Ebook Alligator Bayou, by Donna Jo Napoli
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Alligator Bayou, by Donna Jo Napoli
Ebook Alligator Bayou, by Donna Jo Napoli
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About the Author
Donna Jo Napoli is the author of many distinguished books for young readers, among them The Great God Pan, Daughter of Venice, Crazy Jack, The Magic Circle, Zel, Sirena, Breath, Bound, Stones in Water, Hush: An Irish Princess' Tale, and, most recently for Wendy Lamb Books, The King of Mulberry Street. She has a BA in mathematics and a PhD in Romance linguistics from Harvard University and has taught widely at major universities in America and abroad. She has five children and one grandson and lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where she is a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College. You can visit her on the Web at www.donnajonapoli.com.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The night is so dark, I can barely see my hands. It's eerie. As if Cirone and I are made of nothing but air. That's how I used to feel back in Sicily when I'd walk in the caves near Cefalu. I was nothing, till the bats sensed me and came flapping out in a leathery clutter--thwhoosh--then my arms would wake and wave all crazy as they passed by and away into thesea breeze. But this flat meadow couldn't be more different from those hillside caves; this sleepy Louisiana town couldn't be more different from busy Cefalu; and I feel like a whole new person. I was a scaredy-cat boy when they pushed me onto the ship last autumn to come here. But now I work like a man. And I'm important at work, because I can speak English with the customers. Still, some of the old me remains. Right now I'm jittery at being out late without permission from my uncles. It was my cousin Cirone's idea. It's always his idea. We all go to bed early every night except Saturday, but he's got energy to spare. He begsme to sneak out. The grass is high here behind the lettuce field, but soft. It crushes underfoot, silent. I follow close behind Cirone. He knows lots about this place. He's been in America longer than me. He came with his big brother, Rosario, when he was only four. He's thirteen; I'm fourteen; I edge in front of him now. The slaughterhouse sits on the outskirts of town, at the edge of the woods. The place is lit up and we can smell the rot and hear the men inside singing as they work. Cirone heads that way. "Shhh," Cirone says, even though we weren't talking. "They hear Sicilian and they'll chase us off." I don't get why people here don't like Sicilian. Our family supplies this town, Tallulah, with the best fruits and vegetables. You'd think the sound of Sicilian would make their mouths water. Instead, we hold our tongues--or speak English if we can--in the presence of town people. But not everyone minds hearing Sicilian. That's how I met Patricia. I smile. She overheard Cirone and me as we unloaded crates, and she asked what we were speaking. She said Sicilian was pretty, like music. And she walked off singing. We've talked a half-dozen times since then. Always at the vegetable stand. I hear her voice in my head all the time. I'll be working, and there she is, in my mind, looking over my shoulder, saying something sweet. I miss hearing Sicilian in the streets--jokes, arguments, announcements, everything that makes up life. Here the six of us are like mice on a raft in the middle of the sea. Oh, there are two more Sicilians in Milliken's Bend, five miles away--Beppe and his son, Salvatore. To find more, though, you have to travel down south to New Orleans, over 250 miles. Thousands live there. I watch Cirone's shadow move farther ahead of me, out of whisper range. But here in the dark it's better to hush anyway. In the woods now, we wind through pines. These trees are gigantic compared to the trees back home. They crowd out the sky so I can hardly see the stars. In an instant Cirone is running, and I am, too. We dash for the open grass. No one's chasing us, but it feels like they are. "Calo, stop!" Cirone grabs me by the arm and pulls me to a halt. A giant cat comes out of the woods. Tawny brown sleeks his back and white flecks his head and shoulders. He glances at us and pauses as his eyes catch the light: yellow-green. He flicks the tip of his long tail and I think I might wet myself. That cat weighs more than me. The cat hisses low. Then he walks on toward the stench of the slaughterhouse. Cirone's fingers dig into my arm. "A panther," he breathes. "They stay in the forests, away from people. It's special to see one so close to town." "Special?" I'm shaking. In Sicily mountain wildcats don't even come up to your knees. "I can do without special. I can go the whole rest of my life without special." "We did good. We did really good, Calo. You're never supposed to run from them. You just stare. A panther won't attack unless you look away. If you stare right at them, they think you're going to eat them." I yank his arm, and we run. We don't slow down till we see our house. Out front we hear a man arguing with Francesco in English. Shouting. The man stomps off into the night, throwing curses over his shoulder. Cirone and I crouch off to the side. It's so dark, all we can see is the tip of Francesco's cigar, glowing red whenhe sucks on it. And he's sucking fast. Red, red, red, red. He's mad, all right. Cirone and I sneak to the back and climb in through a window. We quick move the sacks of pinecones in our bed that were doubling for us and stash them. We dive under the sheet fully clothed. My heart still bangs against my rib cage. A panther. This place is full of surprises. Nasty ones. I have to push Cirone's feet away from my chin. Mine reach past his nose. Feet stink, especially when you don't dip them in the wash pan before sleeping. But lying head to toe is the only way we both still fit in this bed. I turn my head to the right and listen to the noisy breathing of Rosario, Cirone's brother, in the next bed. He's thirty-seven, old enough to be Cirone's father. Rosario has a big beak of a nose and long sideburns. Cirone's nose is small like mine. Beyond Rosario there's Carlo, in his fifties. And in the next bed, Giuseppe, who's thirty-six. Carlo and Giuseppe are Francesco's brothers. Francesco, the youngest, is only thirty, but he's the leader. It's his nature. He sleeps in the bed closest to the door--the first to face trouble, if any comes. These two sets of brothers are cousins to each other. And then there's me. We're all from Cefalu, in Sicily. The men call me nephew, and Cirone calls me cousin, even though my father was just good friends with them. Back in Cefalu I have a younger brother, Rocco. The spitting image of me. The one person alive in the world I know for sure I'm related to. When Mamma died last summer, there we were, Rocco and me, with nobody but each other. Our father disappeared years ago. The Buzzi family next door took in Rocco, but they couldn't afford me; I eat too much. They put me on a ship to Louisiana. They said Francesco would take me in. My father paid his passage to America years before--it was time for Francesco to repay the favor. I miss Cefalu, with its stone and stucco buildings; I miss the glowing colors of the cathedral mosaics. I miss the sense of how small I become when I kneel in the pews. The music in the public squares. The sharp-and-sweet spongy cassata on holidays, lemony, creamy with ricotta. The purple artichoke flowers in fields that go on forever. The smell of the sea night and day, wherever you go. How close the sky is.
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Product details
Age Range: 12 and up
Grade Level: 7 - 9
Lexile Measure: HL430L (What's this?)
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Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Wendy Lamb Books; Reprint edition (May 11, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780553494174
ISBN-13: 978-0553494174
ASIN: 0553494171
Product Dimensions:
5.2 x 0.6 x 7.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.8 out of 5 stars
12 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#969,208 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Summer reading has been hit-and-miss. _Alligator Bayou_ was a read for my summer book club, and would otherwise not be my standard fare. What a wonderful suprise, then, to enjoy it so much. Set in 1899 Louisana, the story revolves around a family of Sicilian immigrants who are attempting to live the "American dream," part of the immigration story that is so often romanticized. But this is the Deep South, just one year after the Plessy decision and in the midst of one of the nation's worst depressions in a quarter century. To boot, the Sicilians are unaware of the racial - and economic - boundaries in their adopted country. Told through the eyes of 14 year-old Calogero Scalise, Napoli does a top-notch job in showing the complexities of the Jim Crow South as well as the challenges immigrants face as they seek to make their way in America.The book is written for younger (ages 9 - 13) readers given the complexity of the sentence structure and plot - but Napoli (a linguistics professor by trade) also shows a mastery of AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) and Italian in the dialogue, and clearly - brutally - brings to light what life was like in the South at the start of the last century. What is perhaps most shocking, however, is that the story she has written here - of Sicilians not seen as "colored" (to use the term of the day) nor as "white" (thereby not granted the social status of "Americans") and the persecution they suffered is based largely on real-life events. At issue, of course, is not so much "race" as the maintenance of power (particularly economic power) by the elite. Power that was held and perpetrated by dividing the poor along "racial" lines (poor whites over poor African-Americans, poor immigrants somewhere in the middle ... divide and conquor, let them fight among themselves in order to preserve the status quo at the top of the social and economic heirarchy.) This is the sort of story I wish was taught more to our youth at an earlier age.Of special interest for older (older than 13) readers is the bibliography Napoli provides at the end of the story, outlining the real events that inspired the story, as well as a list of articles and websites for readers to delve more deeply into the story. Its a short read - maybe a lazy afternoon (or weekend) - but certainly worthy of attention.
Coincidentally, I read this book over the weekend in which Rep. Gabriel Giffords was shot by paranoid loner Jared Loughner. The talk in the media has focused extensively on whether and to what extent the aggressive rhetoric and violent imagery employed by pundits and politicians may have contributed to Loughner's rampage. That question may never be fully answered in Loughner's case, but this book shines light on a perhaps related incident from the 1890s which shows that words do indeed have power.In Donna Jo Napoli's fictionalized account of an actual event, 14-year-old Sicilian Calogero has been staying with his uncles and a cousin in rural Louisiana since his mother's death forced him to leave Italy. The six Italians run a grocery store and produce stand which have become the favorites of the local women, threatening the solvency of the local company stores in an area already hard hit economically. At the same time, the Italians are not accepted by the local whites as neighbors or even as equals. They don't speak English and they don't follow local customs. Local and national newspapers report that Italians are all mob members, armed and dangerous. The black community (referred to in the book as "Negroes" in keeping with the custom of the times) meanwhile, is also wary of them. With the exception of business contacts and a small handful of more enlightened locals, the Italians are profoundly isolated.Calogero is still trying to navigate his new world when events start to escalate. Calogero finds himself smitten with a black girl his age. He and his cousin Cirone begin to make tentative friends with her and her brothers. Meanwhile, his uncles anger the locals because they wait on blacks ahead of a white man. Their goats roam the town, angering the town's doctor. The more comfortable Calogero becomes with Patricia and her family, the more racial and other tensions escalate.Reading this book is much like reading a horror book (in fact, it could be argued it IS a horror book). You know from the get-go that nothing good is going to come out of the situation, so you spend the whole book waiting for the axe to fall, so to speak. Every happy event, every positive scene is shadowed by the looming disaster, the knowledge that the good times won't - can't - last.This book does a good job of showing the multi-faceted face of racism and prejudice. Prejudice is not just an inherent white-black thing. It's based on fear, economic factors, propaganda, wariness over differences, ignorance. It's also not simply unilateral. The blacks were almost as prejudiced against the Italians as the whites were. The Italians had their own prejudices. But racism has the added component of power, and in the antebellum South, it was the whites who had the power, so they became the perpetrators while blacks and Italians became the victims.I can't quite give the book a five-star rating. The characters were not all terribly well developed. I had a hard time telling the four uncles apart and keeping them straight and many of the white townsmen seemed like clones of each other. Also, Napoli's spare narrative style makes some events rather difficult to follow at first reading. But nonetheless, I recommend the book highly for the spotlight it shines on racist and prejudicial attitudes and the tragedy it can lead to, especially when ignorance is stoked and fears are fanned through rumor and propaganda.
Not many people realize the lynchings of Italians were just as prevalent as lynchings of Africans in America. In fact, the greatest lynching America was the lynching of Italians.In this coming of age tale set in Louisiana, we see the roots of prejudice in he South.It's all about money and power. It is a blight on our country that is still there today with those that want to deny others what they received so that they do not give up their perks. Christian country, my ass.
wow, I had no idea of this history. great story to show solidarity between oppressed in the jim crow south
I loved this book.Even tho it was a novel,it had historical significance.i thought it was well written and great content,it was easy to read and kept my interest.
Not very interesting
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