Daniela GioseffiLOSING JESUS TO POETRY AND SCIENCE: A PERSONAL ESSAY Because my older sister, Lucy, hated me and her friends always dominated our yard and front porch, I was lonely. I decided to bond with Jesus Christ as my secret friend, dropping Roy Rogers as my hero. I bought a plastic-framed portrait of Jesus, with beatific blue eyes and silky red hair and beard, at Woolworth's 5 & 10 Cent Store and with it deposed Roy Roger's from my bed table in our new house. Because of Lucy, this would prove to be a mistake. Lucy, my older sister by six years, always hated me. She would marry four times and never get it right. She would decide to blame all her life's failures on me, no doubt because I was born when she was six years old and still the first grandchild of my father's big Italian family. She was what psychologists call nowadays, "displaced" by my coming. She would always feel that I was given my better life as a gift from our parents and refused to notice that I worked--babysitting many kids in the neighborhood for fifty cents an hour while doing my homework religiously--to get myself through public high school. I would go on to grocery check-out clerk, drugstore delivery girl, Howard Johnson's soda jerk, and Country Club coat-checker, to put myself through the local State College, now Montclair University, but at that time, Montclair State Teachers College. In the early 1960's, I could attend a New Jersey state college for a mere $95 a semester, plus books and transportation. From age eleven to fifteen, I was the Pied Piper of Little Falls, New Jersey. We moved there when I was eleven to escape the poverty of our Newark Italian ghetto. I babysat for every kid in our new suburban neighborhood and they, I must say, seemed to love me even if my big sister Lucy never would. I sang lullabies and told bedtime stories like Cinderella and Pinocchio to the kids in my charge. We had lots of fun together. I used to pretend to them that I was Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz just returned from Kansas on the wings of a Tornado to tell wild stories of my life "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." After escaping Newark for Little Falls, we lived in a cracker-box development house which my mother promptly individualized by repainting it white with blue trim in one afternoon. In a couple of years, with the help of "Miracle Grow" fertilizer, she'd covered it with red rambling roses and shrubs. She had a greener thumb for growing plants than for raising children. She knew how to do outdoor work harder than two men--often ignoring us kids in favor of her garden. Lucy had run away two years earlier, eloping at the tender age of fourteen with Billy Matteo because he played the guitar like Les Paul and sang with her. He was only eighteen, so if my parents annulled the marriage, Billy would've gone to prison for statutory rape. "What if she's pregnant? We can't annul!" My mother argued. "Let her stay married and work!" "But she's too young! She should finish school!" My father argued sadly. He'd worked delivering newspapers on foot, despite a lame leg, emptying coal buckets, tending parking lots all night, to put himself through college and earn a Phi Beta Kappa from the alpha chapter of that prestigious honor society, one of the first immigrants with an Italian name to do so. He thought that America would be his oyster, because of his college degree with honors from Union College, Schenectady, but in 1928, when he'd graduated Columbia University with a Master's Degree in chemistry, Sacco and Vanzetti were being fried by Judge Thayer of Massachusetts as "Dirty Guineas" for their labor organizing. Companies like RCA hired him to pick his brain in return for a petty salary with no benefits. In fact, he set up RCA's first chemical laboratory for the budding electronics industry--only to have the boss put his WASP son in charge of it after my father had it running smoothly. My father, Donato Gioseffi, invented "The-Blue-Dot-for-Sure Shot" and "Softlight" for Sylvania from which the corporation made millions-- only to be given a mere dollar for his patents earned on company time in the corporate laboratory. "It's because you're a little, lame guinea that you let them use you!" My mother complained in despair, as she continued to work long hours as a seamstress in a Paterson silk factory, taking the bus early every morning to work. By the time Billy Matteo ran off with Lucy, my father had been through the job mill and was fairly tired and discouraged. My mother continued her argument: "Lucy and Billy love to play the guitar and harmonize. They sound just like Les Paul and Mary Ford when they sing, 'How High the Moon?' Let them stay married! Lucy plays hooky all the time anyway," She finally persuaded my father. "Billy's parents will be hurt if we annul because the boy will have to go to jail. Do you want to send him to jail?" "Lucy plays hooky because she says she gets mugged in the halls for her lunch money at that damned Springfield Avenue School over in the Ironbound section! We've got to move to the suburbs to have a better school for the kids!" "Lucy's a conniving liar!" My mother insisted. "She's buying cigarettes and sodas with the money and cutting classes for fun. She's always arguing with me and making trouble for me. She costs too much. Let her stay married and out of my hair," my mother shot back! "Or I'm leaving. It's her or me!" My father gave in, thinking that Billy Matteo's family seemed pretty stable and owned their own home in a nice area of Summit, an upscale town in the suburbs of the city. Lucy had taken to playing Billy Eckstein records, and my mother was always yelling at her, "Turn that disgusting nigger off!" How can you stand the sight of him?" Billy Matteo with his dark little moustache, except for having skin a shade or two lighter, looked a lot like Billy Eckstein, the African American crooner of the day. Billy Matteo sang "Blue Moon, I saw you standing alone, without a love in your heart, without a dream of your own," to Lucy and played his guitar for her. She'd met him at some singing club near her high school, and so they ran away with the result that Lucy was married and pregnant by age fifteen, and miserably bored with being stuck at home as a mother--not knowing how become the singer she dreamed she'd be. I thought Billy Eckstein sounded good with his rich voice and smooth diction, and his photo on the album was very handsome, even if his skin was dark. I understood why Lucy liked his records. He looked like somebody who already had a tan and didn't have to bake and burn in the sun to get it like we did. Secretly, I sat on the floor of Lucy's closet and sang along with Billy Eckstein's records, but my mother kept accusing Lucy of liking "nigger music" and being a "nigger lover!" My mother didn't like Lucy's friend Connie Germano either, because Connie was what they called olive-skinned and Connie wore earrings in her pierced ears and sometimes the holes that held her earrings festered with puss. My mother thought it was disgusting to pierce your ears and make them all pussy, and then put earrings in them. My mother, Josephine, who was raised an orphan by a Polish-Russian-Jewish woman, named Rose, used to call my father a "Greenhorn Guinea, when she pushed him away. He would get angry and hurt and call her a "Dumb Pollack" in return for not wanting his kisses. Lucy began to be afraid of earrings and jewelry and she would never let my mother come near her when she wore them. Maybe she thought they would make her fester, too, like Connie's earlobes. Lucy hated her high school. She was petrified of the older black boys in that Newark Public High School. My mother wouldn't let us go out on Halloween alone to get candy like the other kids on Hunterdon Street, all dressed up as ghosts with pumpkin heads, witches with black pointy hats and green faces, princesses with cardboard glitter crowns and high heeled shoes, gypsies with scarves on their heads and lots of plastic beads and hoop earrings from Woolworth's 5 & 10 Cent Store. "Those niggers rape young white girls out alone at night," she told us. She'd grown up on Long Island and she was afraid of "colored people" as she called them --when she was being more polite. On Halloween, we had to go around the block with Mommy walking us and we never got as much candy as the other kids, because she would only go a few blocks and then be tired. She had to get up to go and sew in the factory in the morning. When I think about it, I realize that she made Lucy scared of the black boys at school, so Lucy used to hide in the school bathroom and smoke cigarettes or play hooky with Phoebe Flood who lived upstairs with her drunken father, "Ole Man Flood," and her two sisters. My mother said that Ole Man Flood raped his daughters, too. She really made Lucy scared of men, I think. Maybe that's why Lucy divorced four times. But, the Polish woman who raised my orphaned mother, Josephine, used to barter sex for groceries and schnapps. My mother hated all the men who used to visit her mother in the bedroom locking her out, leaving my mother alone and hungry and waiting to be fed. Rose had come alone, dejected, and starving, steerage passage from Poland, after burying her husband and sons--dead of a small pox epidemic--in the earth with her own hands on a farm outside of Warsaw which she'd worked with them. As a lonely widow with four kids to feed, she drank lots of schnapps and partied with the working men of her Polish ghetto who gave her favors of groceries, clothes, shoes in return for her charms. She had three mouths to feed, besides my mother whose father had never come home from World War I. "I was born in 1910, the year the Titanic sank," my pretty blue-eyed mother would laugh and sometimes cry, "and I've been sinking ever since!" She looked like Maureen O'Hara in the movies-- reddish hair--peachy smooth skin, and she sewed clothes to make herself look like a Hollywood star. I loved when she once in a while stayed home from the sewing factory to make us doll clothes and sing to us and pull us on a sled through the snowy streets. Once, she even visited my classroom on "Parent's Day" and all the kids thought she was so beautiful in the green dress and hat she'd made for herself, her blue eyes smiling and red hair shinny like Maureen O'Hara's. "Your Mom's pretty!" they all remarked, making me feel special for a change. "Even the teacher said, "What a beautiful mother you have, Daniela!" I felt so proud of her and wished she would come to school more often. That once sticks in my head like a flash of light filled with her youthful smile, her red lipstick, her green hat tilted to a jaunty angle on her head. By the time we moved to Little Falls, Lucy, a pretty, dark-haired teenager who looked like my father's Italian family, was pregnant and living in an attic apartment in Summit with Billy Matteo. She was very unhappy and slept all day and never took out her garbage. She had a little baby named Danny after my father, not me. Baby Danny was blond and blue-eyed like me and my mother, not dark and brown-eyed like Billy Matteo and his family. He had a face like my mother's, so my mother liked him and I used to help her babysit for him when Lucy left him with us in Little Falls on Donato Drive. In our development house, I had my own small bedroom for the first time. Baby Danny stayed in my room when Lucy left him with us and he was company for me. The railroad went by about two hundred yards from our backyard, but even though I liked the sound of the mysterious train whistle in the night, and the patterns the train lights made on our walls as it ran through Little Falls, it also scared me and I would hold Baby Danny so he wouldn't cry. I kept my secret friend, Jesus in that plastic photograph always at my bedside--his eyes gazing upward toward heavenly salvation. I showed him to Baby Danny whenever Baby Danny stayed in my room, and I babysat for him singing Billy Eckstein songs to him as he cooed and smiled. "See, this is Jesus Christ, and he likes children and lives in heaven in the sky, and he takes care of us," I told Baby Danny. "He won't ever let The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Thing, Godzilla, or the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz get us. Not ever!" My father never made us go to church and he didn't go either. Other kids made fun of me because I didn't go. They said that I would fry in hell for not going to Catechism like they all did after school. My mother didn't want to go, because Rose, or the woman who raised her, had prayed and gone to church too much before she died. She had made my mother go to Catechism and Holy Communion, and my mother said that the priest always grabbed and squeezed her breasts in the confessional--scaring her and hurting her. Also, when the palm of her hand was festering from some glass she'd gotten into it, a nun, in her seventh grade Catholic School, hit her hard on her wounded palm with a ruler for whispering to her friend--smacked her hard on her injured hand, making it ooze with green pus. My mother was so hurt; she hopped up from her school desk and ran out of the class faster than the nun could catch her. She never went back to school again. Instead, she forged working papers and went to work as a seamstress in a factory. She said that was why she never went beyond the seventh grade, and why she was stuck working in a factory doing "piece work," --why she never wanted to go to church again. My father never went because his father, Galileo, said the priests in Italy were "mariuolo," swindlers who want your money and your children to work for The Church instead of for, la famiglia." My father told me later, that where he lived in Candela, Provincia de Puglia, the only schools were run by priests and nuns who would demand money of the village families and then try to get their children to leave home and serve The Church as priests and nuns--rather than help la famiglia tend the fields to grow food for the table. The Church, La chiesa, was an institution of the Vaticano and the Pope in the north of Italia, not the mezzogiorno -- the poorer south -- where the farmers toiled for little pay to fill the bread basket of north while trying to feed their own families. The Church and the north had always abused and used the south, my father said. So, Grandpa Galileo would have none of it. My father grew up without religion and was a cynic about "the blood bath of history" largely, he said, caused The Church. All through my youth, he made many sacrilegious jokes, especially about The Crusades and The Inquisition, which he said were excuses for butchery. So, when I saw the dramatized story of The Cucifixion and Jesus of Nazareth on television at Easter time, in black and white movies, I became devoutly religious, sure that my belief would save me from all the unhappiness my parents endured. I saved my pennies and bought that little plastic framed, romantic photo of a soulful looking young Jesus, handsome and mild, his eyes cast heavenward, his reddish beard glowing with light, and always kept it close at night. It had a magical significance, and I took to praying to it constantly to save me from all the scary monsters of the movies who lived in the dark. My mother never let us have a night light and my active imagination caused me many a sleepless night of worry as the shadows in my room took on varied and evil Hollywood characters--Dracula with his thirst for blood; The Creature from the Black Lagoon, an ugly beast half-fish and half-man who rose out of the dark water to murder and devour people; The Beast with Five Fingers, a disembodied hand that crawled around the house at night to strangle its inhabitants; The Thing, a large vegetable creature from outer space with claws that tore people apart.The Thing was almighty and could only be killed by cooking -- searing him like a carrot with fire. He couldn't be stabbed or shot like the bad guys in cowboy movies who always lost to Roy Rogers. But, Jesus was more magical than Roy Rogers. He could change water into wine, cure lepers and raise the dead! And, do it all without a gun or a horse, too! Jesus Christ with his kind eyes and lovely red beard, flowing hair and handsome young face, would save me from all these horrible creatures, not the least of whom was "The Wicked Witch of the East" from The Wizard of Oz , green faced, pointy chinned and cackling, who had tried to kill pretty little Dorothy, her friends and her cute little dog, Toto. I lived most of my nights in terror of these Hollywood creatures, unable to fall asleep in the dark, thinking my vigilant stare into its deep precipice would save me from harm. I could at least scream if I saw a shadow move or heard a voice, but now, I had magical Jesus, my secret friend, to protect me, and I fell asleep in comfort after my prayers for grace and salvation were complete. That is, I had Jesus until Lucy's baby, Danny, suddenly got sick for no reason at all that I could understand. I remember clearly my mother gasping as she spoke to Lucy on the phone. "We'll be there soon as possible. I'll call Daddy." My mother and father left immediately, as soon as he drove home from the chemical laboratory where he worked and beeped the horn in the driveway. They didn't come back all day and night. I decided that I could save Baby Danny, no matter how grave his illness. All I had to do was pray hard to Jesus Christ. I knelt beside Jesus's magical photo, shining in its white plastic frame. I prayed and begged for Baby Danny's life. "He's only a little baby, six months old, Jesus, and he hasn't even had a chance to be bad or steal anything. He hardly even cries and he smiles a lot just for a rattle or a song. I know his head is kinda flat in the back, but Mommy says it's 'cause Lucy doesn't pick him up and turn him over enough, and she sleeps all day. That's not Baby Danny's fault. I know you know that, Jesus, and you love children, so please, please let him live! His father Billy smokes and works a lot and he doesn't pick him up either. Lucy's not happy, but that's not Baby Danny's fault. He's just a Baby and he doesn't know much, so I know you will look after him -- because I heard you love children, even though you make them 'suffer ye to come unto you.' Lucy found out that running away and getting married and having a baby is not as much fun as going to Springfield Avenue High School even. She's sad because she doesn't want to be a Mother. She wants to be a singer like Ella Fitzgerald or Mary Ford, but that's not Baby Danny's fault, so please, please let him live and be well, Jesus, Son of God. Please. I know you will take care of him, just like you protect me from The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Thing, The Beast with Five Fingers ,Godzilla, and The Wicked Witch, too. Thanks Jesus, Son of God. Thanks a lot for taking care of me and Baby Danny...." I prayed harder than any human ever had all day and night without stopping once for a drink of water or to go to the bathroom or anything. I was sure I was saving Baby Danny from all harm. All day and into the night, praying on my knees, until I fell asleep on the floor prostrate before the magic photo, of my secret friend with kind eyes and face more handsome than a movie star. I dreamed of him standing there in my room by the bedpost in a white gown, his arms spread open to welcome me. His face quietly smiling like a mother happy to see her child. He faded into a ghostly white light that shimmered around my bedpost like a white lily just where the moonlight hit it. "Wake up and get in bed, Daniela! What are you doing here on the cold floor, you crazy kid?" My mother grabbed me by the arm awake. "The baby's dead," she said. I started to whimper climbing into bed half-awake. "Go to sleep! There's nothing you can do about it! No one can to anything about it." she spoke matter-of-factly as she pulled the blanket up over me. "We'll have to have a funeral for Baby Danny and bury him in Summit tomorrow. Get some sleep or you can't go with us for the ride in the car." After she left the room, turning out the light to save electricity, and leaving me in the scary dark, I mulled over what she said. Then a big sob shook free from my throat and I defiantly turned the light back on just long enough to punch Jesus off the bed table. I never prayed to him again. If he couldn't help a little baby like Danny who never hurt anybody and couldn't even talk or walk yet, one with blue eyes and blond hair which my mother said was better, too -- a little baby who never did anything bad to anybody -- he surely wasn't going to help me. I sometimes stole bread and cake from the kitchen when my mother wasn't looking. I wasn't good like Danny, and if Jesus wouldn't save Baby Danny, he surely wouldn't save a sinner like me from the horrible movie monsters of the night. Some years later, in my teens, I was to read and learn about "The Doctrine of Original Sin," the idea that we are all born dirty from the sinful act of sex. The idea that sex is a dirty and evil thing and that it was all men wanted from women had already been imbued in me by my mother's teaching, but I knew she was wrong. Somehow, I knew that the act that makes us all living, breathing humans, the sexual union from which we come is not dirty or evil except that people make it so. To me, the idea that sex is dirty and evil is one of the most dirty evil ideas on earth. Somehow, I knew that my father wanted love as much as he wanted sex from my mother, maybe more, and she would give neither. That I sensed from early childhood--the way she was always pushing him away and he was always trying to hold and kiss her. They were never nice to each other like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. "The Doctrine of Original Sin" would be the final reason that I would forsake Catholicism, and finally all religion for science and its actual wonders. If we are all born dirty and in sin, then why bother having us all grovelling here alive trying to earn a bit of happiness along with our bread from this earth? There is too much beauty in the goldfinch and cardinal's song for them to be born in filth, too much sweet innocence in a small child for him or her to be born of dirty sin. I decided at the age of sixteen, after reading Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Renaissance," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" and Shakespeare's "Tempest" that The Doctrine of Original Sin" couldn't possibly be The Creator's idea. It was the Calibans of the earth that ruined sex. My father with his dramatic diction and passionate recitation read me, at fifteen, Romeo and Juliet. He wept at the sad ending. Next, he read me Cervantes's Don Quixote, saying he felt like Don Quixote at the finale. He said his Italian Mother, Lucia had told him stories of Cinderella and Pinocchio, animating them with her voice and gestures, as he sat with her by the coal stove in their Newark, cold water flat -- darning covers on baseballs from the baseball factory, for a penny each, to buy bread. When my father started reading to me, I stopped being so afraid of the dark and would dream of the characters in my father's favorite books at night, instead. Unwittingly, he got me started along another path -- one that asks important questions without giving easy answers -- as good poetry does. "Some crazy, misogynistic priests who hated women -- the type who would castrate Abelard for loving Eloise -- had made up that "Doctrine of Original Sin," I decided. It was in antipathy to all the natural beauty I saw around me, the rain on the leaves, the sun streaming through my windows, children laughing -- the wondrous gift of our animal joy, too purely sensational -- man and woman combining in love to produce a child as I wished my parents had -- too astonishingly perfect a plan for it to be wrong, dirty, a sin! I eventually forgave Jesus for getting mixed up with all those priests and their crazy ideas of sex as sin. "The Sermon on the Mount" is true and good, I told my Christian friends, but Christianity is one thing, ChristenDUMB another!" I decided, finally, that Jesus had loved Mary Magdalene, that Mary Magdalene's gospel had been lost and subverted with The Gnostic Gospels, that Jesus himself did not think of sex as sin, and would not have condemned Baby Danny to eternal Hell or Purgatory for not being Baptised. The Doctrine of Original Sin was surely the idea of some women-hating priests who wanted to make all the boys celibate so they would join the monastery and priests could have the boys all to themselves. Anyhow, what did celibate priests know of life, love, babies or nature's glories? Why did children have to suffer to come to Christ? That was their idea, not his. Just like it was the idea of mortals that people of different color skins should be segregated, and so I gave up Jesus and gained a fervor for social justice and the wonders of science, nature Herself, instead. [I was to have my run in with the Ku Klux Klan at twenty in Selma Alabama, in the days of the Freedom Riders and Sit-ins -- but I didn't know that then and that's a whole other story.] "What could be more extraordinary than all those unseen molecules spinning around their nucleii, the schemes of photosynthesis and atmospheric balance that most live daily unaware of?" I thought. "How often when chopping down trees or rain forests do men think of the Romance of Photosynthesis-- first link in the food chain that weds us all to Mother Earth? That spectacular wonder by which plants convert sun to energy for the entire animal kingdom! How often do we think in our daily lives of the trees giving off oxygen as we breathe out giving them carbon dioxide in the balance of planetary breath? What is more awe inspiring than the mystery of endless space, stars shining light years away in the galaxy; what more spiritual than the music of the spheres as we spin in an expanding universe too vast to know; what more phenomenal than the red and blue colors of the sunset which continues to out do itself year after year; or the flight of a tiny ruby-throated hummingbird thousands of miles south and north in its yearly migration to breed; what more religious a prayer is there than the cry of a baby pushed from a womb, bloody and wet, into the light of spectacular seeing--all come from the wondrous gift of pleasurable sexual union?" If there is a god and he had a mortal son, he knows that He got it just exactly right when he made up the scheme of sperm and ova from which we miraculously blossom into the light of wondrous seeing, hearing, smelling tasting, and he wants us to love the flesh of life, the sensuous glory of being, the baby pushed from the cornucopia as the fruit of the womb. There is no Doctrine of Original Sin in nature, no perversion in act of love where sperm meets ova in a primal swim of fertile impregnation to bring forth life and the possibility of love. |