In going through some of my mother’s memorabilia, I came across a yellowed clipping from the Feb. 13, 1969, edition of the Bolivar County Democrat, Rosedale’s long-ago defunct weekly newspaper.
There was a photo and a story with the headline: “Mrs. Agusto Graziosi marks 89th birthday.” It featured her comments about leaving her native Italy at the tender age of 17 to settle in a country half a world away and where she could not speak the language and had no special skills or talents to offer except a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for hard work.
Antonia (Toni) Maestri Graziosi – the original pea in my pod of three-- was born in 1880 in the far-north Piedmont region of Italy, just a stone’s throw from the French border. When she came to the U.S., she joined her older brother in Memphis and later Helena, AR.
Six years afterward, she married Agusto (Gus) Graziosi, also a recent immigrant, and they settled in Rosedale where they operated the “R Cola Bottling Company” for eight years before buying a small farm about a mile south of town on Highway 1.
Agusto raised a little cotton with the goal of buying additional acreage while Antonia found her niche with a “truck farm” and sold tomatoes and other vegetables by the bushels to stores in Rosedale and Greenville. As a sideline, she began producing a pepper sauce that became regionally famous and is now a feature of Backyard Burgers as “Miz Grazi’s Sauce.”
Agusto died relatively young in 1940, but Antonia continued the operation with the assistance of son-in-law Burl Dykes.
She was a tiny but efficient dynamo. In addition to the aforementioned cotton, vegetables and pepper sauce, she always kept a couple of hogs for slaughter, fryers and layers for food and eggs, two cows from which she got milk and hand-churned butter, peach, pear and fig trees for preserves and pecans for personal consumption and sale. With that kind of self-sufficiency, she spent very little time or money at the grocery store.
The photo accompanying the article pictured her just as I remembered -- a smiling but weathered face from too many hours in the sun, waist-long gray hair that she kept in a bun, and the ever-constant twinkle in her deep-brown eyes that reflected her fun-loving side -- which included ending each day by sipping a shot glass of straight bourbon whisky while sucking on hard peppermint candy. Perhaps that was her idea of a mint julep.
Since she was 60 years old when I was born, my childish mind never pictured her as once being young until a number of years back when I discovered a photo taken in her mid-20s. Her long hair was also tied back in those days but had a black sheen instead of gray, the dark eyes were twinkling as always, her body was shapely, and she had movie star good looks.
I remember thinking to myself at the time, “Good Lord, Maw-Maw was a hottie!”
I have often surmised that things must have been pretty bad in the old country for her and other Italian immigrants to make such an uncertain move to the United States, but the newspaper article indicated it was a choice that Antonia never regretted.
“I liked the United States as soon as I got here and have never been back to Italy,” the article quoted her in an interview wherein the reporter apparently fixed her broken English. “I never wanted to go back. Conditions were pretty bad when I left and I have had a wonderful life in this country and have never missed my native land.”
She became 100 per-cent American – learning the language as best she could and requiring that only English be spoken in her home. Starting with nothing, she made a very comfortable living by working hard and never asked for or received any special favors or concessions from the government of her new country. She sought only opportunity, and she found it in abundance.
I don’t think she would understand the immigration issues of our day.