Waning

I am still refreshing the appointment request form on the website for the Italian Consulate in New York. After researching the story of one of the women in Against, I needed a date for when her anarchist lover arrived at Ellis Island from Italy. From there, I learned I qualified for Italian citizenship through iure sanguinis, or right to citizenship by blood. For whatever reason, my great-grandfather Enrico didn't apply for his American citizenship for decades after first immigrating to the United States. In the meantime, my grandfather was born. Enrico waited to file his declaration of citizenship until 1931. Why 1931? Was it the Depression? Mussolini? Or to put that time in some other historic terms: it was the year of the Scottsboro Boys' arrest in Alabama and the year Ida B. Wells died in Chicago—which I only knew because that's when Against begins, or at least, what's happening in the parts of Against I wrote first and will finish first, before election day if I can.

My great-grandfather Enrico had to affirm he was not an anarchist when he sought to become an American by law in 1931—ten years after the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti began, not far from the courthouse where he would have filed his papers. I imagine Italy will not ask me this in 2024.

Working today to get from the 1930s to the 1890s and back in Against.