Serafino and others in the store would listen spellbound while Domenico read about arrests, lynchings, and dragnets in Italian neighborhoods, or confiscations and wholesale expulsions of Italians from towns. Umbertina went about her business trying to seem un-attentive, but in her heart she asked, Could this be America? What was the reason for such hate? And yet some of it she knew by herself: The Italians were pouring in, more and more each year, and they were taking the jobs away from the Americans. But was this a cause to hate and kill them? After all, the Italians were doing the jobs that all the others scorned and refused. And wasn’t there supposed to be reward for hard work and making good in the American way? Wasn’t that what America was all about?

“You have to become citizens and get the vote so that we can all protect ourselves—that is the only way,” Domenico would say, and for once she agreed with him. Serafino had gotten his citizenship papers, and she had told him to vote as Pasquale Luppizzi wanted so that Luppizzi would protect them against the extortionist Black Hand Corvo family. But Domenico derided her idea of the vote as a favor to pass on to Pasquale Luppizzi. “You have to educate yourself to think for yourself, not let someone else do it,” he told her while she mentally scorned him as a dreamer.

For Umbertina these were all words—not bread to put in her children’s mouths and not the protection that would keep the Corvos from coming around and demanding money so that her windows wouldn’t be broken, her bins of flour ruined with rat poison, and her vegetables dumped into the street. She had to work and stay safe, not go to school to learn to read and then be unhappy with the things she couldn’t prevent anyway.

She did not want Domenico as her conscience; she did not want to hear that there were ugly patches in the American design, that there was discrimination and hate and prejudice. She liked her life now, she liked being her own boss and making money and seeing things go well. Why should she listen to the gloomy talk of Domenico, who was like the fox that said the grapes he couldn’t reach were sour? Just because Domenico, learned though he was, was still only a shoemaker and not making the money they did, did that give him any right to come and spoil their good times with his bad news?

Serafino was all ears when Domenico came.

“Does it make you feel like you’re back with Garibaldi?” she would ask him dryly after the shoemaker left.

“Domenico reads things we don’t know about,” he answered. “He understands things. We should listen.”