My blog "The Soil Remembers: The Saga of the Sieli Family" continued: The Sieli Chronicles: The Soil Remembers: The Saga of the Sieli Family
Community (and the Lack of It)
The town took note of them as one takes note of a fencepost: useful if it holds, in the way if it does not. Some Anglos waved. Many did not. A man named Ezekiel Crowe—tall, tight, with a beard like a brush dipped in bitterness—set himself up as the voice of the valley’s conscience and told anyone who would listen that papists were building a secret kingdom one rosary at a time.
“They worship statues,” he said on a corner one afternoon as the Sieli wagon went by with barrels for water. “They will bring the Pope’s law over the mountains on their beads.”
Antonio reined the mule, opened his mouth, and Giuseppe touched his wrist. “Ask him to come for supper,” Giuseppe said, low.
“What?”
“Ask him to break bread with us.”
Antonio stared, then barked a short laugh. “And poison him?”
“Feed him polenta with cheese and a sauce of tomatoes he has never tasted and hope that God has made his tongue before his mind.”
Antonio did not call out. But that night, when their neighbor Mrs. Pérez brought eggs and the latest tidings about whose fences had fallen and who had married whom, Giuseppe asked, “How far is it to the little chapel?”
“Two miles if you cut across the ditch,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “Four if you take the road like a gentleman.”
They walked the two miles on Sunday, dust powdering their boots like flour. The chapel was adobe, white as a tooth from a distance and brown as coffee up close where hands had repaired it. A young priest with a Genoa nose and a California tan welcomed them with a pressure that hurt in the best way.
“Bianchi,” he said. “Matteo. And you—your faces,” he said, eyes bright with that joy that arrives before propriety, “I know their cousins. Where are you from?”
“Liguria,” Giuseppe said.
“Ah,” Father Bianchi breathed, as if the word were wine, “then you know hills and hunger. You will do well here.”
Outside the door afterward, Ezekiel Crowe and his small congregation perched like buzzards on a fence, hymns poised on their tongues as weapons rather than offerings. The priest nodded to them. The Sielis tipped their hats. No one said papist or heathen out loud that day because the weather was too hot for a fight.
Flood, Drought, and the Algebra of Failure
That first winter the river rose gentle, then greedy. One night, rain wrote its own gospel on the roof so loudly you could not hear yourself think. By morning, muddy water had taken the low rows and rubbed away the edges of the field as if it meant to erase the Sielis as a mistake. The brothers waded waist-deep to lift vines that had not yet learned to hold on. They built small dikes and watched the river laugh at their geometry.
The spring after—the pendulum swung. The sky forgot how to sweat. Wind came out of the north with a grit-teeth whistle, and by August it felt like the sun had set up a forge inside their chest. They hauled water in barrels until their shoulders howled. They shaded what they could with burlap. They learned the brutal arithmetic of farming: how much loss you could bear and still count it as survival.
One evening, when the mule had finally learned which rows not to nibble and the creek had learned to be a creek again, Tomás—the Mexican from Placerville, a man who had drifted south like a seed and taken root near Fresno—knocked at their door. Behind him stood his wife, Lucía, and a girl of six with a ribbon in her hair too big for any purpose except joy.
“We heard the vines fought the flood and the drought,” Tomás said, smiling. He held up a basket of peaches the size of saints’ hearts. “These won their war. Share?”
They ate together at a table that had once been a packing crate. Lucía told stories in a Spanish soft as dusk; Father Bianchi stopped by and blessed the food and then stayed to tell of a man in Rome who had argued with the Pope and lost, which seemed to comfort him. When they stood to go, Lucía kissed the girls on their heads—girls who had not had names when we began this chapter and now insisted on themselves: Rosa, who collected pebbles; and Caterina, who learned to run before she learned to walk.
After the door shut, Antonio sat without moving for a long time.
“What is it?” Giuseppe asked.
“I am listening,” Antonio said.
“To what?”
“To the sound of us being allowed to exist.”
The Reunion from the Sea
It took nearly five years of saving every spare coin before Giuseppe and Antonio could send for their wives. Letters had crossed the ocean like prayers folded in bottles—each one written in cramped script, stained with vineyard dust and hope. “The vines grow, the house stands, and we dream of the day we are not two but four again,” Giuseppe wrote. When the reply finally came, sealed with trembling hands from Genoa, it carried the words they had longed to read: “We will come.”
That winter, the Sieli brothers stood at the port of San Francisco as a steamship from Liguria pulled through the fog. The women who stepped off looked older and smaller than the memories they had kept, but their eyes—those same patient, sea-colored eyes—held steady. Lucia ran to Antonio first, clutching the rosary that had crossed two oceans; Maria found Giuseppe and pressed her face into his chest as if to make up for all the years absence had stolen. When they reached the vineyard days later, the women wept to see the vines alive in foreign soil. “They remember home,” Maria whispered, brushing a leaf with her fingers. Giuseppe smiled. “Then they are like us,” he said. “Rooted in new earth, but still faithful to the old.”
That night, they shared their first meal together under the sycamores—a loaf of bread, wine from the first vintage, and laughter that made the valley seem less empty.
First Wine
The third autumn brought grapes that tasted like arguments resolved. The clusters lay in their hands with the weight of small animals; the skins bled purple on their palms; the seeds cracked like tiny promises under their teeth.
They crushed in a makeshift vat with their ankles stained like sinners. The children squealed. Lucía laughed and shook her head: Esta gente de Liguria with their feet in everything. They pitched yeast as Bellosio’s cousin had instructed. They watched the airlock blurp like a heartbeat. They waited, ferociously.
On a cool evening in late October, when the light lay low and slow across the rows, Giuseppe pulled a sample from the barrel with a thief he had fashioned from cut cane. He held the glass up. The liquid caught the last sun and made it an argument for mercy.
“To the men who drove us out,” Antonio said, and then felt the meanness of it and tried again. “To the men who drove us on.”
“To the hands that held,” Giuseppe added, thinking of Seamus, of Li Ming, of Tomás, of Mrs. Pérez and her eggs, of Father Bianchi and his tired laugh, of the Yokuts woman who had nodded fractionally by the river and then gone on with her life.
They drank. The wine was rough at the edges and sweet at the center, like a good man. They coughed once, grinned like thieves, and filled another glass.
They sold three barrels to a tavern with a proprietor who swore he could not spell Sieli but who could count the coins he owed them. They rolled a fourth barrel into town and left a jug with Mrs. Pérez. They carried a fifth to the chapel and left it in the shade with a note: Per la festa.
When they passed Ezekiel Crowe’s farm on the way back, he stood by his fence with his arms folded, his beard in what might have been thought. For the first time since they had arrived, he did not speak.
The Kitchen Table Testament
The speech had been growing all season without Giuseppe knowing it, a vine of sentences winding around his ribs. It ripened the evening the first cold breeze moved under the door.
The children gathered at the kitchen table under lamplight that made halos and shadows of their hair. Rosa traced the grain in the wood with her finger as if reading a map. Caterina swung her legs and hit the chair rung in a steady clunk that dared anyone to stop her.
Giuseppe set his hands on the table palms-down. They were hands that had known salt, ash, splinters, and grape skin, and had loved each of them.
“You will hear stories,” he began, his voice even, not moralizing, just offering. “You will hear men tell you that this place makes everyone equal. You will hear them speak of gold as if it has a conscience. You will hear them tell you that if you suffer, it is because you deserve it.”
Antonio stood by the hearth with his shoulder against the wall, watching his brother more closely than he watched the flame. The priest had said once that some men were born to homilies and others to hammers. Giuseppe, though he could be both, leaned toward the former tonight.
“When we came,” Giuseppe said, “they called us names that were meant to make us smaller. Dago. Garlic eater. Papist. They nailed signs to doors, and sometimes those signs were as sharp as knives. In the mountains, men were burned out, beaten, hanged, and no one wrote their names down afterward, so it was as if they had not been.”
He paused. Caterina’s legs stilled.
“We did not become brave men,” he said. “We became careful ones. We hid our voices when we needed to. We cooked and sharpened and prayed like thieves who knew God would still hear them if they whispered.”
Rosa glanced at Antonio’s forearms, at the little red mouths where sparks had kissed him. She looked back at her father.
“The gold,” Giuseppe said, “was never ours. Perhaps because we did not belong to it. Perhaps because we refused to belong to a thing that asked for our souls before it offered a crust of bread. But the soil—” he spread his fingers on the table as if feeling it there—“the soil is a different master. It punishes without malice. It rewards without flattery. It requires patience and pays in seasons.”
He reached for the jug and poured into little cups not because the Church would have approved but because the world had taught him that children must be inducted into sacraments or they will grow up believing they are only spectators to other people’s faiths.
“Drink,” he said. “Just a little. Taste what your name can do.”
They sipped, grimaced, then smiled because to be included in a ritual is sweeter than sugar. Antonio took his cup and lifted it a finger’s width.
“To the men who did not kill us,” he said dryly, and the room loosened with laughter. “And to the vines that learned our names.”
Giuseppe nodded. “And listen,” he added, more quietly, the last of the speech tightening like a knot that will hold when dragged. “Belonging is never free. It must be earned, and even then, it can be taken away. You must be ready to pay, and you must be ready to lose. But you must also be ready to plant again and again, knowing some hands will push your seedlings over and some hands will lift them. Know the difference. Bless the latter. Endure the former. And keep your rosary where your enemies can see it, so they will know you know exactly who you are.”
There was a little silence after that—not heavy, just dignified. Outside, wind moved in the vines with the self-importance of a bishop, and the sycamores translated it into a softer language.
Caterina resumed thumping the chair rung. Rosa asked, “Papa, will the gold ever be ours?”
“The gold?” Giuseppe said. He smiled, small and sad and honest. “No, little one. But the grapes—these will be ours, and yours, if you keep faith with them. And that is a kind of wealth the river cannot take.”
Coda: A Sign Comes Down
A year later, Seamus O’Rourke arrived dusty and thinner, a small sack over his shoulder and a healed scar splitting his eyebrow. He smelled the fermenting room and laughed.
“I told you there was gold,” he said, accepting a cup.
“You did,” Antonio admitted, clapping him on the shoulder, “but you got the color wrong.”
Seamus leaned in. “Did you hear,” he said, eyes sliding sideways with pleasure, “in Placerville somebody tore down a sign.”
“Which sign?” Giuseppe asked, though he knew.
“The one that confused a people with a slur.” Seamus drank and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “A fiddler’s bow sawed it right off, I’m told.”
“Good wood for a fire,” Antonio said.
“No,” Seamus replied. “They nailed it back up with a different word underneath. It says Welcome. And someone, maybe a man with hammer’s hands, took a punch and chased the old letters till they looked like they were learning to be new ones.”
He set the tin cross he had once given Giuseppe back on the table, newly straightened and polished.
“Figured you might want it back,” he said, and then added, as if to make nothing of it, “You didn’t. I just wanted to see if it would shine.”
Giuseppe ran his thumb over the metal and felt, beneath the polish, every blow that had made it true.
“Stay,” he said. “There’s room. Not much. Just enough.”
Seamus looked out at the rows, at the way the late sun combed them into gold. His grin came slow and sure. “I think I’ve held a pick long enough,” he said. “Let me see what it is to hold a pruning knife.”
They went out together into the evening, the three of them, and the vines listened the way old friends do—half-amused, wholly forgiving, ready to teach if the men were ready to learn.
The Flag and the Fire
“We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.”
— Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1861
“Italy is made, now it remains to make Italians.”
— Massimo d’Azeglio, 1861
“What is a nation, if not a people bound by memory, language, and sacrifice?”
— Pietro Borsieri, c. 1840s
The year 1861 reached California with the scent of wet soil and faraway triumph. Word traveled slowly from Europe, crossing oceans and deserts in folded newspapers and travelers’ mouths: Italy was finally united. Garibaldi’s redshirts had marched, kings had fallen, and the tricolor—green, white, and red—flew above Rome’s dreams, if not yet its stones.
Antonio spread the paper across the kitchen table, its corners held down by spoons. The ink was smudged, but the names were clear enough—Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi. “Italy,” he said, sounding the word like something borrowed. “A real nation. Imagine that.”
Giuseppe looked up from his workbench, where he was mending a cracked barrel hoop. “I can imagine it,” he said, “but I can’t yet believe it. All my life, we were Ligurians. Genoese. Sardinians. Piedmontese. Never ‘Italians.’”
Seamus leaned in from the doorway, pipe glowing faintly. “Aye, and now you are all one people,” he said, teasing. “A flag, a king, and a fight to remember.”
“Garibaldi,” Antonio said with a half-smile. “The hero of two worlds.”
“Or a mercenary,” Giuseppe muttered. “Depends who’s paying.”
Seamus laughed. “You sound like an Englishman. The man fought for liberty in South America, in Italy, even offered to fight for Lincoln! That’s no hired sword—that’s a soul on fire.”
Giuseppe wiped his hands and sat down. “A soul on fire burns hot enough to blind. Some say he’s a Mason, others say a soldier of fortune. He loves the fight too much.”
From the hearth, Lucia spoke without turning. “And yet, he fought to make our homeland one.” She stirred the pot slowly, her voice quiet but sure. “After a thousand years of division, that counts for something.”
Antonio nodded. “She’s right. A man doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. I don’t care who paid him, so long as the flag flies.”
“The flag,” Giuseppe repeated, leaning back. “I saw a sketch of it once. Green for the fields, white for faith, red for the blood shed. A good flag. Maybe even a holy one.”He looked out the window toward the vines, their winter skeletons standing proud in the wind. “Still, it feels strange to be proud of a country we no longer live in.”
Lucia smiled faintly. “We plant here, but our roots remember there.”
Seamus raised his cup. “To Italy, then,” he said. “And to America, her stubborn cousin.”
Giuseppe returned the toast. “To both,” he said, and after a moment added, “But mostly to this soil, because it keeps us fed.”
They laughed, and the conversation turned to whether Italy’s new king would care for men like them—the farmers, the laborers, the forgotten poor who built kingdoms but never sat at their tables.
Antonio shrugged. “Maybe this time will be different. Maybe uniting the flag will unite the people.”
Giuseppe’s eyes darkened with thought. “Maybe. But I’ve learned something here, brother. No king, no priest, no general will save us. The vineyard saves us. Work saves us. Faith and patience, like the vine—they bear fruit if tended.”
Lucia poured wine into their cups, red as the new Italian flag. “Then we’ll keep tending,” she said softly. “For both our homes.”
Though Italy had become one, the Sielis had already found their nation in the rows they planted and the promise they kept: that the land, wherever it lay, would always answer to those who loved it enough to stay.
The Man on the Rope
The rumor came running the way rumor does—mouth to ear, ear to fear, fear to feet. By the time it reached the Sieli tent, it had learned new adjectives and a taste for speed.
“Jackson,” Seamus said, white around the lips. “Claim dispute. Foreign fellow. Maybe Chilean. Maybe Italian. They’ve tied a knot.”
The road to Jackson was a ribbon with rocks for teeth. The brothers and Seamus took it anyway, because some things must be seen or a man spends the rest of his life arguing with the ghosts of what might have been.
They reached the square to find it already arranged like a stage: a cart rolled under the old oak, the rope licking the branch. Men in shirtsleeves, arms browned by labor and belief. A preacher with a voice heavy on judgment and light on mercy. A woman with her mouth set in a hard line that tried to hold back tears and failed.
The man on the cart was young. His hair clung to his forehead. His shirt was torn where someone had counted his ribs with a fist. He did not speak English well, but fear translates. He said, “Please,” and then he said something else in a language that was not English and not Italian, and every mother on the edge of the crowd knew it meant I am not ready to die.
A foreman type—vest, chain across his belly—read from a paper in a tone that made law sound like a hammer. “Caught stealing another man’s claim. Assaulted a citizen. Found guilty by a committee of good men.”
“Good men do not need committees,” Antonio said before he could stop himself.
A murmur. Heads turned. Seamus’s hand closed on Antonio’s sleeve.
The priest from Jackson—older than Father Bianchi, with a face like the bark of the oak—stepped forward and asked to speak with the condemned. The foreman waved him up with the benevolence of a man who enjoys the shape of his own power.
The priest climbed onto the cart, bowed his head close, murmured the words every Catholic learns to keep behind his teeth for a day like this. He finished, pressed his thumb to the young man’s brow, and then turned, seeking faces in the crowd that might yet remember being human.
“Mercy,” he said softly, as if trying a door he already knew was locked. “Once, if not twice.”
“Too late,” the foreman said, and glanced at the man with the rope.
Giuseppe stepped forward, heart thudding, and held up both hands. “The committee has condemned a man,” he said, forcing the words across the stones of his tongue, “but the law has not spoken. Let him wait for a judge.”
“We are the judge,” the foreman said.
“You are a crowd,” Giuseppe answered, and heard the whisper ripple, admiration and anger braided tight. “What will you do when it is the wrong man?”
“We will be swift next time,” the preacher said, pleased with the cleverness of it.
The noose kissed the young man’s throat. The cart rolled forward like a thought a man thinks and then cannot take back. The body dropped. The world held its breath to see if God would intervene. He did not. He was busy counting sparrows.
Someone cheered. Someone retched. The priest wept openly. A child laughed because sometimes children laugh when the air tears, and the sound went through Giuseppe like a nail.
They cut him down after, because death is not supposed to be comfortable. The foreman removed his hat, because his mother had taught him manners. The woman with the hard mouth closed the dead boy’s eyes, because she remembered being sixteen and because her own son would be, one day.
On the way back to camp, the road seemed longer. Antonio did not speak. Seamus walked as if he were counting steps, a prayer he made up on the spot and promised to never say again.
At the creek, Li Ming handed Giuseppe a cup of tea without a word. It tasted like leaves and mercy. He drank, and some of the iron in his throat dissolved.
The Vigilance Committee
The paper came a week later, handbill ink still tacky. Vigilance Committee Formed to Protect Honest Men. Names at the bottom: familiar from saloon doors, from the rigging of scaffold ropes, from pews.
“They mean to borrow a badge from themselves,” Seamus said, flipping the sheet back to the table. “So they can fine, hang, and call it holy.”
“What does it mean for us?” Antonio asked.
Giuseppe pinched the bridge of his nose, a gesture he had learned from his father when the weather and the vines conspired. “It means the law now has the exact same mustache as the men we argued with last week.”
“So it means hide better,” Seamus said grimly.
It meant more than that. It meant they learned to walk together at dusk and not alone. It meant they timed errands so they would not be seen in the square after the preacher’s dinner bell. It meant they kept their chits in order and their heads lower than their hats.
The Naming
The clerk in Fresno asked, as clerks always do, “Family name?”
Giuseppe looked at Antonio. The brothers said together, “Sieli.”
The clerk wrote Sieli and then, beneath it, Shelly, because his ear was lazy and his pencil quicker than his attention.
“Do we correct him?” Antonio asked on the steps, paper warm in his hand.
Giuseppe folded the document and tucked it against his heart. “The vines know our name,” he said. “The rest will catch up.”
11) The Mass for the Unnamed
On the anniversary of the day in Jackson, the Sielis brought a jug to the adobe chapel. The priest said a Mass for the soul of the young man, because God does not require a surname to find a person. Seamus, who had drifted south and returned sometimes with a grin and sometimes with a bruise, stood at the back, head lowered in a way that made him look taller.
Afterward, they poured a little wine at the chapel door, a libation not sanctioned in any book Bianchi owned. He said nothing, because he understood that men must sometimes instruct their own dead.
“Mercy,” Giuseppe said quietly. “Once, if not twice.”
“Twice,” the priest answered. “If not always.”
The Lesson at the Table
That winter, when the vines slept the way soldiers sleep—one eye open, a hand on the hilt—Giuseppe told the children what the tax had cost. Money, yes. Dignity, more. Fear, most. He told them of the ledger and the rope and the preacher’s clever cruelty. He told them of the priest’s thumb on a brow and of the way a woman can do what a crowd cannot: close the eyes of the innocent without lying.
“Why did they hate us?” Rosa asked, scrubbing at a grease spot on the table as if it were the question itself.
“Because we made them feel as if the world belonged to more people than they were comfortable with,” Giuseppe said. “Because our prayers are shaped differently. Because our dinners smell like garlic. Because their fathers told them the world is small and fragile and must be guarded by suspicion.”
“And because of gold,” Caterina added, wise beyond what is fair.
“And because of gold,” Giuseppe agreed.
He poured a measure of the third-year wine and spread his hands over it as if warming them. “We answer with soil,” he said. “We answer with vines. We answer by staying. We answer with our names, long when we can afford them, short when we must, never absent.”
Antonio lifted his cup. “To the price of foreign blood,” he said, not bitterly but very clearly.
Giuseppe lifted his. “And to the harvest that remembers.”
They drank. Outside, frost traced the window with a lace finer than anything shipped around the Horn. The vines, black against the sky, dreamed of sap and sun. The children, who would one day call themselves Sieli or Shelly or something else entirely, memorized the taste of a reply that does not raise its voice and is heard anyway.
Faith in Hostile Soil
The newly built chapel of adobe and timber was more than a place of worship—it was proof that faith could root even in hostile soil. In the spring of 1862, the parish celebrated its first great festa: a Mass of thanksgiving for the harvest and for survival. After the final “Amen,” Father Bianchi led the congregation out into the Fresno dust, a statue of the Blessed Virgin lifted high on a wooden platform carried by the men of the parish, candles flickering despite the wind. Children scattered rose petals. The women sang Ave Maria in voices that wove through the heat like prayer itself.The brass band struck up When the Saints Go Marching In, the American tune oddly at home beside the Italian hymns. Farmers, ranchers, and field hands followed the banner of St. Joseph down the road, praying the Rosary as they marched.From across the street, Ezekiel Crowe stood with his small band of Anglo Protestants, their hymnals shut but their mouths open.“See it?” Crowe shouted. “Told you so! They worship idols! They bow to Rome—the Whore of Babylon!”
Another man spat in the dirt. “Ain’t religion, it’s witchcraft!”
Giuseppe tightened his grip on the pole bearing the parish banner, his knuckles white. “Ignore them,” he whispered. “Christ had His mockers too.”
Father Bianchi, walking at the head, did not flinch. “Pray louder,” he said, and the people obeyed. The Ave Maria rose above the jeers, fragile but unbroken.
As the procession passed the Sieli vineyard, Rosa crossed herself, murmuring, “If they call this idolatry, may God forgive them.”
Antonio glanced back once at Crowe’s sneer. “He fears what he does not understand,” he said.
“And what he cannot control,” Giuseppe replied.
When the parade returned to the churchyard, the crowd shared bread, wine, and laughter beneath the sycamores. The statue of Mary glowed in the sunset like a promise. The insults from earlier seemed to melt into the hum of cicadas.
That night, Father Bianchi wrote in his journal: They tried to drown our song in hatred, but the people sang louder. Perhaps that is the first miracle of this place.
Fire in the Chapel
Historical Note
Anti-Catholic sentiment ran hot in mid-19th-century America, fueled by the Know-Nothing Party and later vigilante groups. Immigrants—especially Irish, Italian, Mexican, and Portuguese Catholics—were often accused of being “un-American.” In California, this prejudice echoed alongside hostility to the Chinese, Mexicans, and other laborers of color. Secret orders and masked night riders borrowed rituals and intimidation that foreshadowed the Ku Klux Klan of later decades.¹
In towns like Fresno, humble chapels of adobe and pine became lightning rods for fear and violence.
The winter night smelled of smoke before the flames were seen. Rosa Pérez was first to cry out, pointing toward the adobe chapel where Father Matteo Bianchi said Mass. Its whitewashed walls glowed red, and on them were scrawled in tar and pitch:
“WOP.”The mob—hoods flickering in the firelight, eager for spectacle—circled the chapel with torches raised. Ezekiel Crowe, bitter as ever, shouted over the crackle:“They worship idols! Rome’s spies, papist traitors! This is our valley, not theirs. America is for Americans!”
At the chapel door stood Father Matteo Bianchi. His cassock was singed at the hem, a bucket in his hands. His voice rang steady:“You burn not only our church,” he cried, “but your own conscience. This house is mud and straw, yet it holds the prayers of children. Do you fear prayers so much that you must silence them with fire?”A stone cracked the wall. A voice jeered: “Go back to Rome, papist dog!”Bianchi crossed himself, his gesture both shield and defiance. “For every beam you burn, we will raise two. For every insult you spit, we will sing louder.”
Antonio and Giuseppe Sieli pushed through the line of onlookers, their faces streaked with ash.“Basta!” Antonio roared. “This is cowardice!”Giuseppe lifted his rosary high. “You call us dagos, wops, papists. We are farmers. We break bread with Mexicans, Irish, Chinese. We ask only to till soil God has made. If that makes us enemies, then your enemy is the earth itself.”
The mob faltered. Some lowered torches. Then Seamus O’Rourke’s fiddle rang out—“The Battle Cry of Freedom”—its tune defiant, impossible to ignore. Irish laborers stomped boots in rhythm until the mob’s chant fell apart.
Neighbors argued openly in the firelight:Whitcomb the tavern keeper shouted that the Italians kept their debts and their word.Crowe thundered that papists bowed to Rome and would one day sell the valley to the Pope, echoing slogans of the Know-Nothing Party.²A rancher muttered that fire spread faster than sermons, and a man who burned chapels might burn barns.Lines were drawn that would not easily fade.
By dawn the chapel was a husk. Yet in front of it, Father Bianchi knelt with his people—Italians, Mexicans, Irish, even Li Ming and his nephews, who had carried water pails though they were not Catholic. Together they prayed in Latin, English, and Spanish, voices weaving into one defiant psalm.Giuseppe pressed soil into his palm and whispered to his daughters, “The land remembers. If they burn our church, we will build in the vineyard. God is not homeless while we breathe.”Crowe and the mob rode off at dawn, leaving their slogans blackened on the wall. Rosa Pérez scrubbed until her hands blistered. “They do not get the last word,” she muttered.
That night, Antonio spoke to his brother beneath the sycamores.“They will come again.”Giuseppe nodded. “Then we will be here again. Vine by vine, brick by brick. They want us gone. Instead we will plant deeper. The soil will remember—not their hatred, but our endurance.”And so the Sielis stayed, their faith tested by fire, their roots watered by defiance.
While there is no record of a Catholic chapel in Fresno being burned by hooded vigilantes in the 1850s, such events occurred elsewhere. The Know-Nothings in San Francisco attacked Catholic institutions in the 1850s,³ and anti-Catholic mobs in the East destroyed churches in Philadelphia and Massachusetts. The insults shouted at the Sielis—“wop,” “dago,” “papist”—were drawn directly from the vocabulary of the time. The Sieli family here embodies how immigrant Catholics resisted through faith, solidarity, and the simple act of remaining rooted.
References
Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 58–60.Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 85–89.Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5.Philip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 41–43. To be continued....: The Sieli Chronicles: The Soil Remembers: The Saga of the Sieli Family