South Brooklyn Profiles: Procession of Santa Maria Addolorata

Procession of Santa Maria Addolorata
I am reminded that summer is over, not by a barbecue or a telethon, but by a procession that winds its way through my Brooklyn neighborhood, Carroll Gardens, the first Sunday of September. It not only calls to mind the approaching season, but is a small reminder of the town where I grew up in central New Jersey, psychically if not physically eons from Brooklyn.
My parents and I had moved from a small city to what was then a rural area, building a house on a ten acre plot with few families on our road we could remotely think of as neighbors. I would ride for miles by bike to stare enviously at the set of houses being built near each other where the little kids would just go outside to find a playmate. That "development" was hardly a neighborhood since it was made up of five houses at best, but it was getting closer to the idea of "town" for which I have always searched.
Now in Carroll Gardens, a brass band's mournful sound calls my current neighbors to their windows and stoops each Labor Day weekend. We all watch a procession of black-garbed men and women wind slowly through the neighborhood -- an annual funereal parade.
The tradition is one brought to New York by the people of Mola di Bari, a town of approximately 25,000 people in southeast Italy. There too a procession is held twice a year, on Good Friday and in September. (The American parade is held one week before the Italian -- Labor Day weekend attracts more people to the feast.) The processions, which have been a part of this neighborhood for years, is the joint effort of four Malo di Bari clubs, three in Brooklyn, one in Staten Island.
The focal point of the procession is a large statue of Santa Maria Addolorata, standing on a large gold podium, carried by alternating crews of young men. The statue is a famous one in this predominantly Italian section of Brooklyn -- the saint is portrayed with a sword in her heart and an anguished look on her face.
As the procession makes its way through the neighborhood, traveling from Hicks down to Columbia Street and up to Court Street ("We go around the town," one man tells me), viewers may request the statue be turned towards their homes for a brief benediction. Many donate money that is pinned to a green, red, and white sash hanging from the Madonna's hand which is already laden with golden pendants and chains. The procession continues as the women quietly sing a traditional song, drowned out by the brass band. Small girls, wearing replicas of the Madonna's dress and small crowns, evoke a sense of early responsibility.
The clubs also hold an annual beauty contest, naming one Miss Mola to walk in the procession, bedecked in crown and sash, an odd blend of religion and the very secular notion of a beauty queen.
Despite the inappropriate American trimmings, the essence of the parade goes unscathed. It's an introspective holiday; even casual viewers seem quiet, not talking among themselves, but sitting on stoops or at windows, engaged by the solemnity and perhaps eager to find themselves in a smaller New York, one suddenly shrunk down to manageable size.
My memory of a procession several years ago, includes one of my neighbors, a young gay woman, sitting on our stoop, watching. She's moved now, back to Florida, after her brother's AIDS-related death. I imagine her returning to the smaller universe that she and her brother once felt they had to leave; she may have, while mourning for her brother, wanted the support of a smaller community she hoped to find in Florida. There was no guarantee they would accept her or her brother's memory now, but at least there would be a reaction -- something to work with or against -- a spur that her many years in New York had not given her, and that she might sometime need to escape again. Here in Carroll Gardens there is the kind of small-town community she returned to, but, like myself, she was not a part of it.
As I follow the procession, I watch spectators, not unlike myself, who are rather obviously not from this neighborhood. How I know that, I cannot quite say; it has to do with dress, expressions, people I think of as "the observers." They are my friends and neighbors who have left suburbs from across the country, somehow landing in Brownstone Brooklyn. They are always one step removed from the neighborhood, with no particular intentions of staying or leaving.
Trying to escape that sense of impermanence is admittedly, one of the several reasons I have made friends with the Carbones, neighborhood old-timers. Occasionally, when I am asked over for dinner, I barrage them with questions of the neighborhood in earlier days, and they generously show me their photographs -- when they first met, Mr. Carbone as an ambulance corps driver, the two of them dancing at their granddaughter's wedding. I love looking at these, but I feel secretly frustrated with the photos' backgrounds: why didn't they shot themselves with the appropriate neighborhood landmarks in the distance? Where's that large clock that everyone talks about, the one on Union and Columbia where the longshoremen would line up for work? What about The Luna and The Happy Hour, two of the many movie theaters that once populated the area?
What's worse, I cannot keep myself from asking what part of Italy their parents are from: they have no idea. This astounds me, and I keep asking questions as if to make the answers exist. My store of knowledge about my family's town is essetnial to who I am. I am snobbishly saddened for people my age who know little of their family backgrounds, but I am surprised to find people my parent's age who find such information unimportant. I know from the procession that at least some of their contemporaries value such knowledge.
But the Carbones, second and third generation Brooklyn-ites, see themselves in a way that more accurately define the views of many in the neighborhood. They are Italian-American and that has nothing to do with another place: it's a label that has to do with their current world. There is no old-world nostalgia to it.
As "the observers" watch the procession, I dare them to have anything that approaches an amused expression on their faces. As many of my friends make a habit or, in some cases, a living, out of studying other ethnic groups, I find myself furious to find Italians under their microscope. I imagine the conversations the procession will prompt. "It's a ritual they still keep up." "You feel like you're in some Italian town -- all the women and men in black." And worst of all, "If you pay, the Madonna faces your house; it's as if they think they can buy a blessing."
I turn my back on them to shut out my fears of how this event will somehow reconfirm their unspoken feelings about Italian-Americans as uneducated, superstitious, backwards.
But then I am faced with another set of barriers; the people I want to defend feel no particular ties to me. I am Italian, yes, but I am not from this neighborhood, my family is not even Barese. Though, the neighborhood also has a large population from Torre del Greco, very close to my family's town, I still have little to say to them either, as much as I would like to. Their day-to-day lives in America have little connection to my own. After all, I am neither from Italy nor from New York. Often, I understand what people are saying to me when they address me in Italian; my response, though, must be in English. My inability to recreate the words I've been hearing my whole life has been a constant source of genuine wonder for me. Things that seemed so natural to my ear, have always been foreign to my mouth and because I know the right sounds that should be there, the utterings I make sound all the worse.
While my reasons for not learning were more complicated than my tongue's refusal to cooperate, that language pull has been central to me, as to so many first and second generation Americans. When I moved into this neighborhood seven years ago, I found myself caught again between Italian and English in the forms of the neighborhood oldtimers (many who don't speak Italian themselves; some who don't speak English) and "the observers."
The very man who referred to Carroll Gardens as a town, told me about the importance of the procession and the invisible, but real presence of a blessing: "A lot of people get touched -- you don't see, that's for sure . . . we believe it exists . . . you believe it can help you out." He would never feel any need to be defended by me; his belief was all that mattered and while he was happy to see me interested, it wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't been.
Next year, the Mola procession will again create the illusion of a small town one that includes everyone within the boundaries of the procession -- a Catholic eruv, holding us inside the walled city. And if I haven't decided to leave and observe some other place, I'll again be relieved to be here and furious that I'm really not.

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This project is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Development Fund of BAC/Brooklyn Arts Council, Inc., which is made possible with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.