screaming wops” could keep it down. Assunta did not care about being called a wop, but Tony did, and it made him even angrier.<\/p>\n
Stella wanted to comfort her mother, to mourn and pray for Nonna Maria together, but she wasn’t going to step into the battle between her parents. Instead, she and Tina hid in their bedroom, crocheting and watching the shantytown dwellers move among their bonfires. Stella crossed her eyes at the dismal facades of the tenements behind the sciantinas, <\/em>pretending that beyond them on the obscured horizon was her little mountain overlooking the marina, that in a stone house at the little mountain’s peak there was a bowl of fresh olives, just harvested, sitting on the table and waiting for her to bite into their tender green flesh. Stella thought of the first Mariastella. With Nonna Maria gone, there would be no one left to remember the baby or to clean her grave.<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
STELLA ALSO RECEIVED A LETTER from Stefano’s mother in Sambiase. Stefano was still away in Africa. She begged Stella to send a letter she could save for him.<\/p>\n
Stella was torn between guilt at not having written\u2014she owed it to Stefano; he had no other girl to write to him while he was at war\u2014and misgivings about not knowing what to say to this man she had realized she would never marry. In the end she had little Louie, who had learned good penmanship in the American school, write a message for her. Dear Signora, We are praying for Stefano every day, and for your <\/em>family. We are well here but we are working hard and we think of our family in Calabria. We send you our best wishes. Sincerely, Stella Fortuna.<\/em><\/p>\n
After that, the war must have become more difficult, or perhaps the censorship was stopping communication, because the Fortunas had no other letters for a long time.<\/p>\n
[click next page to continue]<\/p>\n
\n

\nSTELLA AND TINA WERE ONLY trapped in their dingy tenement room for a few weeks before they found another job. One of their new friends from the Italian Society, a sweet, thin Pugliese girl named Fiorella Mulino, had found jobs for them in a laundry on Front Street. It was no good for Joey, because they only hired women, or for Assunta, who couldn’t be on her feet for ten hours, but Stella and Tina arrived with Fiorella the first Monday of October and the manager let them stay. They were put in Fiorella’s group, ironing and starching, up on the second floor.<\/p>\n
Instead of paying a day wage like the tobacco farms, the laundry paid by the piece, which put a kind of performance pressure on their employment. Stella liked it. Each shirt starched and ironed was worth two cents. After a frustrating first day, she got the knack\u2014dipping the shirt, stretching it across the board, pressing and alternating irons. She experimented with stroke rotations to permeate the heat more quickly and evenly through the cloth. She could fit four or even five shirts in an hour, and sometimes came home with eighty or ninety cents a day.<\/p>\n
Tina, on the other hand, did not respond well to the time pressure. She was a person who liked to do things thoroughly\u2014whatever any-one else did, Tina did it more, and harder. For example, she had once washed Assunta’s good ceramic pitcher so energetically that the handle had broken off in her hand. This aggressive task approach did not combine well with the anxiety of counting accomplishments against the clock; under pressure, Tina could not harness the required finesse. The first time she got in trouble was for a shirt so stiffly starched it had to be rolled to crack it, then sent down to the first floor and rewashed. Tina starched for four days, her face an arterial pink and streaming sweat, which descended her jaw like tears and spattered the bosom of her dress. On the fourth day, she overcompensated for her slowness by pressing too hard on the shirt she was ironing, leaving a devastating iron-shaped burn mark. The manager was enraged, but yelling at Tina was never any good, because she sobbed so thoroughly\u2014as thoroughly as she scrubbed pitchers\u2014that after a while you felt stupid yelling and ended up doing whatever you could to get her to stop. So Tina was sent home at three o’clock with no pay; she wasn’t fired, although it took Stella all evening to convince Tina she hadn’t been. Stella didn’t tell her sister that she’d given the manager the seventy-four cents she’d earned that day to pay for the ruined shirt so he wouldn’t count it against her little sister. Tina could come back to work the next day, but she had to be on the washing team on the first floor, with the Polish ladies. That was less desirable work to the Italian girls, but at least Tina couldn’t accidentally ruin anything in the washing room. Maybe with her vigor she’d be able to get some of the tougher stains out.<\/p>\n
Seeing his daughters had a taste for work, Tony harassed them to study English harder. He tried to impress them with the fiscal ad-vantage of having papers\u2014if they naturalized, they could apply for factory jobs. “I make five times as much money as you in one week,” he said.<\/p>\n
But the citizenship test was an insurmountable obstacle. Stella and Tina took turns carrying the study book around, but after months of turning the pages it was no more legible than it had been in the beginning. With much concentration, Stella could sound out the English words and guess their meanings, but Tina had had so little schooling in Ievoli that she could barely remember how any of the letters were supposed to sound even in Italian, never mind in this strange foreign language where nothing sounded the way it looked. Ten months in the United States had given them only a little English. They were surrounded by Italian speakers. Stella was shy of her accent; even when there was a chance to speak to an American\u2014say, at the store\u2014she found herself doubting words she’d been sure of a moment before, and resorted to pointing or blurting out Italian instead.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, she quizzed her sister like she used to for catechism.<\/p>\n
“You know this one,” she’d say, then read in English, ‘Where is the Statue of Liberty?”‘<\/p>\n
“I don’t know,” Tina said hopelessly.<\/p>\n
“Yes, you do! You saw it yourself.” Stella raised her arm and made a fist in the air, like the green lady with the torch. She repeated in slow English, “Statue of Liberty.”<\/p>\n
“New York!” Tina smiled. She got one!<\/p>\n
“‘What is the name of the president?”‘ Stella read out carefully.<\/p>\n
A pause for thought. “Rosa Vela,” Tina answered. This meant “pink sail” in Italian, which Stella had thought up so Tina could remember Roosevelt’s name. “Picture a fancy boat with pink sails,” Stella had suggested. “It’s so fancy the president sails on it.”<\/p>\n
But then things became very opaque, and the book’s answers didn’t help the girls understand the questions.<\/p>\n
“Why does the American flag have thirteen stripes?” Stella spread the book between them so Tina could see the picture of the flag.<\/p>\n
“What is ‘stripes’?”<\/p>\n
“Strisce.” <\/em>Stella pointed to the alternating white and gray in the sketch. Tina was silent. “It says here there are thirteen stripes because there are thirteen ‘colonies.’ ”<\/p>\n
“What is ‘colonies’?”<\/p>\n
“You know, like colonia,” <\/em>Stella said. “Cologne, perfume.” This didn’t seem right, but it was the best she had for Tina. “Maybe America has thirteen famous perfumes?”<\/p>\n
The questions only got harder, full of words Stella had never even heard the Italian equivalent of. Who wrote the Declaration of In-dependence. How can an American participate in their democracy. What is the role of Congress. Under our Constitution, what powers are given to the federal government. How many times has the Con-stituation been amended. It was very hard to help Tina memorize the answers when Stella couldn’t explain what the questions were asking. Fiorella Mulino reminded them she had passed the citizenship test by attending night school at Hartford High. Classes were free; they started at seven, so you could come after work.<\/p>\n
Stella disliked the idea of night school and would have preferred to keep trying to memorize the book on her own. She loathed putting herself in any situation where her weaknesses were on display; she also didn’t relish the nightly walk out of their ghetto of paesan, <\/em>past the shantytowns and dark alleys of lurking strangers.<\/p>\n
“I’ll escort you,” Fiorella offered. “Stella, you’re clever, you might be able to pass on your own, but Tina won’t, no matter what you do, you know that. And if you go with her to the classes maybe you can help her catch up.” She smiled slyly. “Plus, you might meet some nice boys.”<\/p>\n
“Oh, Madonn’.” Stella clasped her hands and rolled her eyes heavenward in supplication. “Please don’t put that idea in Tina’s head.”<\/p>\n
The first class they went to was on a Tuesday in mid-November. It hadn’t occurred to Stella and Tina to change out of the sweat-stiffened dresses they’d worn all day at the laundry, but after they saw how smartly some of the immigrants dressed up for class, they followed suit. The classes were boring and confusing, just like school had always been, only worse because now it was in English. Stella was often tired after a ten-hour day standing over the ironing board. But she went, feeling nagged and guilty about the money she could be earning if only she could get a better job.<\/p>\n
Joey, who was working part-time as a janitor at the Italian Society, didn’t seem to worry about his U.S. citizenship. But in general Joey didn’t worry about anything. That was his gift. Sparkly brown eyes; bright, straight teeth when he smiled; and not a care m the world.<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
AFTER THEIR FIRST AMERICAN THANKSGIVING, which they celebrated with the Nicoteras, Carolina talked Stella and Tina into cutting their hair. “You want to get it like this.” She’ reached up and patted her own curls, which radiated from her head like saints’ halos in church paintings. “And you want to get a permanent wave, if you can, so that you don’t have to mess around with curling rags every night.”<\/p>\n
“Our father likes us to wear it long,” Stella told Carolina. Tony had the notion that women with short hair were loose. They could move faster, dance more energetically without worrying about pins flying around.<\/p>\n
“But he always says how he wants you to be real Americans,” Carolina said pointedly. ” Make him look around. All the American girls have short hair. The only girls with long hair are the country girls.”<\/p>\n
Stella knew what she meant by “country girls.” There were some Italian families on Front Street who lived strictly, raising their daughters the way things had been back home\u2014ankle-length skirts, veils, arranged marriages. Tony Fortuna had his rules and became explosive if they were disobeyed, but he didn’t make the girls cover their faces to go to mass. Stella thought he was smart not to impose that kind of embarrassing stricture on his family; after all, they had lived most of their lives without him, and he didn’t want to put himself in a position where they might stand up to him. He was a disgusting person, in Stella’s opinion, but a wily despot.<\/p>\n
Stella and Tina talked it over that night as they were combing out before bed. It was weird to think about parting with all that hair\u2014the marker of their femininity. But Stella didn’t want to be lumped in with the “country girls” anymore. Of course, Tina would do whatever Stella did.<\/p>\n
The conversation with Tony began much as expected. “Papa, Tina and I want to cut our hair,” Stella said during dinner that Sunday.<\/p>\n
“Absolutely not,” he said. “Women in this house dress respectfully.”<\/p>\n
“But Papa, you say you want us to be American. No American woman wears her hair long. Everyone will think we’re … we’re poor and new here.”<\/p>\n
Stella had been prepared for a protracted argument, but after several moments of hard thought, Antonio seemed ready to reverse his opinion.<\/p>\n
“Yes,” he said. “You’re right. Short hair is better for life in America.”<\/p>\n
That seemed too easy. Stella watched his face to try to guess what kinds of private thoughts were passing behind it. “So you’ll give us money for the hairdresser’s?”<\/p>\n
“All right,” he said. “All right. You girls will cut your hair and then we should get a family portrait taken. That’s what we will send home at Christmas.” He slapped his thighs. “One year as Americans. Yes, we should take a portrait.”<\/p>\n
Her father had a vision in his head. Stella decided to press her luck. “Tina and I need five dollars each.”<\/p>\n
Antonio turned to look at her. His face was turning red, and she braced herself, but then he started to laugh. “If that’s how much the hairdresser costs, you can figure out how to cut your own hair.”<\/p>\n
“No, Papa, it’s for the permanent wave. We need to go and get it professionally done. They have to put chemicals in your hair to make it\u2014”<\/p>\n
“Absolutely no permanent wave. Mannaggia, <\/em>give them a finger and they take your whole hand.” Antonio had returned his attention to his food. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you each two dollars. You, too,” he said to the boys. “You spend it on what you want, haircut, clothes, whatever. Just make sure you look good for the picture.”<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Two WEEKS BEFORE CHRISTMAS all six Fortunas dressed in their best and went down to G. Fox to get studio photos taken. The girls had each spent fifty cents on their new short haircuts, which they had practiced rag-curling and combing to frame their faces. The remainder of their budgets had gone toward blue cotton Stella sewed into matching, long-sleeved dresses on Fiorella’s mechanical sewing machine. Stella and Tina had begged Antonio for extra money for new shoes, but he had drawn the line.<\/p>\n
The Fortunas posed with Antonio and Assunta seated in front, their sons on either side, and Stella and Tina standing behind them to disguise the old shoes they’d bought in Nicastro. Tina is one inch taller and a bit less bosomy, and of course there is that standout mole above her lip. Otherwise their smiles are identical, as are their dresses, their posture, the angles at which they hold their elbows\u2014similar in the subtle and comprehensive ways only sisters are similar. Assunta’s ankles are crossed and her feet tucked under her chair. She is smiling this time. Antonio may be smiling as well, but as with the Mona Lisa, no one can ever be sure what he is thinking; most of his expression is concealed by his mustache. Together, they are an impressive accomplishment of a family.<\/p>\n
For fifty years, this portrait hung on various walls next to the grainier black-and-white of the first Mariastella. Somehow there is no other photo of the entire family, not even at any of the children’s weddings. This was the first and last time they were photographed together.<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Excerpt from The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna\u00a0<\/i>by Juliet Grames. Copyright\u00a9 2019 by Juliet Grames. Courtesy of Ecco and HarperCollins Publishers.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Advisory: this passage contains abusive language and a dream sequence with an imagined sexual assault. from The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna Youth (The Fifth Death) by Juliet Grames THE\u00a0 FIFTH DEATH BEGAN IN A DREAM. One July morning in 1941, in the hanging lavender of predawn, Stella Fortuna rose from the bed … Continue reading The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[39,53,51,45,46,12,40,35,47,38,113,112,30],"class_list":["post-769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-juliet-grames","tag-catholicism","tag-class","tag-connecticut-setting","tag-death","tag-family","tag-feminism","tag-fiction","tag-hartford-history","tag-hartford-setting","tag-italian","tag-jamaicans","tag-tobacco","tag-womens-lives"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=769"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":796,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769\/revisions\/796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}