“So, how are they treating you?” Max leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. He glanced at the door as if he expected a guard might burst in at any moment.
“They’ve been…fine. Better than I expected,” I admitted. And it was true. “Officer Reilly, well, he was so worried about me in the blizzard, he says, he almost had a heart attack. Warden Sage gave me a long lecture about telling the truth.”
“You could have told us the truth too, Rocco. The whole truth,” said Max, banging a hand on the table. “You didn’t have to take it all on yourself. We would’ve helped. Mr. Riis was so worried. We all were. Weren’t we, Mary?”
She sat there looking stern. It would be better if she yelled, I thought.
“I’m sorry. B-but…I—I had to do it this way,” I stammered. “I couldn’t face you because of all the lies I’d told. It seemed the only way to put everything right—and make people really see. Besides, Max, I kept thinking about you being a reporter. You got a better story this way.”
“That’s true.” Max grinned. “About that. I have some good news for you. Mr. Riis was so impressed with your photograph that he’s forgiven you for taking his camera the way you did. And the organization Henry Bergh helped to start, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, is working to convict your padrone. He’ll soon be in jail.”
“What about the boys at Crosby Street?”
“Officials have contacted relatives, and some of the boys have already gone home,” Max told me. “Though I heard of one who can play the violin so well he’s been given a scholarship to study music here.”
Giuseppe!
“Those boys know they have you to thank, Rocco,” Max continued. “You allowed yourself to get caught, knowing you’d be sent back here to the House of Refuge.”
I flushed and glanced at Mary, who still said nothing. What is she thinking? If she never wants to talk to me again, why did she come?
“I’m learning more English and how to write better,” I told Max. “I’m in the printshop. That’s where I was, uh, before. I’m getting better at typesetting, and now I’m even learning to write stories too—just like you, Max.”
“That’s good,” he said, getting up. “You’re going to need those skills.”
“What do you mean?”
“When you get out, my newspaper is prepared to offer you a position as a messenger boy, under my direction, of course,” he said. “That’s how I started, you know. And with a good word from Jacob Riis, I think there’s a chance our appeal for you to be released early will be granted.”
I stammered my thanks. Maybe I wouldn’t spend my thirteenth birthday locked up after all.
“I’ll leave you two for a minute,” said Max. “I need to speak with the warden.”
Now I was in for it.
Mary and I were silent for a time. Finally, I got up my courage.
“I lied to you,” I said. “I lied a lot.”
“Yes, you did.”
“And you’re right to be angry. I’m sorry.”
I took a breath. “Another thing. It was me, that day. I was the boy who spat at you in the snow last year. I wanted to tell you that.”
“I knew that. You looked familiar somehow, then it came back to me when Da asked you about your scar,” Mary said. “After that, I just kept waiting to see if you’d say something.” She paused. “I thought I was your friend, Rocco. And friends don’t lie to each other.”
“I know. I guess I’m not very good at being a friend,” I told her. “I’d like to get better at it, though.”
That much was true. Pug, Jimmy, and George were still here in the House of Refuge. Pug, I knew, would never forgive me, and George would do whatever Pug ordered. But Jimmy and I had begun to at least say hello to one another.
“I’d like to be your friend, Mary Hallanan.”
“Okay.” Mary began to laugh. “I tried, but I knew I couldn’t be mad for long, especially after you helped me in the storm. Besides, I do remember that the first time we met, I hit you pretty hard with those snowballs!”
She pushed a package wrapped in brown paper across the table. “Go on. You can open it.”
“For me?”
“You left before I finished the story,” she said. “I thought you might want to know what happens in the end.”
Black Beauty! I ran my hand over the cover of the book.
“I don’t know what to say.”
She tossed her head, making her braid fly. “You don’t have to say anything. But you’d better read the whole book, all the way to the end. Then, when you get out of here, you can read it to me.”
“All right.” I grinned. “Though I’m not sure there’ll be time.”
“Why not?”
“We might…,” I told her, “we might be too busy being meddlers.”
“I don’t know about you, Rocco Zaccaro,” declared Mary Hallanan, “but I will never, ever be too busy to read Black Beauty.”
EPILOGUE
Spring 1889
Giving a delightful account of a parade, as well as some unexpected events that provide a satisfying and heartwarming conclusion to the tale
My story began with a donkey, but it ends with a horse. Lots of horses.
The spring of 1889 was one of the prettiest ever. The sun was so bright that people couldn’t help smiling; horses picked up their feet as if dancing through the streets.
Mary was still in school, and still volunteering for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She was also making a lot of progress in math, and was helping her father with his business more and more, especially since he was so busy finalizing the patent for his new rubber horseshoe pad. I worked for Mick Hallanan a couple of times a week now. He’d bought another building and had room for twenty-four horses. I could count Tim as a friend. And Sheridan, of course.
I had one other friend too. A few months after I was released from the House of Refuge (just in time for my birthday, I might add), I ran into Carlo, who looked much leaner and stronger than I remembered. He greeted me pleasantly, as if our last interactions had never occurred.
“Tony took a fall, Rocco. He’s at the House of Refuge,” he said. “You must have just missed him.”
I was glad for that. Tony would have made my life miserable. “What about you, Carlo? Are you still…you know?”
“Naw.” He shook his head. “I’m done with that. I decided if it could happen to a wire as good as Tony, I’d be next. I got a job at the harbor, unloading ships. It’s hard work. But you know what? My mother is real proud of me now. And I’ve got myself a girlfriend too.”
—
It turned out that I’d worked for Mick Hallanan twenty-two days, beginning with the Great Blizzard. Despite the fact that I’d lied to him (quite a lot, if you recall), the blacksmith had paid me for each one. I’d given two of those dollars to Luigi, but I kept the other twenty—the same amount the padrone had promised my family each year. Max had helped me figure out how to send it home to Calvello.
I had three jobs now, which Max and Mr. Hallanan said meant I was definitely becoming an American. “Americans love to work,” they both liked to say about their adopted country.
I read every newspaper I could get my hands on too. I was taking to heart Max Fischel’s advice that to be a good reporter, one has to know the news: not just the news from your own paper, but from rival papers too.
That’s how I discovered that the first harness parade had been held in London, England, in 1886, as a way to show pride in horses and how crucial it was to treat them kindly.
Now, led by the ASPCA and Mick Hallanan, New York City was holding one of our own. Mary and I got to march down Fifth Avenue at the very head of it, holding a banner reading: WORKHORSE PARADE OF NEW YORK CITY.
There was a grandstand of distinguished and important people; the best horses were awarded fine, shiny ribbons. More than a thousand drivers participated. We had a fair bit of waiting around in Washington S
quare that morning before we got started. But, I can tell you, I felt a surge of pride as we marched.
As Mary and I set out, the clattering of hooves in our ears, someone waved and shouted, “Rocco! Rocco Zaccaro!”
I laughed, and my sister Anna ran out to plant a kiss on my cheek.
—
Yes, Anna had come to America. We hoped to bring the rest of the family before too long, what with my earnings and Anna’s from her job in a shirtwaist factory. We rented rooms on Elizabeth Street from another family from Calvello. The best part? Signora Marinello’s sausages were almost as delicious as the ones Mama made.
It had taken a long time to get Anna here. With help from our priest back home, Anna had been writing simple letters to me ever since my money had reached them. She kept urging me to fulfill my promise to her.
But it wasn’t until I saved enough money to buy her passage—and she arrived in New York—that I heard exactly what happened after Luigi and Marco arrived safely home.
“One day, Luigi and Marco and their parents paid us a visit,” Anna told me. “It was like a procession. They had gifts and had come to thank Papa and Mama. We gathered outside our doorway, and Luigi made a big speech about how you saved them.”
I grinned, remembering how Luigi had made himself stay awake to open the door for me. “He was brave too.”
“That’s not all,” Anna went on. “Rosa’s mother came to see Mama and Papa too. She said that you had done a great service to their family.”
“She didn’t tell them what happened, did she?” I didn’t want Rosa to get into trouble.
Anna shook her head. “No, but Papa guessed, because the day before I left Calvello, he brought me to the piazza. Everyone was there, including the landlord. First, the fathers of Luigi and Marco told everyone that thanks to you, the padrone would go to jail.
“Papa spoke next. He told everyone he was entrusting me, his elder daughter, to you in America. ‘My son Rocco has made me proud,’ Papa declared.”
I flushed. “He said that?”
She nodded. “I wish you’d been there, Rocco.”
“That’s all right,” I told her. “Papa can tell me himself when he joins us.”
For the truth was, I no longer dreamed of going home to Calvello. This was my home.
Now, before this history draws to a close, I should tell you how it came to be. Jacob Riis first gave me the idea to put my story on paper.
“So much has happened to you, Rocco,” he said one evening as we were heading out to take more photographs. I was, under his direction, becoming a rather good photographer myself. “You should write it down.”
“You mean, an autobiography?”
“Exactly,” he replied. “I’m hoping to turn my own history into a book one day. I’ve already decided to include the story of my dog.”
“Do you know what you’ll call it?”
“Yes. I will entitle it The Making of an American.” He paused. “What about you?”
I didn’t think something so grand would fit my checkered, muddled story. All at once it came to me. “I know! I’ll call it A Bandit’s Tale.”
And so I have.
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A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Containing a variety of facts and resources of possible interest to the reader, as well as information illuminating historical personages
A BANDIT’S TALE AND THE PICARESQUE NOVEL
A Bandit’s Tale is historical fiction written in the style of a picaresque novel. The word “picaresque” comes from the Spanish pícaro, which means “rogue” in English. The first picaresque novels were published around 1600 in Spain, beginning a tradition in fiction that continues to this day.
What makes a story picaresque? Most literary critics agree that picaresque novels center on a protagonist who is not wellborn or aristocratic. Instead, like Rocco, the hero is a poor individual forced at a young age to live by his or her wits in an unfriendly or hostile society. The story is often told in the first person and usually has an episodic plot structure—our rogue is an outsider who wanders from misadventure to misadventure, somehow managing to survive. The main character sometimes addresses the reader directly, just as Rocco does. Picaresque heroes are often male, but not always. Perhaps the most celebrated female in the genre is Daniel Defoe’s creation Moll Flanders, from his 1722 novel The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders.
Probably the best-known American picaresque novel is The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow, which won the 1954 National Book Award for fiction. It begins: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.” (The observant reader may spot an echo of this opening in Rocco’s story.)
One of the masters of the comic picaresque novel was Henry Fielding, author of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) and The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742). The delightful chapter headings of both novels (which you can read online through Project Gutenberg) inspired those in this book.
The novelist Charles Dickens admired Fielding and even named one of his sons Henry Fielding Dickens. Dickens wrote several of his own novels in a picaresque style, including Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress (1838), which inspired the musical Oliver!, and The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844). Dickens used his novels to explore social issues of the day and, as we shall see below, could certainly be considered a “meddler” in his own right.
THE SETTING
A Bandit’s Tale takes place in New York City in the late nineteenth century. A time of tremendous change and turmoil, it seemed the ideal setting for a story of an uprooted boy living on the outskirts of the underworld. Through much of the nineteenth century, immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe crowded into the Lower East Side, peddling on the streets, doing piecework at home, and toiling in the sweatshops and factories of America’s burgeoning industrial revolution. Living conditions for poor families could be brutally harsh; immigrant children often began work at a young age.
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Charles Dickens was himself no stranger to hardship. At age twelve, after his father was put into debtors’ prison, Dickens lived on his own and worked in a boot-blacking factory. This personal experience may have been part of why Dickens advocated social responsibility in novels such as A Christmas Carol (1843).
During his tour of the United States in 1842, Dickens went to Five Points, the heart of New York City’s slums. He recorded his impressions in a book commonly referred to as American Notes: “This is the place: these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth….From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, some figure crawls half-awakened….Where dogs would howl to lie, women, and men, and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings.”
Dickens influenced other social reformers of the time, including the pioneering photojournalist Jacob A. Riis. An immigrant to the United States from Denmark, Riis once worked selling subscriptions to Dickens’s novels door to door. Later, established as a reporter, Riis used both stories and images to illuminate the lives of the city’s poor.
A Bandit’s Tale takes place during a pivotal time in Riis’s career. One day, in the fall of 1887, Riis read a newspaper account of the invention of flash photography. Immediately he realized the impact that photographs could have on the public. Riis taught himself photography and began using it to shed light on the darkest corners of the tenements. (Check out the “Reading and Resources” section for information on how you can see a demonstration of the flash technique and equipment Riis used to take his startling photographs.)
Published in 1890, Riis’s groundbreaking work How the Other Half Lives is considered the first book to use photojournalism in the battle for social justice. Riis’s efforts to expose untenable living conditions
for the poor attracted the attention of the future U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1895 was named police commissioner of New York City.
Roosevelt became a partner to Riis in his crusade. They championed reforms such as tearing down the notorious tenements in the Five Points neighborhood, establishing parks, and requiring landlords to provide adequate light and sanitation. They also investigated contaminated water supplies, which could lead to cholera, and worked to enact child-labor laws.
In 1897, reflecting on what they had achieved together, Roosevelt told Riis that he had undertaken this work “because I was trying, with much stumbling and ill success, but with genuine effort, to put into practice the principles you had set forth, and to live up to the standard you had established.”
THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN AND ANIMALS
In A Bandit’s Tale, the fictional characters Rocco and Mary find themselves caught up in two social-reform movements of this time: preventing cruelty to children and improving the treatment of animals. In the mid-1800s in New York City, these were closely linked.
Rocco Zaccaro is a street musician from the town of Calvello in southern Italy. His situation is based on documented examples of Italian padroni bringing children (both boys and girls) from this region to Paris, London, and New York to be street musicians. In New York in the early 1870s, Italian padroni kept children at 45 Crosby Street in conditions much like those described in A Bandit’s Tale.
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In the summer of 1873, one of those boys, named Joseph, ran away to Central Park, where he hid for several days before being discovered. His story, reported in the New York Times, helped to raise public awareness. Legislation was passed (the “Padrone Act” of 1874) to stop this exploitation of children. Information in A Bandit’s Tale on street musicians is based on an excellent scholarly book by John E. Zucchi.
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