BACKSTORY
The Story Behind Seeds:
My grandfather Sebastian was a mailman in Kensington, Brooklyn. He wore long sleeves and pants, even on the hottest summer days. There were scars—terrible scars—from a fire that had killed his whole family when he was a boy. He never talked about it, except to say that he’d fallen or been pushed from his third-floor tenement window. A fireman had caught him in his net, and with my grandpa’s clothes aflame, had rushed him to the hospital on foot.
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Grandpa lived a long life. After he died, I couldn’t stop thinking about that long-ago fire. Some of it was that Grandpa lived a quiet life. We were, by and large, a quiet family. That kind of drama—an entire family obliterated in a tenement fire—surely, the wounds would run deep and manifest in some obvious way. But no one seemed to know more. Not his daughters or his sons-in-law; not his grandchildren.
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Sebastian Amoruso, age 19 (8 years after the fire)
then, Sebastian Amoruso, age 35
Saving Lives at a Tenement House fire
Mug shot of Antonino Inglese, taken upon commitment to the Atlanta Penitentiary in 1909
The only surviving photograph of the "real" Mimi Inglese
​So I was left to wonder: was the fire real? Could that many people have perished, and my grandfather survived, because of some fluke or accident of fate?
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By the time my grandpa died, I was entrenched in my career as a lawyer and professor. So I did what any self-respecting history geek would do: I started doing research.
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I found the fire on the front page of The New York Times. The article screamed:
20 DEAD, TRAPPED IN TENEMENT BLAZE ON UPPER EAST SIDE
Among the dead were my grandfather’s younger brothers: Tony, age 9, and Eugene, 7. Two days later, his great-grandmother Rosina was listed as dead. Also included among the dead was Mattia Inglese, 30 years old. Grandpa had talked about his great-grandmother. She’d immigrated as an old woman, only to die in this horrific fire. But who was Mattia? No one had ever heard of her. ​​​​​​​
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I returned to the research. The New York Times had a photograph of her in one of their follow-up stories. Her dark, deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, and full lips. My first thought was that she looked like my niece, Catherine. It was this photo that the artist used in crafting the cover to Seeds.
The 1910 and 1920 Censuses had Mattia living with her parents, brothers, and sisters, first in a house on 109th Street, then at the Lexington Avenue tenement. I did more research. Her autopsy report stated that her body had been found in the cellar, beside Grandpa’s two brothers. How did they get there? The Fire Marshall determined it was arson, and the fire had burned so hot that the inside of the building imploded. Grandpa’s words returned to me: he’d survived because he’d fallen or been pushed from a window. He was the oldest and the only one to get out. Could it be that Mattia got him onto that sill, intending that the other boys would follow, but that the fire exploded before she could?
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I read and reread that autopsy report, the realization beginning to dawn: maybe Mattia had pushed Grandpa from that sill. Maybe she was the reason he’d survived.
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This happens when you’re doing research: one answer opens the floodgates to a deluge of other questions. Who was Mattia? Why was she with my grandfather and his brothers? Where were the boys’ parents? And their grandparents and Mattia’s parents—Antonino and Maria Inglese—the Census reported they resided there, too. But there was no record of them in the dead or injured, even though the fire had been set in the middle of the night.
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I kept doing research. Some of the questions were answered; many others remained. It was a frustrating time: I was a researcher, but on so many instances, the trail ran cold. This was especially true for Mattia. I found her birth record at the Town Hall in Partanna, Sicily. She was listed on the immigration records at Ellis Island. There was the autopsy report and death record, that photo, and a few newspaper mentions. But nothing more. Like so many young, unmarried women, there was little trace of the life she’d lived.
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The men in the story owned property; they had occupations; and they’d been drafted or served in the military. The women, though, were silent.
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I wrote my first book from the point of view of three characters: Antonino, Mattia, and Sebastian. A long, meandering slog, from 19th-century Sicily through mid-20th-century NYC, it hewed closely to what I knew and could prove. After all, I had a Ph.D. in Political Science. I couldn’t just make things up. The problem, of course, is that I didn’t know much about Mattia. Still, she whispered to me. As I began to rewrite the story, Sebastian fell away. Then Antonino. But Mattia’s story stayed with me: one of love and self-sacrifice.
As time went on, I began to ask who she was and what her life would have been had she survived that fire.
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Seeds of the Pomegranate is the answer.
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