It was in winter that the city’s Sanitary Police came around at night, banging on doors and calling “Apri porta!” to gather evidence of illegal overcrowding in the tenements. For when work was scarce and people kept arriving in the city, the only solution was for the jobless to take in lodgers at night and for the homeless to pay their nickel a spot to lie on someone’s floor or to sleep sitting up squeezed in an alcove or someone’s doorway. One night, in the room below them, Umbertina saw the police evict twelve people and send them off to a police station probably as overcrowded and as filthy as the hole they had been driven from. And she wondered what kind of country it was that tried to do good by recognizing evil, but whose remedies were as bad as the original evil. It strengthened her resolution that they had to take care of themselves and be their own salvation.

But the summers were the worst, with the cooking, sleeping, working, living all together in the sweltering tenements and streets, unable to breathe. In the newer tenements, the Barracks, those who could moved to the roofs and fire escapes to sleep, but those in the old frame houses were trapped there in rooms heavy with sweat and stale, fetid air. This was the time of year when babies slipped from windows and adults rolled off rooftops in their sleep. And in the streets the Americanized children chanted at their games, “July, July, go to Hell and die!”

People who had worked all their lives in open fields became tubercular. Almost every front doorway on every block bore the grimy white bow with streamers that announced an infant’s death in the building.

Despite Umbertina’s constant wish to get away, they slipped into the rhythm of the place. Serafino stopped nightly in the saloon downstairs to pay 2¢ for a mug of stale beer and talk to his comrades; Giacomo and Benedetto had begun to go to the American school and speak English and wanted to be called Jake and Ben; Umbertina found some solace in the company of other Calabrian women, with whom she sat out on the sidewalk and chatted while she mended or shelled beans or picked over the greens for their meal.

She learned from them a dozen ways to cook escarole. And she heard with a feeling of shock how they derided the American teachers of their children.

“Uh-ei!” said one of the tough comari. “These American feminine know nothing. My Vito comes home and says his teacher told the class they should have meat, potatoes, and a vegetable on their plates every night, all together. Like pigs eating from a trough, I tell him. In my house I have a minestra, a second dish, and a third dish. And beans if I want to! Madonna, that skinny American telling us what to eat!”

“These teachers are not good,” said another. “They make the kids cry because they can’t pronounce Italian names and make them ashamed. Annunziata says her teacher makes a face like she’s vomiting when she calls her name. Miserabile!”