The beads were smooth from use. Three sets of hands had worn the finish off them — a grandmother’s, a mother’s, a daughter’s — each woman’s fingers finding the same grooves in prayer, wearing the wood down the way water wears stone. Slowly. Over years. Until the rosary held the shape of every woman who had ever held it.
I didn’t set out to write a novel about objects. But when I began researching the world Lucie Santoro would inhabit in The Promise — East Harlem, 1919, the Italian immigrant community at its most tightly knit and fiercely guarded — I kept coming back to the things women carried. Not metaphorically. Literally. The physical objects they packed into trunks and clutched on steamships and unpacked into tenement rooms that smelled nothing like home. Those objects did work that language couldn’t always do. They held identity when identity was under siege.
Consider what it meant to leave southern Italy at the turn of the century. You were leaving a village where your family had lived for generations, where the church bells marked your days and everyone knew your name. You were boarding a ship in steerage — weeks of seasickness, salt water for washing, strangers pressed against you in the dark — with no guarantee you’d ever come back. And you could bring almost nothing.
What you chose to carry said everything about who you were and who you intended to remain.
For the women, the choices were specific and deliberate. A rosary, blessed and familiar, small enough to tuck into a pocket or press against your chest during the crossing. A saint’s medal, perhaps — a tiny silver Christopher for protection on the journey, or a Madonna for the children. And then the corredo.
The corredo — the bridal trousseau — was the largest, most labor-intensive thing a woman brought to her new life, whether that new life was a marriage or a new country. In southern Italian tradition, a girl began assembling her corredo in adolescence, sometimes earlier. Her mother, her grandmother, her aunts — every woman in the family contributed. They embroidered bed sheets and pillowcases, hemmed table linens, stitched nightgowns and dish towels. Even the humblest families were expected to produce a minimum collection: dozens of sheets, pillowcases by the score, towels, tablecloths for everyday and tablecloths for occasions that hadn’t happened yet.
The corredo wasn’t just practical. It was proof. Proof that a family had raised their daughter properly. Proof that she could maintain a household. Proof of status, of care, of generations of women’s hands working together toward a future they were building stitch by stitch. In Sicily, the trousseau was displayed publicly the day before the wedding, laid out for neighbors and extended family to inspect and evaluate. A professional appraiser sometimes assigned values to each piece. The competitive pressure was real — an elaborate corredo signaled a family’s standing as surely as the church pew they occupied on Sunday.
When these families crossed the Atlantic, the corredo came with them. Five-foot wooden trunks packed with hand-embroidered linen, carried through Ellis Island alongside crying children and crumpled immigration papers. Some of those trunks survive to this day in the attics and basements of Italian American families — the fabric yellowed, the embroidery still precise, the monograms still legible. Evidence of a world that traveled inside a box.
But here’s what struck me most deeply in the research, and what found its way into The Promise: these objects didn’t just preserve tradition. They enforced it.
The corredo was assembled for a daughter, but it was also assembled around her. Every stitch was a stitch toward marriage. Every pillowcase was a promise that she would become a wife, a mother, a keeper of the home her linens would fill. A girl who rejected marriage was rejecting the years of work her family had invested — not just emotionally, but materially. The corredo made duty tangible. You could hold it in your hands. You could feel its weight.
The rosary worked the same way. In the Italian immigrant neighborhoods of East Harlem, faith wasn’t private. It was communal, visible, and monitored. Your rosary marked you as belonging — to the parish, to the neighborhood, to the generations of women who had prayed those same prayers before you. To carry your mother’s rosary was to carry her expectations. To lose it, or to bring it somewhere it didn’t belong, was to sever something that couldn’t easily be repaired.
In Mamma Santoro’s East Harlem, the neighborhood operated under campanilismo — loyalty to everyone within earshot of the bell tower. The bell tower of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on 115th Street, built with labor donated by the immigrant community itself, was the spiritual and social center of Italian Harlem. The community saw everything. Noted everything. Remembered everything. Your possessions — what you wore, what you carried, what you displayed in your home — were read as text. A crucifix above the bed. A saint’s card in the kitchen. The good china on the right shelf. Every object was a sentence in the story the neighborhood was always telling about you.
For a young woman like Lucie, growing up inside that world, objects carried a double weight. They were comfort — the familiar feel of her mother’s rosary beads, the kitchen that smelled of garlic and candle wax, the household rhythms that connected her to something ancient and sure. And they were constraint — the corredo being stitched for a marriage she hadn’t chosen, the ring that would replace her name, the church bells that told her when to wake and when to pray and when to come home.
What happens when a woman outgrows the objects that defined her? When the rosary that once meant safety starts to feel like a leash? When the hope chest full of hand-embroidered linens starts to look less like a gift and more like a sentence?
That tension — between what we inherit and what we choose, between the objects that hold us together and the ones that hold us back — runs through all of my fiction about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America. It’s the tension at the heart of The Promise, where Lucie must decide what to keep and what to let go — and discover that some things, once released, can never be recovered.
I think about the real women who made those crossings. Who packed their trunks with linens their mothers had embroidered and rosaries their grandmothers had prayed. Who carried the old world into the new one, object by object, and then watched their daughters reach for something different. Something lighter. Something their own.
The objects stayed. Tucked into drawers, hung on walls, pressed between the pages of prayer books. Silent witnesses to everything that changed and everything that held.
This is part of the world Sherilyn explores across all her fiction — read more about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America.
The Promise Trilogy is set in 1919 East Harlem, it follows Lucie Santoro as she navigates the impossible space between the life her family has planned for her and the one she’s beginning to imagine for herself.