Justice and law in AVFTB
Alfieri is a representative of the legal profession (law)_ but he also understands the cultural background of the community in Red Hook. He turns a blind eye to the fact that members of that community support ‘submarines’ and he knows about the mishaps that occur on the docks, when a case of whiskey breaks open on Christmas Eve…as they are ‘inclined to do’. He has worked for 25 years in this community, helping people settle their ‘petty squabbles’. He is grateful that now people ‘settle for half’, that is, they compromise and reach some sort of mediated agreement .
However, Alfieri can remember a time when matters of ‘justice’ were settled by ‘unjust men’ through gangland killings. Alfieri himself used to keep a pistol in his filing cabinet, which suggests that people were taking the law into their own hands and meting out ‘justice’ as they saw it, and sometimes they might have tried to pay back Alfieri for something he had done- or not done- as a lawyer. He likes it better now. This sort of justice, outside the legal system and often against the law in fact , is closely connected with a person’s idea of ‘honour’ and respect and this in turn is very much a reflection of their cultural or ethnic background. Eddie for instance, accepts that Vinnie Bal?? deserved to be treated as roughly as he was when he reported the submarines to the immigration authorities. Eddie and the community regarded this as a betrayal and thought that what happened to Vinnie was ‘just’.
So it seems that in AVFTB, notions of justice are socially or culturally based- Americans perhaps think of ‘justice’ differently from those with a Sicilian background and part of the process of Americanisation is for these people to accept the American system and assumptions, that ‘justice’ is gained through the legal system and that often it involves compromise. On the other hand, the law is the law, and American law probably does not reflect cultural understandings of justice held by minority groups.
This is complicated by the idea that Alfieri puts forward that the law only reflects what is ‘natural’. He uses this argument to try to persuade Eddie that it is right, or just, that there is no law to stop Catherine marrying Rodolpho. Eddie is infuriated by this, and this fury leads him to break the code of his community. Because he has rationalized his unspeakable feelings for Catherine by casting doubt on Rodolpho’s motives for wanting to marry her, Eddie thinks that there should be a law to stop the exploitative marriage that he claims it will be. When Alfieri tells him that there is no such law, Eddie stumbles out of his office and goes straight to the phone box in the street and reports the illegal immigrants- Marco and Rodolpho. Presumably he tells himself that this is ‘justifiable’ because it is a way to stop Rodolpho marrying Catherine for what Eddie suggests are corrupt motives.
Once Eddie has broken the code of the community and betrayed Marco and Rodolpho, he is treated with contempt, just as Vinnie Bal?? was. Marco spits at him and this means that Eddie is honor-bound to make Marco take back the insult or to fight him to the death. This has nothing to do with the law. It is all about the traditional Sicilian notions of loyalty and betrayal, justice, honour and respect.
Alfieri says that he knew that this would be the outcome but that he was powerless to stop it because “no law had been broken.” He is suggesting that he knew how things would play out because he knew that Eddie would betray Marco and Rodolpho and once that happened, Eddie’s death- or Marco’s- was inevitable. Because Marco is so recently arrived from Sicily, none of his cultural notions have been moderated by the American ways of doing things and his outrage at Eddie’s action and the implications that it has for the future of his family- he says they will die of hunger- make it inevitable that he will want Sicilian justice.
Eddie participates in this absolutely, and there is at least some suggestion that he is sacrificing himself because he knows that he has broken the code and it is just that he dies…perhaps he is so shamed by Bea’s suggestion that he wants Catherine for himself that he views his death as a just outcome.