I am Mary Morizia and I was born in the Bara, Italy in 1918. I am the only surviving child in my family to come to the United States of America. I had five brothers and sisters of which two were twins. I was the first born. My brothers and sisters died not long after birth from ordinary childhood diseases. There were no known cures for diseases when I was growing up in the beginning of the twentieth century.
My aunt in the United States sponsored my mother and I so we could travel by ship and join her. My father had died after the Italian war of pneumonia so it was just the two of us. The year was 1927 and I was nine years old when we sailed on the ship to America. It took 28 days to sail across the ocean. We were frightened but looked forward to a new beginning and thought of the trip as an adventure. While on the ship, food and drinking water was scarce. We had to wait in line to get a piece of bread and broth. I would sneak back into line for seconds and sometimes thirds. There were so many people that no one noticed me in line a second or third time. We had nothing to do on the ship but to wait, eat and sleep until we arrived in America.
We landed in New York on Ellis Island, where we were checked to make sure we had the proper papers. My aunt was waiting for us and we went to her home in Brooklyn. I was enrolled into school and leaned to speak English (Ellis Island, 2000).
My mother remarried a Sicilian immigrant a year later. My step father was cruel and was connected to the Mafia is some way. He did bad things to people and to my mother. I was twelve when he did something bad to me. My mother sent me away to live with the nuns at the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary for two years. I was 14 when I left and went back to live with my mother. My mother had left my step father, I returned to school and family life was better. We moved to a different area of Brooklyn among other immigrants of different descents (Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary,...