Madonna by Mary Gabriel EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Mary Gabriel
- Language: English
- Genre: Biographies & Memoirs of Women
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 10.8 MB
- Price: Free
Pontiac, 1958–1963
I don’t think he had words for his pain.
1
—Madonna
THE HOUSES WERE modest, the families inside young and frugal. In the
summer, it felt like a neighborhood of children, whose adventures took
place in small yards bordered by a chain-link fence, train tracks, and
beyond that a sewer system that would, when they were old enough to
climb the fence, become a new place to play.
2 When they were young,
though, the yards were the extent of their world, and that was plenty. It was
a world of motion and noise: cries and laughter, the sound of records and
radios, the clatter and chatter from mothers cooking, cleaning, and hanging
up clothes, and the shouted greetings of fathers, day and night, at the start
and end of their shifts, mostly in GM factories. Only at twilight, after the
children were in bed, did the streets grow quiet enough to hear the
occasional TV laugh track through an open window and the continuous
buzz of an electrical tower that loomed over the neighborhood, driving
them all mad.
3
Pontiac’s Herrington Hills, like so many communities across the United
States, was peopled with men and women busily rebuilding society after
World War II. Theirs was the stuff of the American dream: faith, family,
country. What made Pontiac unique was that its citizens were people of
many ethnicities and races, all having been recruited in previous decades to
come north to Michigan to work in the exploding auto industry. African
Americans, Mexicans, Eastern Europeans, Italians, Irish—anyone and
everyone from throughout the United States and abroad who wanted a
union job and a settled future. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, GIs back
from fighting joined the influx, and whole neighborhoods sprouted up to
house them, just as schools were built to educate their children.
4 That was
key to the dream. Having survived a hideous recent past, they wanted a
better future for their children. They found it in Pontiac, where the school
district became the best in the state.
5
Silvio “Tony” Ciccone, twenty-four, and his new bride, Madonna Fortin,
twenty-two, added to the Herrington Hills bustle when they moved into a
small bungalow on Thors Street, in 1955. Their arrival came amid a second
great wave of migration into the community, which filled it with people
their age and at the same stage of life.
6 That meant that when Madonna
began having children—five in five years, beginning with Anthony, in
1956, and Martin, in 1957—she was surrounded by mothers doing the
same. The community of strangers became family, and that strengthened the
young couple’s bond as they embarked on what they fully expected would
be a long and happy life together.
Tony Ciccone was the youngest of six boys born to Italian immigrants
from the Adriatic region of Abruzzo who had settled in western
Pennsylvania to work in the steel mills. His family was physically in the
United States, but in every other way it had remained in Italy.
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