There are only two stories that I remember my mother telling me about Rosa de Jesus. The first dealt with the fact that my mother had opted not to live a countrywoman's life by allowing my father, who lived on the western edge of the freguesia, to court her. Her grandmother had other ideas, and whenever my father as a young man would pass by Rosa's on his way to court my mother, the old woman would provoke him and laugh at him for not replying to the provocation. The second was about the time when one day the old woman returned home from a shopping visit to Ponta Delgada and decided to stop by 4 Praia dos Santos, where we lived, and visit Since it was around lunchtime, my mother fried some blood sausagemorcela cut some wheat bread, and brewed tea for her. The old woman ate and, after having filled herself, looked at her granddaughter and admonished her for feeding her that well. Why, she said, you and your husband will never amount to anything if that's how well you eat. Money was invented to be saved - not to be spent foolishly in luxuries,
STRANGE, REALLY ,when ordinary food is a luxury...
I wish someone had left me a photo of Rosa de Jesus, that is, Rosa 'Figueira' I even wish I knew how the nickname Figueira was born. Could she have had a fig tree in her back yard and used its fruits for occasional cash? No statistic, even if I were to find Rosa's Baptismal Records would ever tell me that. Oh, how incomplete one's life can be...
AS I WAS TOLD
July 20, 1931, in S. Roque, S. Miguel, Azores, was supposedly a warm day. That's what my mother told me. While my father was at work, my paternal grandmother stood watch, as she had on many previous occasions when young women in that part of the village were about to give birth. I was born at about 2 p.m.. I wasn't weighed, for no one ever bothered with those facts at the time. But, according to those who saw me, I was a big, healthy baby. My parents were Joao da Ponte Rezendes, born September 12, 1906, and Isabel de Jesus da Costa Afonso, born on February 10, 1908 They were married on July 17, 1930, at S.Roque's Parish Church, where they had also been baptized.
Since space was at a premium in those days, my parents settled at 4, Praia dos Santos Street, S.Roque, occupying the eastern front room of the house, where I was eventually conceived and born. The rest of the residence was occupied by my paternal grandparents, Jos? da Ponte (Rezendes) and Maria Jos? de Melo, and two uncles (Jacinto and Guilherme) both younger than my father and still single. My father had three other surviving brothers, Manuel (living in America), Anthony, and Francisco, who were married and living on the island. When Jacinto married about four years after my parents, he and his wife, Gilda, moved to the western room at the same address. My cousin, Edgardo, now buried at Cambridge, Massachusetts, was born in that same room, and also delivered by our grandmother.
To say that relations were often strained in such a mixed situation would not be exaggerating. My mother, for example, never tired of telling me years and years later about a piglet that my father had bought one day around 1934 and had brought home to raise in the pen reserved for such purposes. When the pig grew and reached the age of slaughter, my parents, who were short of cash (The Depression was in full swing in the Azores also), decided to sell it to a man named Mois?s who had a small home-pork-processing business and was constantly looking for animals to slaughter. Naturally, my parents' idea of selling a pig that several adults were already counting on for their steady chouri?o, lingui?a, and morcela supply did not go down well with the rest of the family who tried its best to devalue the pig as my parent negotiated with Mois?s. It was then that my mother stepped in, swearing before the Almighty God that, if my parents had to slaughter the pig instead of selling it, no one in the house, except for her and my father, would ever partake of its bounty. Naturally everyone got the message and the pig was sold.
According to my father, his parents had eleven children, among them two sets of twins of which only the males (Anthony and Jacinto) survived. The girls who were born with each of the boys died at birth. My paternal grandparents were in America on several occasions, their trips being motivated primarily by whatever work was available, or unavailable, at the time. It was always their intention to eventually settle in the Azores after they had acquired sufficient funds to live on back home. Somehow, the fact that most of my grandmother's brothers, and two of my grandfather's sisters had settled in America was not sufficient motivation to keep them away from the island. My father was conceived in America, although he was born on S. Miguel, two weeks after my grandparents' last return.
One interesting detail about that last stay of my grandparents was a story that my grandmother told me about the assassination of an American president during the time she lived in the United States. I was about eight when I heard it and had a hard time believing it. When at sixteen, however, and attending Rindge Technical School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, I had my first course in American History, I suddenly discovered that Maria Jos? had told me the truth. William McKinley, the 25th President of the United States, had been shot by an anarchist, Leon Czoigosz, on September 6, 1901, and died on September 14th. My granparents were living in Fall River, Massachusetts, at the time.
As far as I know, my maternal grandparents never left S. Miguel. They did manage neverthless to become quite prosperous, as some of the properties that my grandfather owned proved. By the time I was ten, however, all of them had been lost thanks to various factors, the most important being my maternal grandfather's alcoholism, possible middle-age depression, and vanity. I still remember the property at Pico das Canas, S. Roque, and the variety of fruit trees that it seemed to produce at all times of the year, and which were constantly available to my cousins and myself. They were really wonderful times, the times that I spent there - in fact, the thing I seem to miss the most about S. Miguel.
My parents named me Manuel Luiz - Manuel, because it had been a tradition in the family; Luiz, because of my father's admiration for a man, F. Luiz Tavares, a prominent and progressive man on the island, who often gave him work in his various properties. My father was a carpenter in his younger days. The admiration must have been mutual for when in 1936 my father was amongst hundreds of applicants for a steady job with a subsidiary of Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, it was Dr. F. Luiz Tavares who convinced that company into hiring my father. Dr. Tavares was at the time, amongst other positions he held, the top person in the largest Azorean shipping company, Carregadores A?oreanos. He simply told the management at Socony that if it did not hire my father, he'd take his company's oil needs to its island rival, Shell. My baptismal records show that I was baptized by Father Joao Amorim when I was about a month old. My godparents were my maternal grandfather, Ant?nio da Costa Afonso (Better known around the S.Roque and Livramento areas as Ant?nio Figueira and his second wife, Rosa. My mother's mother. Maria da Concei?ao da Ponte (No relation to my paternal grandparents), died of childbirth in 1922. Like my paternal grandmother, she had also had eleven children, six of whom (three girls and three boys) survived to adulthood. My mother was the second of the girls. The others were Maria da Luz (who died in Connecticut around 1990), and Sofia, who died in the Azores around 1941. The boys, Ant?nio, Virg?nio, and Manuel are all dead as of this date (January, 2000). Manuel died in Massachusetts, his brothers in the Azores. They all left several children and granchildren. I shall not detail their whereabouts. Suffice it to say that presently most live outside the Azores, over several states in the US and at least in two Canadian provinces.
I really don't know much about my mother's side of the family, except for bits and pieces that I have come across through what is primarily a sort of oral history. It seems that my mother, as a young girl, was quite fond of her maternal grandmother. She never made it a secret, however, that she didn't care much for the Figueira side of the family. As I recall, she seemed to despise her paternal grandmother, a woman whom I saw on several occasions as a child but with whom I never even exchanged a word as far as I remember. I knew that she was some sort of grandmother to me, but that was all. I also knew that, besides my grandfather, she had had at least two other sons and two daughters. Although I remember the latter, I can not recall their names. As for the sons, Nuno, the youngest, was the only one I recall, for he worked often for my grandfather as a farm hand. The other brother, according to my mother, was assassinated one night by another village man while on his way home. At least that's what I learned the first time I passed by a cross marker across from the northside of S. Roque's Church. My mother never told me the motive for the crime, nor what had happened to the assassin. She did tell me, however, about her maternal grandmother's arrival in the Azores, a most interesting story....
of the days that used to be,
I live in memory
among my souvenirs...
???????????? From an old Irish song.
Uncle Jacinto died in 2001 in his home at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two of his sons, my cousins Carlos Ant?nio and Edgardo, died prior to him, leaving Jos? Maria as the only remaining son, along with five grandchildren. Gilda died in July 2002. Although she had been the most frail of my grandparents' daughters-in-law, she lived longer than all the others.
'til time ran still
leaving loneliness my neighbor.
Doors leading to horizons
widened in distances unmet,
into the sound of tongues
unknown,
unfelt,
unfeeling.
then love appeared...
I felt the horizon
and walked no longer.
St. Louis, Missouri, December 18, 1973
your somber ways.
Undaunted I faced you
and felt your power.
Winds of seasons change -
But you -
Relentlessly
facing life unaltered.
We have battled,
fighting still...
Until spirit that once lived
Pleadingly accepts,
Destiny.
It was only natural that the following morning , after I had cleared customs in Miami, I should go to the telephone to let my family know that I was back in the United States and that all was well with me.. My wife on the other hand had other news. Granted that I knew that  that soon our daughter Jane would give birth to a baby, but, then, it isn't until one is fully certain that the event had happened that one rejoices as one should. I was no exception... I'M A GRANDFATHER, I shouted for the world to hear. A GRANDFATHER, I repeated, People in the terminal suddenly looked towards me and smiled as I stood with the public telephone receiver at hand.  A GIRL...!
That little girl who for  brief spell made several people at the Miami International Airport smile, temporarily making them forget their grief, is now a few months over 21 years of age. She has been followed by two brothers and seven cousins and, as the photo shows, has grown into a beauty..
I wonder if any of the people who heard me at Miami remember that wonderful moment in my life... .
* AZOREAN TIME
*AN_AZOREAN_WITHOUT_AN_OCEAN
* CONTINUED INTRODUCTION
* MORE MEMORIES
* KATHY'S SITE
* CHRISTMAS_98_99* MISCELLANEOUS
* FROM S?O ROQUE TO SAINT LOUIS
* GERMANY AND SWITZERLAND
* IRELAND AND LONDON
* AN AZOREAN IN ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA
* POETRY
* PORTUGUESE CHRONOLOGY,1900-2000
* PORTUGAL - PHOTOS AND COMMENTS
* PORTUGAL IN ST. LOUIS
* PRIESTHOOD AND CHICKENS
* VIEWS OF S?O MIGUEL
* LATIN AMERICA
* PEOPLE ALONG THE WAY
* ACCIDENTAL TOURISTS
Although at the time I had already heard of such American literary figures as Washington Irving, Mark Twain, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, thanks to the reading matter that the American consulate in Ponta Delgada made available to local readers, I had never hear of anyone named Longfellow.
Miss Gibson's staff, however, insisted that Longfellow had been important. Fortunately, they never made us read his work while we were part of the ETP program. Not that we'd understand it, anyway.
On the other hand, the day after the visit, Miss Gibson made us each write a letter in whatever Basic English we knew thanking our host for his allowing us to vist that historical house.
I am glad that I have lived long enough since to photograph it.
