Storia vera e terribile tra Sicilia e America [A True and Terrible Affair Between Sicily and America] by Enrico Deaglio. Palermo: Sellerio, 214 pp., €14.00 (paper)
On a sweltering July night in 1899, five immigrant Sicilian produce vendors were seized by a furious mob in Tallulah, Louisiana, and publicly hanged. The night before, Dr. J. Ford Hodge, the coroner of surrounding Madison Parish, had shot a goat that had wandered into his garden. When the animal’s owner, fifty-four-year-old Pasquale Defatta, confronted him the next day over the loss of his goat, Hodge knocked him to the ground, pistol-whipped him, aimed the gun at Defatta’s head, and pulled the trigger, but it jammed. At that point, his brother Giuseppe, thirty-four, ran out of the family’s nearby store with a shotgun and…
