Direct questions always made Mogwa and Ogwa nervous.  Their pale blue eyes, which were intensely luminous, would dart in every direction except at the questioner.  Occasionally Mogwa would answer immediately, but the brothers got tricked often, which made them wary.  So mostly they'd get scared and hesitate, trying to discern the intentions of their interrogator, caught in a snaky limbo that terrified them all the more.  At times like this, you could see right into their heads and watch their minds at work.

One time my older brother, Joey, and I tore apart a broken Big Ben alarm clock—the wind-up kind with hands and numbers that glowed in the dark.  Inside there were countless notched wheels and tiny gears that fit perfectly together and turned to a beat that made time.  Looking into the twins’ minds was like looking into that Big Ben.  Only Mogwa and Ogwa were people, not a wind-up clock, and it wasn't time they needed but safe words that no amount of human gear-clicking could ever contrive.

At those times when the twins were caught in their wind-up misery, wondering what to say and daring not to say anything at all, they were vulnerable and easy prey for anyone.  Mogwa and Ogwa never learned how to avoid minor persecutions, yet it wasn’t in them to complain about mistreatment.  Which is probably why Anthony Fusco seized every chance that came his way to harass them.

One day Anthony spotted the twins about to enter the North Avenue side of the pedestrian tunnel beneath the railroad tracks, just as his cousins, Mike and Johnny, were coming through from the South Avenue end.  Anthony ran after the twins, calling out, “Hey Mogwa and Ogwa, wait up!”  As Mogwa and Ogwa turned to face Anthony, Mike and Johnny snuck up behind them, looked around to make sure no one was entering the tunnel from their blind side, then waited for Anthony to begin his mischief.

"Yeah, well Mogwa, I was just wonderin where you and your brother was thinkin of goin?”

“We goin ta store.”  Mogwa answered directly, not sensing any threat in Anthony’s demeanor.

“You’re not goin through the tunnel, are yous?”  Anthony’s voice was full of exaggerated concern, which confused Mogwa and set his mind to clicking.  Ogwa just stared wide-eyed at Anthony until he felt Mogwa's confusion, then he, too, grew uneasy.  Behind them Mike and Johnny were making faces and crude gestures, but the twins were oblivious.

“Naw, you don wanna go through that tunnel. You know what happens in that tunnel?”

Mogwa couldn’t answer now, and Ogwa was lost in the staccato movement of his own darting eyes.

“Want me to tell ya?  Niggers piss in there!  Yeah, the whole place is covered with nigger piss—the walls, the floor, drippin off the ceiling, even!  Can’t you smell it?”  Anthony glanced behind the twins to his cousins, and they signalled back that they understood.  Once more looking to see if anyone were coming down the South Avenue steps, Mike and Johnny began to quietly pull down the zippers on their chinos as they inched closer to the twins.

“How come you don’t answer a simple question, Mogwa?  Maybe I better repeat it for ya:  Can you smell the nigger piss?”

As Mogwa and Ogwa struggled to deal with Anthony’s insistence on an answer, Mike and Johnny began urinating all over the twins’ legs.  At first the twins didn’t notice, but as the cousins began to howl with laughter, Mogwa and Ogwa turned towards them and simultaneously felt their clothing cling wetly to their lower bodies.

Just then there was the unmistakable sound of descending footsteps reverberating through the tunnel.  Everyone turned to face the South Avenue stairs.  Mike and Johnny hurriedly tried to cover themselves, but in their fumbling haste they weren’t quick enough and so stood partially exposed as a group of four Black boys came bounding noisily into the tunnel.  As they started to walk through they took in the bizarre scene at the other end.  

“Whatch you doin down there?” one of them yelled, filling the tunnel with an earsplitting echo.  Another shouted, “They messin with the Mogwas!”  Then all four started running through the tunnel as Anthony, Mike, and Johnny took off in three different directions, trying to outrun their pursuers.

One of the four stopped when he reached the twins.  “Don’t you worry, they’ll get them dudes good!  Come on now, I take ya home so you can get cleaned up.”  Then he gently took each brother by a hand and led them out of the tunnel.  Mogwa and Ogwa, their curls blowing in the light breeze outside the tunnel entrance, held onto the proffered hand gratefully and began to walk with an awkward shuffle towards their home on St. Mary's Avenue a few blocks away.

First they crossed the commuters’ parking lot, which was filled with late model cars of professional people who drove from other neighborhoods to take the train to their offices in New York City.  Some of these commuters hated having to leave their cars here all day, and if they worked late, they felt uneasy about walking through the parking lot after dark.  They didn't trust the kids in this neighborhood, who were mostly Italian and Black.  Now as the three boys walked across the lot, Ogwa kept touching the fenders of particular cars, running his fingers over the smooth, shiny metal.  The boy watched him for awhile, then asked, “You like blue cars?”  But Ogwa didn’t answer, so they just kept walking.

They cut diagonally across the lot and came to the first of the dress factories that lined North Avenue.  As they did so they heard the loud hum of the machinery inside, then the louder sound of a bell ringing.  Suddenly the doors opened and scores of women streamed out.  It was the ten o’clock break, and the women gathered in small groups to stand in the morning sun.  The Italian women stood together and the Black women stood together, but they didn’t mix.  Inside they worked together all day long, worked side-by-side, talking and laughing together, helping each other; but when the bell rang, they stood separate in the sun.

The boys crossed North Avenue and continued walking until they came to a short dirt road, the only unpaved street left in the entire city.  They turned onto it and walked right up the middle.

“You remember me, Mogwa?  My name Ronald."

Mogwa looked directly at Ronald but said nothing.

"I know you two don like to talk.  That’s okay with me.  My older brother Chuckie, he eighteen and he don talk much either.  My mother, she work in that second dress factory we jus passed—I seen her out on break but she didn’t see us—she always prayin for Chuckie to talk, but my father say, ‘The boy don’t have to talk if he don wanna.  Too much talkin in this world already.’  But my mother she jus keep prayin, say ‘I want the boy to be able to be with people in words as well as silence.’”

Both Mogwa and Ogwa had listened intently to Ronald when he had spoken about his brother.  Their eyes had been riveted to him when he’d imitated his father.  Ronald had tilted his head to one side and made his voice deep.  It actually made him look older than his ten or eleven years.  When he’d made his mother’s voice, he had tightened his features and his face seemed to glow with an inner light.  His skin tone became redder, more bronze than brown, making him look more Native American than African American.

As they turned down St. Mary’s Avenue, Ronald said, “Me and my friends, we the ones who got after those other boys that was botherin you by Valentino’s Market.  We told them straight-out, ‘You messin with the Mogwas, you messin with us!’  Those White dudes thought they was bad till we showed them different.”  Ronald laughed loudly and started to strut down the Avenue.  Mogwa and Ogwa watched him for awhile then tried to copy Ronald’s graceful stride, but they weren’t very successful.

Walking that way—holding hands and strutting—they headed down the single sidewalk on St. Mary’s Avenue.  On their side of the street there was a row of houses, two-story, wood-framed houses, so close to each other that what went on in one was no secret to the others.  The houses didn’t have much of a backyard and only a small plot of grass out front.  Inside, whenever the train went by on North Avenue, everything shook a little for a moment and then was still again until the next train.

On the other side of the street was the cemetery, St. Mary’s Cemetery.  It was surrounded by a high, spiky, wrought-iron fence.  At the entrance were two huge, wrought-iron gates with SAINT MARY’S CEMETERY in an arc over the top of them.  The cemetery consumed an entire block, and so the whole neighborhood had an open feel to it, for the sky was visible and present, unblocked and untainted by city structures.  It gave the neighborhood an almost rural feel, as though this were a pasture set deliberately among the hills of houses that surrounded it.  The graveyard itself was filled with headstones but no mausoleums.  What marked the stones as unique was the unusual number of angels that perched atop them, their stone wings spread as if ready to take flight into the open sky.

About half-way down the block, the three boys came to where Butch Fusco, Anthony’s older brother, was working on a ’56 Chevy pulled up in his front yard.  It was painted metallic mauve and had skirts over the wheel wells and dice sponges hanging from the rearview mirror.  Butch had been trying to set the timing for over an hour, but he just couldn’t get it right.   Already frustrated and angry, when Butch noticed the twins coming down the Avenue hand-in-hand with a strutting Black kid, he yelled at him, “What you doin with them?”

Ronald stopped immediately and looked at Butch.  For a moment they glared at each other, the much younger Black boy defiantly daring to stay linked to Mogwa and Ogwa.  Then Ronald noticed the taut expression on Butch’s face, the hawk-like shape of his nose that gave Butch the look of a predator.  Butch picked up a wrench like it was a weapon and shouted, “G’wan, get outta here!” as though he were scatting a pesky dog he hoped would defy him so he could beat it.  Ronald didn’t hesitate any longer but dropped the twins’ hands and took off across the road, running along the fence that lined the cemetery.

Butch turned to the twins and said, “That’s one jigaboo won’t be botherin you no more,” then went back to his Chevy.

Mogwa and Ogwa stared at Ronald’s retreating form growing smaller as he raced away.  They looked at each other, at Butch Fusco, at running Ronald.  Then they continued down the Avenue, still trying to strut the way Ronald had—with grace.

They hadn’t gone far when they heard flirtatious laughter floating towards them from a porch they’d just passed.  They stopped to look back at the Rinaldi house.  On the steps of the front porch Diane Rinaldi was sitting next to Vinnie DeMatteo, her arm draped loosely over Vinnie’s leg as she stroked the inside of his thigh with her hand.  Diane was twelve but looked eighteen.  She had that classic, Italian beauty, both pristine and sensual.  She wore bright red lipstick that matched her emblazoned fingernails.  Her dark hair was kept pulled back loosely into a pony tail that hung below her waist.  Diane was friendly to everyone she met, especially adolescent boys, and very secure in her sense of life.  She never doubted that she would be cared for, in part because of her physical beauty, in part because of her parents’ close relationship with the man everyone called Mr. B.

Mr. B. didn’t live on St. Mary’s Avenue and rarely visited, yet he was a presence there.  Most of the year he spent on his large estate in northern New Jersey.  Its rococo entranceway was lined with larger-than-life busts of his children, which had been painted in life-like colors.  Everyone talked about Mr. B.’s wealth, but no one ever discussed its source.  Every Friday night at seven o’clock Diane and her parents drove to the Halfway House Restaurant on Route 22 where Mr. B. fed twenty or more of his associates, friends, and lackeys in a private room off the main dining hall.  They talked, feasted for hours on rich Italian food, and drank heavily—all for free.  It was Mr. B.’s way of being gracious to this faithful coterie.  Like many Italian men, Mr. B. grew more handsome as he aged, his silver hair highlighted against his olive complexion.  He could have been Italian nobility, so sophisticated and genteel were his manners and appearance.  But the people around him knew that he wasn’t, and they often spoke of unsophisticated things, like the handguns they wore concealed.

During these dinners Diane sat silently, patiently waiting for Mr. B. to notice her.  On the weeks when he did, she would smile at him like a little girl, all innocence, which is precisely how her mother had taught her to respond.  Then she would wait until the next time he noticed her.  Meanwhile, if someone said something humorous, her throaty laughter filled the room as it now filled the Avenue.

Vinnie Dematteo had said something that had made her laugh.  He was telling her about his grandmother, whom he thought was crazy.  “Every day she sits on the porch, rockin back and forth, waiting, waiting, waiting.”

“What’s she waiting for?”  Diane already knew, as did everyone on St. Mary’s, but she wanted to hear the story again.

“She’s waiting for Michael Anthony, you know, that guy on the TV show The Millionaire.  She thinks he’s real, that one day he’s gonna come walkin down St. Mary’s Avenue lookin for her to give her a tax-free check for a million dollars from . . . what’s that guy’s name, his boss, the one whose face you never see? . . . John Bears Fortipton the Third, right?

“Yeah, I guess so.  What would she do with the money?”

“She says,” and here Vinnie imitated her broken English, “‘I giva to my sista.’  Her sister’s crazier than she is.  She’s the one who took the two hundred grand in small bills with her in that suitcase when she visited her son in Miami.  After she come back to the hotel from shoppin, she discovered someone had ripped off the suitcase.  So she calls the cops. Of course they want to know what she’s doin with all that cash.  She tells them the truth!”  Vinnie shook his head in disbelief.  He didn’t understand the naïveté of the old ginzos, as he called them, and he loved to ridicule them, especially their speech.  Now when he imitated his great-aunt, he opened one hand, palm side up with the fingers spread apart, and shook it up and down for emphasis.  His voice was falsetto:  “‘My late husband—Godbless—make dis money in his luncheonette.  He keep in da suitcase.  When I come to see my son, I afraid to leave at home.’  Now the IRS is investigating and lookin for back taxes, and my Grandmother’s waitin all day for Michael Anthony to show up so she can save her sister.  Look, look down the street and you can see her now, just rockin back and forth, a small smile on her lips, the Mona Lisa of St. Mary’s.  She knows he’s comin.  If not today, tomorrow then.”  Vinnie laughed and Diane laughed with him, throwing her head back so that the full throatiness of the sound came out.

Mogwa and Ogwa turned away then and continued up the Avenue, passing Vinnie’s house along the way.  His grandmother, Mrs. Nitoli, was there on the front porch as he had said, rocking back and forth with a subtly expectant look on her face.  When she saw the twins she smiled sweetly and waved, then went back to her silent vigil.  They stared at her a moment, then waved and went home.

THAT EVENING MOGWA and Ogwa were back out on the Avenue, cleaned up and still strutting as the rest of us gathered by the cemetery fence, arguing when it would be dark enough to climb over.  Though the gates were never locked, we couldn’t just walk in because we weren’t supposed to be there and the caretaker, who also lived on St. Mary’s Avenue, might see us.

We were all there:  Anthony Fusco and his cousins, Johnny and Mike, Diane Rinaldi and Vinnie DeMatteo, Sonny Sontini, Jeannette and Christine Russo, and of course me.  Mogwa and Ogwa were too scared to climb over the high spiked fence that surrounded the cemetery.  So the curly-headed brothers would watch for us from the back of Lincoln School playground, just where it borders the cemetery.  They’d grab onto the cold, wrought-iron bars of the fence, dig in their heels, and rock back and forth, softly crunching the loose black gravel beneath their high-topped Keds.  They’d wait there, silent and big-eyed, until they grew tired of waiting.  Then they’d slowly walk along the fence, daring to trail their fingers over the bars, making an eerie, plinking song. While the twins were too scared to go over the fence, and Christine and Diane just weren’t interested, Jeannette Russo always climbed with us boys.  She wouldn’t have it any other way.

Once the sun had set and the evening mist had risen among the stones, one of us would get tired of arguing about when we’d make the climb, and just do it, the rest of us quickly following.  We'd drop to the dewy grass on the other side of the spiked fence, then go running silently through the place, feeling wild and free with all that sky above us, running and romping over the graves of our ancestors.  I never thought they minded.  I suspected, even, that they liked it, liked the excited rhythm of our running.  I often thought of them lying there, just beneath us, waiting all day with nothing to do, just waiting eagerly for the thumping sound of our sneakers pounding the earth that now was their home.

When it got dark, completely dark, so dark we couldn’t see anything through the mist but wavering forms and shadows, we would begin our ritual game of hide-and-seek.  We played hide-and-seek in other places, but it wasn’t the same game as when played silently in the cemetery late at night in the dark.  Our hearts would pound with the terror of it, and more than once kids were located by the pitiful sound of soft whimpering.

When finally we’d had enough and the game ended, all lost souls gratefully found, we’d have to climb back over the fence to get out, and it always seemed like a more difficult climb coming out.  Occasionally someone would get hung up on one of the spikes—a cuff caught or maybe a shoelace snagged—and the kid would start yelling for help.  We’d all rush over, saying, “Sshhh, sshh!” so the sound of the yelling wouldn’t wake Mr. Comolli, the caretaker, who lived too close and heard everything.  He had a big, part-shepherd dog that was as white as snow and looked like a wolf.  Mr. Comolli  called him Spook, I guess as a kind of graveyard joke.  It wasn’t a joke to us kids.  Spook hated everyone, but most of all kids.  Of course he was pure puppy to Mr. Comolli, but we knew that Spook wanted our flesh in chunky pieces hanging from his slavering jaws.

ONE SUMMER MY brother Joey worked for Mr. Comolli in the graveyard, cutting grass and cleaning headstones.  Joey was nineteen at the time and had just finished his first year at college.  He was the first kid on St. Mary’s Avenue to go to college.  The priest, Father Testa, liked Joey and had gotten him into Seton Hall where he was studying government.  Father Testa had said, “Joey can do whatever he wants.  He’s academically gifted.”

My mother had wanted Joey to be a priest, but Father Testa encouraged him to study the law.  It was hard for her to confront the priest with her own wishes, but in the end she’d told him one Saturday in the near dark of the confessional, “The law of God is what my son should be studying, Father.”

Father Testa had sighed deeply before replying, “The Church is full of Italian Fathers.  What we need are strong advocates for our people in the legal arena.”  So Joey went to college in pre-law and in the summer worked for Mr. Comolli.

Every lunchtime Joey would feed Spook half his sub sandwich.  First he’d stand out of range from where Spook was chained, then throw the sub to him and talk as if they were friends.  “But whadda you talk about, Joey?” I asked him when he’d told me what he was up to.

“Machiavelli.”

“Machiavelli?  He live around here?”

Joey laughed at me and said, “Machiavelli was an Italian philosopher and political advisor at the turn of the 16th Century.  He wrote a book called The Prince in which he described the amoral maneuvers and machinations of men in power.  Only now people call manipulative power-seeking ‘Machiavellian’ and claim that he justified using any means necessary to achieve power.  It’s just not true.  All he was doing was describing what he saw.  But to so-called scholars, Italians are born sleazes and Machiavelli was the King Sleazo.”

Joey talked like this often.  It all started in ninth grade when he had been elected treasurer of Maxson Junior High student council.  The advisor to the group, who later grew to trust and respect him, told Joey that when he’d first gotten elected she had thought, “Oh God, not an Italian!”  Joey didn’t reply, but just laughed because he didn’t know what else to do.  Later he’d told me, “Up until then I’d never even thought of myself as Italian. I was just me.”  That’s when he started paying attention to to what he calls “Wop talk”—any obvious slurs or subtle prejudice against people of Italian background.

“You really talk about philosophy to Spook?”

“Sure, anything just so he gets used to me and the sound of my voice in a friendly, safe way.”

So by the Fourth of July Spook had stopped barking at Joey.  And by Labor Day Joey was actually petting that white wolf.

“You’re crazy,” I told him.

“I’m just using psychology,” he answered, a superior look on his face.

The last day that Joey worked for Mr. Comolli he walked right up to Spook and petted him like they were best friends.  At noon Joey gave that dog half a tuna sub.  But Spook must have wanted meat that day, because as soon as Joey turned his back on him, he lunged at Joey, knocking him to the ground, then ripped a piece of flesh from Joey’s leg.  Maybe Joey shouldn’t have told him about Machiavelli, after all.

AFTER THAT SPOOK was the last thing any of us wanted to meet on our way over the fence after hide-and-seek.  Mr. Comolli, if he heard anyone messing around in the cemetery at night, would set Spook loose to investigate.  The mere idea of being hung up on one of those spikes with that dog coming was terrifying.  So we never wasted any time shushing and freeing someone hung up on a spike.
When we were all out safely, we’d head over to Anthony Fusco’s house.  We’d hang out on Anthony’s stoop in the dark, talking softly in the bluish light of the TV coming through the living room windows.

One night Anthony turned to me and said, “Hey Tony, what you doin’ in that graveyard?”

“What you mean, Ant’ny, I ain’t doin nothin,” I said, alarmed by his accusing tone.

“Yeah you are.  You’re doin somethin cause we can’t never find you.”  Anthony looked at me a long time.  Then he began tapping his finger on my chest, a tap for each word, as he said, “So what you doin in there, Tony?”

“I ain’t doin nothin, Ant’ny.  Just hidin like everyone else.”

“Naw, Tony, you doin somethin else and I know it.  I think maybe you’re cheatin, but I can’t figure out how.”

We both glared at each other then.  He hadn’t exactly called me a cheater, but it was close enough so that I might have to fight him over it.  I didn’t want to fight, not Anthony, not anybody, but everyone was looking at us, waiting for me to make a move.  The air grew heavy in the long silence, and then I noticed how strange everyone looked in the thick, bluish light from the television inside.  I could hear the theme song from Gunsmoke coming through the open window, and in my mind I imagined Anthony and me facing each other in the dust of the nearby dirt road, poised and ready to draw our six-shooters and fire at each other.

The idea of a showdown on St. Mary’s made me nearly laugh out loud, but I was saved from the whole thing by the cooing call of Cousin Brucie on WABC radio.  It blasted from the little, white transistor radio Mogwa often carried with him.  He and Ogwa had just strutted up the Avenue hand-in-hand, making an easy target of themselves, for there were two things Italian boys couldn’t get away with on St. Mary’s Avenue in 1960—they couldn’t hold hands and they couldn’t act Black.  The first was a betrayal of gender, the second of race.  Now the twins were doing both, which immediately  diverted Anthony from me to them.

“Hey look!” Anthony shouted.  “Here comes the Dolly Sisters tryin to walk like niggers.”  To show his disgust he spat through the wide gap between his two top front teeth.  His gob landed at the twins’ feet, exactly where he’d aimed it; Anthony was the best spitter on the Avenue.  “C’mere, girls,” Anthony called, sneering at the brothers who’d stopped dead, wondering whether to run.  “I wanna talk to yous.”

I knew then that I had been saved from having to fight or reveal the truth, for Anthony had been right—I was doing something in the graveyard:  Whenever it was time to hide and the person who was “it” started counting, I’d wait until everyone else was scattering.  Then I’d find a plain headstone and jump up on top of it.  I’d press my fists into my sides while folding my arms behind my back, which made them look like wings.  Then I’d stand perfectly still and pretend to be an angel.  In the dark night with the mist making everything vague, whoever was “it” would walk right by me, sometimes even lean against the very stone upon which I perched, and never see me standing above them, my arms backspread like wings, my mind heavenward.

My hiding was so successful that I was never found.  To pass the time I’d watch my friends hiding behind the cold stones of their ancestors.  I’d wonder about them, both the living and the dead.  Besides warm flesh and breathing, what separated the two?  Was it that the dead knew everything?  Could they even now hear me thinking, did they know all my secrets?  If I were truly an angel instead of pretending to be one, would I have such knowledge?  What would it be like to see inside someone?

These thoughts would race through my mind, making me so dizzy I’d have to steady myself on the stone.  Though I couldn’t have expressed any of them aloud, silently these questions filled me up, making me feel lighter than the mist that surrounded me.  They’d sweep me up and I would feel as if I were soaring, soaring over St. Mary’s Cemetery, taking in the whole of it, both the seen and the unseen, feeling it all inside me and me inside it.  Then I’d look across the graveyard to the houses on St. Mary’s Avenue, wondering about the people in them.  What were they doing, thinking, feeling?  Who were they, really?  I knew them so well, yet didn’t know them at all, not even the simplest thing about them.  Oh I knew what they did, but not why.  Why, I wondered, are we the way we are?