America 1982-Chapter 31: Let’s find a guide

Tommy Hawk, clad in athletic wear, was currently catching his breath against a lamppost in the Southern District of Warwick City before he turned to look at Melanie beside him and asked,

"Auntie, you’re a woman, right?"

Seeing Tommy Hawk pant heavily after just three kilometers, Melanie looked at him with disdainful mockery and said, "Wow, sharp eyes. How could you tell, Tommy? If you hadn’t said anything, I’d have thought no one in the world could uncover that secret. Keep running! There’s seven hundred meters left to St. Egidio Church."

"I don’t understand why you suddenly forced me to run with you every day," Tommy Hawk said, filled with bafflement. "I updated my profile two months ago. It says I’m not good at track and field; I prefer table tennis, and I’m the star player of the school’s ping-pong team.

With all seriousness, Melanie lowered her voice to Tommy Hawk, "Don’t you think the things we’re about to do are risky? For that, you need to make thorough preparations, like at the very least, you should have enough stamina to run away when the police catch you."

"I can give you a reasonable explanation. There are no flying bullets like in the movies, no bloodshed, no gangsters and cops. This is just a harmless little business." Tommy Hawk covered his face with his hands, rubbed vigorously, and his muffled voice came out from beneath his palms, "Melanie, you should watch fewer of those Californian TV dramas. Ever since I told you about this small business, you’ve become a bit edgy. We’re just poor sods selling cigarettes, not arms dealers or drug lords. We don’t have the clout to be involved in the big scenes you’re talking about. The scariest scenario you might encounter is me accidentally reading the compass wrong while steering the fishing boat, aiming to head up to Canada but ending up in Cuba instead."

"Normal people would get nervous." Melanie, ignoring Tommy’s helplessness, threw back a comment and turned to continue jogging ahead, "Only a freak like you would act as if it’s nothing."

After finishing the last seven hundred meters and standing outside the front door of the church, which was neither majestic nor luxurious, Melanie finally asked Tommy Hawk, "Why come to the church?"

"Not to the church, but to the facility next to it. See that understated and inconspicuous sign?" Tommy Hawk stretched out his finger, pointing to a two-story building next to the church.

Looking in the direction Tommy was pointing, Melanie read the somewhat faded Italian words on the sign, "Fraternity of St. Egidio."

"A church organization?" After reading it, Melanie looked unsurely at Tommy Hawk and asked, "Although I’ve come to St. Egidio Church countless times with my parents, I never noticed this inconspicuous sign."

Tommy Hawk shook his head slightly, "Are you sure you’re Italian, Auntie?"

"Just as you’re not quite sure I’m a woman, full of doubt," Melanie sighed, saying to Tommy Hawk, "Tommy, haven’t your friends ever reminded you that it’s better to speak more directly?"

"This used to be a great place, a help center for Italians in America. It has lost its glory now, but finding a guide here shouldn’t be difficult," Tommy Hawk told Melanie.

The Fraternity of St. Egidio that Tommy Hawk spoke about was an organization of Italian Americans that once spanned the East Coast and West Coast of the United States, founded in 1942.

The establishment of the Fraternity was due to the fact that the United States had formally entered World War II, and the United States Government was worried that Italian Americans, with their strong sense of family and homeland, might be exploited by Mussolini, posing a great hidden threat to the U.S. homeland. Consequently, various restrictive policies against Italians began in California and swiftly spread like a tidal wave, expanding to all the states along the West Coast. Although there were hundreds of thousands of Italian American soldiers serving the U.S. fighting desperately on the battlefields, this could not dispel the U.S. Government’s suspicions of the Italian American community.

Italian Americans suddenly found that they were no longer allowed to go to the seaside, their livelihood of fishing boats were forcibly seized, and Italians were subjected to a separate racial curfew policy. As soon as night fell, they were not allowed to go out, and leaving their residence for more than five kilometers necessitated a permit from the police. Most importantly, violating any of the above restrictions would immediately lead to being forcibly taken away and labeled as "enemy aliens" and sent for custody.

These policies resulted in tens of thousands of Italian families on the West Coast who depended on the fishing industry losing their jobs completely. At the time, on the Northeast coast of the U.S., in areas like New York and New England where there was a large population of Italian immigrants, the government could not enforce massive racial controls, so the restrictive measures were relatively milder, focusing mainly on persuasion and co-optation. From this, one could clearly see the difference in how the U.S. treated immigrants from different regions: the South was barbaric; the North was civilized.

Italian Americans place great importance on family and like to form associations, especially valuing relatives. So even those separated by thousands of miles would reach out to help their kin or friends on the West Coast when they learned of their troubles.

But assistance from such a great distance was excessively difficult, so someone proposed that those unemployed Italians on the West Coast should migrate to the Northeast coast. Along the way, Italian Catholic churches in various states could be used as contact points, and Italian religious personnel as liaisons, offering whatever food, money, and help they could.

Thus, as this idea gained acceptance among the Italian people, almost all Italian immigrants on the East Coast came together—gangsters, craftsmen, factory owners, merchants, fishermen, barbers, and even pimps... Regardless of their status or location in the U.S., they all made efforts to participate, providing all kinds of help and information wherever they could, in an endeavor to save their own people from dire straits. In this way, a migration route for Italians crisscrossing the U.S. began to emerge on the map.

A large number of Italian descendants used this migration route to secretly start from Los Angeles, California, in the Southwest, using information from their fellow Italians to bypass checkpoints and travel through various U.S. states to eventually reach the Northeast cities of New York, Boston, Portland, Providence, and even heading north to Canada.

Because the idea of using churches along the way as contact points for assistance, with Italian religious personnel as liaisons, to slowly complete this difficult Italian migration was first proposed by Rocky Salvato, a priest from St. Egidio Church in Providence, the organization of Italians in various states offering assistance came to be known as the Eccio Fraternity.

At the time, the Eccio Fraternity not only helped migrating kinsfolk but also timely exchanged information about the attitudes of different states and cities in America toward Italians, helping fellow countrymen find suitable places to settle. It was because of its existence that many Italian children managed to survive when their parents were controlled, avoiding death by starvation.

As time went by, today’s Eccio Fraternity can no longer shine as it once did; after all, Italians prefer clannishness and value family. They have always had little enthusiasm for large institutions and organizations like the Eccio Fraternity, feeling that their affection is limited and can only be given to their closest people.

So once their relatives were rescued and the crisis had passed, the once united Italians dispersed like stars in the sky, returning to their own lives.

Today’s Eccio Fraternity indeed resembles more of a church organization used by Italian churches in various places to maintain communication, but it has retained one characteristic: when Italians need to go to a completely unfamiliar city for some reason, you can come to a church with the Eccio Fraternity marker looking for help. If there are also Italians living in that city, the Fraternity can help you connect with an enthusiastic and communicative fellow Italian who can offer assistance in integrating into the new city. Of course, this service is now paid, like a tour guide.

After hearing Tommy Hawk’s story, Melanie stared at him for a few seconds before saying:

"Tommy, where did you learn all this information? What you’ve told me has made me start to doubt whether I’m Italian at all; there’s nothing about this in the American history textbooks."

Tommy Hawk looked at the signpost and walked towards it: "Among those forced to migrate, there was an infant girl named Alida Leon," he said. "She told me about it. Let’s go. We need to find a guide."