Maria Roma Renner could see her grandfather's face. She could not recall his name. At 82, she could tell you the name of the family dog from before she turned ten, and it came to her instantly.
Bismarck.
Her son, Mike Filsaime, sat with her and recorded the conversation. He asked about the people who came before her: her parents, her grandparents, the island where she was born, the ocean she crossed as a child. Maria died on June 16, 2026. Mike wrote her story from that recording, edited it with help from AI, illustrated it with cartoon-style images, and set it to an English narrator's voice. The result is a ten-minute film.
When he shared it, Mike wrote:
“Before my mom passed away on June 16th, I had a chance to talk to her and record it and capture everything she knew about those that came before her in her early life. I hope you all enjoy. I love you, Mom. I miss you.”
Mike Filsaime
Maria's story appears here with his permission. The notes marked Masterwork Reflection are Sherrie Rose's commentary, set apart from her story so her voice stays her own.
Why Did an Italian Family End Up in Haiti?
Maria was born in Haiti in 1942, into an Italian home. Her middle name, Roma, came from Rome. Her mother told her that once, and Maria remembered it for the rest of her life.
The Haiti of her childhood was green and beautiful, a place where families from around the world had settled and put down roots. Arab, Chinese, French, Jewish, and Italian families lived side by side. They kept mostly to themselves, and they all called it home.
The Renner family came for the shoes. Maria's grandfather held the Florsheim distributorship for the Caribbean, and possibly South America too. He was a wealthy man with seven sons and two daughters. He brought the sons with him to Haiti. The daughters stayed in Italy.
The family was set to move to the United States. Then came the problem of the dog. Bismarck would have to go into quarantine, and the family refused. They went to Haiti instead.
Inside the house, Haiti disappeared. Italian was spoken at home. Maria lived with her grandfather, and the family made ravioli by hand, made their own mozzarella, and made wine from a grapevine growing under the portico. When Mike assumed she had grown up speaking Creole, she corrected him. She spoke very little of it. Italian was her first language.
The Word She Chose Every Time
Maria's father was Mario Renner, a very smart man. He was accepted to Harvard and later expelled for joining the Communist Party. In the late 1930s, to many young, educated people, communism meant the idea that all people should be equal. Mario signed up for that idea without knowing what it would become. His daughter remembered his intelligence more than his politics.
Around 1949 or 1950, Mario took Maria, about seven, and her sister Lena to Italy. Every time Maria told the story, she used the same word. She said he kidnapped them.
They stayed about a year, in a town in the Naples region that sounded like Avellino. Mike asked whether a girl born outside Italy was treated as an outsider there. She said no. Her grandfather had retired back to Italy, her relatives were there, and she was welcomed as the granddaughter brought home.
She remembered a big plaza. Looking down it felt like looking into a forest, green and deep. She remembered a hill, and her grandfather's face.
Then an international court ordered the girls returned. Officers came, took Maria and Lena out of Italy, and brought them to their mother, Olga, who was already in the United States.
Third Grade, Not Fifth
Maria arrived in Queens at eight or nine years old and started third grade. When Mike guessed fifth or sixth, she corrected him.
Four girls shared that household. Maria and Lena were Mario's daughters. Nancy and Paulie were the daughters of Pablo, a Cuban. Mike had assumed all four were full sisters, and his mother set him straight. It became one of the clearest facts of the whole conversation.
She came to America speaking Italian and picked up English. When she spoke the Creole of her birthplace, people laughed at her. She was a child from an Italian house in Haiti, set down in Queens, belonging fully to no single place. She learned her teachers' language and her neighborhood's streets, and she kept the accent of the kitchen and the names of the food.
The money went the way money goes. Her grandfather gave each of his seven sons $100,000. Within a couple of years, it was gone.
There was one more offer, meant to set up Maria and her sister. The recording is garbled there; it may have been a trust or a business. Olga turned it down.
Mike told his mother that if Olga had said yes, the whole future would have changed. He might not have been born. Maria's answer was simple: people do not realize what they are doing. She was being kind. People act on what makes sense to them in the moment, and only history gets to weigh it.
Olga's side had its own journey. Her father, Prato, was Italian too. He came to Haiti and traveled the provinces for the distilleries. No one could recall his first name. Olga's mother was Cora, and Cora's mother was a Simon, from an English family said to be connected to a department store.
Underneath that line sat another story. A man went to Jamaica and had a child with a woman there. Her family rejected him, saying he was not white. He took the baby and brought her back to Haiti. Names, borders, race, and money, the whole tangle of the last century, sat inside one family's ordinary life.
Mario's life ended in Haiti. He went back to Italy, then back to Haiti, and fell ill with what Maria believed was tuberculosis. He died when she was in her twenties. She could not place the year. “I was a kid,” she said. “I never paid attention.”
A Party in 1958, and a Conversation That Kept Going
In 1958, Maria went to a friend's party in Manhattan. Mike guessed Queens, and she corrected him again. She thought she was sixteen, or just turning sixteen. The young man she met there had left Haiti that same year and was about nineteen, turning twenty.
She remembered almost nothing about the room. Mike asked about an elevator, a grand entrance. She did not remember. She remembered being there, at a friend's place in Manhattan, and that the evening opened a door.
Years later, Mike's father remembered her mind. Clever. Articulate. A good student, mature for her age. She could keep up her end of a conversation, and so could he, and they loved to talk.
That was the beginning. Two people who found it easy to talk to each other.
Everything before that evening, the island, the Italian house, the grapevine, the plaza, the court order, the ocean crossing, the money that vanished, led her to that party. Everything after it is the rest of the family.
A Hundred Years From Now, Who Will Find Them?
Near the end, Mike asked his mother why any of this was worth recording. She was not sure it was. It makes no difference once you are dead, she told him.
Mike told her he wanted the names to survive. A hundred years from now, someone should be able to find Mario. Find Olga. Find Cora. Find Bismarck, even.
Maria did not argue about legacy. She said she wished her sister Lena were still alive, because Lena knew all the things she had forgotten.
Maria Roma Renner was born on March 22, 1942. She died on June 16, 2026, at 84. She was short, with black hair. In her last conversations she worried the names would disappear, even the ones she had already lost.
Mike made the film for his family: for Lionel, for Natasha, for Lionel's children, and for the generations after them. A hundred years from now, someone will know that a girl named for Rome was here, and that she was loved.
Hear Maria's Story in Mike's Film
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