by Carol Zoref
My father punched the ragman across the jaw. “You think I’m an animal that would steal for you? Maybe get arrested? Get deported?”
“Are you crazy, Sol?” cried Uncle David, who had been waiting for my father so they could begin the subway trip home. He pulled my father away from the ragman, but my father struggled out of his grip. My uncle locked his arms around my father’s chest. My father always vowed in a pious way, though not without a touch of pride, that this was the one and only time he ever punched another grown man.
The startled ragman, still stunned, crawled out of the scummy puddle he had fallen into. He wiped his bloodied lower lip with a rag that he then buried back in his cart. To their astonishment, the ragman introduced my father and uncle to a man at the reins of the next cart over. “You deserve it, you filthy, greenhorn, sons-of-a-bitches Yids,” the ragman yelled as he rode off.
“You’ll never get out of there,” cried Aunt Sara that evening when she heard the news about the job on Barren Shoal. She was shaking her head and weeping and soon Flat Sammy was wailing in unison. My father tried distracting Sammy with a hand puppet he fashioned from a sock, hoping that Sara would get distracted too. “The stench there is poison,” cried my aunt, who was my father’s oldest sister. “The smell of it will kill you, living out there like an Italian, sorting through garbage.”
“It’s a factory job, Sara. And a place to live.”
“We smell that place in the summer when the wind blows. Fheh! The cows in the Queens, they stop giving milk. The rich people complain up on Carnegie Hill. I know this; one of the ladies in our building, Mrs. Aryeh, does sewing there.”
“On Barren Island?” asked my uncle.
“Carnegie Hill,” my aunt replied.
“This isn’t Barren Island,” said Uncle David. “It’s another place: Barren Shoal.”
“Did you wake up today stupid? It’s called Barren because nothing grows there,” she went on.
“It will be better for us all if...” my father began.
“Don’t tell me things you don’t know,” she stammered. “Now you’re some kind of authority? What do you know from better?”
She was addressing not just my father, but my uncle as well, who she was holding equally responsible for the idea. Knowing my aunt, she was speaking to anyone who would listen, including Mrs. Aryeh, from downstairs, who was also part of my aunt’s sewing circle, and who came up in the middle of the commotion to drop off some cloth. “Tell them, Frieda,” my aunt said to Mrs. Aryeh. “Tell them about your ladies up on Carnegie Hill.”
“There’s probably more fresh air on Barren Shoal, by the ocean, than in all of Brooklyn,” said my uncle. “And smells don’t kill you, for heaven’s sake.”
“What’s heaven got to do with it?” she said, louder.
“Let it go, Sara,” shouted Uncle David, who was now cradling Flat Sammy like an oversized doll too large to tuck completely into his lap.
“There’s no going back and forth so easy,” she shouted in return, “no subway to the incinerators. You go, you’re gone.”
“Enough, Sara,” said my father. “You’ll see us plenty.” He took Flat Sammy from my uncle’s arms, kissed the flat of his head, and stroked the back of his neck with the hand puppet. The only sound left was the whistle of Sammy’s troubled breathing.
According to my father, it was Mrs. Aryeh who broke the silence. “Stanley,” she yelled out the window to her husband’s little ground floor studio, where he took pictures on weekends because what he was paid making pictures for the newspapers was not enough. “Come up to the roof and bring the camera. This family needs a picture!” I do not know why she suggested the roof, where Mr. Aryeh’s pigeon flock cooped. Maybe his little studio was impossibly small for a whole family.
There is a family portrait from that day, a copy of which is now tucked in the frame of my bedroom mirror. My mother is slender, her thick auburn hair pulled back into a handsome French braid. My beautiful father, still a boy really, has one arm around my mother’s waist and the other around a stony-faced Sara. My aunt is cradling Flat Sammy in her arms, the flat back of his skull resting against her breast. Uncle David, a head taller than my father, is standing behind the three of them, his long, slender arms wrapped around their shoulders. Standing before them, leaning against her father’s knees, is my cousin Ruthie.
Five days later my parents went to live among the twenty other families on Barren Shoal.
CHAPTER 2
My father could have been a butcher. The animals he dismembered on Barren Shoal were just a different kind of dead. Hundreds of carcasses arrived every day: work horses that collapsed from illness or exhaustion; dogs found roaming in packs and shot for sport by policemen; pigs, goats, and cows too diseased to be disguised and dressed as meat. The Barren Shoal cutters beheaded and quartered them, gutted them, severed their limbs, spilling new blood on top of the old blood that clotted the cutting room floor. The loaders—less skilled and fewer in numbers—shoveled the usable pieces into vats where they were rendered into commercial grease and glue. The unusable body parts went into ovens where they were burned down to ash and smoke.
“You must know a little about chopping animals from making shoes,” said Mr. Boyle, the plant foreman, on my father’s first day. “Heh, heh, heh.” His laughter was deep and low, and no one ever knew if he was talking the sound or really laughing because his teeth were clenching the cigar he always had lit to camouflage the smell in the air. My father, who had only a dozen words of English at his disposal, laughed with him.
My brother Noah was born in 1914, seven months after my parents arrived on Barren Shoal. On the morning that my mother was in their cabin in labor, gasping and pushing and moaning my father’s name, my father was butchering a draft horse that had died of the colic. A midwife, a Jewish lady who lived on Barren Island, came over on the high tide by rowboat to help my mother; she sent her son to fetch my father when Noah finally arrived. Mr. Boyle told the boy to wait while my father finished slitting the dead horse’s belly in order that its knotted intestines could be pulled away.
Noah was named in memory of my father’s great uncle, Noach Eisenstein, but I like to think it was in honor of my brother being conceived on a ship crossing the Atlantic. I was born five years later and named Marta in honor of my mother’s mother Magda, though she told me it was in memory of some great uncle whose name was Moishe. My mother made up her own rules regarding the traditions about giving names, certain that once she left for America she would never lay eyes on her mother again and that the prohibition against naming a newborn for someone living would not matter. About that she was right.
My mother never saw the baby blanket that my grandmother knitted after the letter arrived back in Zyrmuny announcing the birth of Noah. My grandmother slept with it every night, she explained in a letter to my mother, the only way she had of swaddling her first grandchild. The blanket was made of sheep wool dyed with turmeric, which turned it amber. I would like to have seen it. My younger sister Helen arrived three years later, also in July, and Grandma knitted another blanket, this one dyed burgundy with beetroot. I am surprised that I do not remember the color of the blanket she knit for me, but I cannot. Such a silly thing to forget. The Olympic Games took place in Paris the summer Helen was born and my mother said that this baby kicking so hard in the final weeks of her pregnancy must be an Olympian. She named her Helen, from the ancient Greek story that was even told by people in Zyrmuny, which was not really all that far from ancient Troy. In 1926, Sofia Paradissis and her parents, brother Yorgos, and grandmother moved next door. A family from a place even closer to Troy. Sofia was as dark-haired as I was blonde, straight haired to my curls, with brown eyes to my hazel and a round face just like mine. Sofia was 18 months older than me, the girl on the Barren Shoal closest to my age.
The Paradissis family had traveled from their village in Greece to Ellis Island to Brooklyn. From there, Mr. Paradissis’ childhood friend from the village, Mr. Kost
as, brought them to Barren Shoal to take the place of Mr. DeWitt, who Mr. Boyle moved from the cutting room into the gatehouse on account of the arthritis in his hands. Between the worsening arthritis and the years of contact with enzymes in the dead animal meat, Mr. DeWitt’s thumbs had curled into fat utility hooks. At night we would see him sitting at his post clenching a horsehide pouch filled with smoldering coals. Mr. Boyle had fired Mr. Morgan, one of the old Negro coal stokers who had become the gatekeeper when his back gave out, so that Mr. DeWitt could have his job. The company took back Mr. DeWitt’s house for the Paradissises to live in. Mr. DeWitt, who lived alone, moved into a new gatehouse some of the men built for him so that he did not have to live in a black man’s room. It was shameful, people being shuffled around from one house to another and Mr. Morgan being sent away from Barren Shoal. But no one talked about it. From then on Mr. DeWitt sat at his post clenching the horsehide pouch filled with the smoldering coals, the heat a medication for the pain in his joints. Soon enough the gatehouse became a place where the men would gather.
Mr. Morgan watched the demolition of his gatehouse from the stern of the garbage barge on which he made the crossing to Sheepshead Bay, where, I imagine, he took a streetcar to the apartment where his wife lived after he lost his job as a stoker and their Barren Shoal house was given to the stoker that followed, also a black man. The stokers were always black. It was the most dangerous job on account of being closest to the fires. The worst paying job, too, I later found out when the union troubles began and Mr. Boyle posted the men’s salaries in order to turn them against each other. The old gatehouse was in pieces before the barge with Mr. Morgan cleared the harbor.
Within weeks of her family’s arrival, Sofia and I were rambling back and forth all day from her house to mine and to hers again. Mr. Paradissis, a carpenter in Greece, got assigned to the cutting room with my father. Sofia’s mother, like all the mothers, raised chickens that kept the family in eggs until the coldest days of winter, when the hens refused to lay. The Paradissises, like everyone, planted a vegetable garden on every inch of the sandy patch behind their little house. My mother raised lettuces and cucumbers, pole beans and squashes, cabbages, garlic, beets, tomatoes, radishes, dill, bay leaf, and parsley; Mrs. Paradissis introduced her to dandelion greens and escarole, eggplant and zucchini, rosemary and oregano. Mr. Paradissis set up hives. Soon we had real honey. He built a little arbor for growing grapes. We fed the plants a muck of garden scraps, eggshells, and disintegrated fish.
Noah and Yorgos, close in age, were more cautious about friendship than Sofia and I. Noah never spoke with anyone, even me, unless he had to. Though he was around plenty, the door to his room was always closed. One day, a couple of months after the Paradissises moved to Barren Shoal, my mother said I could go fishing with Noah if Sofia came along to stop me from pestering him. Mrs. Paradissis said yes but only if Yorgos went along to watch over Sofia. Mrs. Paradissis was very old world, even if she had nothing to worry about with Noah.
My father rigged poles for each of us, and after that we never returned home empty-handed. Most days we got flounder and blowfish. When the current was cold there were plenty of blues. Our mothers split the catch evenly no matter which one of us had pulled in what or how many. There were lots of blue crabs and chowder clams for the taking, gorged on what the garbage scows lost to the sea. These we carried home in a burlap sack for the Paradissises. It was impossible to keep kosher on Barren Shoal, but my mother said it was easy enough not to eat traif. My mother sometimes sent Helen along with us so she could run herself tired in the sand. She was only three years old then, but Yorgos made a toy pole for her from a driftwood stick and some string. She would carry it proudly until she got tired and then she would cry for someone to carry her. Sometimes we made her walk home anyway to stop her from becoming spoiled, we told ourselves. The fact was I did not want her bothering me any more than Noah wanted me pestering him.
By the time the Paradissis family celebrated their first year on Barren Shoal, Sofia and I were inseparable, and our parents had given us permission to wander the entire island, together, on our own.
On a foul-smelling September day, after a successful afternoon of crabbing near the saltwater marsh, Sofia and I triumphantly returned with a dozen blue crabs struggling in the burlap catch bag. Our first stop was to return Helen to my mother; next we went to surprise Mrs. Paradissis with our bounty. We had stopped at twelve crabs because thirteen was an unlucky number, according to Mrs. Paradissis, who was a believer in things that were no harder to imagine believing in than the things my own parents still believed in, like an intervening God, you should pardon me.
Sofia set the bag on the kitchen table like a trophy. Mrs. Paradissis did not look up from the thin, fragile sheets of phyllo pastry she was brushing with oil using one of the duck feathers we collected for her from the beach. Sofia and I helped ourselves to the plate of special-occasion-only kourabiedes cookies airing on a sideboard.
“Lucky I don’t feed you to the crabs,” said Mrs. Paradissis, whose attention turned to us from wherever it had been.
We stood there with half-eaten cookies in our hands and telltale confectioner’s sugar dusting our lips and noses.
Mrs. Paradissis removed the plate of cookies from the sideboard, relocating them closer to where she was working the phyllo. “Look how people feeding themselves,” she said. “Poor people eat the barge. And you stealing cookies and not ask.” We knew she meant the people who scavenged the barges on the trip over from Brooklyn and Manhattan, picking through the dead animals for anything they could eat.
Sofia lifted the catch bag with the crabs from the table and signaled for me to follow. She quietly placed the bag on the floor. One more step and we could both be out the door.
“You live like them, those barge people, and need steal food?” Mrs. Paradissis continued, her voice rising in the broken English she was speaking for my benefit. Sofia and I shook our heads. “You some goat you can’t speak?”
“No,” said Sofia. Her cheeks puffed up the way they did when she got upset, like a small blowfish.
“Every day something bad, these girls,” said Mrs. Paradissis, like she was talking to someone else. Grandma Paradissis hardly counted since she was stone deaf and spoke no English. “And you, Marta, such a pretty girl. Your mommy and daddy say to take and not asking?” She shook her head in a scolding way and said we were old enough to know better. I was seven; Sofia was eight and a half.
“I told Marta it was okay,” said Sofia. She treasured occasions, even bad ones, that allowed her to remind me that she was the boss.
“Marta knows better. You too. You girls want, first you ask.”
It could have ended there, but Sofia would not let it go.
“Why the kourabiedes, Mommy? There’s no holiday.”
“Your brother asked,” said Mrs. Paradissis. She lifted the burlap catch bag and dumped the crabs into the sink. They were quiet for a moment, stunned by the light and air. Then they scratched and crawled over one another, like they could fight their way back to the beach. Mrs. Paradissis did not thank us for the crabs; she never thanked us for things that were expected.
Sofia’s cheeks got puffy again. “It’s not Yorgos’ birthday.”
Yorgos was six years older than Sofia. Mrs. Paradissis treated him like Zeus, a god trapped among us simple, mortal human beings. Sofia said this was the way all Greek mothers treated their boys.
“If he gets them, I want...”
“Signomi!” Mrs. Paradissis shouted, though she was smiling. She cautiously extracted a crab from the sink and held it up for inspection. The crab flailed about furiously, pinching the kitchen air with its pincers.
“What?” I asked Sofia.
“‘Sorry,’” Sofia translated.
“I accept,” said Mrs. Paradissis triumphantly, though it was obvious that Sofia was interpreting, not apologizing. “Now go,” she said, pleased with herself for tricking Sofia. She pressed another kourabie
des into my hand and pushed me out the door.
After waiting a lifetime we entered grade school in September. The center of our universes shifted overnight from our little houses and yards to the schoolhouse, where it stayed until I had a universe large enough to keep me busy for a lifetime.
A whitewashed wood and tar cabin identical to our houses, the schoolhouse was little more than a frail box with a thin roof and walls. Our parents were grateful for those boxes even though they were poorly insulated—even though the toilets were outside in tiny huts and the indoor tap ran cold. They did not yet know that Mr. Boyle’s monthly “occupancy charge” went straight into his pocket, a fact revealed when there were union troubles. We knew nothing, either, of how in other parts of New York the schools had desks with inkwells, instead of discarded tables with legs sawed short for the smaller children and planks of wood balanced on saw horses for the big ones. The one black child in the school said that in the Negro schools in Brooklyn the pupils sat on church pews and used their laps as desks. Our teacher, Miss Finn, made do with a 30-year-old globe commemorating the dawning of the 20th century. On its base were the words: Human Progress Through Technology.
Every day on our walk to school Sofia and I saw the barge scavengers Mrs. Paradissis compared us to when we swiped her cookies. The factory owners did not care about the scavengers. Glue was made from bones, not from the rotting meat and sinew that the scavengers picked until the carcasses barely resembled the animals they had been. So long as the factory got the bones, no one bothered the scavengers coming and going. The men on Barren Shoal did not talk about them, as if that kind of poverty was contagious. Every day Sofia and I saw children foraging with adults. Some of the adult scavengers would wave a child over to work a rich find; others pushed them away. They ate while they worked, stuffing extra little pieces into their pockets and spitting into the water the unchewable. It was enough to make anyone sick, which it surely did, but it was better than starving. As for our mothers, they went on feeding us as much as they could.