The King of Mulberry Street Read online

  I sank into a sea of people. Most were quiet, putting their energy into the struggle to breathe in this heat. Some grumbled that they weren't allowed up on deck. The only people left on the ship now were third-class passengers. A man said there were five hundred and twenty of them, all in a stench of vomit and feces.

  Here in the dark, no one could see beyond arm's length. But there was bread with lard spread, salty and delicious. And all I really needed to do was stay on this ship.

  Home to Mamma. It was just a matter of time. My mamma.

  The officers allowed us to sleep on the top deck. Babies cried, men cursed.

  I was too wound up to do anything but wander among them. I found a man and two boys wearing yarmulkes, but I couldn't understand them. So I hung around Napoletani and listened. They pointed at a statue in the harbor and fell to their knees in prayer. I thought often of Uncle Aure-lio and his speeches about le possibilità.

  The next day the quarantine station officers came on board. People had been warning one another about them. They checked for typhus, yellow fever, smallpox. The trick was to stand at attention, look alert, and, no matter what, not cough. I was grateful to know the trick. Some who didn't were taken off someplace. It was rumored that they went into observation far away, and if they got sicker, theywent into isolation somewhere even farther away. After that, who knew what became of them?

  That second night, I took my shoes off and spread out my socks to air. I carefully tucked the cloth with the tassels inside one sock, and I used, instead, the corner of the padded crate cloth that I carried everywhere to rub the shoe leather soft, because it had dried hard again after being in the water. When I went to put my shoes back on, I couldn't find my socks.

  My tzitzit—my tassels!

  No!

  I felt all over the floor around me. I ran through the clusters of people, looking everywhere. I tugged on women's skirts and asked for help. I looked and looked and looked.

  No no no.

  My grandfather's prayer shawl tassels were gone. America had thieves, like Napoli—but worse ones. Far worse.

  I stared out over the buildings of New York and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyelids. Still the tears came. I brushed them away as fast as they fell.

  Some of those buildings seemed as tall as Vesuvio. But they didn't make me feel uplifted, like the high building of my synagogue in Napoli. Instead, I felt tiny and weak.

  I turned my back to them and looked at the statue the others had prayed to—the grand Statue of Liberty.

  I didn't want liberty. I stood there snuffling. All I wanted was to go home.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  On Land

  When it was time to disembark, men put gold chains around their necks, then ties and vests and coats, and they combed their mustaches. Women pinned their hair and put on jackets and fancy shoes with big wooden heels and any number of rings. Even the children sprouted boots and coats. I was a scugnizzo compared to them. And I was the only one missing a label—they all had a big number three pinned to their jackets, for third class. I tucked my shirt in my pants and smoothed the front of it.

  The men carried baggage in both hands. So did the women, unless they were carrying a child or two. Some had an infant strapped to their chest. Everyone clenched their health certificate in their teeth.

  I held my padded cloth and tried to blend in. I had a plan. As we filed along, I was going to duckinto the cow house. It had worked last time—almost. All I needed was to stay on this ship until it left for home.

  But when I opened the cow house door, the woman behind me shouted, and a man from Napoli pulled me back into the crowd. He said, “What? You want to go to England? America is better.” Stupid me, to think that because this ship had left from the port of Napoli, it would return there.

  Now I needed another plan.

  The crowd carried me along, deafened by boat horns blasting from every direction, down the plank, around crates and animals and wagons on the pier, into the customs building. When it was my turn, the officer simply waved me past, and again the crowd carried me, this time onto a barge, men going to one side, and women and children to the other. They piled the baggage between us.

  In less than half an hour we were ferried across to Ellis Island, and our shipload of passengers merged with shiploads from all over the world. No one understood anyone else. We went into a giant building. I'd never seen a building with wood walls. In Napoli only shacks were made of wood, not homes, and certainly not official buildings. On the bottom floor was a baggage area. Everyone was told to place their belongings there, but no one wanted to. The official kept saying that they could fetch them after they'd passed through the registration room upstairs. Still, no one put anything down.

  The official lost patience; he barked at us.

  Everyone's eyes darted around. Then they opened their bundles and layered extra clothes onto already sweating bodies. Around their necks they hung picture locketsand saint medals and keys to the homes they'd left behind. They loaded their pockets with bone fans and wood pipes and rolling pins and little bottles and all kinds of documents. A woman from Napoli took out needle and thread and sewed letters from her dead husband into the hem of her skirt. She said they were love letters. Some people locked their fingers around the handles of their suitcases and simply refused to give them up.

  Mamma's voice called, “Tesoro? Tesoro mio?”

  I whirled around and watched a boy run to the fat, short woman who had stolen Mamma's voice, stolen Mamma's name for me—treasure. She said, “Grab hold of my skirt and don't let go, no matter what.”

  That was what Mamma would say to me. My heart raced. I had to bite my hand to keep from screaming.

  I threw my padded crate cloth onto the baggage pile and joined the crowd on the stairs. Everyone was talking and telling everyone else to hush so they could figure out what was going on. I stayed close to Napoletani. If they understood anything and repeated it, I would understand, too.

  At the top of the stairs doctors checked fingernails and the backs of legs. They opened collars and felt necks. Women shuddered, their faces tight with fear, for they'd never been touched like that before. The doctors made everyone take off hats and kerchiefs, and they parted hair to inspect scalps. Men with pompadours were yelled at, as though they were trying to hide something in their puffed-up hair. Then the doctors took out metal hooks—like the kind people used to button their shoes—and looked inside lower eyelids. All that took only seconds.

  Children screamed constantly. Doctors wanted to make sure any child over two years old was healthy enough to walk alone, but the children clung to their mothers. So the doctors ripped them away and walked off several paces with them, then set them down to go shrieking back.

  I watched everything closely. Watch and learn and fit in—that was what Mamma said.

  Almost everyone was pushed on into the giant registration room. But now and then the doctors made a mark with colored chalk on a person's clothes. The mark was always a letter; I saw S, B, X, C, H, L, E, K, F, G, N. Sometimes there were two letters, Ft, Pg, CT, Sc, or sometimes an X inside a circle. All the letters meant something bad, because they were written on people a doctor had spent extra time with. A man took off his coat and turned it inside out to hide the mark on his lapel.

  The doctor who inspected me took five seconds. He touched the scabs on my arms from the barnacles on the piling pole at the dock and said something to me in English. I stood at attention, without coughing—I remembered the trick. Then he said something to the woman behind me and she shrugged. Two women in white uniforms—nurses— came up. One pulled me to the side. She did things with her hands, sticking up one finger, then five, then three, or forming an O with her thumb and index finger. The other woman mimicked her. Then the nurse turned to me and made a shape with her hand. She waited. I looked at her. The other nurse mimicked the shape. They both looked at me. And I got it; I made the shape. The first nurse took me through several shapes. Then
she drew shapes on a piece of paper and I had to copy them. She smiled at me and pattedme on the back and pointed for me to go join the lines in the registration room.

  I'd passed another test. Though what it meant was beyond me. I got in line and looked back at the nurses. They were still watching me, with suspicious eyes now. So I moved ahead through the line, out of their sight, till I found two men speaking Napoletano. I stood behind them and looked up at their faces as though I knew them. After a while I snuck a glance back; the nurses were testing someone else. I heard a man say they were testing for idiocy. So they'd thought I was an idiot.

  This was the first time in my life I'd ever stood in a real line. Napoletani waited for things in clusters. But here, there were three strict lines. I was in the one on the left. I couldn't see the front, so I kept my ears open and I looked out the side windows at the Statue of Liberty. She was green in this light, and her torch was bright gold. A barge pulled in with more people. Where would they all fit? I looked at the floor. It was tiled, like any floor in Napoli. But it was dirty. Why was everyone coming to a place where people worked in wood buildings with dirty floors?

  The lines moved slowly, but finally I could see an inspector at the head of each one. The inspector for my line questioned everyone in English. When they answered in another language, he called over a man in uniform who could speak every language in the world. The men in front of me called him a translator. Everyone handed over documents and pulled money out of pockets and hems of coats. The inspector asked questions and handed it all back, including the money.

  A woman in the next line cried to her husband. Shewasn't from Napoli, but I could understand her. Their child had gotten a chalk mark on his jacket because he was sick. The nurses said they'd have to take him away. She was afraid to let him go. At the same time she was afraid that if she didn't, they'd all be sent back. I wanted to tell her they'd be lucky if they were sent back. As soon as I reached that inspector, I would tell him everything and be sent home.

  The two Napoletani in front of me practiced what they were going to say.

  One of them played the inspector: “Do you have a job?”

  The other answered, “Yes, at …”

  “No!” said the first one. “It's illegal to have a padrone who got you a job ahead of time. You say, ‘No.’ ”

  “But we paid all that money. We have a padrone, right?”

  “Of course we do. He's waiting for us when we get out. Okay, second question. Where are you going to live?”

  “I don't know.”

  “No! You say, ‘At my cousin's on Mulberry Street.’ With as little money as we have, unless we say we have a place to stay, they'll send us to the Board of Inquiry, who will send us back to Napoli. Listen, you be the inspector. Ask me what I'll do in America.”

  “What will you do in America?”

  “Anything. I will take any job I am offered. See? That's the right answer. Ask me about money.”

  “What about money?”

  “We have to have enough. That's what I just said. Show the inspector all your money.” He sighed. “They have to let us stay—we can't go back to starving. Look, I'll answer first.Listen and you say the same thing when it's your turn. Understand?”

  “I understand.”

  I doubted the second man understood anything. But I understood. And I was happy. I had no money. They'd send me home for sure.

  Finally, the inspector talked to the two men. The translator spoke our language pretty good. The inspector checked their names against the ship's list. He asked if they could read, if they were sick, if they were married, if they'd committed crimes, what their occupations were, if they were anarchists—on and on, ending with how much money they had. The men couldn't write, so the translator wrote answers for them.

  I glanced over at the next line. The inspector there asked a woman if she was married. He asked her that shameless question with her child holding her hand, right in front of her husband. She stiffened at the insult and her husband objected in a fierce voice.

  Mamma had to put up with insults because of me all the time. And it dawned on me: right now, wherever she was, she didn't have to. Anyone new who met her didn't have to know she had a child. They could ask, “Do you have a child at home?” and she could answer, “No.” She could get an office job—the right kind of job for someone who could read. Maybe she had one already.

  That would be good. If she had a job, she couldn't cry all day about missing me. And when I got back, she could keep the job, because her boss would realize by then how smart and useful she was. Life would be better.

  The man behind me pushed me forward. The inspector spoke to me in loud English. It was clear he was annoyed. He must have been talking to me while I was thinking about Mamma.

  “I want to go to Napoli,” I said.

  “Ah,” said the translator, “another from Napoli. Where are your parents?”

  “Everyone I know is in Napoli.”

  “No no, I'm talking about here. Where are your parents in this room?”

  “I'm alone. I want to go to Napoli. I have no money.”

  The man lowered his head toward me. “What's your name?”

  Should I tell the truth? Beniamino, the name I was born with, or Dom, the name the cargo crew had given me?

  “You know your name, boy. What is it?”

  I shook my head.

  “A lost child,” said the translator.

  “There are lots of lost children,” said another translator. He stood in front of the middle line, and the way he talked, I knew he'd grown up in Napoli. “Put him out on the front steps. His agent—some tricky padrone—will find him.”

  “I don't think he has one. He must have come on that big ship—the Città di Napoli. That ship's careful not to break the law; they don't let on children who belong to a padrone. He must have lost his family.”

  “Then his father's in this crowd,” said the Napoletano translator. “Don't worry. The father will find him.”

  “He'll stay with you, then, Giosè.”

  “I'm as busy as you are. I can't worry about a littlescugnizzo.” The Napoletano translator turned away and spoke to the people at the front of that line.

  “My inspector says you have to keep him beside you till his father shows up,” my translator said, then gestured to the man behind me to come forward.

  “I'm not babysitting him,” said Giosè.

  “Look,” said my translator. He pointed at my shoes. “This is no urchin. The father will be grateful. Maybe I should keep him myself to get the reward.”

  Giosè blinked at my shoes. I might not have had socks, but my shoes looked beautiful. “What am I supposed to do with you? All right, you've got shoes. You're somebody's little signore. Get over here and stand behind me.”

  I stood behind Giosè. My arms hung at my sides like dead fish. It was too hard to keep fighting. Soon enough they'd realize I had no father here and they'd have to send me home.

  The lines went on forever. Giosè told me that more than five thousand people would pass through these lines that day. I knew that was huge.

  The immigrants were almost all men, some in their teens. They talked about how wonderful they knew America was and how they would send for their wives and mothers and sisters soon, as though Giosè would be impressed and treat them better. But he didn't really look at them, and he did a lot of sighing. Many of the men held books and read to one another.

  When Giosè went to the bathroom, I asked the man at the front of the line, “What are the stories about?”

  He smiled proudly. “These are no stories. This book isteaching me how to speak English. Listen.” He spouted off gobbledy-gook. Then he waited.

  It took a second before I knew what he wanted; I clapped.

  He pressed his palm against his chest. “I'm a skilled artisan and now I speak English. I'm going to get a good job making beautiful furniture.” His breath was foul, and I found myself staring at a tiny black bug jumping in hi
s hair. I stepped away.

  Giosè came back and the morning went by slowly. Every time I sank to a squat, he told me to stand again so my father could find me.

  My father.

  Mamma hadn't ever told anyone who my father was.

  I imagined him now. He'd have black eyes. His nose would be straight—because mine was straight and Mamma's was crooked, so I must have gotten my nose from him. He'd be able to read. Mamma never would have chosen an uneducated man.

  Maybe Giosè was right; maybe my father was here. I stared at each man. None of them looked at me.

  After a while I switched to staring at the boys. They came in groups, ranging from six years old up, and most of them were with an uncle.

  Giosè whispered, “Those men aren't really uncles. They're hired by the padroni to bring the boys over. A padrone pays a man's ticket. In return, the man watches over the boys until they get through immigration. Then the ‘uncle’ goes on his way.” Giosè brushed off his hands. “And the boys begin work for the padrone. It's illegal, but that doesn't stop anyone.”

  The boys were barefoot, skinny, and dirty. Their “uncle” barked orders, and they obeyed immediately.

  I stared at one boy. Mucus crusted his cheek and there was a colored chalk mark on his shirt. His “uncle” pointed at me. “That one, he's my nephew, too.”

  Giosè shook his head as though he'd been right all along about me. “Get over there behind your uncle.”

  “I don't know him,” I yelped. “I've never seen him before.”

  The “uncle” grabbed me by the elbow and flung me behind him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Trust

  “No!” I screamed. “I don't know him!”

  “Shut up,” said the “uncle.”

  “Send me back to Napoli!” I screamed.

  The “uncle” smacked me across the jaw with the back of his hand. I fell. He went on answering Giosè's questions.

  The other boys turned their backs to us, but one of them hissed out of the side of his mouth. “Stupid. You'll have work in America. And food. Get up.”