Streets of Gold Read Online Free PDF

was
la vicinanza
, the neighborhood, nine blocks long and four blocks wide, unless one chose to include the short stretch of Pleasant Avenue, a decrepit slum today, but aptly and justly named for 1901, a wide, tree-lined esplanade with a commanding view of the East River.
La vicinanza
ran from 116th Street on the south to 125th Street on the north, and was bounded on the east by the river and on the west by Lexington Avenue. Beyond Lex were the Negroes; Francesco quickly learned to call them “niggers,” as part of the naturalization process, no doubt. The blacks were not to begin their own mass immigration northward till 1920, and in the following decade the population of Harlem (
their
Harlem) would rise by 115 percent. But they were there in 1901, too, and already they were niggers to someone who himself wasn’t even a second-class citizen but merely an alien with a work visa.
    The ghetto was not too terribly strange to Francesco. The language he heard there day and night was the same Italian spoken by the peasants in Fiormonte and the urban dwellers of Naples; the food he ate was the same food he had eaten when times were good in Fiormonte, the area crammed to bursting with grocery stores selling pasta and cheeses and salamis and fresh olive oil; chicken on the leg to be had at the market on Pleasant Avenue, seven cents a pound, claws tied together, bird hung upside down on the white-tiled wall, throat slit, white feathered wings flapping and splattering blood, cleaned and plucked by the poultry man; fresh pork sausage from the
salumeria
on 118th and First, ten cents a pound;
cannoli
and
cassatine
and
sfogliatelle
from the
pasticceria
on the corner of 120th Street — there was much to eat in this golden land (though it was not so golden to Francesco, who worked in the darkness twelve hours a day), and all of it was prepared in the coarse southern Italian style, heavy on the garlic and spices, “
bruta,”
as it was once described to me by a saxophone player in a Roman nightclub. The sounds were familiar, the smells were familiar, even the signs on many of the stores were in Italian, as foreign to him as were the signs in English because he could read or write neither language. Except for the constant noise of the transportation facilities, which seemed to Francesco to express the tempo and the spirit and also the manners of the city — the jangling, rattling streetcars on First Avenue, the metallically clattering elevated trains rushing along ugly steel viaducts on Second and Third Avenues — he might have been living in a neighborhood in Naples.
    The ordeal of the January Atlantic crossing was behind him, those terrible sick days in the hold of the ship with Pino cradling his head so that he would not suffocate in his own vomit, the cooking smells of the foreigners, the Russian Jews and Austro-Hungarians already aboard the ship when it steamed into the Bay of Naples, the babbling Spaniards they picked up in Málaga before they passed through the Strait, the handful of Portuguese in Lisbon, blankets hung from sweating steel bulkheads and overhead pipes, the sounds of mandolins and balalaikas, arguments in a dozen tongues, the fistfight between the small dark Spaniard who spit phlegm into every corner of the deck and the huge Russian peasant who would have killed him had not an officer of the ship come below with a billy and knocked the Russian senseless. The stench in steerage was overpowering. The passage was costing him twelve dollars, advanced by Bardoni, but for twelve dollars (sixty-two lire!) a man did not expect to be treated like an animal. At Ellis Island, he was penned according to nationality, examined like a horse or a mule, his mouth, his eyes, his nose, his rectum, heard English for the first time, questions fired in English, and stood with wide bewildered eyes while things were done to him or asked of him, commands accompanied by hand signals, thank God for Bardoni who was waiting for him and Pino