Keep it In the Family

JF: Welcome to BackStory — the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

JF: If you’re new to the podcast, each week, along with my colleagues — Nathan Connolly, Ed Ayers, and Brian Balogh — we explore a different aspect of American history.

JF: Now, I joined BackStory in 2017. And although I was the only female co-host, I didn’t join the team thinking about that … nor did I give much thought to my identity as a historian. All of the co-hosts were historians. That was a given.

JF: But during my time at BackStory, different show segments surprised and moved me as a woman, and as a historian in ways that I hadn’t anticipated.

JF: This is the second-to-last installment of an ongoing “Best of” series we’re doing as BackStory starts to wrap up after more than 12 years.

The final one will be Best of BackStory – the Listener Edition, which means we’re looking for submissions from YOU. Let us know what interview or BackStory moment was most memorable for you, and tell us why! Just check the show notes to find out how to get in touch.

As for this episode…I’m excited to have the chance to share these three conversations with you. And I hope you enjoy them, too…

You’ll learn about 19th century Antiquarians, collectors nostalgic for the so-called “olden times.”

And you’ll hear from Senator Tammy Duckworth about her life of service and what it takes to change the culture of Congress.

But first, we’re going to talk about honor culture in America.

JF: Now when you think about honor culture, you probably think about duelling in the 19th century. We’ve all heard the story of Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and their notorious duel. The affair was all about honor, and the culture demanded that men protect their good names and reputations by any means necessary.

We might not see a lot of duels anymore, but in many ways, honor culture lives on today…

A couple years ago, I spoke with writer Karen Tintori about how she discovered a decades-old secret. It was a secret that connected her family to honor culture in a surprising and disturbing way…

JF:My interview with Karen Tintori, who reconstructed and wrote about a family honor killing from generations past, grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go.  Even when I was preparing for the interview, it brought tears to my eyes; I remember feeling compelled to call a BackStory producer to process my thoughts. There were many aspects of the story — and the interview — that touched me. But perhaps most of all, I was deeply struck by this attempt to erase the life and identity of a woman, and the work and passion that went into recovering her story and acknowledging her life.

JF: So here is my conversation with Karen from the show, “Death Before Dishonor: Shame and Reputation in American History.”

And a warning. This story contains disturbing descriptions of violence against women.

Joanne Freeman:
Several years ago, Karen Tintori discovered a devastating family secret. She’s a journalist and writer from a close knit Italian American family. And while she knew a lot about her father’s side of the family, she realized she knew very little about her mother’s family, which had immigrated from Sicily in the early 20th century. So she started asking her grandmother, her mother, and her aunt some questions, but for some reason they didn’t want to talk.

Karen Tintori:
They would say, “Okay, come over on Tuesday.” And then Monday night I’d get a phone call. “Well, Nope. Grandma has a doctor’s appointment.” Et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t realize for many years that I was getting the runaround.

Joanne Freeman:
She finally managed to get her grandmother to agree to speak with her about the family.

Karen Tintori:
I walked in and my grandmother was already agitated and sputtering in Sicilian to my aunt, “Who is she going to show? Who is she going to tell?” And on the corner of the table was an old shoebox filled with documents and the top one was a family passport. My aunt, Grace, opened it up and pointed to a line in the list of children that had been obliterated with a black pen and she said, “That’s the one they got rid of. Did your mother ever tell you?” And it took about another hour for her to explain that my grandmother had a sister next to her, a year younger, who was murdered by her brothers about 1920 in Detroit in an honor killing.

Joanne Freeman:
Tintori Spent more than a decade piecing together the whole story, she eventually published a book about her great aunt’s murder. She learned that the one they got rid of was her grandmother’s sister, a girl named Frances. She’d come with her siblings and parents to Detroit from Sicily in 1914, but Frances disappeared from the census records in 1920. She would have been about 16 years old.

Karen Tintori:
She had been promised to a “mafioso” who was 20 years older than she was by her father. And because she broke that engagement and she eloped with the man she was in love with, her older brothers were very upset with her that she had blackened the family name, she had dishonored the family by disobeying the father and by ruining their chances to get a leg up in a better street gang. The brothers took matters into their own hands, they were so angry with her that they kidnapped her and they took her to Belle Isle, which is an Island in the Detroit river. And the story was that they cut off her hands and her feet, and weighted her down with cement and threw her in.

Joanne Freeman:
What led you to call this an honor killing?

Karen Tintori:
Everyone in the family when we talked and they said it was an honor killing because she dishonored the family, she blackened the family name. When I called my mother later that day and said, “Is what Gracie told me true?” She said, “Oh, she had hot pants and she was fooling around with boys in the alley.” And that did not make sense to me at all. And I thought, “You know what? She was 16 and no matter what she did, if she did anything, she didn’t deserve the fate she got.” But to that older generation of the family in Sicily and transplanting that culture to the United States, the honor of the family was tied up in the chastity of the women, the appropriate conduct of the women, the way they dressed, the way they behaved, obedience and just not doing anything out of line in public.

Joanne Freeman:
Because to do that would bring shame on the men.

Karen Tintori:
Oh, to do … Yes.

Joanne Freeman:
Yes.

Karen Tintori:
It was control, I guess is what you want to say is. That the men could not keep their women under control, that dishonored the men. That they weren’t … I guess that it boils down to virility and manliness. And if they couldn’t keep their women in control, then they weren’t really men.

Joanne Freeman:
Absolutely. So honor is always in some way about manhood.

Karen Tintori:
Yes. Whether it’s fighting a duel or killing your sister because she goofed up your chances to run in a better mob.

Joanne Freeman:
Wow. In reconstructing this, how much did you find out about Frances and who she was, and what her life was like?

Karen Tintori:
Well, when my mom was dying, one of the younger brothers, her uncle, came to visit. He was the one when he was a little boy, he hated his older brothers for murdering Frances and vowed that he was going to grow up and kill them. He said that she was sweet, that she would take any little money that she had and buy the little brothers ice cream, and that she was really the sweetest and the kindest of all the sisters.

Joanne Freeman:
And did you get any sense of what her life was like before she eloped?

Karen Tintori:
Well, here she is murdered in 1920 about, right when women in this country are getting the right to vote, when everything is opening up. I mean, the future that she would have had, had she been allowed to grow up. Women basically they cooked, they cleaned, they ironed. I understand that the brothers threw their shirts down. They’d wear their shirts, two, three shirts a day, and then she like my grandmother being the first two girls would do the cooking, the cleaning, the ironing with the starch. And it was pretty much a life of toil.

Joanne Freeman:
Now, how did your family respond as you began unraveling this?

Karen Tintori:
Well, it was quite interesting. My mother of course was outraged that I was going to follow up or ask any more questions. And part of my family was horrified by the news of this family secret that had been kept for 80 years, and my mom said, “We heard about it when we were little kids and our parents thought we were sleeping. I would hear my mother and her sisters talking about Frances and crying.”

Joanne Freeman:
So you’re putting together this amazing story, then what led you to go the next step and then to publish it in some way?

Karen Tintori:
Well, because of the stigma and the honor of my own family in telling this tale that they thought was so horrific, I thought, “You know what? We’re honoring the bad guys by protecting them from what they did, and dishonoring her.” The night they murdered her, they came back and destroyed everything of hers, her pictures, her clothing. And I just thought, “No, I have to give her back her name.” There’s a Jewish curse, “May your name and your memory be erased.” And that’s what I thought of when I saw that line of litigated in the passport and that they burned everything of hers that night, it was like they obliterated her as if she never existed.

Joanne Freeman:
So in telling this story about this honor killing, basically you were redeeming her honor in a way.

Karen Tintori:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Joanne Freeman:
So over the course of researching the book and writing about it, did you come to feel differently about your family’s honor?

Karen Tintori:
That’s an interesting question. I did. I had considered honor, but not exactly in the word “honor”. There’s a Italian word, “[foreign language 00:07:27].” The [foreign language 00:07:28] is the shame. So shame was more the word than honor. And the shame was on the brothers, the shame was not on Frances. I mean, it was okay for them that didn’t dishonor the family, that they murdered their own flesh and blood? It’s mind boggling.

Joanne Freeman:
Has your family sense of themselves changed now that the secret is out?

Karen Tintori:
I think there’s a sense of relief in a sense of closure. Some of the women cousins we’ve talked about going to Belle Isle and doing a Memorial service for her, but we have not yet been able to do that. When you go to Belle Isle, there’s a beautiful Scott fountain there and people would go, because it was like a wedding cake of a fountain and the bridal party would go down there. My parents went. My aunt, Grace went. We have wedding pictures of everybody gathered around the fountain. And you go to the Island and go, “Well, did they kill her on this side? Did they kill her on that side?” It’s like if we knew where she was, we could really honor her by doing something like that.

Joanne Freeman:
So your family comes from Sicily to Detroit. In all of your research … and you did so much, did you get a sense of what that world would have been like coming from Italy to America? How different it was or how similar it was?

Karen Tintori:
In Italy, in Sicily, they came from poverty and they lived in stone house, and scrambled for something to eat. And America was a promise of food on the table and a better life for the family. But it was also an insular community in the Detroit area. They brought the food, and the customs and, and the culture with them, they just lived in different kinds of homes.

Joanne Freeman:
So in a sense, I mean the family, it got transported to America and by being in a Sicilian Italian community, everyone else shared that same sense of honor and family honor. And so they all felt bound by the same rules and by the same customs, and I guess by the same demands it sounds like.

Karen Tintori:
Yes. And it’s not just limited to the Detroit area. When the book came out, the feedback that I’ve received from readers who grew up in a Sicilian American family has been astounding. Some people were upset because they said, “Oh, well that didn’t happen in my family, and it gives a bad name to Sicilians. You’re dishonoring Sicilians by publishing the story because it’s reflecting badly upon us.” But one woman wrote to me and she said … 70 years old. She said, “All my life, I thought it was my fault and now I understand where all of this honor and female second place business came from.”

Joanne Freeman:
It’s such an amazing thing because this kind of honor culture generally, it’s obviously deeply powerful to the people who are in it, right? It means a lot to the family, it means a lot to the community. It’s this enormous network, and then it’s a thing that no one talks about.

Karen Tintori:
That’s the [foreign language 00:10:30], that’s the keep quiet, keep your mouth shut, keep your head down and obey.

Joanne Freeman:
But it shows you how absolutely powerful it is, right? If no one even needs to talk about it, it’s just something that everyone knows is the way things should be.

Karen Tintori:
Exactly. It ripples out like a pebble in a pond and it does, it affects everybody.

JF: Karen Tintori is a journalist and author of Unto the Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian American Family.