Memories of Life in the Azores

My grandmother was an American citizen. She was born in a farmhouse in Seekonk in 1912 to a father who was an American citizen and a mother who was not. When she was 7 years old, her family took a trip to the Azores so that her father could avoid hay fever season here in the states.

Shortly after their arrival, my great-grandfather contracted malaria and died, leaving his wife and children stranded many miles, and an ocean away, from home.

When my grandmother was 19, she married the son of a fisherman. They had four children, one boy and three girls. My mother Maria dos Anjos, was born in 1943. She is the second youngest of the four children.

Life in the Azores was difficult for the family. They wore secondhand clothes; they did not own shoes. There was no indoor plumbing, no running water, no electricity, no heat. Bread was baked in an oven built out of lava rocks. Food was cooked over a wood fire.

They lived in a three-room house with dirt floors that were always damp. When the floors were swept, they would become uneven. Eventually, more dirt would have to be carried into the house to reconstitute the floors.

Hunger was a constant concern. They kept their bread in a basket suspended from the ceiling to prevent the rats from eating it. One day, they lowered the basket and discovered that the last dry crust of bread had gotten moldy. They scraped off the mold, moistened the bread with water, and ate it anyway. When the eldest child encountered an octopus while swimming, he brought it home and they ate it for dinner.

Sometimes, when they were lucky, relatives gave them the table scraps that would ordinarily be fed to the pigs. At least the pig slop contained meat; usually the family the family had to rely on whatever they could grow in their own garden. One evening, with a wife and four children to fee and everyone hungry, my grandfather snuck into a neighbor's garden to steal a watermelon.

When he got it home, he was dismayed to realize he had stolen not the ripe watermelon that he had his eye on earlier, but one that was still green inside. They went to bed without eating that night.

I asked my mother what she remembered most about her life in the Azores. To my surprise, it was not the hard work, the hunger, or the poverty.

She said, "My most vivid memory in all my life is of the time when my father rented a stagecoach on the day before we left the Azores to come to America. We traveled to a little nearby town to say goodbye to family members. We took that stagecoach, and we rode it for miles and miles, and all I saw was the most beautiful hydrangeas on both sides of the road. It was the most incredibly awesome sight that I have ever seen. I shall never forget it."