Death 5 Rape （Marriage） #4
The sun would just be rising as the laborers were sorted into field hands and stitchers.
The fieldwork involved pulling weeds, mending tents, and harvesting mature leaves, ten hours under the beating summer sun.
The air was heavier and wetter here than it had been in Ievoli, and amplified the discomfort of the heat.
The shade under the tobacco tents was no relief, it was so stifling and humid.
Stella’s and Tina’s smooth pink cheeks burned so badly the skin cracked and peeled off in itchy sheets.
Stella learned to look out for little green snakes in the dirt and for thin-legged brown spiders, sometimes as big as her palm, nesting near the holes in the netting, where the bug hunting was best.
In the barns, the leaf-stitching team sorted through the baskets brought in for drying and separated the leaves by size.
Each leaf was strung into a graduated stack that would later roll into a single cigar.
The foreman, who was courteous to the older ladies, never selected Assunta to do fieldwork, which was a blessing, what with her varicose veins.
Everyone else waiting for the truck in the morning was black. Stella was scared almost out of her wits the first day to be surrounded by black people, and none of the Fortunas would have gotten on the truck if Vito hadn’t been there with them.
“Just keep your hands and your eyes to yourself and they won’t bother you,” Vito told them. “Joe, you can take care of your mother and sisters, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Giuseppe said, although he was more of a symbolic chaperone. He was seventeen and still boyishly slender.
Fortunately, many of the black people were women, which was much less worrisome than being surrounded by black men, whom Antonio had warned his wife and daughters to be very afraid of, although Stella thought if it had really been so important to her father that their virtue not be subjected to strange men, maybe he shouldn’t have made them go to work in the fields in the first place.
Many of the women were friendly and tried to chat with Assunta and the girls.
Some of the black ladies were not Americans, either, Stella learned.
They were Jamaicans, from an island they said was hotter than the hottest day of Connecticut summer.
“You make test?” Stella asked two of the ladies in the English Za Filomena had taught her. She never learned their names. “For sitizenscippu?”
They shook their heads. They were only in America for the summer. When the tobacco season was over, they’d go back to their hot island. “That’s home, and we love it.”
Stella indulged in a short, jealous fantasy in which she would sail home to Ievoli at the end of the tobacco season. “Then why you come here? If you just go back home.”
The ladies laughed. “Money, girl,” the thinner one said. “Same as you.”
The money in question was sixty cents a day per person, two quarters and a dime.
The foreman paid them as they boarded the truck at the end of the day.
Zu Vito had warned them they’d be easy robbery targets when they got off the truck in Hartford at sunset, obviously coming home from day labor, so they walked quickly and kept their eyes down.
When they’d made it safely to the Front Street tenement, they filed through the kitchen and dropped their coins into a washed-out bean can on the narrow shelf where Assunta had perched the photo of the first Stella.
When all the Fortunas had made their daily deposit in the bean bank, Stella counted up the total, making a tally mark for each accrued dollar on a paper ledger she tucked in the can.
She kept the can where they could all see it to inspire them; she maintained the ledger as ostentatiously as she did so that Giuseppe—or Joey, as he was going by now—would know he couldn’t steal from it for candy or cigarettes.
On Friday night after dinner, Stella and Tina stacked the week’s quarters and dimes and rolled them into the paper wrappers the bank gave out.
There were forty quarters in a ten-dollar deposit roll, and every week the Fortunas made at least one such roll.
Five-dollar rolls of dimes were rarer accomplishments, a roll every other week.
On Saturdays, while her children worked a sixth day at the tobacco farm, Assunta went to the bank to make the weekly deposit in their house savings account.
The whole cycle should have been miserable, toiling away in the sun to save money for the house they’d thought their father had already bought them.
But . . . no. That sound of the coins echoing hollowly in the empty can, less and less hollowly as the can filled—it had become Stella’s favorite sound.
Assunta and her children were buying themselves their own house.
They were a little army led by a haphazard but lovable general, and together they were taking care of business.
START TO FINISH, the tobacco season lasted four months, and by the beginning of September there was no more work. Then Stella and Tina were back to being stuck in the Front Street apartment all day.
To make matters worse, the news that Nonna Maria had died finally reached Hartford.
It came in a letter from Antonio’s younger brother Zu Egidio, who wrote to relate his intentions to emigrate to Australia, and who in passing offered condolences.
Maria must have died months earlier; Za Violetta had not gotten around to sending them a letter.
As one would expect, the news was debilitating for Assunta.
She had been sure that by leaving Ievoli she had written her mother’s death sentence, and now her guilt was irrefutable.
She vacillated between silent, sobbing prayer and hysterical anger.
In her grief, Assunta’s awe of her husband vanished.
She blamed Tony for snatching her away in a time of need.
She shouted into his face, and when he struck her to silence her she shouted more.
The neighbors downstairs banged on their ceiling when the fighting got too loud; the blond-bunned woman who lived on the other side of the third-floor landing came over armed with a rolling pin to say she’d appreciate it if “you screaming wops” could keep it down.
Assunta did not care about being called a wop, but Tony did, and it made him even angrier.
Stella wanted to comfort her mother, to mourn and pray for Nonna Maria together, but she wasn’t going to step into the battle between her parents.
Instead, she and Tina hid in their bedroom, crocheting and watching the shantytown dwellers move among their bonfires.
Stella crossed her eyes at the dismal facades of the tenements behind the sciantinas, pretending that beyond them on the obscured horizon was her little mountain overlooking the marina, that in a stone house at the little mountain’s peak there was a bowl of olives sitting on the table and waiting for her to bite into their tender green flesh.
Stella thought of the first Mariastella.
With Nonna Maria gone, there would be no one left to remember the baby or to clean her grave.
STELLA ALSO RECEIVED A LETTER from Stefano’s mother in Sambiase. Stefano was still away in Africa. She begged Stella to send a letter she could save for him.
Stella was torn between guilt at not having written—she owed it to Stefano; he had no other girl to write to him while he was at war—and misgivings about not knowing what to say to this man she had realized she would never marry.
In the end she had little Louie, who had learned good penmanship in the American school, write a message for her.
Dear Signora, We are praying for Stefano every day, and for your family.
We are well here but we are working hard and we think of our family in Calabria.
We send you our best wishes. Sincerely, Stella Fortuna.
After that, the war must have become more difficult, or perhaps the censorship was stopping communication, because the Fortunas had no other letters for a long time.
STELLA AND TINA WERE ONLY trapped in their dingy tenement room for a few weeks before they found another job.
One of their new friends from the Italian Society, a sweet, thin Pugliese girl named Fiorella Mulino, had found jobs for them in a laundry on Front Street.
It was no good for Joey, because they only hired women, or for Assunta, who couldn’t be on her feet for ten hours, but Stella and Tina arrived with Fiorella the first Monday of October and the manager let them stay.
They were put in Fiorella’s group, ironing and starching, up on the second floor.
Instead of paying a day wage like the tobacco farms, the laundry paid by the piece, which put a kind of performance pressure on their employment.
Stella liked it. Each shirt starched and ironed was worth two cents.
After a frustrating first day, she got the knack—dipping the shirt, stretching it across the board, pressing and alternating irons.
She experimented with stroke rotations to permeate the heat more quickly and evenly through the cloth.
She could fit four or even five shirts in an hour, and sometimes came home with eighty or ninety cents a day.