Linda Stasi was the longtime co-host of NY1’s “What a Week” and is currently the book critic for CUNY TV’s “Uncensored.” She also teaches novel writing to journalists at the Newswomen’s Club of NY and was once named one of the “Fifty Most Powerful Women in NYC.” (Photo courtesy of Stasi)
By Jack Delaney | jdelaney@queensledger.com
RED HOOK — When Linda Stasi decided to take her mother to dinner at Ferdinando’s Focacceria, she didn’t expect the whole restaurant to end up in tears. Nor could she imagine that it would kickstart her new novel, “The Descendant,” out on March 10.
It was 2010, and Stasi’s daughter had been working on the set of a movie being shot in Carroll Gardens. In the process, she befriended Frankie, the owner of the iconic — and sadly now-closed — Red Hook eatery. He offered to rent her the upstairs apartment; she declined, but insisted that her ailing grandmother come by for a meal.
“Where are we?” she asked, as they settled in. But while eating panelles, a traditional Sicilian fritter, something clicked. She called Frankie over. After chatting with him about the place’s history for a few minutes, she put her finger on it: “My mother died here,” she declared.
“Everybody in the restaurant, they only seat 35 people — everybody started crying,” recalled Stasi, in a conversation earlier this month. “There’s truck drivers, people of every race, and they were all hugging my mother. They took down a picture from the wall; it was my grandmother’s apartment, and my mother said, this is where she died.”
That was the night that Stasi, a longtime co-host of NY1’s “What a Week” segment and the current book critic for CUNY TV’s “Uncensored,” felt her latest novel start to percolate. Inspired, she began digging deeper into family stories she had heard scraps of growing up, especially records of Italian immigration to Colorado.
“The Descendant” gently fictionalizes the remarkable lives of Stasi’s mother and grandmother, who was lured from Sicily to America by the false promise of land. After fighting their way from horrific coal mine work to ownership of a ranch, the family became embroiled in the Mafia and resettled in Prohibition-era Red Hook, above Ferdinando’s.
“The day they moved to 151 Union Street, her mother says, ‘Pull down the shades, pull down the shades.’ They said, ‘Why?’ And then they hear — BOOM, BOOM, BOOM,” said Stasi. “Somebody was shot in the vestibule of their building on the very first day they moved there. It was a real scary place at the time.”
Coal miners strike in Ludlow, CO, in 1914. “The Descendant” follows the La Barbera family from Sicily to Colorado, before they finally land in Red Hook. (Photo: Wikimedia)
During the research process, Stasi came across another book, “Mountain Mafia,” written by her cousin Sam Carlino. Inside, she learned that her aunt had been married to a man named Charlie Carlino, who was killed in the longest gunfight in Colorado history when their daughter was only 10 days old.
The shootout, which took place on the Baxter Street Bridge, shared too many similarities with a scene in “The Godfather” to ignore. Stasi believes that its author, Mario Puzo, based his saga in part on old newspaper clippings about the Carlinos.
But the beating heart of “The Descendant” is the stranger-than-fiction saga of Stasi’s mother and aunts, a gauntlet of near-Biblical trials and tribulations.
First there’s the drought in Sicily, straining Maria La Barbera’s honeymoon. Mount Etna erupts; almost 100,000 people die in the ensuing tsunami.
“She didn’t understand that she couldn’t take a wolf to Brooklyn.” — Linda Stasi, on her mother’s unusual pet
America seems like salvation: higher wages, land of one’s own. But the voyage turns out to be a ruse, engineered by John D. Rockefeller to rustle up indentured labor. Coworkers die in cave-ins, and when a union intervenes, the La Barberas are caught up in one of the bloodiest crackdowns in American labor history: the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, part of the Colorado Coalfield War, which sees the National Guard open fire on women and children.
The family flees to the mountains, where Maria gives birth. Her husband Mariano, who has become abusive since leaving Sicily, threatens to kill the newborn — until a wolf intervenes to save her. (Though it seems improbable, Stasi says her mother really did have a pet wolfdog. “She didn’t understand that she couldn’t take a wolf to Brooklyn,” she explained, “so it was very traumatic for her.”)
Prohibition rescues the La Barberas from the brink. Mariano builds a bootleg empire off sugar beet moonshine, raking in the profits needed to buy a ranch. But tragedy strikes again, this time in the form of the Great Pueblo Flood of 1921, which whisks away the town of Pueblo and all of the family’s holdings.
“The Descendant,” from Regalo Press, is expected to release on March 10.
The blows don’t stop. Just as they’re pulling their life back together, Al Capone comes calling: Mariano has killed the wrong man, and it’s time to leave for Red Hook, also known as the mythical “Brook-a-Land.” Mariano goes ahead, only to gamble away the La Barbera’s savings, leaving them no choice but to cram into the tenement above Ferdinando’s. All that before the devastation of the Great Depression.
Stasi cites the late action writer Nelson DeMille as one of her greatest influences, and the brief, punchy chapters of “The Descendant” — combined with its heaping serving of catastrophe, and side of the supernatural — make for a total page-turner. Yet as Stasi notes, episodes like the Ludlow Massacre rarely feature in high school textbooks, and her rendering of a multicultural West in the 1910s doubles as a crash course in forgotten history à la Howard Zinn.
Northwest Brooklynites will find familiar names, such as Saint Mary Star of the Sea, but the novel is less interested in the local topography than in the effect this new environment has on the outdoorsy La Barberas and their tangled relationships within Red Hook’s Italian American community. (“On Union Street, Mariano was loathed, Maria was loved. He was feared, she was fearless. He took, she gave.”)
This is a restless epic, however, and it doesn’t stay in Red Hook for long. A death sends the narrative back to Colorado, before the story loops around to Brooklyn once more. World War II brings fresh questions of identity — yet the most compelling element is the one with which the book opens: the wolf. What is this guardian spirit, vengeful and wild and watchful, that accompanies Firenze, a stand-in for Stasi’s mother, from rugged hills to a bustling port? More than a thriller, more than an ethnography, “The Descendant” brims with a fierce love — I have your back, it will be alright — that rises above the tide of woe.
Stasi will be holding a book signing at The Corner Bookstore in the Upper East Side on March 10 at 6 p.m.
