They Did Some Hanky Panky
By Jeannine Patané • 31 August 2007

     Southern France. I’ve been here before in oral history, but never in my travels. Now I'm traveling along the populated coast from Nice Ville to Antibes, and I can only be reminded of France, Italy and a very important gift that was given to me as a nine-year-old. It’s the gift of a story, told by my grandmother, Nana.
     In my younger years, the family would go to my grandparent’s house every Sunday in New York. There was one Sunday in particular which I remember. The late summer season displayed itself in the oak and maple trees, showing the slightest hints of yellow in their leaves. That afternoon, as we grandchildren were running in and out of the house, Nana asked me to sit out on the porch with her.
     Nana was one of those grandmothers who spent most of her life in the kitchen. If she wasn’t in the kitchen permeating the house with fresh garlic, simmering tomato sauce with meatballs or roasting seasoned turkey, she was in the dining room setting an immensely long table for a family gathering. Sometimes the hardwood table had to be turned 90 degrees into the living room to accommodate all of its leaves for full expansion. For Nana to take time out of the kitchen to sit with me rarely happened. As we walked out of the sitting room door, She put her hand on my shoulder, “I want to tell you the story of where your name came from.”
     The porch was always cool. It had a raised concrete floor with massive granite arches that rose up from the ground. The timber rafters above supported the weight of large slate tiles. This was a solid house; an estate built long ago for caretakers who took care of the castle that sat off in our distance up on the wooded hill. To offset the hardness of the porch, redwood furniture supported brown, orange and yellow floral print cushions. Nana also kept flower boxes around the porches as part of her extended garden.
     I sat down on the vinyl cushion with her to hear this intriguing story she was about to tell. It must have been important, because she left the house to tell it to me. My fingers plucked and twisted a cushion button in anticipation. The cushions had the faintest smell of mildew, as most soft outdoor décor do over time.
     “Back during the Napoleon era, during the French Revolution, lives this French nobleman named Patané. He lived in a lovely castle in Southern France and was a very wealthy man. Then the revolution started to get big and spread downward. The peasants were cutting off the heads of the aristocrats, and he didn’t want to be one of them. Patané figured he’d have to leave France before the peasants cut his head off too. He gathered up his things and fled with his wealth from Southern France across the border to Northern Italy. Once he was in Northern Italy, he knew he was safe and built himself another castle.”
     I heard one of the horses whinny from the nearby pasture. It was getting close to their evening feeding time, and they were calling out to my grandfather. I’d skip the feeding today; I wanted to hear the rest of the story.
     “Now, the nobleman established himself; he hired new staff for the castle. Butlers, maids and a bunch of servants. In particular, he was quite fond of one maid. In fact, he fell in love with her. They did some hanky panky together, and the next thing you know she got pregnant. He married her and then she gave birth to a baby boy. The boy took on the name Patané and he was half French, half Italian. When the boy got older, he married an Italian girl and they had boys—and then the boys had boys—so on and so forth that the name Patané got passed through the generations of Italians from Northern Italy all the way down to Sicily.”
     Fragments of the story started to become familiar for me at this point, because I’ve heard occasional mention through my father, aunts and uncles about our ancestors coming to America from Sicily.
     “Now your great, great grandmother, Marie, was a visionary. She knew everything before it was going to happen. She could see the World Wars coming, and she knew the safest place to be was America. She also knew it was the best place for opportunity and a better life. She rounded up the kids, your great grandfather being just a little boy, and they took a boat from Sicily to America.” Nana went on to tell me about my great grandfather’s life. The sun got a little lower in the sky and she spent a little bit more time with her arm around my shoulders before she had to tend to the kitchen.
     Our family must have bred like rabbits and moved like the wind according to the time span of generations. Although I wonder how accurate Nana’s description is about my ancestry, I don’t want to investigate it. To me, it’s thoroughly real, because it is the only piece of oral history I have received from a grandparent that I can remember. The story is made more meaningful because it was told to me before she died the following year, just before Christmas. This childhood gift is what I have to hold onto and share with our family’s next generation. No matter where we are or where we go, we always keep our folklore through storytelling, and the roots of home stay in our mind.