Streets of Gold Read Free Page A

grandfather’s weekly wages (twelve dollars and fifty cents a week! Bardoni told him) until the advances were paid off, and a smaller percentage of the wages after that until Bardoni’s modest commission had been earned, and then my grandfather would be on his own to make his fortune in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
    “But I will return to Italy,” my grandfather said.
    “Certo,”
Bardoni said. “Of course.”
    “When I have earned enough money.”
    “Of course,” Bardoni said again. “
Italia è la sua patria.”
    It had been a barren Christmas Day in Fiormonte. I have tried hard to understand what life in that village must have been like, because I know for certain that the life transposed to Harlem, and later to the Bronx, and later to the town of Talmadge, Connecticut (where I spent more than thirteen years with Rebecca and the children), was firmly rooted in Fiormonte. The family, the
nuclear
family, consisted of my grandfather, his parents, his two sisters, and his younger brother. In musical terms, they were the primary functions of the key. The secondary functions were the aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived within a stone’s throw of my grandfather’s house. The
compari
and
comari
were the godfathers and godmothers (pronounced “goombahs” and “goomahs” even by my grandfather), and they combined with the
compaesani
to form the tertiary functions of the key; the
compaesani
were countrymen, compatriots, or even simply neighbors. Fiormonte enclosed and embraced this related and near-related brood, but was itself motherless and fatherless in the year 1900, Italy having been torn bloody and squalling from the loins of a land dominated as early as thirty years before by rival kings and struggling foreign forces. Unified by Garibaldi to become a single nation, it became that only in the minds and hearts of intellectuals and revolutionaries, the southern peasants knowing only Fiormonte and Naples, where until recently the uneasy seat of power had rested. They distrusted Rome, the new capital, in fact distrusted the entire north, suspecting (correctly) that the farmlands and vineyards were being unjustly taxed in favor of stronger industrial interests. There was no true fatherland as yet, there was no sense of the village being a part of the state as, for example, Seattle, Washington, is a necessary five chord in the chart of “America, the Beautiful.” The
patria
that Bardoni had mentioned to my grandfather was Fiormonte and, by extension, Naples. It was this that my grandfather was leaving.
    He made his decision on Christmas Day, 1900.
    He had been toying with the idea since November, when Bardoni returned in splendor, sporting patent leather shoes and tawny spats, diamond cuff links at his wrists, handlebar mustache meticulously curled and waxed. The economic system in Fiormonte, as elsewhere in the south of Italy, was based on a form of medieval serfdom in which the landowner, or
padrone
, permitted the peasant to work the land for him, the lion’s share of the crop going to the
padrone
. (We call it sharecropping here.) Those carnival barkers who came back to the villages to tout the joys of living in America were
padroni
in their own right; a new country, a different form of economic bondage. They would indeed pay for steerage transportation to the United States, they would indeed supply (and pay for) lodgings in New York, they would indeed guarantee employment, but the tithe had to be paid, the
padrone
was there in the streets of Manhattan as surely as he was there in the big stone house at the top of the hill in the village of Fiormonte.
    My grandfather’s name was Francesco Di Lorenzo.
    The house he lived in was similar in construction, though not in size, to the one inhabited by Don Leonardo, the
padrone
of Fiormonte. Built of stone laboriously cleared from the vineyards, covered with mud allowed to dry and then whitewashed with a mixture of lime and water, it consisted of