Accordion Crimes (3 page)

“Excuse me, I seek a boardinghouse, number sixteen, but it seems there is no building here—” The man did not answer, spat to his right as he passed. Silvano saw the punishment for not knowing American. The man must be an American—one who despised Sicilians.

The accordion maker, unnerved, said to Silvano, “a cursed fool, let him dine on weeds made bitter by the piss of drunkards.” They dragged their bundles and the trunk back to the wharf. There was the ship they had left only hours ago. Silvano recognized the faces of crew members. They returned his stare with disinterest. One shouted something ribald in American. Silvano experienced the helpless rage of the prisoner of language. His father seemed not to notice.

The employment office described by the young man on the train was a blue shack at the end of the wharf. A dozen men, both white and black, leaned against pilings and boxes and spit tobacco, smoked cigars, staring at them as they approached. Inside the shack a dog with an iron collar lay under the chair and a man with a swollen, bruised nose who called himself Graspo—Grapestalk—spoke to them in language they could understand, but he was suspicious and insolent, demanding their papers, asking their names, the name of their village, parents’ names, the name of the wife’s family, who did they know and why had they come here? The accordion maker showed the map, told of the young man on the train who had given the address of the boardinghouse, described the charred timbers, said he knew no one, wanted work on the boats or docks.

“What was the name of this man on the train?” But of course the accordion maker did not know. After a time Graspo softened, although his tone was still lofty and condescending.

“It is not as easy as you think,
contadino,
there are many things involved in working here, many people of strength against each other. There is sometimes trouble, the times are difficult. The Sicilians suffer very much. We must look out for one another. But I can tell you the name of a boardinghouse in Little Palermo, number four Mirage Street, cheap and well located for work. Perhaps I can get you something on the fruit boats, you and the boy. You will see that the Irish and the black men have the best of it, those who are screwmen. The humble Italian—for here Sicilians are regarded as Italians and you must swallow that as well—must be content to be a longshoreman.” He cleared his throat and spat. “For you the cost is three dollars, for the boy two, and the address of the boardinghouse is free. Yes, you pay to me. I’m the
bosso.
That is how it works in America,
Signor’ Emigrante Siciliano.
You must pay to be paid. You know nothing, no one, you pay for an education. I offer you this education for a modest sum.”

What choice had he? None, none. He paid the money, turning his back to Graspo while he pried the strange coins from the kidskin money belt, stained now with sweat. Graspo told the accordion maker to go to the boardinghouse and make an arrangement, come back in the morning for the shape-up; if fortune was with them there would be work. The accordion maker nodded, nodded, nodded and smiled.

“They will ask you at the boardinghouse what work you have. Show them this paper and tell them you work for Signor Banana. Ah-ha.”

They found the boardinghouse in Little Palermo, a noisome district as bad as any Sicilian slum, except that black people
lived here as well as Sicilians and Italians. Mirage Street was lined with decayed French mansions shedding flerried slates like dandruff, the fine rooms chopped into cubbies, thin strips of deal bisecting plaster cherubs, a ballroom partitioned into twenty mean kennels. Number four was a filthy brick pile obscured by crisscrossed lines of grey laundry and belted around and around with sagging balconies. Somewhere a dog barked.

(Years later in the oil fields it was not the horrible event that Silvano remembered but this relentless barking by an unseen animal that went on day and night. An American dog. In Sicily someone would have killed it for its disobedience.)

The courtyard was knee-deep in refuse, smashed bed frames, scrap wood, great drifts of oyster shells, suitcase handles and bloody rags, holed cooking pots and tin cans, broken crockery, chamber pots half filled with green-scummed water, weather-stiffened hames, a legless horsehair sofa furred with mold. In a corner of the courtyard was a reeking
baccausa
which served the scores who lived in the building. When the accordion maker entered this outhouse he turned away, retching; the mound of excrement protruded from the hole. In the corner was a smeared stick to push it down a little. He noticed later that some of the residents squatted in the courtyard like dogs to relieve their bowels, and in this wasteland children played.

“Listen,” he told Silvano. “Do not go there. There is a demon in that backhouse. Find another place. How do I know where? Anyway, it is better to hold it in as much as possible to get the most good from the food I buy for you.” So began Silvano’s lifelong suffering with constipation and griping bowels.

They climbed splintered stairs to the top floor, away from the leaning banister.

“Here is high living, my friend,” said the landlord in a laughing voice. The room was hardly bigger than a closet and filthy. There were two plank beds, over each a long shelf, one partly filled with the belongings of a man with whom they must share this space. A deaf man who would be no trouble, the landlord said. Silvano would sleep on the floor on the sheepskin. The accordion maker touched the broken plaster, kicked at the loose floorboards. From a nearby room they heard cries of abuse, a slap, another, muffled shrieks and blows. But Silvano was delighted with the window, two clear panes above an amber wave of stained glass. They could take turns, he said, looking out over the rooftops at the creamy river where boats growled up and down. Flies buzzed at this window and the sill was buried an inch beneath their husks.

But when he ran down the dark, groaning stairs three boys cornered him on a landing. The one with the dull face and crooked mouth he counted least dangerous, but while the others danced and jabbed at him, that one sidled behind, interlaced his fingers and raised his joined hands to bring Silvano crashing to his knees with a double-handed chop to the back of the neck. Silvano rolled between Dull-Face’s legs, reached up and twisted the tender flesh inside the thigh despite three kicks in the face that scraped his cheek across the gritty floor. A door on the landing flung open and cold greasy water flew at them; there was a tinny rattle and a cascade of spoons and forks as the three attackers leaped down the stairs, shouting back curses.

The landlord, crippled and obese, possessing only one foot and half blind, skin as grey and slick as the bottom of a boat,
hands and arms crisscrossed with cane-cut scars, took the first week’s money from them. He called himself Cannamele, Sugarcane, from the old days when he worked on the sugar plantations, before he crushed his foot in the grinder. The stiff point of a cane leaf had ruined his eye.

“But look, once my hands were strong enough to squeeze water from stones.” He made a clenching gesture. When he heard the name of their village he shook with emotion; for he said he had been born two villages away. He begged them for news of many people. But none of the names he presented was familiar and after a quarter of an hour it was clear that Cannamele had mistaken their village for another. Yet a certain cordiality, a connection, had been established. Cannamele felt it necessary to explain how things were.

Here in Little Palermo, he said, the Americans never came. All the dialects and regions of Italy and Sicily were crushed together here, people from the mountains and the rich plains below Etna, from northern Italy, from Rome, even from Milano, but those haughty ones moved out as soon as they could. He told the accordion maker that the backhouse was supposed to be emptied once a month by black men who dug out the stinking shit and carted it away in their “aggravation wagons,” but they had not come for a long time, no one knew why. Perhaps they would come tomorrow. So, Graspo had promised him work? Graspo was of the Mantrangas, stevedores at war with rival
padroni,
the Provenzanos, in a rough squabble over who would control the hiring of labor to work the fruit boats. The Irish and the black men, the cotton screwmen, had the highest-paid work; Sicilians and Italians had to take what was left, the longshoreman jobs, but at least they were better off than the roustabouts, all black men—wild, roving river hogs covered with pale scars. And as for
those black ones, if the accordion maker had eyes, he could see for himself most were wretched and ragged and their so-called freedom was a mockery. Yet on New Orleans docks they had certain rights which often worked against Sicilians and Italians; there the black screwmen were as good as anyone and better than immigrants. The crafty Americans knew well how to play each against the other. The other occupant of their room, the deaf man called Nove—Nine—because his little finger had been chewed off in a fight, was a stevedore. As for “Signor Banana,” he was the esteemed and wealthy Frank Archivi, born in New Orleans of poor Sicilian parents, an American by birth, and who knows, if not galvanized by the madness of grief when he was twenty, he might have become a boatman or an organ grinder instead of the owner of a shipping line, a man who controlled the rich fruit-import business.

“Think of it, after one week of marriage his bride died of a shrimp which she inhaled while laughing—never laugh when you eat shrimp—and Archivi, the crazed one, eyes as red as lanterns, came to her tomb at night and removed her stinking corpse, dragging it through the streets and kissing the rotting lips until he collapsed. He lay in a fever for a month and when he came to his senses he was as cold as a glacier, interested only in money. And now Archivi, Archivi is bananas and fruits from Latin America, lemons and oranges from Italy. Archivi is deals and ingenuity, and that hard work that makes a fortune, a fortune that grows and swells. If you would see Archivi, look at the carts of the street vendors. He owns ships, warehouses, thousands work for him, he moves in the high circles of New Orleans society, he is an important man in politics. He shook the hand of John D. Rockefeller. He is a Rockefeller of fruit. Every piece of fruit that comes to these docks is controlled by
Archivi. He turned his grief and madness to money.” The accordion maker listened greedily.

“He is brave and agile, he fought the Reconstructionists. You would do well to study him,
americanizzarti,
to Americanize yourself as he has done. When the black men tried to muscle the Sicilians away from the dock work, he led an army of longshoremen against them. I saw this. It was bloody and he won, I can tell you that, he won. You have a knife? Good. You must get a pistol as well. It is necessary. In New Orleans you defend yourself every day.”

Archivi, he said, moved confidently in the Americans’ world.

“But don’t bother to play your accordion for him. He has refined tastes in music, he prefers concerts and the opera. On the other hand, rejoice. There are many musicians working the docks. New Orleans is the queen of music, the queen of commerce.” He sang a few contorted lines of some song the accordion maker had never heard, a limping, crooked song.

“I plan to open a music store,” confided the accordion maker. “I will be the Archivi of accordions.” Cannamele shrugged and smiled; every man had his fantasy. He had thought himself that he would start a bank, first for Sicilians, but later …

It was true, the fruit vendors in their stained clothes who spread through the city each day displayed on their carts an extraordinary variety of fruits; Silvano counted twenty kinds in the distance between the boardinghouse and the wharf: oxheart cherries with juice like blood, yellow peaches, orange silky persimmons, barrows of pears, Panama oranges, strawberries the size and shape of Christ’s heart. The lemon barrows lit up dark streets. Once, moved by his hungry stare,
a vendor gave him an overripe banana, the skin black, and, inside, the faintly alcoholic mush of decaying pulp.

“Hey,
scugnizzo,
your mother must have craved these fruits when she carried you. You are fortunate you do not have a great banana-shaped birthmark on your face.” (Four years later this barrowman moved to St. Louis and started a successful macaroni factory, American Pasta, and died a thousandaire.) Silvano did in fact have a birthmark but it was on his belly and in the shape of a frying pan, the cause of his perpetual hunger.

Graspo started them unloading bananas, great green claws of fruit as heavy as stone, of brutal weight even for the accordion maker’s muscular and broad shoulders. For twelve hours’ labor the pay was a dollar and a half. Silvano tottered twenty feet with a hand of bananas, then went to his knees. He did not have the legs to bear such weight. Graspo put him at fifty cents a day to pick up loose bananas from broken bunches, crush the hairy tarantulas and little snakes that fell from the clusters of fruit. Silvano darted fearfully at them with his cudgel.

The docks and levees stretched for miles along the river in a stink of brackish water, spice, smoke, musty cotton. Gangs of men, black or white, stacked bales of cotton into great piles like unfinished pyramids, others rolled the bales over and over toward the ships whose funnels stretched into the hazed distance like a forest of branchless trees. Two and two, men piled sawed lumber, raw cities waiting to be nailed onto the prairies upriver, teams of four black men double-cut tree trunks into squared timbers. Downriver the shrimp boats unloaded baskets of glittering crustaceans. In the cavernous warehouses men shifted more cotton, barrels of molasses and sugar, tobacco, rice,
cottonseed cakes, fruits; they sweated in the cotton yards where the great bales were compressed into five-hundred-pound cubes. Everywhere men carried boxes, rolled barrels, stacked firewood for the voracious steamboats, each swallowing five hundred cords of wood between New Orleans and Keokuk. A gang of men rolling barrels sang: