In New Jersey it isn’t unusual for mid-September mornings to turn summer-like, but real summer occurs in July when it gets so hot that the tar blisters on the steamy streets.  As young kids we would sit on the curb of St. Mary's Avenue and pop the tar bubbles with popsicle sticks, then pull the oozing, gooey tar as if it were taffy.  That's how hot July days get in Plainfield—tar blistering and broiling.  The nights don't cool down, either, so there's little relief from the heat, which is perfect for tomatoes and corn and other garden vegetables.  I guess that's why the state's nickname is “The Garden State.”  Or maybe it's because people live in a state of innocence, refusing to acknowledge what's threatening their idyllic garden until it's too late.

Maybe New Jersey is the Garden after all, an Eden from which God never expelled His errant children.  Instead He put two big cities at either end—New York to the northeast and Philadelphia to the southwest—and that was punishment enough, for then the Garden became a mere corridor of insignificance.  Its fertile soil was seeded in shame with concrete and macadam, and what grew were traffic lanes and cities like Plainfield, hot and steamy in the month of July.

The street, especially in July, is the center of life in a neighborhood like St. Mary’s. It is the playground, the meeting place, and the school-of-hard-knocks all rolled into one.  Perhaps because it ended at Seidler’s Field and wasn’t a through street, there was little traffic on the Avenue, mostly just the cars of the people who lived there.  One day in July of 1956 we were playing baseball at the Berkman Street end of the Avenue.  We were all there:  Sonny and Jeannette, Mogwa and Ogwa, Vinnie, Diane, Christine, and the Fuscos—Anthony, Mike, and Johnny.  We chose up sides, using Mogwa for the pitcher and Ogwa as catcher for both teams; they weren’t very good at it, but it made them happy to play.  Besides, they played equally badly for either side, so there were no arguments.  For some reason there was a lot of traffic that day.  Every time a car came around the corner, someone would yell out, “CAR!”  We’d all walk over to the curb while it drove through.  It was annoying to have to keep interrupting our game that way.

When it was my turn at bat I was eager to blast the ball.  Mogwa pitched a perfect lob, which I was going to swing at with all my might when suddenly someone yelled, “CAR!”  I had to catch the lob instead of blasting it, and I wasn’t too happy about it.  A hot rod pulled down the street and slowly drove by, making a low rumbling sound. It was an immaculate ‘48 Plymouth coupe, a deep plum color with flames of fire painted on the side panels just behind the engine.

I was annoyed by the interruption, especially irritated by how long the car took to clear the street.  As it drove off I muttered, “J.O.”  I didn’t really know that this stood for “jerk off,” nor did I know what that term technically meant.  I did understand that it was something you said when annoyed with another.  To me it was like “mangia checha,” which my grandmother said all the time.  It’s a derogatory term from Itaglish—that creative amalgam of Italian and English—that meant “cake-eater.”  Older Italians used it to describe Americans unfamiliar with the Italian ways; we kids used it to mean a person who was not streetwise or hip.  I could have said “mangia checha,” but I didn’t.  Besides, I never imagined the driver would hear me above the rumbling of his hot rod.

Suddenly the hot rod stopped, the driver threw it into reverse, tires squealed, and the next thing I knew the driver was glaring at me.  His arm was crooked out the open window, and I could see a tattoo of a cheetah just below the rolled up sleeve of his white T-shirt.  His hair was combed back into a perfect ducktail, and on top two tiny curls fell from his pomp.  I could hear Elvis singing on the radio.  In 1956 Eisenhower was President, but Elvis was King.

“What did you say, punk?”  He snarled at me, just like I imagined a cheetah would.

I hesitated for a moment.  I knew I couldn’t run, so I had to talk my way out of this.  At first I didn’t even remember what I had said, I was so scared.  “I don’t know what I said,” I admitted.  I started to stammer when I remembered.  “I . . . I . . . don’t even know what it means.”

He looked at me with total contempt, deciding whether or not to believe me.  I guess he figured I was telling the truth, it was such a dumb thing to say.  “Yeah, well you better be sure from now on you know what you’re sayin, cause next time,” he paused to suck on the cigarette that had been hanging from his lower lip, “next time you’re dead, punk.  Got it?”

I nodded my head because I couldn’t respond verbally.

“By the way, the only J.O. around here is you, you little faggot.”  He exhaled smoke into my face then flicked the lit cigarette at me.  He must have floored it, because the next thing I knew he was gone in a cloud of blue exhaust.

I don’t know which I felt more, relief at having escaped a physical beating or humiliation over his verbal lashing.

“It’s a good thing you didn’t call him a fag,” Anthony said.

“Yeah,” I muttered.

Although we were only young boys, we already understood the politics of male adolescence.  Simply put, one got power by shaming others.  In a group of teenage boys, it didn’t matter what you said, for any statement would be met with scorn, ridicule, sarcasm.  The game—and it was a political game as old as the world of men—was akin to jousting.  The jousts themselves were the bitter and stinging words and epithets, “fag” and “queer” being the most deadly.  The boy-knights, in search of their manhood, the holiest grail, wore heavy, defensive armor, not to protect the body but to cover their emotions.  When that armor got pierced and one showed that he had been wounded by revealing his hurt feelings, he had lost.  What had he lost?  Control—the veneer of manhood.

IT SEEMED LIKE every day whoever was around ended up playing ball on St. Mary’s Avenue.  We played baseball in the heat of July, football when things cooled down in September, and kickball any time of year.  There were very few days in the whole year when two or more of us weren’t out there on the street playing ball.  Christmas was one, Halloween was another.  On Halloween we only had one thing in mind—candy.  From the moment school let out we were walking from house to house in our costumes, filling our bags with as much sugary loot as we could.

Carmela always helped us with our costumes.  She was very good at giving ideas and putting together whatever we needed to make them real.  One year that I remember well she helped me dress up as a television.  I carried around this box from which we had cut out a screen-like opening, with me inside it.  The box had knobs drawn on it, and aluminum foil antennas.  Christine was a gypsy woman with flowing skirts, a bandanna, and a tambourine.  Jeannette and Sonny were Raggedy Ann and Andy.  They had orange yarn for hair and rouge on their cheeks.  Their clothes were stuffed with rags, making them appear doll-like.  Diane was a beautiful Indian princess with moccasins and beads, feathers and a real hatchet.  Vinnie was a ghost.  He had a white sheet draped over his head with holes cut out for his eyes, and he carried a carved jack-o’-lantern.

That was the Halloween that Mr. Russo took us to Japanese Gardens on Leland Avenue.  It was a Russo tradition to go there every Halloween, and this year we all had been invited.  Only Carmela got sick and couldn’t come, so it was just Mr. Russo in the Woodie.  As we drove down Leland Avenue he told us, “It’s where I met Carmela.  I was livin in Brooklyn at the time with my brother Masimo and a family from Caserta.  We were all paesani—you know, from the same village—so we knew we could trust each other.  In Italy people from different regions act different, even talk different. Plus the people in the North don’t like the people in the South, they think we’re stupid or something because we’re poor, got no factories and whatnot.

“Anyway, one night the padrone comes over.  He’s the guy that gets you work, see?  Some are good, some bad, steal all your money or make you work like a slave for nothin.  But our padrone, he’s from Compania region, too, so he’s okay.

“That night he tells us, ‘There’s a guy in New Jersey wants an Italian garden in front of an old farmhouse he’s remodeling for his American wife.  Turns out this guy’s from India, he’s like a Rockefeller over there.  He came to America to study business and ended up fallin in love with an American girl.  So he buys this old farmhouse and five acres and wants to turn it into paradise for her.’

“I wasn’t workin then so I was interested, but I had to tell the padrone, ‘I don know nothin about Italian gardens.’

“He says, ‘You’re Italian, ain’t you?’

“‘Of course,’ I says.

“‘Well if you make a garden, it’s an Italian garden.  Right?’

“We all laughed, and the next day he took me out there to help make this garden.  I worked in a crew of Italians from every region—Lombardy, Tuscany, Abruzzi, Calabria, even Sicily where Tony’s grandparents are from.  Problem was, everybody’s always arguin cause nobody trusts the other guy.  I don know how we ever got anything done.

“We was in the front of the house.  Out back there’s a million Japanese workin like crazy making a Japanese Garden.  What we was doin was nothin compared with them.  The owner even hired a Japanese architect to design it.  It was called ‘Gulestan,’ which means Garden of Flowers.

“The Japanese workers hand-dug a swimming pool, and then brought in cherry and pine trees all the way from Japan.  You’re gonna see this curved wooden bridge over the brook.  It’s just like one that belonged to the Japanese Imperial Family.  There’s even a statue of a Japanese girl that was carved a couple hundred years ago.”  Mr. Russo grew silent then as though he were seeing it all a long time ago.

Jeannette, who’d been listening intently to every word even though she’d heard it all before, grew impatient.  “So when did you meet Mommy?”

“Oh yeah, I nearly forgot, that’s where all this is leadin, ain’t it?”

IT WAS 1927 and Carmela was eighteen years old.  She had finished high school in June, but unlike the other Italian girls who were content to remain at home waiting to be married, Carmela looked for work outside of Point Pleasant.  She kept checking the ads in The New York Times, and one day saw one for a maid/companion.  She wrote to the address and was surprised to receive back a handwritten reply on fine stationary inviting her to visit in person to interview for the job.  Her parents were outraged, her father particularly livid, but she stubbornly refused to submit to their vision of her life.  “I am an American, not a peasant girl from Turin,” she insisted.  She travelled by train to Plainfield, New Jersey, and got the job on the spot.  A week later she was living in a small room in the top floor of the old farmhouse on the former Leland estate.  She was the personal maid and companion to Mrs. S., as she always called her employer, the young American woman who had wed the wealthy heir from Bombay.  Carmela helped Mrs. S. dress, cleaned her room and bath, and kept her company when her husband was engaged in his many projects around the grounds.

Mr. S. was usually preoccupied with overseeing the construction of their gardens, by which he intended to create a beautiful setting for his new wife.  When the weather was especially perfect, Mrs. S. would accompany him on his inspections, leaving Carmela with little to do once the cleaning had been done.  She would find herself looking out the windows at the work in progress.  In the back of the house the Japanese were constructing elaborate gardens, even a swimming pool.  In the front Italian workers were making a more modest garden.

Gaetano Russo, twenty-seven years old at the time, was mulching a garden bed in front of the house one morning when he saw from the corner of his eye the flicker of a curtain in the nearby window.  He looked up to stare into the large brown eyes of a young woman, tiny yet somehow powerful looking to him.

“That first time I saw her, I wondered who she was, but it wasn’t like love at first sight or anything.  We just stared at each other for what seemed like a long time to me, then she smiled at me and dropped the curtain back into place.

“After that I looked for her, curious and eager for something to take my mind off the work.  From time to time I seen her at the windows.  Each time I spotted her, I gave her a little wave, and she smiled back.  I knew one thing:  I wanted to see her again, and then again.

“One day I was unloadin some shrubs when I cut my hand pretty bad on some wire.  Carmela musta been watchin from the window, cause she come runnin out with a rag and bandages.  From the moment she touched my hand—it was like a shock run through me—I loved her.  I looked into those eyes of hers, and I knew.  I think she knew, too, cause her hands started shakin and she could barely wrap the bandages around my hand.”

“So then what happened, Daddy?”  Jeannette was eating up this story the way the rest of us were eating up the candy we’d gathered on our first run down the Avenue.

“We started seein each other.  I was stayin with the Mandattas on St. Mary’s Avenue; they was from Caserta, too.  I’d walk back to Gulestan after I got cleaned up from work.  Four times a day I was walkin back and forth.  I’d wait for Carmela on the bridge over the brook.  Sometimes she come early, other times I had to wait for hours.  The sun would go down, and I could hear the crickets as the mist come up from the brook.  It was the most peaceful place I ever seen.  Then, just as I would think she ain’t comin tonight, she’d be there.

“One night her boss come out for some air and found us there on the bridge.  When she learned we was in love, she told us she’d help us any way she could.  That’s the kind of person she was—beautiful, like a guardian angel, you know what I mean?”

We all nodded our heads, our faces now covered with chocolate.

“She’s the one got me the job workin at the school.  She had some friend at the Board of Education.  She even helped us buy our house on St. Mary’s Avenue.

“Six months later, me and Carmela got married in Point Pleasant.  Her parents were very happy people.  You see, there’s this old Italian saying in the Piedmont, the region they were from, about the age for marrying:  ‘L’uomo di venotto; la donna diciotto.’  It means the man at twenty-eight, the woman at eighteen.  That’s how old we were when we got married, so they was delighted.  They even ignored the fact that I was from the South.  They had so much food at that wedding you’d think they was feeding the guests for a week.”

Mr. Russo laughed, and we did, too, feasting on our own delicious repast.

IT WAS A ritual of sorts that the Russos went to Gulestan on Halloween.  As it turned out, Mrs. S. died not long after Carmela had left her employ to live on St. Mary’s Avenue.  Mr. S., who was inconsolable, built a shrine to his wife in the most beautiful part of Gulestan, beyond the bridge along the brook.  Every October 31st, the anniversary of the death of her beloved employer, Carmela went to take a small bouquet of flowers to the shrine.  When the place was sold, she continued to go with the permission of the new owners.  I think it was their idea to bring her children along for trick or treat.

The Russos would go to the main house where the new owners always made a fuss over the kids’ Halloween costumes before inviting them all in for cider and donuts.  It was then that Carmela would excuse herself and go to the shrine.  When they were done with their snack, the kids were allowed to roam the grounds, which they found fascinating in part because they knew movies had been shot on location there.  Before Hollywood had become the American film capital, New Jersey had been the movie-making center.  Universal Film Company had shot several movies at Gulestan, including Madame Butterfly with Mary Pickford.  So the kids roamed the grounds with wide eyes, imagining movie stars everywhere:  lounging around the pool and bathhouse that had been built in Japanese style;  standing on the ornately carved wooden bridge that arced over the brook and led to the shrine; kneeling before the shrine itself, which was a miniature pagoda with several layers of roofs that curved upward at the division of each story; gazing at the memorial statue to the Japanese girl carved in 1691; and, of course, walking along the paths that wound through the shrubs and trees.

On the Halloween when Carmela had gotten sick, she had asked Christine and Jeannette to place the bouquet for her.  So while the rest of us were eating donuts, Christine, Jeannette, and Diane went out into Gulestan, very solemn and intent on their adult task.  A while later we boys went out onto the grounds, too, along with Mr. Russo who loved it there.  “It’s so peaceful, you know what I mean?”

We were near the pool when we heard the girls scream.

Mr. Russo took off and Sonny, Vinnie, and I followed, running as fast as we could in our costumes.  We ran past the bath house, down the path to the bridge, over the brook past the statue, and along the path to the pagoda where the girls were crying and Mr. Russo was trying to calm them down.

“It’s okay now, everybody’s okay, you’re all safe.”  He was kneeling on the damp ground, his arms around all three girls as if to reassure them with the safety of his embrace.  Finally the three girls calmed down.

“What happened?”  Sonny asked.

“These boys jumped out of the bushes at us and scared us,” Jeannette said.

“They yelled ‘trick or treat’ and tried to grab our bags of candy,” Christine said.

“But Jeannette wouldn’t give them hers,” Diane said, “so they started pushing her, and when she pushed back, they started swearing at us and then they ripped the bag out of her hand and ran off.”

“Were they White?” Vinnie asked.

“No,” Diane said.

“That’s what I figured,” Vinnie said.  Then he added, disgustedly, “Niggers!”

That’s when Mr. Russo grabbed him and said, “Don’t you ever say that word again, you hear me!”

“Yeah, sure, Mr. Russo, whatever you say.”  Then he added in his own defense, “But they were.”

“I don care what you think they were.  I don like that word.  You understand?”

“I understand,” Vinnie said, but he was confused and felt betrayed by Mr. Russo’s inexplicable outburst.

“C’mon, we’re goin home now,” Mr. Russo said, and we all walked silently back through Gulestan.

ON THE CAR ride back nobody said a word.  We didn’t even eat any candy.  None of us kids understood why Mr. Russo had gotten so angry at Vinnie, and we were afraid to say anything that might spark a similar outburst from him.

After several blocks of riding in silence, Mr. Russo cleared his throat as if he were going to speak.  When he didn’t say anything, Jeannette asked him, “Daddy, what’s wrong?”

“Nothin.”

There was another long silence.

Then Mr. Russo began to talk.  “When I came to this country I was a little older than you are now.  Eleven years old.  I didn’t know what it would be like here, but I thought it must be wonderful because back in Italy everyone wanted to come to America.  My brother, Masimo, said, ‘We’ll be rich in America.’

“Only when we got here it wasn’t so good at first.  We lived in a tenement with a large family from Caserta.  There was too many of us packed into two tiny rooms with the constant noise of the city outside the window and kids cryin all day long and the women yellin at them while the men were out always lookin for work.  I missed my family and the countryside.  I wasn’t used to city life.  It’s so dirty and crowded.

“Back then if there was a help wanted ad in the newspaper—say for a job loadin trucks—it would read ‘No Italians.’”  There was another long silence, and each of us looked at Mr. Russo, waiting for him to continue.  Finally, he did.  “One day I got work at the fruit market through the padrone.  I worked stackin the empty crates and cleanin up.  My boss was okay, but his son didn’t like me.  He found fault with everything I did and refused to call me by name.  Instead he’d just yell, ‘Hey nigger, c’mere,’ or ‘Nigger, you didn’t stack those crates yet.’” Mr. Russo stopped talking.  Jeannette reached her hand over the seat and started stroking the back of her father’s neck.

Vinnie said, “But, Mr. Russo, you wasn’t a —,” but he caught himself in time.

NEARLY TEN YEARS later on a scorching July evening in 1967 I had reason to recall what Mr. Russo had said that Halloween.

Our city looked like a war zone: National Guard were riding the streets in armored personnel carriers bristling with .50 caliber machine guns.  Local police and New Jersey State Troopers, dressed in riot gear and armed with automatic weapons, had cordoned off an eighteen-block area in the oldest part of the city where the poorest Blacks lived.  Over a hundred people had been arrested, and ten people had received bullet wounds.  After a Plainfield police officer was beaten to death by an angry mob, the Governor declared a state of emergency, suspending civil rights.  A massive house-by-house warrantless search was underway in the West End ghetto, where Guardsmen and State Troopers, armed with M-1 rifles, bayonets, carbines, .45 caliber submachine guns and pistols, stormed into apartments and ransacked them, searching for forty-six semi-automatic weapons that had been stolen from a nearby weapons manufacturer.

Plainfield’s mayor first told the press that civil rights were not involved in the racial violence.  He blamed the trouble on a small “criminal group or criminally prone group.”  When some of the young people who had been arrested were released from jail, they painted a very different picture of who had been acting criminally.  One youth said of the police, “They made us hold our hands up in the air and when we got tired and let them down they hit us.”  Another said, “They beat me so I’ve got nothing left in me but hate.”  Later the mayor called the violence “a planned insurrection sparked by similar events in Newark.”

On St. Mary’s Avenue, which was in the East End of the city far from the cordoned-off area, men were out in the street, some with pipes, others with baseball bats.  They were walking down the Avenue towards Asunta Hall where a meeting had been called.

Mr. Russo was sitting on his front porch, rocking back and forth.

“Hey, Gaetano,” one of the men called out, “you comin to the meeting?”

Mr. Russo shook his head and waved the men on.

I was heading to Asunta Hall with Vinnie and Anthony, who had a baseball bat in his hand, when my brother, Joey, came running up behind us and grabbed me by the shoulder.

“Where you going, Tony?” he asked me, a worried look on his face.

“I’m goin to the meeting at Asunta Hall.”

“Don’t go,” he said, almost pleading.

“Why not?”

“You know what it’s about?”  He looked at Vinnie and Anthony, eyeing the bat.  Then he said to them, “Why don’t you go on while I talk to Tony for a minute.”  They shrugged and continued down the street.  Joey took me by the arm and started walking up the Avenue the other way.

“What’s this all about, Joey?” I asked him.  He was going to Rutgers Law School then and was home for the summer, working for a local attorney.

“I don’t want you to go to that meeting, Tony.”

“Why not?” I repeated.

“Cause it’s a hate meeting.”

“They’re just gonna plan on how to protect the neighborhood during the riots.”

“They’re vigilantes, Tony, full of fear and hate.”

“A White cop was killed down there the other night.  They say he was stomped to death, then shot with his own gun.”

“I know, Tony.”  He wasn’t angry about it the way the rest of us were, he was sad.  It was in his eyes, and for a moment he looked just like our grandfather.  Joey hesitated, then he started to speak, then stopped again.  Finally he said, “Look, Tony, this is hard to talk about here on the street, but what’s going on down there on Plainfield Avenue is happening all over this country right now.”

“You mean niggers rioting and goin nuts, burning down their own neighborhoods?”

“No, that’s not at all what I mean!  Listen to you, Tony, listen to the words you use.  I can’t believe you’re talking like this.  You sound like Anthony Fusco.”

“Maybe Anthony’s right, Joey.”

“No, he isn’t.  He’s just prejudiced like all the rest of them.  He learned it from his parents and they learned it from theirs.  The Italians were so used to their petty regional hatreds that American racism came natural to them.”

“You talkin psychology again, Joey?  Remember what happened the last time you did that?”

“This is history, Tony, and you need to know it before you decide to go that meeting.”

He still had hold of my arm, and I thought about brushing him off and catching up with Vinnie and Anthony, but the look in his eyes was starting to haunt me, so I said, “Okay, go ahead, you got exactly thirty seconds, bro.”

“Alright.  Here it is:  When our grandparents first came here there weren’t many Blacks in the northern cities, but then in the forties there was this huge migration from the south.  Suddenly Italians and Blacks were competing for jobs and housing, and naturally we weren’t too happy about it.  Plus now the Italians need to distance themselves from Black Americans so they can prove their own Whiteness.”

“What do you mean?  We are White!”

“No, we’re not.  We never have been.  Look at your own skin.  Look at grandma—she’s got nappy hair, big lips, a wide nose, high cheek bones.  We’re a colored people, Tony.”

“That’s ridiculous, Joey.  You’re crazy, you know that?  You just goin too far out there, man.  I’m goin to this meeting.  See you later.”  I turned away from him, shaking my head in disgust, and hurried down the Avenue to Asunta Hall.

Only when I got there I didn’t stay too long.  The Hall was full of all these guys mouthing off, waving baseball bats and pipes, shouting “We ain’t lettin those niggers in here!’  I kept hearing that word “nigger” over and over, and then I remembered Halloween at Gulestan and Mr. Russo telling us that he used to be called a nigger.  Suddenly I understood what was going on inside that building, and it made me sick.  It was the old adolescent bravado, the boys jousting in the wind again; only they weren’t boys, they were grown men threatening serious harm, and I didn’t want any part of it.

I walked back down the Avenue.  When I came to the Russo house, Mogwa and Ogwa were sitting silently on the steps while Mr. Russo rocked slowly in the hot July evening.  The street had been tar-blistering that day.  Now that it was evening the sun was going down, but it wasn’t much cooler.  I waved to them, and they waved back, then I went to look for my brother.

I found him at P. Natale’s Bakery and Pizzeria on Richmond Street.  He was coming out the door with a small pizza for his supper.  When he spotted me heading towards him he smiled at me like he was never happier to see anyone in his whole life.

“Hey soul man, what’s happenin?” I said.

“You, brother!”  He grinned at me from ear to ear.

Just then we heard the beat of a bass drum and the jangle of a tambourine.  We looked across the street where there was a storefront church.  Outside the church on the sidewalk, a heavy, older Black woman was seated on a folding chair.  In front of her was a bass drum with a foot pedal that she worked expertly.  Two tall, thin Black women flanked her.  A young Black man shaking a tambourine stood just behind them.  They were dressed completely in white, and the women’s heads were covered with white kerchiefs, as well.  They began to sing, swaying with the rhythm of the songs, smiling as if Jesus was in their midst at that very moment.  They sang “He Never Said A Mumbling Word,” “Stand By Me,” “Jesus Is Right On Time,” “Prayer Changes Things,” and “I Saw the Light.”

Joey and I just hung out on the corner of Richmond and Third, sharing his pizza and watching and listening in the hot July evening.  We had nothing to say and nowhere to go, which felt fine.  When the gospel group started Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” Joey’s face lit up and he sang with them like he meant it for all of us in that troubled city that hot night:

I can’t say that I understood completely what Joey was feeling—like why his eyes were filling with tears—or that I suddenly accepted everything he’d told me about Italians and Blacks, but watching him singing his heart out on that street corner that night made me love him in a way that’s never changed and never will.  Capisci?