Accordion Crimes Page 3

  Sugarcane

  The landlord, crippled and obese, possessing only one foot and half blind, skin as grey and slick as the bottom of a boat, hands and arms crisscrossed with cane-cut scars, took the first week’s money from them. He called himself Cannamele, Sugarcane, from the old days when he worked on the sugar plantations, before he crushed his foot in the grinder. The stiff point of a cane leaf had ruined his eye.

  “But look, once my hands were strong enough to squeeze water from stones.” He made a clenching gesture. When he heard the name of their village he shook with emotion; for he said he had been born two villages away. He begged them for news of many people. But none of the names he presented was familiar and after a quarter of an hour it was clear that Cannamele had mistaken their village for another. Yet a certain cordiality, a connection, had been established. Cannamele felt it necessary to explain how things were.

  Here in Little Palermo, he said, the Americans never came. All the dialects and regions of Italy and Sicily were crushed together here, people from the mountains and the rich plains below Etna, from northern Italy, from Rome, even from Milano, but those haughty ones moved out as soon as they could. He told the accordion maker that the backhouse was supposed to be emptied once a month by black men who dug out the stinking shit and carted it away in their “aggravation wagons,” but they had not come for a long time, no one knew why. Perhaps they would come tomorrow. So, Graspo had promised him work? Graspo was of the Mantrangas, stevedores at war with rival padroni, the Provenzanos, in a rough squabble over who would control the hiring of labor to work the fruit boats. The Irish and the black men, the cotton screwmen, had the highest-paid work; Sicilians and Italians had to take what was left, the longshoreman jobs, but at least they were better off than the roustabouts, all black men—wild, roving river hogs covered with pale scars. And as for those black ones, if the accordion maker had eyes, he could see for himself most were wretched and ragged and their so-called freedom was a mockery. Yet on New Orleans docks they had certain rights which often worked against Sicilians and Italians; there the black screwmen were as good as anyone and better than immigrants. The crafty Americans knew well how to play each against the other. The other occupant of their room, the deaf man called Nove—Nine—because his little finger had been chewed off in a fight, was a stevedore. As for “Signor Banana,” he was the esteemed and wealthy Frank Archivi, born in New Orleans of poor Sicilian parents, an American by birth, and who knows, if not galvanized by the madness of grief when he was twenty, he might have become a boatman or an organ grinder instead of the owner of a shipping line, a man who controlled the rich fruit-import business.

  “Think of it, after one week of marriage his bride died of a shrimp which she inhaled while laughing—never laugh when you eat shrimp—and Archivi, the crazed one, eyes as red as lanterns, came to her tomb at night and removed her stinking corpse, dragging it through the streets and kissing the rotting lips until he collapsed. He lay in a fever for a month and when he came to his senses he was as cold as a glacier, interested only in money. And now Archivi, Archivi is bananas and fruits from Latin America, lemons and oranges from Italy. Archivi is deals and ingenuity, and that hard work that makes a fortune, a fortune that grows and swells. If you would see Archivi, look at the carts of the street vendors. He owns ships, warehouses, thousands work for him, he moves in the high circles of New Orleans society, he is an important man in politics. He shook the hand of John D. Rockefeller. He is a Rockefeller of fruit. Every piece of fruit that comes to these docks is controlled by Archivi. He turned his grief and madness to money.” The accordion maker listened greedily.

  “He is brave and agile, he fought the Reconstructionists. You would do well to study him, americanizzarti, to Americanize yourself as he has done. When the black men tried to muscle the Sicilians away from the dock work, he led an army of longshoremen against them. I saw this. It was bloody and he won, I can tell you that, he won. You have a knife? Good. You must get a pistol as well. 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 loud, narcotic drone.

  Of all of these, the swaggering screwmen were the kings of the docks, earned six dollars a day. In gangs of five they threw down their half-smoked cigars and descended into ships’ holds with their jackscrews, waited for the lo
ngshoremen to winch up the bales of cotton from the dock and lower them down into the hold, one at a time. The screwmen seized the bales, stacked them high and tight, forced them into impossibly cramped spaces, odd crannies and corners, through the use of boards and their expanding jackscrews, until the ship nearly split; yet the cargo was perfectly balanced, the ship unsinkable.

  In the late afternoon one day the word flew from man to man: a board had snapped under pressure and shot a splinter into the throat of a black screwman named Treasure. The accordion maker heard cries from an adjacent ship, joined the gathering crowd. He moved slowly, watching, saw a limp body raised from the hold, carried away, the blood pattering on the deck, the ramp, the dock.

  “Move a d’banan’, sonamagogna!” shouted the foreman, driving the Sicilians back to the fruit.

  Apollo’s lyre

  On Saturday night, while Silvano gawped through the mosquito-stitched streets, listening to the American jabber and making up his mind to steal a sweet, drawn this way and that by the cries of vendors of pots and pans, clothes, lemonade, “gelati, gelati,” candies and kitchen implements, but stopping before a man who sold enchanting toy cats of spotted tin that squeaked when their sides were pressed, the accordion maker went with Cannamele, first to Viget’s Oyster Saloon, hot and smoky, where Cannamele swallowed four dozen with lime juice, then to a barrelhouse in the next street packed with ruffians where they drank union beer, ate the stale eggs and firefanged cheese and vinegary pigs’ feet, and the accordion maker wished for the harsh village rosso. But both of them blackened many bottles’ eyes and the accordion maker treated himself to a two-for-a-nickel cigar from a box of fat Rajah torpedoes. A bowlegged Italian sang “Scrivenno a Mamma” in a weeping voice, stopped singing and blubbered.

  “He who saves, saves for dogs,” cried Cannamele, signaling for American whiskey.

  “Heart’s-ease, you grape-jumper,” shouted an Irishman.

  In and out went Cannamele through the scores of dives, tonks and jooks and barrelhouse joints that lined these streets, the accordion maker lurching after him through the musical din of drums and ringing banjos, shouters, pianos clinking away, squealing fiddles and trumpets and other brass snorting and wailing from every interior, and sometimes a string quartet sawing crazily. On the streets children watched and fought for discarded stogie butts, black street musicians and white played for coins, singing improvised songs of insult at those who failed to toss a whirling coin.

  Bow-leg

  Curl-shoe

  Stingy one

  Bad luck on you.

  An apron of sound lapped out of each dive. Inside, chairs scraped on the floor, loud music and talk tangled with roaring laughter, there was endless traffic toward and from the back where little rooms lined the hall and young black girls took customers until their flesh was raw, the rasp of matches, the slap of cards and the clink of bottles on glass, the clack of glasses on tables, the creak of table legs on the floor, the thudding feet of dancers doing the slow drag, the itch, the squat, the grind. Dice doctors with their loaded ivories, drinkers and cockers with feathers stuck to the bloody soles of their boots crowded the rooms, and the street din entered with each customer. And often there was a faito, with grunts and snorts and curses and smack of flesh on flesh, a scream, then a tenor roaring “O dolce baci…”

  The accordion maker had a pistol now and carried it in the waistband of his trousers. Silvano had a staghorn-handled knife with three blades and threatened with it when the gangs closed around him. He had stolen it from a lolling drunk, practiced his first American sentence on a one-eyed dog scavenging for orts.

  “Get outta, I killa you.”

  The accordion maker disliked the music that the black men played, confused music, the melody, if there was one, deliberately hidden in braided skeins of rhythm. He was contemptuous of their instruments—a horn, a broken piano, a fiddle, the wiry curls of its strings twisting out of the neck like morning glory vines, the banjo. He recognized one of the players from the docks, as black as a horse’s hoof, a man with an eye patch and a latticework of scars from the corner of his eye to his jaw that made his face rigid and expressionless on one side. They called him Pollo—what, “Chicken”? thought the accordion maker, but it seemed the creature’s name was Apollo, someone’s sardonic joke—flailing at a—what was it?—a corrugated surface, somehow familiar, set in a gaudily painted wooden frame, a thing that made a raspy, scratching sound like a treeful of cicadas, and singing “shootin don’t make it, no, no, no.” It was a quarter of an hour before he recognized the object—a washboard, a thing women used to rub the dirt from wet clothes—and saw the metal thimbles on the man’s fingers. Pollo put away the rub-board and pulled a pair of spoons from his back pocket, making a clatter like heavy castanets. And the other one, Fish Man, scraping a knife over his guitar strings to make a wobbling shrill. What wandering imprecision! What kitchen music! And the words, the accordion maker could not catch one, but understood the singer’s salacious tone and low, hot laugh. Fish Man twirled his old guitar with a scarred back, sang:

  On my table there a blood dish,

  Dish with drop a blood,

  Somebody butcher my old cow,

  Tell me it really good,

  It really good—

  I don’t have to milk her no more.

  Soon enough the accordion maker was distracted when Cannamele, cock-a-hoop, shoved a black woman against him, a dirty puzzle with running eyes, put his wet mouth to the accordion maker’s ear and said she would change his luck.

  “The man who holds back risks tuberculosis and worse. The bodily system weakens. Go ahead, mine some coal.” (Although the accordion maker contracted syphilis from these adventures, he never knew it.)

  In a Sicilian village, the right eye of a woman no longer paralyzed itched with great ferocity.

  A strange instrument

  In the weeks that followed, the accordion maker recognized many dockworkers among the musicians of the barrelhouses. There were no accordions to be heard until a band of gypsies camped outside the city on a bit of high ground with their tinkers’ tools, horses and fortunes; two of the men played accordions. They stayed a week, another week, a month, mending pots and pans. Sometimes at night passersby heard their private music, a slow, sad wailing, saw the shimmer of sequined bodies dancing. He went to their camp one evening with Cannamele to hear what was to be heard. The music was boisterous and wailing at the same time and five or six men danced a fight with sticks. He was interested in their accordions but could not make the men understand that he wished to examine one. Their language was incomprehensible and they turned away as soon as money changed hands. True outsiders, he thought, people without even a home, lost in the wild world. One day they were gone, leaving trampled earth.

  “Moon men,” said Cannamele, winking his bad eye.

  At first the accordion maker was afraid to bring his instrument into the sweating, dangerous dives where men fought and bled and overturned the tables. He played it only in the room he shared with Silvano and Nove, forty years old and half deaf, who came in many nights streaming blood from knife fights, would wake from midsleep and shout hoarsely, “Listen! Somebody knocking!” But the knocking was in his head and in a few minutes he would lie down and sleep again in his rumpled, stained clothes.

  The accordion maker found his own music calming and beautiful after the wailing, thumping, rattling music of the joints. That slangy music was not suited to the accordion, although its morbid voice might fit the style, but it was impossible to loosen and bend the notes. An accordion would have to play the drone, to be satisfied with the back of the music rather than the front.

  He got up the courage to bring it to one of the barrelhouses. It was noisy enough as usual. He sat off by himself—the bartender complained of his “Italian perfume,” the smell of garlic—and after a while, when the piano man left for the whorehouse, began to play. No one noticed until he lifted his high, strangling voice and a silence fell, heads tur
ned toward this sound. He sang an ancient grape harvest song that had stamping and shouts. But after two or three songs the din of the place rose again, calling, laughing, talking, shouting, drowning him out. Only the Sicilians pressed closer, hungry to hear the lost music that brought with it the scent of thyme and the tinkle of goat bells, and they called out for certain melodies that made them contort their faces with grief.

  Late in the evening Pollo came toward him, forcing his way through the crowd, smiling around his blond cigar. Up close he was the strange red-black color of furniture, of a mahogany table. He said something, pointing at the accordion.

  “He want to know what you call it,” said Cannamele and answered in a loud voice as if speaking to a deaf man: “Accordion. Accordion.”

  The black man said something more, reached for the accordion, looked at it, hoisted it, feeling its lightness, held it to his body as he had seen the accordion maker do and squeezed the bellows gently. Anh. Onh. Anh. Onh. He said something. Cannamele laughed.

  “He say it sound like his woman.”

  Pollo bent over the instrument, pressing the buttons and getting it, getting the feel of it and its sound, and in a few minutes, foot beating, the accordion huffing in an unaccustomed way between bursts of words and um-hm sounds, a rough little song came out. Cannamele screamed with pleasure.

  “He’s the man, the singing is the man, and he’s doing it to a woman and the accordion is the woman!” The accordion maker blushed as the instrument moaned against the black man’s voice.

  How you like—Anh

  My sweet corn, baby—Onh

  Plenty buttah—Anh

  Anh—make you crazy—Onh.

  He handed the accordion back, grinning violently.

  The next day the accordion maker saw the black man, Pollo, sitting on a bollard, graceful, smoking a long blond cigar, on his feet St. Louis flats, heelless shoes with mirrors pasted on the toes, a dreaming expression on his face, but alert enough to spy the accordion maker, catch his eye and make squeezing motions as though playing an accordion or pressing a fat woman’s breasts.