Poor Old Chris
- Timothy E. “Tim” Nourse (1967)
Poor Old Chris,
He lived long ago,
He traveled the world,
So others might know,
He lived long ago,
He traveled the world,
So others might know,
Uncharted waters,
Far-away Lands,
He lived for his time,
And for his time’s demands!
So much was uncertain,
So little was known,
Yet still he set forth,
Great courage was shown!
He was judged by his peers,
As all of us are,
For he lived in HIS time,
Not some future off far.
Was he really so evil?
One cannot truly say,
For we were not there,
Nor did we live in his day.
Was he really so different?
From those that came once before?
All races/religions,
Whatever the shore?
To err...it is human,
Forgiveness we all ask,
For none of us perfect,
No matter the task.
We set forth with the knowledge,
That is based in our time,
If that knowledge is faulted,
Is it really a crime?
Does it really detract,
From what good things we do?
I just pray that the future,
May be more kind to you!
Howdy, Bob—
The above poem was written the other day
by my nephew, Tim, son of my older sister Stephanie Vellani Williams.
You wrote me a few days ago asking what
I thought about the removal of the statute of Columbus from the City Hall
grounds in my home town of Columbus, Ohio. Like so many things worth
thinking about, I have given this matter some thought over the course of the
past month. And, like my nephew’s witty poem above, there’s more than one idea
in play in and between the lines.
For me, born and essentially raised in
Columbus, Ohio, the statue of “Old Chris” on the city hall grounds was always a
bit of an ambiguous mystery to me..
On the one hand, the statue was a
handsome, thoughtfully-intended gift from the citizens of Genova, Italy to the
citizens of Columbus, Ohio in post-war 1955, associated with a person who was
born in, and later left, their city. On the other hand, it was kind of an odd
bit of heroic statuary, plopped down in a not so heroic mid-century midwestern
town, of a man draped in Roman robes, whose claim to fame had been asserted in
the far away Caribbean (also a mysterious, exotic place to me in my youth), and
who seemed to have nothing at all to do with the actual history of Central Ohio,
or really much of the history of North & South America as others clearly did,
in particular, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and British “heroic great men” who
were involved in subduing the different peoples already here and building upon the
rich natural and culinary resources developed by the folks long-living in this hemisphere.
At a very young age, I learned of all
the many other towns in the US named for him—although ours was the largest and,
according to local lore, the reason why the Genovese sought to honor the
connection. To me, our city’s name was not so unique or distinctive as say
Cleveland or Cincinnati or Toledo or Dayton, or, further afield, Indianapolis,
Pittsburgh, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, Boston, New York … 😉 … Boring, boring, little Columbus, we always
had to put our STATE’s name after our city, so folks knew where we actually
resided … 😉 … and then, a bit later, I figured out the
association of his name to the NATION of Colombia & a big river in the US
northwest, and that, as a civic-branding figure, he was part of an effort by
the movers & shakers, primarily of British, Spanish & Portuguese
descent, in the late 18th & early 19th centuries, who
had broken or were breaking away from their own national & imperial monarchs,
to develop a heritage & mythology unique to European, not necessarily
Italian, culture on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
As a young child, I understood Columbus
to be no more-or-less Italian than Giovanni Caboto or Amerigo Vespucci—and at least
Vespucci got a couple of huge land masses named for himself, and not a couple
dozen dusty burgs up and down his eponamous continents. I did know that they
were all studious, ambitious, talented men who left their home territories on the
peninsula in service to the great dynasties & powers of the era—none of
which in the so-called age of European expansion were “Italian,” again as we
understood Italian in the context of our 1940s, 1950s & 1960s family. Unlike
some of his peers, Columbus, though persistent and like-mindedly knowing that
the earth was a sphere, he was a misunderstood, frustrated and imprisoned
malcontent, always arguing with his Spanish kingly & queenly over-seers, holding
out that he had reached Asia, not an intermediary continent, that he died
considered a failure in his day, and that he certainly was not a Cortez or a
Pizzaro or a De Soto or a LaSalle or a Daniel Boone, tramping & mapping
areas unknown & uncharted in the-then European, African, and Asian
experience.
“Italian” in our household, more often
than not, meant something accomplished by a citizen or representative of the
ITALIAN STATE, the entity that emerged from unification in the 1860’s. It was
similar to the way that Pocahontas or John Smith or Peter Stuyvesant were not
really AMERICAN in the same way as Daniel Boone, Thomas Jefferson, Betsy Ross, Andrew
Jackson, Frederick Douglass were AMERICAN, that is, living through or after the
founding of the US as an independent national republic. If their works or
importance predated the modern NATION of Italy, they were persons like Bocaccio
or Polo or Dante or Michelangelo or Albinoni or Vivaldi or Paganini or Rossini
or Verdi, later Caruso or Marconi, who lived in the peninsula and contributed
directly to the Italian AND world experience culturally, linguistically, and artistically,
and were universally, uncompromisingly recognized for their achievements. The
POLITICAL household heroes were Garibaldi & Mazzini & even the Vittorio
Emanueles & Sacco & Vanzetti & Togliatti, or in the US Army Air
Corps, Gentile, or in the inverse, the despicable Mussolini.
Neither Columbus, nor Caboto, nor
Vespucci, ever were ITALIAN in the same way the above persons were spoken of in
our home or in my grandparents’ home. We knew him as the fellow who was embodied
in a downtown statue, the city’s namesake, dressed in classical Roman—not
navigation—robes, and celebrated in a kind of Yankee-Doodled, uniquely-American
sense of Italy—like Chef-boy-ardee or one of the mis-appropriated Marx brothers—a
half-hollywoody historical character APART from the real peninsula, the REAL
Italy, a real nation—not the former Italian peninsula of a hodge-podge of
independent duchies and bishoprics and occupied appendages of Spanish, Austrian
or Napoleonic & Neo-Napoleonic empires, NOT the now, of Italian citizens
relocated in the US, in the 1950’s, people who identified with The Republic, or,
even before, the now-discredited Savoian monarchy.
Further complicating things was the fact that, where I
grew up, there were still plenty of anti-Italian & anti-Catholic epithets
and stereotypes thrown around by neighboring kids & adults, and in the
local press, which further confused me, as, on the one hand folks were citing
Columbus-of-the-Ages as a GREAT person, but real ITALIANS of today, by and
large, were rarely, if ever, represented as great, respected PERSONAGES, rather
more as film & pulp mafiosi or emaciated, brillcreamed crooners—or worst of
all, some combination of the two.
For my grandfather who passed as a bit of a patriarchal
figure-head for our family, Columbus was not a person he studied during his 5 or
so years of formal schooling in Reggio Emilia at the end of the 19th
century. Around the house, he would more often than not brush off the idea that
Columbus was Italian in the same way that he was, although he was fine with his
adopted city being named for him, and appreciated that, during his own lifetime,
more and more, at least once a year, politicians & other persons of
prominence had to say something nice about the real, struggling Italians of the
early and mid-twentieth century, connecting them in some way to the civic-logo Columbus,
a symbol of discovery, progress, and manifest destiny at the founding of this
Republic and other western hemispheric states. The civic-logo Columbus provided
the name an Irish-American priest skillfully appropriated to make a young Catholic
mutual-aid society, the Knights of Columbus, seem less dangerous & suspect
& more acceptable to the WASP powers-that-be in the early 1880s, and which
organization was instrumental in gaining a national holiday of recognition in
1934 in Columbus’ name—a boon to their organization and respectability, as much
as to the Italians who were about to be interred during World War II. Again, my
grandfather was happy to embrace the concept of Columbus Day as something possibly
a bit special to Italians in their struggles for cultural acceptance and economic
fair-play. But by the time it became an actual federal bank-holiday in 1968, my
grandfather was one of the few persons left from his own ambitious,
progressive, destiny-driven, emigrating generation.
Of course, I have to share that my grandfather, Leonida
Vellani, did, at least once, invoke the Americanized, civic Columbus. According
to my grandfather & undisputed by his spouse, or my aunts, uncle &
father, at some point in the late 1920s or early 1930s, as there often were,
wherever Italians settled, there were, at times, pro-Mussolini rallies by
political supporters in the US of the PNF (Partito Nazionale Fascista).
Pro-one-side rallies will often draw out opposing views. My grandfather
attended one such event in opposition to the PNF, and, according to his account,
he began singing a mocking, anti-fascist rhyme set to the music of one of the
PNF’s preeminent musical anthems “la Giovinezza.” His tenor voice struck a
responsive, but negative chord in the hearts and minds of some of the PNF
supporters, and there ensued some sort
of scuffling & confrontation, and my grandfather was arrested with others and
spent the night in the Franklin County jail.
According to him, the next morning when he appeared
before a court official (he called him a judge, it may have been a magistrate,
whatever) and was questioned about his behavior, he invoked in an impromptu
soliloquy the following themes: that he, Leonida, was not a man of violence, he
was a man of peace who believed in democracy and freedom, and, furthermore, Columbus
believed in freedom, and Columbus had not been a fascist and would not approve
of Mussolini today. Per Leonida, the official came down from the bench, shook
his hand, and, with his arm around him, escorted him out of the building,
apologizing to my grandfather for the inconvenience of the arrest. My
grandfather asserts that he answered, essentially, don’t worry, “Non importa,” he
understood, no hard feelings, and besides, he’d never stayed the night in jail in
Columbus before, and he always had wondered what they were like. And now he
knew.
So, like many things worth
thinking about, I can think more than one way about Columbus--the man, the
myth, and the nature of material, social, and cultural progress. I’m confident
that the gifted statue will be safely maintained, and, eventually, be on
appropriate display somewhere in Columbus (Ohio), hopefully used to faithfully
and as accurately as possible, tell the story of the many peoples who have
lived and loved and flourished with integrity, in success and failure, in winning
and losing, rightly and wrongly, justly and unjustly in Central Ohio … and in
telling those stories do justice to the many important memories of yesterday,
as well as the dreams of today and tomorrow.
