The Power of Words. Celebrating the ambiguities of life, and Columbus

10/13/97
Celebrating the ambiguities of life, and Columbus
Christopher Columbus is adored by some, and deplored or ignored by others. But to planners of this weekend's events on Federal Hill, he's a hero. Always.

By ELLIOT KRIEGER
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

       PROVIDENCE -- Around the nation, Columbus Day may be our most ambiguous national holiday, a day for celebrations, for parades, for shopping expeditions, but also for wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth.
       Christopher Columbus, the Genoa-born explorer whose life we celebrate each year on the second Monday in October, is to some a hero because of his voyages that led to the European conquest of the New World. To others, he is a dastardly fellow who kidnapped and enslaved the native people he met on his journeys to America.
       But on Federal Hill, at the heart of the city's Italian community, there's no ambivalence about Columbus whatsoever. The annual four-day Columbus Day festivities, which will continue through this evening, fill the streets and the shops with more than 100,000 visitors from around the state.
       It's an occasion for great ethnic pride and lots of fun - and nobody has a bad word to say about Columbus the Great.
       "He was a man of vision, he took a chance, he stood up for what he believed in," said Joseph De Giulio, one of the owners of the 75-year-old Joe's Acorn Market, on Atwells Avenue. "They wanted to lynch him, they wanted to throw him overboard, but he kept the course. If it weren't for that - this part of the world, anyway, should be thankful."
       De Giulio is one of the merchants in charge of this weekend's parade and festival. He and the festival co-chairman, Mike Antonelli, who runs Leo's Convenience Store, right across the street, took a few moments last week to reflect on the man who - no doubt about it - for them, is a hero.
       "I think he opened up a new world, that's for sure," De Giulio said. "What he did, in his time, was of major significance. Who knows where we'd be today if he didn't do this?"
       Have there ever been protests at the Columbus Day parade, by Native Americans or others disturbed by Columbus's legacy?
       "I've never heard of anything," Antonelli said, slowly shaking his head. Noting that all sorts of ethnic groups march in the parade, he consults his multipage list of bands and flotillas.
       "We have Colombians, Jamaicans, Bolivians, Vietnam vets . . . ."
       "People have come to the realization that we have to live together and look, in perspective, at what this man has done in the course of history," De Giulio said.
       "We have Puerto Ricans," Antonelli added. "I've never heard of anybody going against Columbus, not in this area."
       Yes, but elsewhere, Columbus and the holiday have been denounced by groups as diverse as the American Indian Movement ("Columbus Day is a perpetuation of racist assumptions . . .") and the National Council of the Churches of Christ ("Opportunity for some was the occasion for oppression, degradation and genocide for others").
       The bashing of Columbus has become so widespread - probably reaching its apex five years ago, during celebrations of the 500th anniversary of his first voyage - that a countermovement has begun.
       "My students come in with the sense that he is an unmitigated villain," said John Bezis-Selfa, an assistant professor of history at Wheaton College, in Norton, Mass. "I'm trying to get them to see the complexity of it - which isn't to apologize for what he did, but to try to place him in historical context. Most of them are pretty resistant, and that's perfectly okay."
       Bezis-Selfa, who teaches Latin American history and is himself a Latino, said that his main goal is to try get his students beyond the point where they see history as a "morality play," in which all the characters are either good or evil.
       "In 1492, Columbus behaved in ways that we would consider completely reprehensible today," Bezis-Selfa said. "He was, to all intents and purposes, a racist. He deliberately kidnapped people. He clearly had a sense that he was vastly superior to the people he encountered."
       And that's not evil?
       "It's very easy," Bezis-Selfa said, "for us to condemn the morality of what our ancestors did, and today we are the beneficiaries of that."
       Or, as R. Douglas Cope, an associate professor of history at Brown University, in Providence, put it: "You can't blame Columbus for not being a 20th-century man."
       Cope did allow that "you could say that, even in the context of his time, (Columbus) had some unfortunate characteristics."
       Yet Columbus also had qualities worthy of celebration. "He certainly was very courageous," Cope said. "He had convictions, and he followed up on them, at great expense to himself."
       Whether Columbus was a hero or a scoundrel is immaterial to Cope. In his course on colonial Latin America, Cope pretty much ignores Columbus the man.
       "I treat him as just one of the people who were involved in colonization," Cope said. "I try to get them to see why the colonization took the shape that it did, rather than focus on a particular individual such as Columbus."
       History without a hero? Columbus as just one of the many? That's not the way they see it, up on Federal Hill.
       Joseph De Giulio and Mike Antonelli, standing between a shelf stocked with olive oil and a refrigerated case filled with veal and sausages, can't understand why others would ignore, much less condemn, their man.
       "People that are 'anti' try to bring down something that belongs to someone else," De Giulio said. "You always have isolated cases, I'm sure, who see Columbus as a villain, but in our eyes he's a hero - always."
       "Always a hero," Antonelli added.
       "An explorer, a visionary, a man who took a chance," De Giulio said. "There are people who changed the world. He's one of them."

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