Accordion Crimes Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
Bananas
    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:
    Roll’m! Roll’m! Roll’m!
    All I wants is my regular right!
    Two square meal and my rest at night!
    Roll! Roll’m, boy! Roll!
    The din of commerce sounded in a hellish roar made up of the clatter of hooves and the hollow mumble of wheel rims on plank, the scream of whistles and huffing of engines, hissing steam boilers and hammering and rumbling, shouting foremen and the musical call and response of work gangs and the sellers of gumbo and paper cones of crawfish and sticky clotted pralines, the creaking of the timber wagons and the low cries of the ship provisioners’ cartmen urging their animals forward, all blended into a