Gino Gualtiero had his accordion and was playing a lively tune, the women were putting out the coperte in the fields to spread the breads and cheese and salamis upon, and Domenico Saccà was making a fire to boil water in a cauldron for the heaps of still-unshucked corn next to him. The children ran about gathering field daisies. Umbertina reveled in the feel of sun and in the clean air. She looked with pleasure at Giovanni’s tilled rows of tomatoes, well staked and growing fuller and rounder than she had ever seen tomatoes before; beans climbing up poles, peppers, eggplants, even the feathery rows of finocchio and the dense clusters of rughetta, basil, and escarole; and he had tall stalks of broccoli and cabbage, and beyond these a small vine of grapes carefully trained along stakes.

There were no walls or gates around James Brown’s farmhouse, nor around the other farms they had passed on their way from the city. Everything was open and peaceful, and Umbertina compared it silently to the walls with jagged bits of glass embedded in the top that separated a landowner’s place in Calabria from the landless. “This is what we need,” Umbertina told Serafino. “A field to grow our food on.”

“And here when you hoe the ground you can truly say everything is a mouthful for me and mine and no one else,” said Giovanni Muzzi.

“And what about him?” asked Serafino, nodding toward Brown’s farmhouse.

“All I have to pay him is the rent—not half my crop like in the old country. And we swap, me and the American. He gives me eggs and milk for some of my vegetables.”

The others nodded, recognizing the good fortune of being in such a land.

Umbertina tasted the corn that Domenico had boiled and offered her. She said to herself that she would refuse nothing this land had to offer, would taste everything out of gratitude for being there. But she did not think she would like the grano turco, which appeared strange and coarse and had to be gnawed at as a rodent would gnaw at something. It was out of politeness that she accepted the corn which Domenico pressed on her.

“Here you are, Tinuzza, this is corn, a truly American food . . . the food of the redskins. Eat it like this, spread with butter and a little salt.” He demonstrated and the others watched. “Some of your paesani won’t eat it because what they didn’t know back in Castagna, they don’t want to know here. But you’re not like that.”

Umbertina imitated Domenico and ate her first ear of corn. She was pleased. The kernels were sweet and she liked the look of these golden nuggets. It looked like America—bright and filled with golden promise.

“It is good,” she said. “I will have it in my garden.”