Customer Reviews

Alligator Bayou

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It is the year 1899. Calogero, a 14-year-old Sicilian immigrant, lives in Tallulah, Louisiana, with his uncles and cousins.

They have all come to America seeking a better life. They do well for themselves, selling fruits and vegetables from a corner grocery store. They do not seek out trouble, but it always has a way of finding them.

Calo and his family do not discriminate between blacks and whites. They sell to anyone who will buy their produce. Members of the town find this behavior reprehensible and disgusting. It is only a matter of time before the white citizens of Tallulah turn their backs on Calo and his family, and destroy every possible hope they had of leading quiet, normal lives.

Donna Jo Napoli has done extensive research for this novel. The afterword explains that Napoli came across an article about five Sicilian grocers in Tallulah, Louisiana, who were lynched because they served a black customer before a white one. The article moved Napoli, and she felt a story must be told about these men. Napoli based her characters on those people who testified or were talked about in the testaments taken after the Tallulah lynching.

The time and effort Napoli has put into her research makes the story more genuine, more affecting. It is a tragic story that ends with a glimmer of hope.

Read this novel - it is a horrific reminder of what can happen when prejudice prevails and mob mentality rules over all.

Reviewed by: LadyJay

Calogero is a 14-year-old immigrant to Louisiana from Sicily, and he lives in the small town of Tallulah where his cousins and uncles sell groceries and produce. The year is 1899, and the small band of Sicilians find the constraints that won't let them mingle with whites because their skin is dark also keeps them from socializing with blacks.

Calogero and his 13-year-old cousin Cirone are lonely and want to fit in: they work to learn English, eat American food and try to learn the customs of their new country. But tight economic times lead to tension between the white Louisianans and the Sicilians, who the whites see as taking business away from them. When Calogero and his relatives become friends with blacks, tensions escalate.

Based on a true event, Alligator Bayou by Donna Jo Napoli brings this powerful clash of cultures to life with tales of alligator hunts in the bayou, Italian immigrant communities, picking cotton, selling watermelons, cooking sweet potatoes and eating alligator.

This tale reminds us that the immigrant story in the U.S., like the story between whites and blacks, was and is often wrought with difficulties. The story was particularly poignant for me, because I grew up in Louisiana amongst many long-established Italians, and I had no idea of the hardships many of their ancestors endured so their descendents could one day become part of the accepted American community.

Napoli understands the time period she writes of well, and there are references to the all-but-gone Tunica tribe of Mississippi and Louisiana and the 1890 U.S. Census, in which some blacks found out for the first time they were free from slavery. It's truly amazing to look back on the time and issues that dominated the day: Jim Crow laws, the relationship between whites and blacks, and the threat immigrants posed to the normal routine of life.

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.

One of the reasons I enjoy historical fiction is that it offers the opportunity to learn about little known episodes in our country's history, wrapped in the context of a compelling story. In writing Alligator Bayou, Donna Jo Napoli was inspired by a newspaper account about five Sicilian grocers in a small town in Louisiana who served a black customer who had entered the store first before a white one--and ended up lynched by a town mob. Many of the characters in the novel are based on the actual historical figures, but Napoli added a sixth grocer, a teenaged boy, Calogero. He and his relatives from Sicily don't understand the Jim Crow laws of the South, and when they shake hands with black boys their age, the other boys are speechless with surprise. Calogero takes a liking to Patricia, a very attractive black girl in the community, and she's attracted to him as well--but they have to keep their relationship secret. The Sicilians are not accepted by the white people in the town, who call them names and think they are all violent criminals and Mafia members. The black residents are kinder, even inviting Calogero and his cousins to a graduation party, where they are the only white guests, and inviting them to share a Fourth of July get-together.

Trouble is brewing in the small town, though, and it's not only because Calogero gets in trouble for going on a night-time alligator hunt in the swamps or because he wants to go to the neighborhood black school. The grocers' goats, who are left free to wander around at night, keep congregating on the porch of the town's doctor, Dr. Hodge. When they hear shots in the night, they discover that Hodge has made good on his threat to shoot the goats if they keep coming onto his property. Soon there is altercation between the doctor and the Sicilian grocers, and Calogero must run for safety. Will he escape the wrath of the local mob?

This novel delves into many prejudices prevalent in post-Civil War Louisiana; we see not only the expected racial divisions between blacks and whites, but also the hatred for the Italian immigrants, who poured into Louisiana through the port of New Orleans during the latter part of the 19th century, largely to work on sugar plantations. The terrible conclusion of this story is a lesson in the importance of tolerance, the evil of bigotry, and the need to get along with our neighbors from all countries, a lesson that is, unfortunately, still necessary in our multicultural society.

Alligator Bayou has received numerous awards, including the American Library Association Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults, Parents' Choice Gold Award for Historical Fiction, and International Reading Association's (IRA) Notable Books for a Global Society.

In the town of Tallulah, Louisiana in 1899, fourteen-year-old Calogero lives with his cousins and uncles. They are Sicilian farmers that sell their fruits and vegetables at their stand and in their grocery store. Although there are a few people there that are friends with the immigrants, most are not so welcoming. Issues with racism begin to arise when Calogero's family gets wrapped up in the tension between the whites and blacks. In the novel, Calegro finds dangerous adventures on alligator hunts, develops strong feelings for a kind, witty black girl named Patricia, all the while trying to adapt to American customs. Eventually, all the misunderstandings and disagreements between the Sicilians and white community build up to bring Calogero's family to an angry and violent confrontation. This book had an unexpected ending. I enjoyed reading the afterword because I learned that the story was partially based on an article the author read on Sicilian grocers actually from Tullulah in 1899. The innocent grocers unfortunately wound up dead just because they had served a black customer before a white one. It was interesting to find out that the shock and pain she felt from reading it was what urged her to write the novel. Overall, it was a good read and Donna Jo Napoli is a talented writer, but it was a bit below my reading level. I look forward to reading some of her other books.

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.