Vienna’d just drug in one evening from being on her feet all day long. It had been busy because Tate Dash’s band, with Peck now filling the first trumpet seat, was coming to town. Women wanted to look their best for the Dash band’s Friday and Saturday night appearances. There was always a jumping time when Tate and his boys came blasting the blues.
Vienna sat there on the porch with Chap until she could get up enough strength for that last climb up to her room and to wash before dinner. When Mr. Amalfi, Carlo Amalfi, the produce man with the horse-drawn wagon, his hat tilted at the angle favored by the Negroes themselves as they angled against the walls and streetlamps along Dunbar Street, came walking up, whistling. During the winter he delivered coal and his wagon was for hire for moving and cartage.
He had on a suit jacket and clean shirt. His horse was nowhere to be seen. They spoke. Naturally, it was Chap he wanted to talk to. And Vienna wasn’t about to get up to move. She wanted to see what had brought the I-talian, half-no-English speaking man who reminded her of somebody in the movies whose name she could not remember, late in the evening to talk to Chap.
He stopped whistling as he approached the porch, reminding Vienna of the way our colored men approached white men with say-so. The Italian was apologetic, humble, and respectful. Chap invited him up.
There were just the two chairs on the porch. Chap gave Vienna a look and she, over the protestations of the vegetable man, excused herself, but didn’t go any further than just inside the screen door. The vegetable man took her vacated seat. He was very formal. He said, with obviously rehearsed language, how he had great admiration for Chap and his position on Dunbar Street. And he wanted to speak to him businessman to businessman. What it turned out to be was he wanted to ask permission for Son to come work for him. Ride along with him when he made his morning rounds. He had heard of the young man’s singing from around the neighborhood and thought it might prove beneficial to all concerned if the young man—Son—did his singing to attract buyers for the grocery man, Mr. Carlos Amalfi’s, produce. With the Italian’s broken English and Chap’s total lack of Italian, it took a while to get it all out.
Chap explained he wasn’t the boy’s father. Mr. Amalfi understood that. It was out of some kind of I-talian or old country courtesy to Chap, as the head of the house, that he was asking. Chap nodded.
Chap said he would speak to Son’s mother on Mr. Amalfi’s behalf. But there was one thing. For Chap to intercede on Mr. Amalfi’s behalf, Mr. Amalfi would have to start his deliveries on Dunbar Street at least once a week, before he went uptown to Lewis Heights. What Chap was talking about was those on Dunbar getting the freshest vegetables first thing and not having to wait and end up with the picked-overs late in the afternoon. Mr. Amalfi didn’t bristle. He didn’t balk. Without missing a beat he had a counter offer. He said he would alternate his days. And, Chap added, Mr. Amalfi would charge no more on Dunbar Street than he did in Lewis Heights. A deal.
Standing in the foyer of 560, watching them on the porch, Vienna witnessed how Chap was his daddy’s son. She had always known it. But again felt pride swell in her at witnessing once again the evidence of it. She thought of Peck and how she loved colored men who carried themselves like men.
Chap and Mr. Amalfi stood up together. They shook hands.
“Rispetto per rispetto,” Mr. Amalfi said.
“Respect for respect,” Chap said, understanding.
The first part was settled.
Now they had to convince Pearl. Chap asked Vienna if she would ask Pearl to come to the door.
Pearl joined them on the porch and Mr. Amalfi bowed from his waist as they shook hands. He told her how he wanted to offer Son a job. Pearl told him that Son had a job. She said Son had asked her back when they first arrived what he could do to help; what would his job be? She said she told him to listen and learn. She wasn’t sending him to school, she said, and this was the way she was getting him to learn. Learn to talk like them, meaning President Roosevelt and most of the white men on the radio. Because that’s how the educated talk. Listening is his job. Listening to everything they say, they being white folks, and how they say it. And learn what they think matters. Listen to the news and the soap operas and comedy programs and quiz shows and adventure shows. Learn that. That was his job she said.
Yes, Missus, Mr. Amalfi agreed. Being able to speak good was important. It was important to being a good American. But, he said, relaxing enough to make his first joke, earning money was important too. A good American was an American with an earned wage in his pocket. They laughed at his wisdom and wit. And being outside in the air, he added, rather than cooped up inside. That was good too.
What did he really want? Pearl asked him, direct. He could get any or a whole bunch of colored or Italian or white boys to ride with him. There were a plenty that could sing, and see. What did he really want with her son?”
“Your son is special, has accortezza,” the vegetable man told her, shaking his head at not knowing the correct translation.
“Oculato . . .” Tapping his forehead with his index finger. “Sagace.”
“Smart?” Chap asked. It wasn’t exactly what Mr. Amalfi meant, but he didn’t know a better word in English. He told her how he had not been able to speak any English when he arrived in American. How he had come with a dream of doing better.
“Good sense?” Vienna said.
“Si! Good sense,” the vegetable peddler nodded. “Oculato. Sagace. Graci.”
“Shrewd,” Chap volunteered, making a maneuvering motion with his hand.
“Si, Si.” That, Mr. Amalfi thought, was even closer to the word the Italian was looking for. Accortezza. Shrewd. Yes. And her too, he told Pearl. She was a wise lady, for she knew the value of speaking well.
He was, he said, too old and too busy to attend school. “I want your son to learn me to speak as he is learning to speak. Our true arrangement,” he admitted, “will be that he will teach me to improve to speak good. And I will teach him what I have learned about the ways of my customers, and about music, and about—” He made a gesture indicating everything. “I will be his pupil. He will be mine.”
“And,” Son said, “If I teach you as I am learning, you will pay me—si?”
They laughed.
“A smart man,” Mr. Amalfi said, quoting from memory, “knows what to say. A wise man knows whether or not to say it. I say, si. I will pay you. Wages.”
They laughed, acknowledging his wisdom.
“For what is in his head,” Pearl said. She put her hand on Son’s head, him not shying away. “This,” she said, “is where he will do the work he does.”
Mr. Amalfi left, whistling.
“Hear he likes a little dark meat,” Chap said to Vienna and Luck after Pearl and Son had gone inside.
Vienna’d heard it too, said, “Mr. Amalfi’d be colored if he could.”
“Would be if it didn’t cost him,” Luck said.
“Might be even if it did,” Chap said.
Son started that next Monday morning.
In the early morning light, in the gateway of the writhe of metal of 560, Son stood at the curb. He was in his zipped jacket and wool cap, listening as Mr. Amalfi, in the seat of his produce-loaded wagon, rambled up Clinton. The sound of the man’s whistling warbled dramatically above the steady pace of the horse’s metal-shod hooves. Horse, man, and rig pulled to a halt.
“Good morning, Mister Amalfi.”
“Buongiorno, Senior Luna.”
Giving the boy a hand up to the wagon seat beside him, and with a light flick of the reins, they began making their way up Clinton Street. The boy’s heart rate much faster than Bellini, the horse’s trod, which he would come to learn was andante. They crossed Dunbar, heading for the Lewis Heights district around North Clinton Avenue. Mister Amalfi, even that first morning, asking questions about phrases and punctuations, laughing when asking what something was called as he pointed to it, before remembering that Son couldn’t see it.
Stupido.
Stupid.
It was the first instance of a lot of their time spent laughing at and about their handicaps with English and sight. Fun. Not like work.
“Good morning, ladies,
ready or not . . .”
Daisy—the domestic, the girl, the help—who worked for Mrs. Jacob, who was the wife of Mr. Russell Jacob, who was the manager of First Chilton Bank, recognized the voice, but it took her a minute to place its owner.
“Here comes the produce man
come see what Tony’s got.”
Then it came to her like sunshine breaking through a cloud. Son. Couldn’t be nobody but that blind who’d won the last, she couldn’t remember how many, amateur contests on Thursday nights at the King picture show.
“Got sweet onions and salad greens,
peas and beans,
got carrots, turnips and beets,
5 cents a bunch.”
She heard him sing as she, wiping her hands on her apron, walked down the hall from the kitchen and looked out the parlor window.
“String beans, spinach, cooking apples,
5 cents a pound.”
Him, all right. Sitting beside the Dago Tony on the buckboard of the wagon.
Daisy saw the front curtains, upstairs and down, in the Boland house across the street pull back; Ruth Ann, old Mrs. Boland’s girl, a fellow petitioner at Zion AME, likely downstairs; and Mrs. Boland, the wife of Mr. John Boland, a high-up, senior manager of something out to the plant, peeking out from the second floor.
Son’s head held back at the same angle as when he was on stage, same joy in his voice, same smile on his face, singing out.
“Got sweet onions and got corn,
tomatoes round and ripe,
got string beans, pretty and green
and the price is right, come see what I mean.”
As she headed back down the hall for the back door, Daisy patted her apron pocket to make sure she had the seventy-five cents produce money she’d been given that morning.
“Miss Jacob,” Daisy called, hoping the woman was having her after breakfast nap; “it’s the vegetable man!”
Son was singing now, just like Bessie Smith,
“There ain’t nothing I can do, or nothing I can say
That folks don’t criticize me,”
Just like Bessie Smith for the world,
“But I’m goin’ to do just as I want to anyway
And don’t care if they all despise me.”
Laughing she moved quickly back to the kitchen, pausing only to slip into her shoes, then grab the big woven-string shopping bag from the doorknob and through the back door, across the porch, around the side of the house toward the street.
In that bright spring to browning fall season along North Clinton Avenue and the wide, quiet, oak-lined streets of the surrounding Lewis Heights neighborhoods, there were occasional minor distractions that broke up the routine of Daisy’s and the other domestic’s monotonous day-work duties. Welcomed were the mailman, the door-to-door salesmen, the regular arrivals of the milkman and egg sellers, and shinny men. But their favorite diversion was the Tuesday and Saturday appearances of Son and the produce man. The sharp, slow clop-clop of the horse’s hooves on the cobblestones, and the boy singing his chants about their produce and his other songs, popular and operatic, were the unquestioned highlights of those days.
Though they would not understand the opera songs’ words, they marveled at how smooth, as the shimmering colors in the soap bubbles of her Monday morning wash, each note flowed out of and into the next, and how they rose from low to high and back like the call of a whippoorwill. Daisy longed to sing along with him, jealous to know the words the way the blind boy did, and to be able to speak Italian. She tried to imagine Horace and her sitting at a candle-lighted table in an Italian restaurant, with a strolling singer serenading them as they held hands.
That first morning Daisy was among the girls to gaggle and jockey good-naturedly to get the best of the items in bushels and baskets and boxes in the loaded wagon bed.
Tony, the not half-bad looking Italian man with the thick mustache, who reminded her of a rough-around-the-edges version of Warren William in Imitation of Life, answering, Questo è il mio colore figliola. His colored son, he translated, as he and the boy laughed, and he gestured for the women to keep it a secret from their employers.
Tony, as always, gracious to the colored women, young and old, as if they were donna di casa, women of the house, rich and positioned and white, white as the white women peering out at them from the windows of the stately houses they were mistresses of. Calling each by name with a tune whistle-trilled for each and a parting Grazie e bona giornata, signora (Thank you and good day, madam), as he added their coins to his four-barreled coin changer, and Bellini with a short nicker, neigh, or snort, clopped, shoe-hoofed forward, like an 80-stone winding-down windup toy. Windup toys being exactly what Mrs. Jacob thought all of them, their colored help, were, something mechanical to be wound up and ordered around until they finally ran down at the end of the day.
Even before they arrived, Daisy whisked the feather duster absentmindedly at the menagerie of porcelain lords and ladies, as she imagined Son and Tony making their way among the other, just stirring, merchants at the farmers market, and maybe waving to Horace in the early light as they moved up Chilton Street and across Dunbar on the ride out each morning. Horace maybe saluting them with his nightstick, his badge number 79 shiny on his dark blue uniform in announcement of who he was: Chilton’s first colored patrolman.
After they had purchased what their white women had instructed their girls to get and the wagon had moved up the street, their white women would come downstairs and sit in the way at the kitchen table, smoking and sipping at a cup of coffee, asking after the odd couple. Who was that colored boy sitting next to that Tony, singing? And was he blind?
Yes, and he had talent, he was smart and he was theirs, Daisy thought, and guessed all of the other colored maids and cooks, babysitters, and laundresses up and down the length of North Clinton Avenue were as possessive about Son as she, and would go through the same sort of interrogation. They too would know pretty much the same things about Son, but would parcel out bits of it in one-word answers like a miser doling ducats from his stash. Their employers wanting to know not only about Son but also about what went on down below Dunbar. It was as if the employers were striving to close the wide gap in the disparity between what their employees knew about them versus what they knew about those who worked for them.
Fat chance. It was one of the things the women and girls laughed out loud at as they waited at the bus stop or in the back of the public transportation as it rumbled them home in the evening. They swapped stories about how they had deflected inquiries about their business as they had picked up bits of gossip told directly, overheard during phone conversations, or the dozens of other ways the domestic cadre knew what they knew about the households and business lives of white folks in the North Clinton district.
Tony and Son went on up the street too busy tending to their own to think about them noisy women. Son singing and attracting the housekeepers like the Pied Piper, as if they were intoxicated by the fecund aroma of plump oranges, plums, apples, and melons to heft, sniff, thump, and then purr about in flirty tones, unnecessary to the transaction but fun, like humming birds flitting around impatiens. Thinking the boy too green to understand the game as they teased the produce man in hushed, hussy-coded innuendos, inquiring about the firmness and juiciness of items in the tradesman’s haul. All chirping at him at once as he tried to comprehend it all and answer in kind with rushing flourishes of tongue-stumbling English before having to resort to what, in their imaginations, were rutting yet romantic Italian expressions. Making him even more difficult to understand, and delighting them even more, until either the boy, humming and rocking slightly, secretly pulled the reins, or the horse’s internal clock thought it time to move on, and with a snort took one clop step forward, causing the jingle of the traces, signaling it was time for the boy to sing out again above its adagio gait, in a tone as musky as a rotting onion—
“Big fat berries been plucked,
peaches shook from the tree,
telling you the berries’ve been plucked,
sweet, juicy peaches
shook down from the tree.
Ladies, if you want you some,
run out here now and talk to me.”
—and them covering their mouths to keep their screaming laughter at this twelve-year-old soul, sounding for the world like the bassist blues singer, from rippling across the lawn and through the windows for their boss women to hear, until then it was really time for them to scruff back to their dusting, scrubbing, diapering, or cooking.
Until soon one morning came a sudden summer downpour and they, man and boy, soaked to the skin, were given refuge by Daisy on Mrs. Jacob’s back porch. It was on Daisy’s own initiative to give them towels to dry their heads and she who double spread newspapers for them to stand on just inside by the kitchen door. Mr. Amalfi politely declined, but Son entered. He was given a cookie to nibble (and one wax paper-wrapped to put in his pocket for later), and a cup of milk from a quart delivered fresh that morning, cream on top, and if Mrs. Jacob didn’t like it, then too black bad.
Daisy was asking about his mama, or Luck, Chap, or String, until Mrs. Jacob came to check on the commotion.
“He’s dripping on your floor, Daisy,” she said.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Well, if you want to mop it again it’s fine with me.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Well worth it, Daisy thought, in a way she didn’t try to analyze or justify. She just knew it felt good to have him standing there, and if it meant mopping “her” floor again she’d do it and hum while she did.
What happened was Mrs. Jacobs pulled rank and the boy was kidnapped and ushered down the hall into the parlor and stationed by the door of the bright, dustless room while he was questioned about ways and things to do with Tony, or ‘lo’ Dunbar, including was his mama the woman who was the seamstress? Miss Pearl Moon, yes, ma’am she was. Well tell her I might be calling to speak with her about a garment, Mrs. Jacobs said, but it had to be kept a secret between the two of them. Yes, ma’am he would and he would deliver the message. Yes, she said, she could see that he was a young man of his word. And then, that bit of business out of the way, she went seeking verification of juicy bits of gossip gleaned from the tidbits overheard by her and the other mistresses from girls up or down the block, many of which he might have known but almost surely had little knowledge of and even less interest in, but which Daisy—probably eavesdropping from the kitchen—had claimed total ignorance of.
Until the rain stopped and it was time to go. Thanking them, and assuring them he’d pass the greetings along to Chap and Luck and his mother and Vienna and Branch Ottley, Son returned to his hawking—
“Come look ladies, we got it all,
Tony’s best produce for the fall.
Beets, carrots, cabbage, grapes,
okra, potatoes, collard greens,
pumpkins, peppers, pears,
lettuce, limes, Brussels sprouts,
come see our wares!—”
—and the planets and squirrels went through their cycle, and leaves greened and flamed and fell, and the wagon on the last day of the season rolled back down North Clinton Avenue toward Dunbar and below, Tony and Son together on the seat; the boy singing; Daisy, as she had come to do over time, humming, harmonizing her soprano with his tenor until they faded out of hearing.
They’d assigned each other homework, a radio program to listen to with an articulate speaker or a classical music or opera program, to be discussed the following day, clarifying points, defining, correcting grammar, notions.
Son had buon orecchio, a good ear, and uccello beffardo, mockingbird skills. He learned as much Italian as his boss learned English. It was still heavily accented, but grammatically correct. He had a steadily increasing English vocabulary. The boy had also learned about Italian opera and composers, and oratorios, da capo arias, trills, and accents that thrilled the listeners along North Clinton Avenue. If he had a voice, Tony said, never mind like Caruso, but like Son’s, he would be happy as a lark. He would sing outside the windows of all the beautiful Negro women, Tutte le belle donne di Negro, while they flung roses down to him.
Until it was finally time, as Son, holding Bellini’s reins, pulled up in front of 560. Mr. Amalfi helped Son down.
“Goodbye, Mister Moon. Thank you.”
“No, grazie, Mister Amalfi.”
The boy moved through the iron gateway and up the walk as the horse’s hoof beats faded down Clinton.