Detroit City Is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli Read Free Book Online

the weeping willow tree for use as whips in obscure games involving slavery.
    My father, Italo, arrived in Detroit in 1959, when he was twenty-six years old. He came from Pinzolo, a village in the Dolomites. While he was still a teenager, his parents pulled him out of school and sent him to Trieste to apprentice in a butcher’s shop. One of his jobs involved massaging the blood of freshly slaughtered pigs (by hand) as it drained into a tub (preventing coagulative jellying apparently being a crucial preliminary step in the production of blood sausage). He’d always been good with machines and dreamed of becoming a mechanic, but at that time, with the postwar Italian economy reduced to rubble and my paternal familial economy long an austere one—my grandfather, Clemente, a bit of a drinker, had mostly worked a string of odd jobs, including plastering homes, tending cows, and delivering mail to neighboring mountain villages via horse-drawn cart—his parents had impressed upon him the unshakable necessity of making his way across the Atlantic to seek fortune, or at least a steady job, in America.
    For years, one of the primary exports of Val Rendena, the mountain valley where my dad grew up, had been knife sharpeners. According to local lore, the heavily forested valley was originally famed for its lumberjacks, but then at some point one of them hit upon the marketability of a key secondary skill of their trade: keeping one’s axe sharp. And so, during the long winter off-season, they began hauling their whetstones to balmier climes, where they would find work as itinerant knife grinders. 5 The first knife sharpeners to make their way to the Detroit area had been Binellis from Pinzolo—although, in an unsettling twist, they came from the maternal side of my dad’s family. My father unconvincingly insists this line of Binellis bears no relation to the paternal Binelli line my grandmother married into, but the total population of Pinzolo and its two largest neighbors is something like two thousand people, which makes his protestations suspect. To sound less Italian, one of the first Binellis to arrive in Detroit dropped the “i” from his surname and thus became a “Binell.” (In a fairly sizable oversight, however, he neglected to change his first name, Mario.) My grandmother’s younger brothers, Caesar and Angelo, followed, along with my dad’s best friend, Fausto, and soon my father himself joined them. At first they operated out of the back of a van, eventually securing a brick warehouse building on Davison Street, on the east side of the city. They called their business Detroit Cutlery.
    My mother, Anita, was born in Madonna di Campiglio, a mountain resort town overlooking Pinzolo. Her family emigrated to Detroit in 1947, when she was only two years old. Her parents had managed various hotels in Campiglio, but the war had a predictably deleterious effect on local tourism, necessitating the move. As it happened, her mother, Josephine, had been born in Manhattan, where my great-grandfather had also worked as a knife sharpener. They lived in a tenement building on First Avenue near 125th Street, now Spanish Harlem but at the time the largest of the city’s several Little Italys. Through a series of misfortunes, my grandmother found herself back in Val Rendena with a new stepmother but without her father, who stayed behind in New York to sharpen knives and send over money.
    My grandmother Josephine began working in one of the hotels in Madonna di Campiglio, which was where she met my grandfather, Pio. Also the son of an Italian knife sharpener, he had grown up in Wiesbaden, the German spa town, fought for the Germans in the First World War, and studied in art school in Frankfurt, before making his way back to Italy. After marrying my grandmother, he considered moving the family to New York, where one of his best friends from the Kunstgewerbeschule , Ludwig Wolpert, a master silversmith who has been described as “one