Poor Old Chris

- Timothy E. “Tim” Nourse (1967)

Poor Old Chris,
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 18^th & early 19^th 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 19^th 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.