Where I grew up, in and around Boston, it was Puritan this, Pilgrim that, Colonial everything else. Who were these pure people who had supermarkets and liquor stores and laundries named after them? We knew they’d founded the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but we didn’t personally know many Protestants, though we admired their churches and studied their history, which was somehow our history, though our grandparents (except for a mysterious, unacknowledged grandfather) were immigrants from Catholic countries.

Growing up, I was always trying to understand when their history ended and our history began. And how did the history of black people fit into their old American history and our newer place in it? We were so different from the Founding Fathers, but in relation to African Americans, we were the same: white. Truth didn’t always make sense. The place where we lived seemed to belong to the people who founded it, but there were already people in Massachusetts when they arrived. And now there were Catholics, lots and lots of us, with massive churches that weren’t as pretty as the trim, white-steepled Protestant meetinghouses. Monuments and plaques and statues told one story. I looked at things and wondered about people whose names no one remembered.   

When I was twelve we moved out of Boston to a town called Weymouth, twelve miles south on an inlet of Boston Harbor.  Though Weymouth had deep roots in colonial history—it was site of the first town meeting in America—it wasn’t picturesque like  Hingham and Cohasset and Duxbury, towns further south where ships’ captains and merchants built beautiful white churches and stately mansions. Our town had old houses covered with aluminum siding and asbestos tiles, defunct shoe factories, and a main drag with a McDonald’s and two Dunkin’ Donuts.

We lived on the north edge of the town, across the water from Quincy, a few blocks from the Fore River. Washing dishes in the kitchen, you could see the Procter and Gamble factory, the big smokestacks against the changing sky. Sometimes while you were hanging the laundry in the yard, you could smell Ivory Soap being manufactured at the plant.

From upstairs we saw the Edison Electric Illuminating Company with its stacks and its coal conveyer. And across the Fore River were the enormous dry docks and cranes of General Dynamics Shipyards, still busy running several shifts a day as ships came in for repairs and new ships went to sea.

They opened the drawbridge for all of this shipping. It was a deco structure, built in 1936. We could see it from our bathroom window. My mother’s father was a Sicilian stonemason who was born in Salemi, a town near Trapani. He had worked on the WPA crew that built the drawbridge.

In 1885, when my grandfather was born, Emily Dickinson was still alive in Amherst, writing about places she’d never been, among them Sicily and the metaphysical South:

A South wind has a pathos
Of individual voice
As One detect on landings
An Emigrant’s address 

A hint of Ports and Peoples—
And much not understood—
The fairer—for the fairness—
And for the foreignhood

I never knew my grandfather. He died when my mother was fourteen. I had heard about the black bunting on the house, the body laid out in the parlor, the sadistic older sister who locked my mother in the dark room with the body. By then World War II had started. My mother’s mother, the only grandparent I ever knew, got a job as a seamstress in a factory that made men’s uniforms. Years later, she made quilts for us with the rough scraps she took from the factory. They kept us warm and cost almost nothing to make, but I coveted the other American quilts I’d seen, trim and pretty. Protestant quilts.

I still have an enormous spool of khaki thread my grandmother got from the factory floor. I use it for most of my mending—socks, underpants, hems—and I cherish it. I won’t use all of this thread if I live to be a hundred.

The building where she worked is no longer a factory. It’s been converted to lofts. I’ve been to a party in one of those elegant spaces. You can see this building from the highway as you head into the tunnel toward the North End from Dorchester. On the side of the building there’s a faded painting of a man in a blue uniform. A ghost.