The neighborhood women would come into the store and when they pinched their pennies or complained of prices, she would scold them and tell them to think of their children’s health. She saw all of her paesani from Castagna and the nearby villages. Most of them were workers in the mills or slate quarries or laborers on construction jobs. The Muzzis were doing well, but Cristina Muzzi was the same in Cato as she had been in Castagna, still having sick children in a land of plenty. Not because they didn’t have money, but because of their mentality. Miserabili, Umbertina would say of them—afraid to spend for good food, saving for the doctor and the pharmacist by not spending on God’s bounty. Their children would forever go on looking like stunted Calabrians and not Americans.

The neighborhood women also would come to the store for counsel. “Comare Umbertì,” they would say, “what shall I do about my child who is ailing . . . shall I see a doctor?” “What do you think of the young woman my son is seeing? Is it suitable?” “Now I have money in the bank. Shall I go back and buy property in Castagna or shall I buy here?”

She scoffed at them for sending money back to their relatives in Italy; never a cent of hers would go back, she said. And in fact it was well known, and talked about in the neighborhood, that Umbertina Longobardi never sent anything back except her photographs.

“A question of $26 for her brother’s fare and she couldn’t even send that,” they whispered about her.

“È dura,” the women agreed, “she’s a hard one.”

“Have you made your money here?” she would ask the women with a cold courtesy that barely masked her contempt. “Have you found fortune and benessere here? Then use it here. For your sons and grandsons who are Americans.”

She saw men and women who had come over at her time, or later, remain peasants. They sent their money back or they went back, after saving and scrimping, and bought patches of dry, worn-out land in the old country instead of property in the new. And, improvident, they let their sons continue to work for others. Umbertina had learned what it was to fill the stomachs and pockets of barons and bosses.

Once the uprooting had taken place, everything from then on had to go toward regaining strength in the transplantation. She was not of peasant stock for nothing; she did not tend her own fields without learning. Her family had been uprooted by misfortunes, they had suffered loss and shock; now they must concentrate on new root growth, here in this soil that favored them. What nonsense did Cristina and Domenico and all the others talk of sending money back, going back, buying land and starting again back there? Can one keep moving one’s roots and buds? Not and produce good fruit—that much she knew.