But Umbertina, who had risked so much, would not risk sending her sons among the evangelists, where they would surely be turned into Protestants and thus burn forever after death in Hell.

“You people are impossible. It is you, from the South, who have given us Italians in this city a bad name. You live where the Germans and Irish and even the Jews, no matter how poor, won’t live. You break the picket lines where workers are trying to force decent wages out of their bosses, and when you are robbed and even murdered, you won’t go to the police—you want to take care of it among yourselves in your disgusting little vendettas. But surely you’re different, signora; I see how you want to get out and be something better than a slum dweller. I see you making an effort to be clean and take care of your children. But why won’t you help your children break out of ignorance?”

“We cannot be changed overnight, signorina. We can change some things . . . but my children must be of my faith.”

Umbertina wondered why this woman, who felt so superior because she was English-speaking and Protestant, still bothered to call herself Italian. She felt a mixture of both pity and contempt for Anna Giordani because she was a plain, angular woman, tall and thin, with drab light hair and fishy gray eyes, who was working among the poor because she didn’t have her own children and husband to look after; who labored each day among conditions she could not change, venting her anger on the victims of those conditions.

Umbertina resented the cold appraisals of this joyless woman, and yet she respected her, too. No one else, as much as Anna Giordani, had taught Umbertina the real facts of American life; had stimulated her desire to overcome her disadvantages and make good; had, in a real sense, protected her and her sons against the worst dangers of slum life. And Umbertina knew she was right to scorn those who clung to the slum only for the comfort of its teeming life and in fear of the coldness outside . . . and yet Umbertina also knew that when you are poor and have nothing it is natural to hang on to what is familiar and known. There were always two sides to everything.

Now, safe on the train, Umbertina remembered when Anna Giordani had brought her the answer from Domenico Saccà. “Your countrymen from Castagna, Carlopoli and Soveria Mannelli,” Domenico had written and Anna read, “are here in Cato and have found work in the knitting mills or on construction jobs. Gino Gualtiero and some others have moved out near Canastota and Emory, where they have started farms on the rich black land out there. It is a long winter here and not an easy life even for a shoemaker like me, but things go well and we live in our own homes.”

Those words came to Umbertina on a day of bleak depression when all hope seemed to have sputtered out and died. But as she listened an idea came to her and she knew immediately what she had to do.