Christ in Concrete

Embedded throughout this chapter is the concept of the American dream, which is often espoused by immigrants who dream that their children will be able to climb the American ladder of success and escape the backbreaking labor that they must suffer as first-generation immigrants: “I tell you, son of Geremio shall never lay bricks!” (10). Geremio is optimistic for Paul. He wants him to study well and become a great builder—likely an architect. He believes his children will adopt American customs and come to be accepted as Americans in mainstream society, instead of facing the discrimination that they encountered as Italian immigrants. As Geremio tells Annunziata: “Our children will dance for us…in the American style someday” (7). With Geremio’s death, this dream comes to a crashing halt, although Paul will stubbornly hold onto the idea of the American dream for years to come. 

The silence that Geremio adopts at home reflects the silence that Paul will also adopt toward Job at the end of the book. The nature of Job is so oppressive that Geremio does not want to discuss it with his wife and thus allow Job to oppress him at home—his one place of sanctuary and reprieve from the grueling routine of work. However, in keeping silence, Geremio also places a distance between himself and his wife. In this chapter, “home” becomes a place of family, warmth, and love—everything that Job is not:

Ah, bella casa mio. Where my little freshets of blood and my good woman await me. Home where my broken back will not ache so. Home where midst the monkey chatter of my piccolinos I will float off to blessed slumber with my feet on the chair and the head on the wife’s soft full breast (6).

Home is a brief reprieve from the daily toils of Job. Simple pleasures like thoughts of the warmth of home and the comfort of a wife, allow Geremio to suffer through Job every day. This passage also shows how the book seamlessly interweaves Italian phrases with English, which illustrates the immigrant’s code-switching between two cultural worlds (American and Italian).

We also see the hopelessness of the worker, who is like a cog in the machine and unable to resist the forces of American capitalism and the demands of the Job, which require that he be ever more productive, even while paid a lowly wage and working in unsafe conditions. As Geremio’s coworker says on the first page: “Work! Sure! For America beautiful will eat you and spit your bones into earth’s hole” (3). If they protest, they will lose their job and their means of providing for their family. Geremio feels he cannot go on living like this, which puts him in an impossible spot from which only death can remove him: “And the terror of production for Boss, Boss and Job? To rebel is to lose all of the very little” (13). The worker’s helplessness and inability to advocate for better working conditions leads directly to his death. Moreover, di Donato makes Job seem like such a terrifying thing because he personifies the concept of work and imbues it with eerie animalistic traits: “The cold, ghastly beast, the Job, stood stark, the eerie March wind wrapping it in sharp shadows of falling dusk” (6). Di Donato also effectively employs personification to demonstrate the passage of time between the seasons: “March whistled stinging snow against the brick walls…” (3).

Manhood becomes a central concept in the book. Geremio feels it is his duty as a man to take care of his family with his own two hands: “But am I not a man, to feed my own with these hands?” (9). This is a view that Paul will later adopt as the male financial provider for the family after his father’s death, even though he also finds Job to be quite emotionally and physically draining. Ultimately, their own feelings matter not because they must feed their family, as Geremio says: “And always, there had been hunger and her bastard, the fear of hunger” (8). The only comfort—if any—that Job provides is a sense of freedom from hunger. In reading Geremio’s words, the reader wonders what price that freedom demands and whether it is really freedom to be so dependent on Job. Hunger is more than just a physical urge, but a psychological one as well. As the men leave the comfort of lunch and return to the drudgery of Job, they long for more—a symbolic hunger of yearning: “[I]n that fleeting moment the breast wanted much to speak of hungers that never reached the tongue” (11).

As an Italian immigrant, Geremio is a devout Catholic. Faith in Christ does keep Geremio’s spirits somewhat afloat. Geremio models his own suffering at Job after the sacrifice of Christ, who was crucified on the cross when he says:“Yes, the day is cold, cold…but who am I to complain when Christ himself was crucified?” (4).

Due to the teachings of his faith that emphasize hard work, Geremio believes that he has rightfully earned a place on Earth for himself and his family: “Blessings to thee, O Jesus. I have fought winds and cold. Hand in hand, I have locked dumb stones in place and the great building rises. I have earned a bit of bread for me and mine” (6). That steadfast faith is cruelly unrewarded when Geremio calls out for God in his last moments before death: “Show yourself now, Jesu! Now is the time! Save me! Why don’t you come?” (18). The death of Geremio occurs on Good Friday, which is an auspicious day in the Christian faith as it commemorates Jesus’s crucifixion and death. The death of the workers—who are deeply Christian—on the same day as the death of Jesus is a symbol. The workers, like Jesus, are martyrs unjustly sacrificed by cruel authority figures. Geremio becomes a Christ-like figure, although he is impaled upon a “cold steel rod” (16) rather than a cross. He literally becomes a “Christ in Concrete” per the book’s title.

One prominent literary device introduced in this chapter is repetition of certain phrases as a way of impressing important themes, emotions, and symbols upon the reader. One of these themes is the aforementioned illusory American dream and the difference between immigrant and American culture when Geremio talks about his coworker chewing quid in the “American” style” or dreaming of his children dancing in the “American style.” This is also evident in the harsh, rote nature of Job, which is necessary to provide for his family but gives so little in return: “The barrow he pushed, he did not love. The stones that brutalized his palms, he did not love. The Great God Job, he did not love” (8). Similarly, we ourselves feel as if we are being crushed when we read Geremio’s repetitive, frantic plea to God in his final moments: “Jesu my Lord my God my all Jesu my Lord my God my all” (18). 

The author also uses simile to create a sense of foreboding: “Yet a vague uneasiness was to him as certain as the foggy murk that floated about Job’s stone and steel” (12). Moreover, the beautiful literary style of the novel emphasizes the pitiful nature of the human body: what we create can easily destroy us. The author illustrates this idea when describing Geremio’s strong body, which “thudded as a worthless sack amongst the giant debris that crushed fragile flesh and bone with centrifugal intensity” (14). The author imagines in visceral, journalistic detail what we would like to ignore. He imagines what takes place between the crashing of a building and the discovery of the bodies—the in-between and grisly struggle between life and death. The scene takes on added meaning when we realize that di Donato lost his own father in a similar manner.

Lastly, di Donato undercuts these moments of darkness with some comic humor in the interactions between the workers on the site, who seem like buddies in their shared Italian immigrant experience. They reference each other’s virility, give each other nicknames like “Snoutnose,” and refer to each other’s wives in a comedic fashion, such as the “big-titted Cola” (4). He describes these characters with such physicality that physical appearance often comes to symbolize personality traits.