The Immigrants Read Free Page B

ever pay it back?”
    “Joe will have a powerboat, and instead of working for a boss, he’ll be the boss. You’ll make the money, and you’ll pay it back.
    Please, Anna, tell him to go to Tony.”
    Anthony Cassala, slender, dark-skinned, dark-haired, was indeed that very rare individual, a happy man, hap pily married, content with his lot, devout and dedicated to his home and his children. He and Maria had two children, Stephan, who was eleven, and Rosa, who was nine. Entirely without schooling, he had taught himself to read and write English, and his son, Stephan, had passed on his grammar-school lessons to his father, teaching Anthony the simple elements of arithmetic.
    Early in the year 1903, a small Italian contractor for whom Anthony worked occasionally begged him to lend him a thousand dollars for a period of three months. He promised at the end of that time to pay back the loan with a bonus of two hundred dollars, twelve hundred dollars in all. Cassala knew nothing of the rules or laws or history of interest; he had not the faintest notion that he would be repaid in terms of 80 percent, 20 percent for three months, 80 percent per year, nor was he able at that time to calculate percentages. Neither had he ever heard the word usury . He took his life savings and gave it to his friend; and at the end of three
     
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    months, the contractor repaid the debt with the two-hundred-dollar bonus. Fortunately, the contractor was also an honest and decent man, and several times more, having to meet a payroll or bills, he turned to Cassala, borrowing and paying, and each time adding a bonus that in yearly percentage figures varied between 50
    and 80 percent.
    In a community of Italian working people, where wages were low and unemployment and layoffs were fre quent, word of Anthony’s generosity—for they saw it as such—got around, and he found himself lending small sums here and there, and more and more frequently. Be cause of the very fact of his nature, he was almost al ways paid back, and within a year after the initial loan, he had become in himself a very small loan company. He asked for no security other than the character of the man who made the loan; he never harassed his debtors; and where it was necessary to extend the loan, he ex tended it.
    It was from his son, Stephan, who went to school and read books, that he learned he was a usurer, and after he had confessed in church and grappled with his own guilts and surveyed his fortunes, he decided to give up moneylending. But the pressures of his countrymen were too great. He fixed his rate of interest, thereby, at 10 percent per annum. His profits were small; he con tinued to work as a mason, but more and more he found himself pressed into the role of banker for people who had no other place to turn.
    In Joseph Lavette’s way of thinking, to borrow was to humble oneself. He had endured poverty and hope lessness and despair, but he had never stooped to bor row, and thus he saw it as surrender and humiliation. For weeks he held out against the urging of his wife, but finally his longing for a boat of his own overcame his pride, and he went to Anthony Cassala.
    “I have never borrowed before,” he protested, “but if I borrow, you have my word as a man of honor—”
     
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    He might have gone on and on, but Cassala put him at his ease.
    “Please, do not lessen my pleasure,” Cassala insisted. “I have been waiting for you. The money is yours.”
    In fact, the money was repaid in a single year, and Joseph Lavette found a friend whom he treasured. But now, the whole sum necessary for the purchase was in his pocket. “No school for Daniel for today,” he told his wife. “I go to buy a boat, and I will not do so without my son.”
    “School is more important,” Anna said.
    “Is the boat for me or for him?”
    “He is nine years old. Leave the boy in peace.”
    “Ah, women,” he said in disgust. “The boy