I’ve thought a lot about what to write on this, the last day of Women’s History Month. Although I’ve written about my maternal grandmother before on this blog, I could think of no other person more important to my history than her. Jennie Lozupone Galeano.
She was born in Gioia del Colle, Italy, and migrated to this country with her family in 1906. In that regard her story is no different than the millions of immigrants who came to the United States fleeing poverty and political strife, all looking for opportunity and a better life.
She married young to a Sicilian immigrant, Joe Galeano, and they had four children in quick succession. Along the way she discovered she had a gift with her hands and began working in Jimmy Bello’s tailor shop in downtown Washington. There, she made suits for Franklin Roosevelt and robes for the Supreme Court justices, along with dresses and suits for her grandchildren.
She and Joe fashioned a good life. Sunday dinners with family and friends, poker games on Saturday night (my grandmother loved cards, and bingo, and the racetrack), and enough money to buy a house in suburban Maryland. My mother would tell a story of coming home from school, or her job, and finding her parents sitting at the kitchen table, a open jar of hot peppers and a bottle of anisette between them, both of them laughing and sweating like there was no tomorrow.
That proved to be the case for my grandfather who died from Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in the summer of 1948, when I was six months old. They had just bought their house on University Boulevard and Gram immediately understood the difficulty she would have paying the mortgage. So, my parents, with me in tow, moved in with her so she could keep her house. My mother went back to her government job and my grandmother became my caregiver for the next three or four years.
During that time my grandmother imprinted with me: the memory of her childhood in Puglia, her accent and mix of Italian and English, the smells and tastes of her food, her belief in family. Much of that has stayed with me to this day. Four years ago when Leslie and I visited Italy, we stopped briefly in Gioia del Colle and I was struck by how familiar and comfortable the place felt, even though I’d never been there before. I can only understand that as genetic memory, my grandmother’s imprint on my young mind.
Jennie eventually went back to work at the tailor shop until it closed. She continued sewing for us kids and later made vestments for the priests in our Catholic parish. As she aged, her eyesight began to fail so she shifted to crochet, making multi-colored Afghans, which she called “Africans” because her language couldn’t quite comprehend the word “Afghan.”
She gifted me the first one she made and, to this day, I sleep under it every night, secure in my memory of her and the history she bequeathed to me.