Under a Black Star

About the Book

The pages within this book were penned in fulfillment of a deathbed promise to a long-suffering mother. They are the work of a novice. But it struck me as I read them that this is the work’s strength.

One of the attractions of the memoir form is that there are often rich ironies to be tilled in looking back. In this true account, born of a bygone era and steeled in the stoic immigrant ethos of a previous generation, a poor, barely literate Italian mother betrayed in marriage and left to fend for herself, struggles against a relentless succession of odds to forge a little corner of life for her family in the New World.

Recounted by a daughter who loved her, suffered with her, and survived, the prose is so simple and naked of artifice, it is the reader, rather than the author, who rubs against these ironies. And that, for my money, is literature.

Something about this story, which I can not deconstruct to the point of fully identifying, made it a compelling read for me. My thought and hope is that you might share this conclusion.

Caverly (Lee) Stringer / Author, Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street

About the Author

Biography

Jean Milone was born to Josephine Greco and Domenic Gagliardo on April 9, 1922, in New York City. The family moved to Ozone Park, New York, where her father died of tuberculosis when Jean was three-and-a-half years old. She had two younger sisters— Maria, then one-and-a-half; and newborn Rose. Her mother remarried to Vincenzo Nanfro in January 1929. He died six months later, in June 1929, while her mother was pregnant with her fourth child, Vincenzina, who was born in January 1930. Her mother remarried again in 1934. Married for five years to an abusive husband and stepfather, Jean’s mother left him. As the oldest sibling, Jean had the responsibility of taking care of her three younger sisters. She completed the eighth grade and then attended high school for a short time before leaving school to work at the Treo Corset Company to help support her family. She went to night school in an attempt to complete her GED, but was unable to do so. Her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1944 and died in 1946. Not until after her three younger sisters got married, did Jean marry Joseph Milone, in July 1951. She then moved to Mamaroneck, New York where she lives to this day. She has three children and four grandchildren.

In 1988, when Jean was sixty-six years old, determined to finish high school and get the diploma she never received, she completed a course at Westchester Community College in Valhalla, New York, where she received her GED. She retired at the age of eighty-one from Mamaroneck Avenue School in Mamaroneck, New York, where she worked as a teacher’s aide for fourteen-and-a-half years. It was after her retirement that she began to write her mother’s life story—a promise she had made to her mother more than sixty-six years earlier.

Jean experienced a young life of poverty, hardship, and abuse; yet she has led her life with compassion, perseverance, and tremendous enthusiasm.