A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [52]
Francie was fascinated by the money angle. After two songs, the fiddle and horn carried on alone while the drummer went around hat in hand ungraciously accepting the pennies doled out to him. After canvassing the street, he’d stand on the curb’s edge and look up at the house windows. Women wrapped two pennies in a bit of newspaper and tossed them down. The newspaper was essential. Any pennies thrown loose were considered fair game by the boys and they scrambled for them, picked them up and ran off down the street with an angry musician after them. For some reason, they wouldn’t try to get the wrapped pennies. They’d pick them up sometimes and hand them to the musicians. It was some sort of code that made them agree as to whose pennies were whose.
If the musicians got enough, they’d play another song. If the take was meager, they’d move on, hoping for greener fields. Francie, usually dragging Neeley along, often followed the musicians from stop to stop, street to street, until it got dark and time for the musicians to disband. Francie was but one of a crowd as many children followed the band Pied Piper fashion. Many of the little girls towed baby brothers and sisters along, some in homemade wagons, others in busted-down baby buggies. The music cast such a spell over them that they forgot about home and eating. And the little babies cried, wet their pants, slept, woke to cry again, wet their pants again and went to sleep again. And “The Beautiful Blue Danube” played on and on.
Francie thought the musicians had a fine life. She made plans. When Neeley got bigger, he would play the hot-hot (his name for an accordion) and she would bang a tambourine on the street and people would throw them pennies and they’d get rich and Mama wouldn’t have to work anymore.
Although she followed the band, Francie liked the organ grinder better. Every once in a while a man came around lugging a small organ with a monkey perched atop it. The monkey wore a red jacket with gold braid and a red pillbox hat strapped under his chin. His red pants had a convenient hole in them so that his tail could stick out. Francie loved that monkey. She’d give him her precious penny-for-candy just for the happiness of seeing him tip his hat to her. If Mama was around, she’d come out with a penny that should have gone into the tin-can bank and give it to the man with sharp instructions not to mistreat his monkey; and if he did and she found out, she would report him. The Italian never understood a word she said and always made the same answer. He pulled off his hat, bowed humbly with a little crook of the leg and called out eagerly, “Si, Si.”
The big organ was different. When that came around it was like a fiesta. The organ was pulled by a dark curly-haired man with very white teeth. He wore green velveteen pants and a brown corduroy jacket from which hung a red bandana handkerchief. He wore one hoop earring. The woman who helped him pull the organ wore a swirling red skirt and a yellow blouse and large hoop earrings.
The music tinkled out shrilly, a song from Carmen or Il Trovatore. The woman shook a dirty, beribboned tambourine and listlessly punched it with her elbow in time to the music. At the end of a song, she’d twirl suddenly showing her stout legs in dirty white cotton stockings and a flash of multicolored petticoats.
Francie never noticed the dirt and the lassitude. She heard the music and saw the flashing colors and felt the glamor of a picturesque people. Katie warned her never to follow the big organ. Katie said that those organ grinders who dressed up so were Sicilians. And all the world knew that the Sicilians belonged to the Black Hand and that the Black Hand Society always kidnapped little children and held them for ransom. They took the child and left a note saying to leave a hundred dollars in the cemetery and