The Shame of Shoes

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His half grin, painted on a face sculpted by German ancestry, was levelled at me when he said, “I was in northern Ohio on Friday and learned something new.” In the middle of our sales meeting for a Cincinnati tech firm, the young man broke into song.

All over the street / to happy feet / Get your shoesies at Januzzi’s.

My feet tapped in double-time to keep pace with my pulse. I knew then, the Januzzi jinx had returned.

I was raised in a shoe store family. My grandfather, Enrico Ianuzzi, at nineteen, cobbled his neighbors’ shoes in his Calabrian hometown. In 1920, he migrated to Lorain, Ohio, amongst other Italians, hammering soles at night while donning steel-toed boots at the mills by day. Together with his wife, Stella, he molded a repair business into a full-fledged store, with the help of my uncle and my dad. He christened their first business venture Enrico and Sons. The next development was baptized Januzzi’s Shoes, an erasure of the original Ianuzzi name. For decades, including eighteen years of my existence, people flocked from across the region for fittings at Januzzi’s. Our ownership was a source of pride—and pain.

The Januzzi family and the Mazzas, Stella’s family, had both originated from southern Italy. In the early 1900s, many Italians migrated from those regions to the U.S. where they were typecast as dark-skinned with inky brown hair and deep-set eyes, not to be trusted. Around town, we felt that mistrust. We called it the Januzzi jinx.

At school, in a town less diverse than where the shoe store was located, I analyzed the soles of classmates as they passed me in the halls. I knew three things: shoe brands, who had forsaken the independent sellers for the malls, and who shopped at Bakers Shoes. When friends boasted about purchases from Januzzi’s, I admired the stripes on their Addidas sneakers or the wooden heels on Thom McAn clogs. But Saturdays at the store, sorting customer cards in the metal cabinet, I scanned the files for my peers—Theresa F., Nick B., Bob H. They hadn’t stepped foot inside our shop. That knowledge was enough to sting. Other schoolmates mangled the radio jingle for the store, rhymed shoesies with floozies, and sung behind my back. Their echoes traveled down the tiled corridors and pierced my green, white, and red prickliness.

In my senior year of high school, my grandfather succumbed to cancer. My grandmother, Stella, had died twenty years earlier. Following disputes on company direction and individual personalities, my father and uncle dissolved the corporation. Maintenance of the customer records was discarded, the cabinet sold. Our name was no longer affiliated with shoes, only with pointed claims about theft and failure. The entity our families had cobbled in place came unglued.

Away from the gossip and confusion that swirled around my parents’ lives, college was my refuge. I wasn’t a Januzzi by reputation. Or linked to shoes. Four years later, I moved to Cincinnati. That day in the conference room, the sales guy repeated the melody with a Greek chorus of singers.

All over the street / to happy feet / Get your shoesies at Januzzi’s.

Hot shame engulfed me in the cool atrium light of that conference room. The staff of crisp Oxford shirts morphed into a laughing, blinding blob that consumed six years.

My father had lost his livelihood and the final connection to his parents. Free of a certain burden, he found his footing elsewhere. My mother, too. Afterall, they were bound over to their Italianità, just no longer required to peddle shoes. For me, the jingle and the jinx cast its shadow along a 250-mile-long stretch of Ohio, to a city where a large demographic claimed a paler shade of European ancestry.

Glancing at my forearms, summer tanned, and kicking around my mid-heel pumps with a peep-toe, I couldn’t shirk the curse.

Two decades whizzed by, as did jobs, marriages, and four kids. My parents died in that timeframe too. Amidst the pandemic, on a whim, I contacted the AM station where my father once placed radio ads. A retired producer uncovered the tracks that had been shelved in the folds of my brain. When an email with an audio attachment hit my inbox, my palms began to sweat. I clicked play. The recording was flawless. The Januzzi’s Shoes jingle remained intact.

The flames of youthful embarrassment dissolved into a mere crackling, more like the store itself.

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