Having little to do, Serafino would hang around the Wholesale watching the loading and unloading of wagons, enjoying the bustle and bickering of selling; or he’d pretend to supervise his grandsons and the neighborhood kids as they sorted fruit into bushels. In pretended rage he’d sometimes flick off the wide leather belt he still wore, mountain style, with pants top hoisted above it, and snap it near the boys to hurry them up and make them jump in laughter.

Much of his time he spent playing scopa and drinking beer at Scalise’s, which he and his friends called the Poor Man’s Club with an irony that delighted them, for weren’t they all past poorness, in one degree or another? Hadn’t America proved itself?

In his last years Serafino and his friends at Scalise’s bar used to debate long and hard over their beer and roasted lupine seeds on the story of their leaving the old country—it was the great story of their lives, an odyssey that was still real and vivid in their memories, a perpetual drama to be retold and acted out in all its shadings of sorrow and joy.

“The climate here is bad and there is no wine worth drinking,” someone would say by way of starting the story.

“What wine could you, a cafone without land and vines, ever have drunk in the old country?” another would jeer. “You would be lucky to have goats’ milk.” And so the story of their miseria and how they had left would be picked up and repeated.

But if Domenico Saccà were there, it wouldn’t be the simple story of how it had been in the old times and how they had gotten where they were; it would become a political exhortation.

“Stupidi!” he shouted at the men, all common laborers and illiterate. “You are not educated! What do you know of the real wrongs of this country? It isn’t because of the wine or the climate that it’s bad; it’s because here you are treated worse than the niggers. The niggers at least speak English, the bosses say, and that makes them more intelligent and worth more . . . and they are loyal Americans who don’t send their money out of the country like the dagos do. So that’s why you dagos get $1.15 for a twelve-hour day and the others get $1.50. And you not only take it, you’re glad to get it and don’t even ask why it’s like that.”

Sometimes Scalise, the wiry bartender, would get so exasperated he would himself lean over the bar and respond to Domenico. “When times are good and people have jobs and their stomachs are full, then there are complaints! Why don’t you go back to the old country and organize your protest?”