Proulx found fertile, if rocky, soil for her first two novels (Postcards and The Shipping News) in the far northeastern corner of North America. In Accordion Crimes she ranges much further afield. The novel follows an accordion from the hands of its maker in Sicily in 1890 until it is flattened by a truck in Florida in 1996. In the intervening century it passes through the hands of a host of unlucky owners and their kin: Abelardo Relampago, who dies from the bite of a poisonous spider; Dolor Gagnon, decapitated by his own chain saw; Silvano, cut down in the jungles of Venezuela by an Indian's arrow.


From Publishers Weekly
America's ethnic minorities have rarely been rendered with the insight, intuition and unsentimental candor that Proulx brings to the large canvas of characters and reaches of landscape in this ambitious new work. The narrative has eight parts, each composed of short vignettes that depict the cultural baggage?the attitudes, behaviors and social conditioning?that immigrants brought with them, and the ways in which they joined, yet held aloof from, American society. Beginning in the late 1800s and ending 100 years later, the novel follows a vividly realized cast of characters, whose names are as colorful as their stories: Ludwig Messermacher, Abelardo Relampago Salazar, Dolor Gagnon, Onesiphore Malefoot, Hieronim Przybysz. Their common bond is ownership of a green button accordion, which was brought to these shores by a Sicilian immigrant and, after his death at the hands of a lynch mob, was transported back and forth across the continent by various combinations of inheritance, violence and bad luck. With mesmerizing skill, Proulx summons up the attitudes and speech of her characters, vigorously detailing a formidable number of settings, including New Orleans, Hornet, Texas, Random, Maine, Prank, Iowa, and Old Glory, Minnesota. She can evoke a teeming, fetid slum as clearly as she can a Montana ranch. An invariable characteristic of these immigrants and their families is the tendency to think of others as "Americans." In their own minds, they are still Italians or Germans or Norwegians or Poles or French Canadian or Cajuns. Almost without exception, they express ancient prejudices and newfound racism: the New Orleans natives hate the Italians, who hate the blacks; Iowa's Germans hate the Irish. What makes all this so spectacular is th at Proulx is a master at incorporating potentially numbing detail and specificity?from the components of an accordion to the bloodlines of Appaloosas and the stages of a Polish funeral?into her vigorous prose. Traditional ethnic music?played by various characters during their brief ownership of the increasingly derelict accordion?is conveyed with impressive authority. The range of scenes, from a drunken birthday party that resembles an animated Booth cartoon to a brutal reaction to a civil rights sit-in at a lunch counter, bespeaks a brilliant imagination. Proulx makes grotesque accidents, bloody catastrophes and bizarre events seem an inescapable part of human existence. If eventually some sameness of mood occurs, and a resultant diminution of tension, this is balanced by the reader's interest in the accordion's odyssey and in the lives it touches en route. For this is a cautionary tale in which pride and greed and self-delusion vie with basic human needs for love, comfort and spiritual sustenance. BOMC dual main selection; author tour. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Proulx (The Shipping News, Audio Reviews, LJ 1/96) combines black humor with stark tragedy in this disturbing series of vignettes centered around the adventures of a small green accordion. The accordion is used by different men as a vehicle of creativity: the instrument for musical expression of the immigrant's dream. The accordion is also something of an evil talisman; its maker is lynched by a mob in 1890, thus beginning the instrument's odyssey through America. It passes through the possession of owners who die painfully of gangrene, snake and spider bites, and suicide. The underlying theme is best stated by a character at the recording's beginning?"America is a place of lies and deceit"?and is grimly underscored by violence and prejudice. Although this is depressing as social commentary, the author's use of description and detail is remarkably original. Edward Herrmann's reading offers the perfect inflection. Recommended.?Jacqueline Seewald, Red Bank Regional H.S. Lib., N.J.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Walter Kendrick
Birds, building materials and human body parts are equal grist to Ms. Proulx's language mill, which grinds brilliant prose out of all of them.


From AudioFile
How beautifully written! From its arresting first paragraph, this epic of immigrant aspiration grips the listener with its canny plotting, vivid characterization and masterful style. In patrician measures, Edward Herrmann, best known as TV's FDR, gives us such a flawlessly tasteful, insightful rendering that he makes us feel as if Pulitzer-winner Proulx created the story to be read aloud. One suspects that the abridgment is a bit less sensitive than the performance for some events seem to rush by too quickly. Perhaps, this is on purpose for it makes one want to turn off the tape and pick up the book--in this instance a not unlaudable goal. Y.R. An AUDIOFILE Earphones Award winner. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
The spectacular success of Proulx's Pulitzer Prize^-winning Shipping News (1993) inspired high hopes for her new book, expectations well met with this compelling if harrowing cycle of stories about immigrant life in America. Proulx uses the fate of an accordion, built by an ambitious Sicilian immigrant in 1890, to connect colorful and hair-raising tales that ultimately span a century of American madness. The accordion maker had hoped to bring his entire family to America, but after his wife is struck by a mysterious malady--the first of many bizarre ailments that bedevil Proulx's unlucky characters--only he and his youngest son make it to New Orleans, where they discover a city seething with corruption, hate, and violence. Even music is subject to bigotry, and the accordion maker ends up dying in an anti-Italian riot. In what becomes a wildly ironic sequence of freak accidents, bizarre illnesses, weird suicides, odd coincidences, bad karma, dumb scams, and poor judgment, the accordion surfaces in North Dakota, Texas, Maine, and Chicago. It is coveted, held, and squeezed by people of Italian, African, German, Mexican, French, Polish, and Irish descent, giving voice to their laments and dreams. In each of the ethnic microcosms she so masterfully creates, Proulx presents us with bitter insights into the malleability and insidiousness of prejudice and the sorrow of lost pasts. As we keep our eye on that precious accordion, we're held rapt by Proulx's imagination, cultural and social perception, and fluency in absurdity. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Proulx's third novel, and first since the spectacular success of her Pulitzerwinning The Shipping News (1993), is a panoramic mosaic of the immigrant experience in 20th-century America that confirms her oft-noted similarity to Steinbeck--and offers the most comprehensive survey of working-class life since Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy. It begins in 1890 with the passage to ``La Merica'' of a Sicilian accordion maker and his small son, and their ordeal in New Orleans, where the (nameless) father finds work on the docks and meets a violent fate that will become the pattern engulfing virtually all of the story's successive characters. Proulx then telescopes the lives of those into whose hands the Sicilian's button accordion passes--whether it's given, sold, or stolen- -through the next hundred years. Thus we observe the mingled passion for music and brute violence of a German immigrant family in North Dakota; a brawling Acadian clan and its Cajun relations; the Polish Przbyszes of Chicago; and many others. The sheer number of varied and vivid characters created, and the specifics of their lives, are enough to make this one of the most accomplished American novels of recent years. Proulx's angular, image-filled prose is tuned down a notch or two here; the demands imposed by the book's staggering content obviously required that it be somewhat more conventionally expository. The real fire is in her tone- perfect dialogue. Some may object to what seems an unrealistic profusion of melodramatic incident. But surely Proulx's point is that America's underclass--particularly its non-native one--is especially vulnerable and (here we see her daring) prone to angry confrontation and early death. She faces it unflinchingly, and the results are grim, depressing, and memorable. The popular-literary audience that loved The Shipping News will devour this big novel as well. (Book-of-the-Month Club dual main selection) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
John Sutherland The New Republic In scale, in vision and in imaginative darling, Accordion Crimes uses all the range and the resources of Proulx's mature prose....She is a great novelist.

Michael Dirda The Washington Post Book World You would think Proulx would have the simple decency to make her third novel merely so-so, if only to let someone else grab a little limelight. No such luck...She now seems to know everything about writing. And a fair amount about life, too.

Phoebe-Lou Adams Atlantic Monthly Splendid...Ms. Proulx is a magician.


Review
Kathleen Byrne Globe and Mail Review of Books Crisp and authoritative, her spare, dense prose is mesmerizing ...A majestic novel.


Review
Kathleen Byrne Globe and Mail Review of Books Crisp and authoritative, her spare, dense prose is mesmerizing ...A majestic novel.


Book Description
E. Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes is a masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent. Proulx brings the immigrant experience in America to life through the eyes of the descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Africans, Irish-Scots, Franco-Canadians and many others, all linked by their successive ownership of a simple green accordion. The music they make is their last link with the past -- voice for their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance. Proulx's prodigious knowledge, unforgettable characters and radiant language make Accordion Crimes a stunning novel, exhilarating in its scope and originality.


Simon & Schuster
Accordion Crimes traces the long odyssey of a button accordion, an instrument made by a Sicilian who immigrates to New Orleans in 1891. Imprisoned in a round-up of Italian suspects after the political murder of the chief of police, the accordion maker is lynched, and his accordion falls into the hands of Apollo, a black steamboat screwman. The instrument begins its long, erratic voyage through 20th-century America, passing through the hands of the descendants of slaves, immigrants and their children, some of whom learn that the cost of becoming American is to surrender the private definition of self.

Accordion Crimes is alive with vividly drawn characters who sometimes meet violent, strange ends, and who, at other times, succeed in a hard world. Filled with indelible images, Proulx's latest novel is charged with sardonic wit and is, at different turns, darkly hilarious and heartbreakingly sad. What we see as the accordion weakens and disintegrates is a haunting and ominous sense of what is America.


About the Author
E. Annie Proulx won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Shipping News, as well as the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. She is also the author of Postcards, her first novel and winner of a PEN/Faulkner Award, and a collection of short stories, Heart Songs and Other Stories. She lives in Wyoming.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1 The Accordion Maker The instrument It was as if his eye were an ear and a crackle went through it each time he shot a look at the accordion. The instrument rested on the bench, lacquer gleaming like wet sap. Rivulets of light washed mother-of-pearl, the nineteen polished bone buttons, winked a pair of small oval mirrors rimmed in black paint, eyes seeking eyes, seeking the poisonous stare of anyone who possessed malocchio, eager to reflect the bitter glance back at the glancer. He had cut the grille with a jeweler's saw from a sheet of brass, worked a design of peacocks and olive leaves. The hasps and escutcheons that fastened the bellows frames to the case ends, the brass screws, the zinc reed plate, the delicate axle, the reeds themselves, of steel, and the aged Circassian walnut for the case, he had purchased all of these. But he had constructed and fashioned the rest: the V-shaped wire springs with their curled eyes that lay under the keys and returned them to position in the wake of stamping fingers, the buttons, the palette rods. The trenched bellows, the leather valves and gaskets, the skived kidskin gussets, the palette covers, all of these were from a kid whose throat he had cut, whose hide he had tanned with ash lime, brains and tallow. The bellows had eighteen folds. The wood parts, of obdurate walnut to resist damp and warpage, he had sawed and sanded and fitted, inhaling the mephitic dust. The case, once glued up, rested for six weeks before he proceeded. He was not interested in making ordinary accordions. He had his theory, his idea of the fine instrument; with the proof of this one he planned to make his fortune in La Merica. He set the fourths and then the fifths with a tuning fork and his naked ear, catching an aching but pleasurable dissonance. His sense of pitch was sure, he heard harmonies in the groan of hinges. The button action was quick, the subtle clacking like the rattle of dice in a gambler's hand. From a distance the voice of the instrument sounded hoarse and crying, reminding listeners of the brutalities of love, of various hungers. The notes fell, biting and sharp; it seemed the tooth that bit was hollowed with pain. The world is a staircase The accordion maker was hairy and muscular, a swell of black hair rising above a handsome face, an ear like a pastry circle. His irises were an amber color: in his youth he suffered the name "Chicken Eye." When he was twenty he had defied his blacksmith father and left the village to work in the north in the accordion factories of Castelfidardo. His father cursed him and they never spoke again. He returned to the village when Alba, his betrothed, sent news of the opportunity to rent a plot of land with a handkerchief vineyard and miniature house. He was glad to leave the city for he was embroiled in a dangerous affair with a married woman. His hairiness drew women's attention. From time to time in their marriage his wife accused him of infidelities, and there were several. Accordions and hair drew women, could he help this? She knew it -- his gift for music had attracted her powerfully, his silky pelt, the hair curling from the throat of his shirt. He took chills easily, shivered when the sun passed behind a cloud. His wife was warm and it was possible to stand close to her and feel the heat that radiated from her as from a little stove. Her hands seized children, plates, chicken feathers, goats' teats with the same hot grasp. The rented vines, Calabrese, Negro d'Avola, Spagnolo, made a harsh wine without name, sold as a blending wine to foreigners. It was the local custom to hold the fermenting must on the skins for a week, the source of the wine's rough character and purple-black color. Swallowed straight down, it raked mouth and throat and, as other astringent liquids, was reputed to have beneficial medicinal qualities. The foreign buyers paid very little for it, but as it was the only possible source of cash income, the growers could not protest. The lack of land, money and goods, the boil of people, produced an atmosphere of scheming and connivance, of sleight of hand, of oaths of collusion, of brute force. What other way through life? Besides the vineyard the accordion maker and his wife rented five old olive trees and a fig espaliered against the wall, and their lives were concerned with children, goats, hoeing and pruning, lugging panniers of grapes. At night the poverty of the place sounded in the whistle of wind through the dry grapestalks and the rub of moaning branches. Their hold on the plot of land weakened as the landlord, who lived in Palermo in a house with a copper roof, increased the rent one year and again the next. The accordion maker's shop was at the end of the garden -- a hut that once housed sick goats with a floor space no larger than a double bed. On a shelf he had pots of lacquer, a box of flake shellac, various glues and sizings, squares of mother-of-pearl, two corked vials the size of a little finger containing bronze paint. Here were files, scrapers, his chisels -- one a flake of chert he had unearthed from the soil -- and gouges, taps, dies, metal tongues and hooks, tweezers and lengths of spring-steel wire, calipers and rules, nippers, punches and clamps, many of these tools stolen from the factory in Castelfidardo -- how else to gain possession of these necessary things? With a rigger's brush of a few sable hairs he painted scrolls and keys, flourishing triple borders bristling with bronze thorns. He sold the instruments to a dealer in the market town who, like the wine merchants, paid him almost nothing, enough to feed magpies, perhaps. As the accordion maker gained mastery over his craft he began to imagine a life not possible in the malicious village, but likely enough in the distant place that rose and set in his thoughts: La Merica. He thought of a new life, fresh and unused, of money hanging in the future like pears hidden in high leaves. He whispered and murmured at night to his wife. She answered, "never." "Listen," he said aloud furiously, waking the baby, "you know what your brother wrote." That bracket-faced fool Alessandro had sent a letter, spotted with red sauce and grimy fingerprints, that said come, come and change your destiny, turn suffering into silver and joy. "The world is a staircase," hissed the accordion maker in the darkness. "Some go up and some come down. We must ascend." She refused to agree, put her hands over her ears and moaned when he announced a departure date, later pointed up her chin and rolled her eyes like a poisoned horse when he brought home the trunk with metal corners. The General's paralysis The accordion maker's posture, suggestive of hidden violence and challenge, caught the eye of other men. He stood with the left foot planted, the right cocked suggestively, his shoes black broken things. His character betrayed his appearance; he seemed louche and aggressive, but was not. He disliked grappling with problems. He depended on his wife to comb through difficulties. He produced the vaulting idea, the optimistic hope, she ordered the way in everything -- until now. How many wake in the night, stretch out a hand to the sleeping mate and encounter a corpse? In the evening the accordion maker's wife had wept a little, lamented the looming journey, but there was nothing, nothing that gave a sign paralysis would come in a few hours to crouch above her ribs and thrust shims into her joints, stiffen her tongue, freeze her brain and fix her eyes. The accordion maker's fingers trembled up the rigid torso, the stone arm, the hard neck. He believed she was a dead woman. He lit the lamp, cried her name, slapped her marble shoulders. Yet her heart beat, sending the blood pounding through the pipes of veins until her rib-harp vibrated and this encouraged him to believe the affliction was a temporary fit that would ease when daylight came, but it did not. As days passed it became clear that this paralysis was an evil put on her by some choleric force, the will of an enemy that she never leave the village, for she had been a healthy woman, her only defects an occasional seizure dating from childhood and a clouded eye, injured by a hurtling almond as she danced at her wedding supper. She was never ill, up from childbed within a day, running her household with authority. Her strong contralto voice was made for command. Her father had called her "the General" when she was a child. Such a person has enemies. The accordion maker was ready to throw himself from a cliff or rush into the wilderness, only let someone say what he should do. He appealed to his mother-in-law. The mother of the paralyzed woman folded her arms. It was as though a powerful dwarf with a basso voice spoke from within the baggy yellow skin. "Go. Three years. Make money and return. We will care for her. It is better that the man goes alone first." The wet olive eyes shifted. The old father nodded a little to show the good sense in this advice. Their oldest son, Alessandro, had emigrated to New York two years earlier and sent them letters stuffed with money, letters describing his handsome clothes, his position, his fine new bathtub (the bathtub in which he was fatally attacked a few years later by a Bohemian, lunatic with rage because Alessandro had kicked his son for making a noise on the stair; even then the old parents denied that their family was cursed). The accordion maker's daughters, sniveling because they could not go on the ship to La Merica, were parceled out with aunts. Silvano, the only boy -- conceived on a Sunday -- was eleven, old enough to stand a day's work; he would be the one to accompany the father. The girls looked at him with hatred. Another who suffered from these events was the frozen woman's younger sister, a child herself, whose task it became to funnel gruel through the stiff lips, to ease the stinking cloths from beneath her sister's dribbling vents, to roll the wasting body with its raw bedsores to new positions, to drip clear water into the dry, unseeing eyes. The helpful young man The father and son left in the dimming starlight of morning, descending the steep path with jumping steps, away from the rigid woman and her relatives' restless eyes, the resentful girls, past the stone in the shape of a beehive that marked the limit of the village. The accordion maker carried the trunk, his tools and the instrument on his back in a kind of harness made from knotted rope. The boy, Silvano, bent under a rolled-up sheepskin and a grey blanket, a canvas bag stuffed with cheese and loaves of bread. The village was out of sight forever in less than seventy steps. They walked for two days, took a ferry across glittering, white-stippled water, then trudged on to a railway station. During this journey the father hardly spoke, thinking first, with tears marring his view, that his wife had been the cloth of his shirt, the saliva in his mouth, then recasting the situation in the harsh male proverb -- the best cold meat in a man's house is a dead wife. Unfortunately his wife was neither quick nor dead. The boy, gangling, humiliated by his father's silence, no longer asked questions but, as they approached villages, filled his pockets with fingerstones to pelt snarling dogs. It seemed Sicily was pouring out as cornmeal from a ripped sack. The railway station swarmed with people shouting, gesticulating, dragging valises and wooden boxes this way and that, crowding from the door of the station onto the platform, itself a crush of relatives embracing and clenching each other's shoulders, a storm of heaving cloth, the women's head scarves folded in triangles and knotted under their chins, brilliant geometries against the mass of black backs. The father and son boarded the train and waited for it to move in the company of buzzing flies and passengers struggling on and off. They sweltered in their woolen suits. On the platform the people seemed mad. Women cried and threw their arms up in the air; men pummeled the shoulders and upper arms of departing sons; children howled and clung to receding skirts with grips that tore fabric; babies wrenched their mothers' hair. The conductors, the train officials, shouted, pushed back the unticketed. Down the length of the train passengers leaned out the open windows, crushing and kissing hands for the last time, their mouths contorted by grief. The accordion maker and Silvano sat unspeaking, their eyes casting over the scene. When the train started, a cry went up as those on the platform watched the cars glide away from them, saw dear faces already changed into the unknowable masks of strangers. An aging man, corpse-thin in a rusty suit, broke from the crowd and ran alongside the train. The hooks of his eyes caught Silvano. Strangers often stared at the boy, taking in his big cheeks and sagging eyes, an uncommon face for a child, something Spanish or Moorish in those red-rimmed eyes. The man shouted something, repeated it, shouting and running as the train gathered speed; he ran with spidery legs over the rough ground beside the track, and as the track curved and the train drew away, the boy looked back and saw the man still running, far behind the train, and at last on all fours, motionless in the locomotive's falling smoke. "What did he say?" demanded the father. "He said to tell Silvano -- I thought he meant me -- this other Silvano to send him money. He said he would die if he couldn't get away." The accordion maker ground his teeth, crossed himself. It twisted his spine that a stranger would call his son's name and ask for money. But the one on his left, a strong young man who had just boarded the train, an ugly fellow with a gap between his front teeth and a flattened nose, pulled his sleeve. "I know that one! Pazzo, pazzo! That crazy one comes to the platform every day, chases the train crying for someone to tell his brother to send him money to come to New York! Pazzo! He has no brother! His brother died a hundred years ago, crushed by the hooves of a horse in La Merica! And you, you are going there?" The accordion maker felt the pleasure of a direct question; the urge to confide warmed him. "To New York. My wife and children, all of us were going, yet two months ago, think of it, only two months, my wife became a wooden plank, transfixed by an evil illness, and now only the boy and I go. She is not dead, she lives, yet cannot move. It was our plan to go to La Merica, start a small music store for instruments and repair. I am an accordion maker, also a little of a musician, you know, I can play for weddings, saints' days. I know a hundred songs. An accordion maker knows how to make the instrument show its voice. But constructing the accordion is my destiny. I understand the instrument, I have a feeling for it. Also I can repair other kinds -- a cracked violin, mandolins, a torn drum." He opened the case to show the instrument's sleek lacquer, the polished buttons. He sounded a flourishing chord, sprinkled a few drops of notes to illustrate the superiority of the tone to this young man, not to play, because the grave condition of his wife made that unseemly. It seemed he had to behave as a widower. He returned it to the goatskin case slowly, tied it closed. "Very nice! A very beautiful instrument! I have cousins who play, but they have nothing so fine as this. One of them, Emilio, was wounded last year by a man so engorged with jealousy that he later perished from apoplexy. Perhaps you will do well in New York! Perhaps not. New York attracts Italians from the north, stuck-up Liguri. The place is full of them! Many musicians there, many accordion makers! There is already an enormous music store on Mulberry Street where they sell piano rolls, everything, books, gramophones, mandolins, sheet music! In New York the winters are savage, the flesh freezes on the bone, there is snow! Winds of a ferocity not to be imagined! There, in old buildings, Sicilians live as close as straws in a bundle! New York? Everything is cold, noise and rush! I have stayed in New York for a year! Unbearable! It was in New York that the crazy one's brother was dragged to his death by a horse, a horse maddened to fury by arctic temperatures! You should do what I am doing -- I am going to Louisiana, to New Orleans! The climate is as soft as baby's flesh! The soil, blacker than the pupil of the eye, of incredible fertility! Sicilians are there in every kind of work! The shrimp and oyster boats! Tremendous opportunity! No music store such as you describe! The place cries out for one! The people of this city love music! The Gulf is a cornucopia -- shrimp of such a size a man can hold only two in his cupped palm, oysters as large as cakes and as sweet as honey, fish of every kind, and a rich nut, the pecan, which grows wild everywhere! The fruit boats give work at once! You can quickly earn enough to make your music store! Think of it! You get off the ship, walk down the dock and get a job in two minutes carrying boxes of oranges! The man hiring you speaks Sicilian, he understands you! Before you sleep on your first night in La Merica you have earned money, more money than you'd see in a week, in a month, in Sicily! But maybe you have relatives waiting for you in New York, perhaps you have cousins and many brothers, perhaps you have connections who will help you battle the immense music store on Mulberry Street? Perhaps you already have enough money to open your own music store at once?" He lit a cigar, offered one to the accordion maker who took it with effusive thanks. No, no, they had no one, he said, rejecting the detested brother-in-law, Alessandro, with his face like dirty clothes. He did not want to see him, that Antichrist. After all, that one was not blood of his blood. No, he said to the young man; his son was not particularly musical, but he was strong and good in mathematics. Whether boats or music stores, he would be useful. The accordion maker leaned forward, asked, what more of Nov' Orlenza, of Luigiana? Were the inhabitants truly inclined toward music? The aromatic smoke formed a cloud around their heads. Greenhorn, thought the young man. One more among thousands and thousands and thousands. He did not count himself. All the way to Palermo, the train jerking down the long incline to the sea, the young man amused himself by extolling the delights of Louisiana, inventing musicians who, for lack of competent repairs, played broken husks of instruments, were forced to sing a cappella because there were no accordions to accompany them, until the accordion maker did not know how he could have considered New York's wolflike cold and crowded tenements, a New York inhabited by the braggart Alessandro -- who, alone of all people on earth, persisted in calling him "Chicken Eye" -- when a city of desperate musicians awaited him. In Nov' Orlenza he would work at anything, unload bananas, juggle lemons, skin cats, to put every scudo -- penny -- aside. In his pocket he had the name of a boardinghouse and a map drawn by the young man on the train who had already sailed on another, swifter ship -- so many ships left Palermo for America. The young man had sworn he would meet their ship in Nov' Orlenza, help them find their way. The map was only if they missed each other. And so the accordion maker veered onto a fatal course. The land of alligators At Palermo he hesitated. The ship passage to New Orleans was more expensive than that to New York. He had planned to use the savings from not purchasing passage for the paralyzed wife and the daughters to give him a little sum toward the music store. Yet he bought the tickets, forty American dollars each, for he conducted his life as everyone does -- by guessing at the future. The Palermo wharf boiled with immigrants. The accordion maker and Silvano stood apart, the trunk between the man's feet, the instrument on his back. Already he dreamed of himself in the whitewashed shop, his tools on the table before him, looking over a list of orders for accordions. In the background he imagined a vague woman, perhaps the paralyzed one restored to action, perhaps a milk-skinned americana. Silvano was repulsed by the moil on the wharf. It was as though some great spatula had scraped through Italy and deposited this crust of humans on the edge of the oily harbor, the squirming crowd a thousand times greater than at the train station. Everywhere were people standing and bending, a man wrapped in a dirty blanket and dozing on the stones, with his head on a suitcase and a knife in his lax hand, crying children, women folding dark coats, anxiously retying cords around scarred cases, men seated on baskets of possessions and gnawing heels of bread, old women in black, scarves knotted under their bristly chins, and running boys, clothes flapping, insane with excitement. He did not join them, only watched. Hour after hour the noisy, dragging mass shuffled up the gangplank onto the ship lugging bundles and portmanteaus, parcels and canvas telescope bags. The line of people hitched along the deck to a table where a pockmarked official counted off groups of eight, families sundered, strangers joined, all the same to him, gave the tallest man in each group a numbered ticket that signified their place at mess call. These eight, familiar or unknown to one another, were bound together by this meal ticket over thousands of miles of water. In the accordion maker's group was a disagreeable old woman with a face like a half-moon, and her two jabbering nephews. The accordion maker and Silvano descended three levels to the men's quarters, long tiers of berths like wooden shelves in a warehouse. They had the top boards, a slot where they slept and stowed everything: the trunk and the accordion, the rolled-up sheepskin and the grey blanket. Oil lamps cast a phlegmy glow, shadows that swayed like hanging men, cast an uneasy, twitching light that raised doubts and encouraged a belief in demons. They had seen the steady calm of electric lights in Palermo. (The smell of kerosene, bilge, metal, marine paint, the stink of anxious men, of dirty clothes and human grease, mixed with the briny flavor of the sea, etched Silvano's sensibilities, a familiar effluvia later on the Texas shrimp boats, and not even the rank stench of crude oil and gas in his roustabout days in the early decades of the new century erased it. For a while he worked on the tank farm fire crews, shooting cannonballs into fiery storage tanks to release the oil into the circular ditches around each of them before it exploded. He went on to Spindletop, Oklahoma's Glenn Pool, caught a glimpse of Pete Gruber, the King of Oil, in his million-dollar rattlesnake suit, worked down the Golden Lane from Tampico to Potrero to Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela where his game ended as he crouched in the jungle trying to relieve himself and a hostile Indian's arrow pierced his throat.) The accordion maker warned Silvano that the passage would be rough, would cause incessant vomiting, but as they drew away from Palermo, from Sicily, from Europe, into the waters of the globe, they entered a zone of fair weather. Day after day sunlight gilded the waves, the sea was calm, without whitecaps or crested waves, numberless oily swells casting off rags of foam. At night this watery lace glowed and shimmered a luminous green. The ship hissed through the sea and Silvano stared into a sky so deeply colored that he saw swarms of larvae, the gestation of stars or wind, crawling in the purple depths. Each morning the passengers emerged from the ship's depths like weevils from a stump and spread out in the sunshine, the women sewing and working lace, the men at some handwork, declaring their plans, walking around and around to prevent costive gripe. Nearly everyone ate on deck, avoided the reeking messroom. The ship's slop metamorphosed into something good as dried tomatoes, garlic, sausages, hard cheese, came out of suitcases. The accordion maker took the calm sea as a sign that his fortune had turned, lit a cigar and enjoyed it, played his accordion in the evenings. Already a few women had smiled at him, one asked him if he knew "L'Atlantico," humming the wavelike melody. He told her he wished to learn it if she would be his teacher. Stories of New Orleans began to trickle from the crew members and passengers who had been there or read letters from earlier travelers: a scimitar-shaped city fitted in the curve of the great river where moss hung from trees like masculine beards, where the tea-colored water of the bayous harbored alligators and ebon people nonchalantly strolled the streets, where the dead lay aboveground in marble beds and men walked holding pistols. A sailor taught Silvano the words "ais crima," a kind of rare and delicious frozen confection achieved with a difficult machine and much labor. The young man on the train had said their language would be easily understood in New Orleans, but in their mess call the old woman who had lived in New Orleans, whose son and family had died of some pestilence, who had gone back to Sicily to fetch her two nephews and was now returning with them, warned them to cast away their Sicilian dialect, to speak Italian instead and quickly learn American. "Italians say Sicilians speak thieves' language in order to plot murder in their open faces. Americans believe Sicilians and Italians are the same and hate them both, curse them as sacks of evil. If you wish success you must master the American language." Words to break the teeth, thought the accordion maker. She looked at him as if she read his thinking. "I see in your face that you will not learn it." "And you?" he retorted. "You speak it fluently, no doubt?" "I have learned many words," she said. "From my son and his children. Now I will learn from my nephews. In America the natural order of the world is reversed and the old learn from children. Prepare yourself, accordion maker." On the last days of the voyage, as they rounded the tip of Florida and entered the Gulf of Mexico, the musky scent of land came to them. They had crossed some invisible bar, were no longer departing but arriving. The accordion maker brought his instrument on deck and played, sang in the high, strangling style of the village. Now we arrive in La Merica -- Farewell to our childhood homes. Here we begin our true lives. Here we find money and respect, Fine houses and linen shirts. Here we become princes. A member of the crew sang a comic American song -- "Where, Oh, Where Has My Little Dog Gone?" -- but the accordion maker scorned to try it and countered with "Sicilia Mia." His strong posture, his hairiness, his desperate voice and the accordions suggestive breathing drew a circle of women and girls around him. Still, he believed in a hell where sinners sat astraddle the heated wards of giant keys and served as clappers in white-hot bells. They coasted into the delta, breathed its odor of mud and wood smoke under sunset clouds, gold curls combed out of the west, or the powdered stamens of a broad-throated flower. In the dusk they could see flickering lights in the side channels, sometimes hear a gruesome roar -- the alligators, said a deckhand; no, a cow bogged in mud, said the woman with the nephews. The immigrants crowded the rail as the quivering ship moved into the Mississippi River, within the pincer of land. Silvano stood next to his father. A red moon crawled out of the east. On the shore the boy heard a horse snort. Hours before New Orleans the odor of the city reached them -- a fetid stink of cesspools and the smell of burning sugar. A demon in the backhouse Nothing went as the accordion maker anticipated. The young man from the train was not at the dock. They waited hours for him while the other passengers disappeared into the teeming streets. "True friends are as rare as white flies," said the accordion maker bitterly. Silvano gaped at the black men and especially the women, whose heads were wrapped in turbans as though they concealed emeralds and rubies and chains of gold beneath the winded doth. They puzzled their way along through the noisy, thronged streets with the young man's map and found Decatur Street, but there was no number sixteen there, only charred timbers among rampant fireweed, a gap in the row of frowsty tenements. The accordion maker forced his courage, spoke to an approaching man who looked Sicilian; at least his hair appeared Sicilian. "Excuse me, I seek a boardinghouse, number sixteen, but it seems there is no building here --" The man did not answer, spat to his right as he passed. Silvano saw the punishment for not knowing American. The man must be an American -- one who despised Sicilians. The accordion maker, unnerved, said to Silvano, "a cursed fool, let him dine on weeds made bitter by the piss of drunkards." They dragged their bundles and the trunk back to the wharf. There was the ship they had left only hours ago. Silvano recognized the faces of crew members. They returned his stare with disinterest. One shouted something ribald in American. Silvano experienced the helpless rage of the prisoner of language. His father seemed not to notice. The employment office described by the young man on the train was a blue shack at the end of the wharf. A dozen men, both white and black, leaned against pilings and boxes and spit tobacco, smoked cigars, staring at them as they approached. Inside the shack a dog with an iron collar lay under the chair and a man with a swollen, bruised nose who called himself Graspo -- Grapestalk -- spoke to them in language they could understand, but he was suspicious and insolent, demanding their papers, asking their names, the name of their village, parents' names, the name of the wife's family, who did they know and why had they come here? The accordion maker showed the map, told of the young man on the train who had given the address of the boardinghouse, described the charred timbers, said he knew no one, wanted work on the boats or docks. "What was the name of this man on the train?" But of course the accordion maker did not know. After a time Graspo softened, although his tone was still lofty and condescending. "It is not as easy as you think, contadino, there are many things involved in working here, many people of strength against each other. There is sometimes trouble, the times are difficult. The Sicilians suffer very much. We must look out for one another. But I can tell you the name of a boardinghouse in Little Palermo, number four Mirage Street, cheap and well located for work. Perhaps I can get you something on the fruit boats, you and the boy. You will see that the Irish and the black men have the best of it, those who are screwmen. The humble Italian -- for here Sicilians are regarded as Italians and you must swallow that as well -- must be content to be a longshoreman." He cleared his throat and spat. "For you the cost is three dollars, for the boy two, and the address of the boardinghouse is free. Yes, you pay to me. I'm the bosso. That is how it works in America, Signor' Emigrante Siciliano. You must pay to be paid. You know nothing, no one, you pay for an education. I offer you this education for a modest sum." What choice had he? None, none. He paid the money, turning his back to Graspo while he pried the strange coins from the kidskin money belt, stained now with sweat. Graspo told the accordion maker to go to the boardinghouse and make an arrangement, come back in the morning for the shape-up; if fortune was with them there would be work. The accordion maker nodded, nodded, nodded and smiled. "They will ask you at the boardinghouse what work you have. Show them this paper and tell them you work for Signor Banana. Ahha." They found the boardinghouse in Little Palermo, a noisome district as bad as any Sicilian slum, except that black people lived here as well as Sicilians and Italians. Mirage Street was lined with decayed French mansions shedding flerried slates like dandruff, the fine rooms chopped into cubbies, thin strips of deal bisecting plaster cherubs, a ballroom partitioned into twenty mean kennels. Number four was a filthy brick pile obscured by crisscrossed lines of grey laundry and belted around and around with sagging balconies. Somewhere a dog barked. (Years later in the oil fields it was not the horrible event that Silvano remembered but this relentless barking by an unseen animal that went on day and night. An American dog. In Sicily someone would have killed it for its disobedience.) The courtyard was knee-deep in refuse, smashed bed frames, scrap wood, great drifts of oyster shells, suitcase handles and bloody rags, holed cooking pots and tin cans, broken crockery, chamber pots half filled with green-scummed water, weather-stiffened hames, a legless horsehair sofa furred with mold. In a corner of the courtyard was a reeking baccausa which served the scores who lived in the building. When the accordion maker entered this outhouse he turned away, retching; the mound of excrement protruded from the hole. In the corner was a smeared stick to push it down a little. He noticed later that some of the residents squatted in the courtyard like dogs to relieve their bowels, and in this wasteland children played. "Listen," he told Silvano. "Do not go there. There is a demon in that backhouse. Find another place. How do I know where? Anyway, it is better to hold it in as much as possible to get the most good from the food I buy for you." So began Silvano's lifelong suffering with constipation and griping bowels. They climbed splintered stairs to the top floor, away from the leaning banister. "Here is high living, my friend," said the landlord in a laughing voice. The room was hardly bigger than a closet and filthy. There were two plank beds, over each a long shelf, one partly filled with the belongings of a man with whom they must share this space. A deaf man who would be no trouble, the landlord said. Silvano would sleep on the floor on the sheepskin. The accordion maker touched the broken plaster, kicked at the loose floorboards. From a nearby room they heard cries of abuse, a slap, another, muffled shrieks and blows. But Silvano was delighted with the window, two clear panes above an amber wave of stained glass. They could take turns, he said, looking out over the rooftops at the creamy river where boats growled t is better to hold it in as much as possible to get the most good from the food I buy for you." So began Silvano's lifelong suffering with constipation and griping bowels. They climbed splintered stairs to the top floor, away from the leaning banister. "Here is high living, my friend," said the landlord in a laughing voice. The room was hardly bigger than a closet and filthy. There were two plank beds, over each a long shelf, one partly filled with the belongings of a man with whom they must share this space. A deaf man who would be no trouble, the landlord said. Silvano would sleep on the floor on the sheepskin. The accordion maker touched the broken plaster, kicked at the loose floorboards. From a nearby room they heard cries of abuse, a slap, another, muffled shrieks and blows. But Silvano was delighted with the window, two clear panes above an amber wave of stained glass. They could take turns, he said, looking out over the rooftops at the creamy river where boats growled up and down. Flies buzzed at this window and the sill was buried an inch beneath their husks. But when he ran down the dark, groaning stairs three boys cornered him on a landing. The one with the dull face and crooked mouth he counted least dangerous, but while the others danced and jabbed at him, that one sidled behind, interlaced his fingers and raised his joined hands to bring Silvano crashing to his knees with a double-handed chop to the back of the neck. Silvano rolled between Dull-Face's legs, reached up and twisted the tender flesh inside the thigh despite three kicks in the face that scraped his cheek across the gritty floor. A door on the landing flung open and cold greasy water flew at them; there was a tinny rattle and a cascade of spoons and forks as the three attackers leaped down the stairs, shouting back curses. Sugarcane The landlord, crippled and obese, possessing only one foot and half blind, skin as grey and slick as the bottom of a boat, hands and arms crisscrossed with cane-cut scars, took the first week's money from them. He called himself Cannamele, Sugarcane, from the old days when he worked on the sugar plantations, before he crushed his foot in the grinder. The stiff point of a cane leaf had ruined his eye. "But look, once my hands were strong enough to squeeze water from stones." He made a clenching gesture. When he heard the name of their village he shook with emotion; for he said he had been born two villages away. He begged them for news of many people. But none of the names he presented was familiar and after a quarter of an hour it was clear that Cannamele had mistaken their village for another. Yet a certain cordiality, a connection, had been established. Cannamele felt it necessary to explain how things were. Here in Little Palermo, he said, the Americans never came. All the dialects and regions of Italy and Sicily were crushed together here, people from the mountains and the rich plains below Etna, from northern Italy, from Rome, even from Milano, but those haughty ones moved out as soon as they could. He told the accordion maker that the backhouse was supposed to be emptied once a month by black men who dug out the stinking shit and carted it away in their "aggravation wagons," but they had not come for a long time, no one knew why. Perhaps they would come tomorrow. So, Graspo had promised him work? Graspo was of the Mantrangas, stevedores at war with rival padroni, the Provenzanos, in a rough squabble over who would control the hiring of labor to work the fruit boats. The Irish and the black men, the cotton screwmen, had the highest-paid work; Sicilians and Italians had to take what was left, the longshoreman jobs, but at least they were better off than the roustabouts, all black men -- wild, roving river hogs covered with pale scars. And as for those black ones, if the accordion maker had eyes, he could see for himself most were wretched and ragged and their so-called freedom was a mockery. Yet on New Orleans docks they had certain rights which often worked against Sicilians and Italians; there the black screwmen were as good as anyone and better than immigrants. The crafty Americans knew well how to play each against the other. The other occupant of their room, the deaf man called Nove -- Nine -- because his little finger had been chewed off in a fight, was a stevedore. As for "Signor Banana," he was the esteemed and wealthy Frank Archivi, born in New Orleans of poor Sicilian parents, an American by birth, and who knows, if not galvanized by the madness of grief when he was twenty, he might have become a boatman or an organ grinder instead of the owner of a shipping line, a man who controlled the rich fruit-import business. "Think of it, after one week of marriage his bride died of a shrimp which she inhaled while laughing -- never laugh when you eat shrimp -- and Archivi, the crazed one, eyes as red as lanterns, came to her tomb at night and removed her stinking corpse, dragging it through the streets and kissing the rotting lips until he collapsed. He lay in a fever for a month and when he came to his senses he was as cold as a glacier, interested only in money. And now Archivi, Archivi is bananas and fruits from Latin America, lemons and oranges from Italy. Archivi is deals and ingenuity, and that hard work that makes a fortune, a fortune that grows and swells. If you would see Archivi, look at the carts of the street vendors. He owns ships, warehouses, thousands work for him, he moves in the high circles of New Orleans society, he is an important man in politics. He shook the hand of John D. Rockefeller. He is a Rockefeller of fruit. Every piece of fruit that comes to these docks is controlled by Archivi. He turned his grief and madness to money." The accordion maker listened greedily. "He is brave and agile, he fought the Reconstructionists. You would do well to study him, americanizzarti, to Americanize yourself as he has done. When the black men tried to muscle the Sicilians away from the dock work, he led an army of longshoremen against them. I saw this. It was bloody and he won, I can tell you that, he won. You have a knife? Good. You must get a pistol as well. It is necessary. In New Orleans you defend yourself every day." Archivi, he said, moved confidently in the Americans' world. "But don't bother to play your accordion for him. He has refined tastes in music, he prefers concerts and the opera. On the other hand, rejoice. There are many musicians working the docks. New Orleans is the queen of music, the queen of commerce." He sang a few contorted lines of some song the accordion maker had never heard, a limping, crooked song. "I plan to open a music store," confided the accordion maker. "I will be the Archivi of accordions." Cannamele shrugged and smiled; every man had his fantasy. He had thought himself that he would start a bank, first for Sicilians, but later... It was true, the fruit vendors in their stained clothes who spread through the city each day displayed on their carts an extraordinary variety of fruits; Silvano counted twenty kinds in the distance between the boardinghouse and the wharf: ox-heart cherries with juice like blood, yellow peaches, orange silky persimmons, barrows of pears, Panama oranges, strawberries the size and shape of Christ's heart. The lemon barrows lit up dark streets. Once, moved by his hungry stare, a vendor gave him an overripe banana, the skin black, and, inside, the faintly alcoholic mush of decaying pulp. "Hey, scugnizzo, your mother must have craved these fruits when she carried you. You are fortunate you do not have a great banana-shaped birthmark on your face." (Four years later this barrowman moved to St. Louis and started a successful macaroni factory, American Pasta, and died a thousandaire.) Silvano did in fact have a birthmark but it was on his belly and in the shape of a frying pan, the cause of his perpetual hunger. Bananas Graspo started them unloading bananas, great green claws of fruit as heavy as stone, of brutal weight even for the accordion maker's muscular and broad shoulders. For twelve hours' labor the pay was a dollar and a half. Silvano tottered twenty feet with a hand of bananas, then went to his knees. He did not have the legs to bear such weight. Graspo put him at fifty cents a day to pick up loose bananas from broken bunches, crush the hairy tarantulas and little snakes that fell from the clusters of fruit. Silvano darted fearfully at them with his cudgel. The docks and levees stretched for miles along the river in a stink of brackish water, spice, smoke, musty cotton. Gangs of men, black or white, stacked bales of cotton into great piles like unfinished pyramids, others rolled the bales over and over toward the ships whose funnels stretched into the hazed distance like a forest of branchless trees. Two and two, men piled sawed lumber, raw cities waiting to be nailed onto the prairies upriver, teams of four black men double-cut tree trunks into squared timbers. Downriver the shrimp boats unloaded baskets of glittering crustaceans. In the cavernous warehouses men shifted more cotton, barrels of molasses and sugar, tobacco, rice, cottonseed cakes, fruits; they sweated in the cotton yards where the great bales were compressed into five-hundred-pound cubes. Everywhere men carried boxes, rolled barrels, stacked firewood for the voracious steamboats, each swallowing five hundred cords of wood between New Orleans and Keokuk. A gang of men rolling barrels sang: Roll'm! Roll'm! Roll'm! All I wants is my regular right! Two square meal and my rest at night! Roll! Roll'm, boy! Roll! The din of commerce sounded in a hellish roar made up of the clatter of hooves and the hollow mumble of wheel rims on plank, the scream of whistles and huffing of engines, hissing steam boilers and hammering and rumbling, shouting foremen and the musical call and response of work gangs and the sellers of gumbo and paper cones of crawfish and sticky clotted pralines, the creaking of the timber wagons and the low cries of the ship provisioners' cartmen urging their animals forward, all blended into a loud, narcotic drone. Of all of these, the swaggering screwmen were the kings of the docks, earned six dollars a day. In gangs of five they threw down their half-smoked cigars and descended into ships' holds with their jackscrews, waited for the longshoremen to winch up the bales of cotton from the dock and lower them down into the hold, one at a time. The screwmen seized the bales, stacked them high and tight, forced them into impossibly cramped spaces, odd crannies and corners, through the use of boards and their expanding jackscrews, until the ship nearly split; yet the cargo was perfectly balanced, the ship unsinkable. In the late afternoon one day the word flew from man to man: a board had snapped under pressure and shot a splinter into the throat of a black screwman named Treasure. The accordion maker heard cries from an adjacent ship, joined the gathering crowd. He moved slowly, watching, saw a limp body raised from the hold, carried away, the blood pattering on the deck, the ramp, the dock. "Move a d'banan', sonamagogna!" shouted the foreman, driving the Sicilians back to the fruit. Apollo's lyre On Saturday night, while Silvano gawped through the mosquito-stitched streets, listening to the American jabber and making up his mind to steal a sweet, drawn this way and that by the cries of vendors of pots and pans, clothes, lemonade, "gelati, gelati," candies and kitchen implements, but stopping before a man who sold enchanting toy cats of spotted tin that squeaked when their sides were pressed, the accordion maker went with Cannamele, first to Viget's Oyster Saloon, hot and smoky, where Cannamele swallowed four dozen with lime juice, then to a barrelhouse in the next street packed with ruffians where they drank union beer, ate the stale eggs and firefanged cheese and vinegary pigs' feet, and the accordion maker wished for the harsh village rosso. But both of them blackened many bottles' eyes and the accordion maker treated himself to a two-for-a-nickel cigar from a box of fat Rajah torpedoes. A bowlegged Italian sang "Scrivenno a Mamma" in a weeping voice, stopped singing and blubbered. "He who saves, saves for dogs," cried Cannamele, signaling for American whiskey. "Heart's-ease, you grape-jumper," shouted an Irishman. In and out went Cannamele through the scores of dives, tonks and jooks and barrelhouse joints that lined these streets, the accordion maker lurching after him through the musical din of drums and ringing banjos, shouters, pianos clinking away, squealing fiddles and trumpets and other brass snorting and wailing from every interior, and sometimes a string quartet sawing crazily. On the streets children watched and fought for discarded stogie butts, black street musicians and white played for coins, singing improvised songs of insult at those who failed to toss a whiffing coin. Bow-leg Curl-shoe Stingy one Bad luck on you. An apron of sound lapped out of each dive. Inside, chairs scraped on the floor, loud music and talk tangled with roaring laughter, there was endless traffic toward and from the back where little rooms lined the hall and young black girls took customers until their flesh was raw, the rasp of matches, the slap of cards and the clink of bottles on glass, the clack of glasses on tables, the creak of table legs on the floor, the thudding feet of dancers doing the slow drag, the itch, the squat, the grind. Dice doctors with their loaded ivories, drinkers and cockers with feathers stuck to the bloody soles of their boots crowded the rooms, and the street din entered with each customer. And often there was a faito, with grunts and snorts and curses and smack of flesh on flesh, a scream, then a tenor roaring "O dolce baci..." The accordion maker had a pistol now and carried it in the waistband of his trousers. Silvano had a staghorn-handled knife with three blades and threatened with it when the gangs closed around him. He had stolen it from a lolling drunk, practiced his first American sentence on a one-eyed dog scavenging for orts. "Get outta, I killa you." The accordion maker disliked the music that the black men played, confused music, the melody, if there was one, deliberately hidden in braided skeins of rhythm. He was contemptuous of their instruments -- a horn, a broken piano, a fiddle, the wiry curls of its strings twisting out of the neck like morning glory vines, the banjo. He recognized one of the players from the docks, as black as a horse's hoof, a man with an eye patch and a latticework of scars from the corner of his eye to his jaw that made his face rigid and expressionless on one side. They called him Pollo -- what, "Chicken"? thought the accordion maker, but it seemed the creature's name was Apollo, someone's sardonic joke -- flailing at a -- what was it? -- a corrugated surface, somehow familiar, set in a gaudily painted wooden frame, a thing that made a raspy, scratching sound like a treeful of cicadas, and singing "shootin don't make it, no, no, no." It was a quarter of an hour before he recognized the object -- a washboard, a thing women used to rub the dirt from wet clothes -- and saw the metal thimbles on the man's fingers. Pollo put away the rub-board and pulled a pair of spoons from his back pocket, making a clatter like heavy castanets. And the other one, Fish Man, scraping a knife over his guitar strings to make a wobbling shrill. What wandering imprecision! What kitchen music! And the words, the accordion maker could not catch one, but understood the singer's salacious tone and low, hot laugh. Fish Man twirled his old guitar with a scarred back, sang: On my table there a blood dish, Dish with drop a blood, Somebody butcher my old cow, Tell me it really good, It really good -- I don't have to milk her no more. Soon enough the accordion maker was distracted when Cannamele, cock-a-hoop, shoved a black woman against him, a dirty puzzle with running eyes, put his wet mouth to the accordion maker's ear and said she would change his luck. "The man who holds back risks tuberculosis and worse. The bodily system weakens. Go ahead, mine some coal." (Although the accordion maker contracted syphilis from these adventures, he never knew it.) In a Sicilian village, the right eye of a woman no longer paralyzed itched with great ferocity. A strange instrument In the weeks that followed, the accordion maker recognized many dockworkers among the musicians of the barrelhouses. There were no accordions to be heard until a band of gypsies camped outside the city on a bit of high ground with their tinkers' tools, horses and fortunes; two of the men played accordions. They stayed a week, another week, a month, mending pots and pans. Sometimes at night passersby heard their private music, a slow, sad wailing, saw the shimmer of sequined bodies dancing. He went to their camp one evening with Cannamele to hear what was to be heard. The music was boisterous and wailing at the same time and five or six men danced a fight with sticks. He was interested in their accordions but could not make the men understand that he wished to examine one. Their language was incomprehensible and they turned away as soon as money changed hands. True outsiders, he thought, people without even a home, lost in the wild world. One day they were gone, leaving trampled earth. "Moon men," said Cannamele, winking his bad eye. At first the accordion maker was afraid to bring his instrument into the sweating, dangerous dives where men fought and bled and overturned the tables. He played it only in the room he shared with Silvano and Nove, forty years old and half deaf, who came in many nights streaming blood from knife fights, would wake from midsleep and shout hoarsely, "listen! Somebody knocking!" But the knocking was in his head and in a few minutes he would lie down and sleep again in his rumpled, stained clothes. The accordion maker found his own music calming and beautiful after the wailing, thumping, rattling music of the joints. That slangy music was not suited to the accordion, although its morbid voice might fit the style, but it was impossible to loosen and bend the notes. An accordion would have to play the drone, to be satisfied with the back of the music rather than the front. He got up the courage to bring it to one of the barrelhouses. It was noisy enough as usual. He sat off by himself -- the bartender complained of his "Italian perfume," the smell of garlic -- and after a while, when the piano man left for the whorehouse, began to play. No one noticed until he lifted his high, strangling voice and a silence fell, heads turned toward this sound. He sang an ancient grape harvest song that had stamping and shouts. But after two or three songs the din of the place rose again, calling, laughing, talking, shouting, drowning him out. Only the Sicilians pressed closer, hungry to hear the lost music that brought with it the scent of thyme and the tinkle of goat bells, and they called out for certain melodies that made them contort their faces with grief. Late in the evening Pollo came toward him, forcing his way through the crowd, smiling around his blond cigar. Up close he was the strange red-black color of furniture, of a mahogany table. He said something, pointing at the accordion. "He want to know what you call it," said Cannamele and answered in a loud voice as if speaking to a deaf man: "Accordion. Accordion." The black man said something more, reached for the accordion, looked at it, hoisted it, feeling its lightness, held it to his body as he had seen the accordion maker do and squeezed the bellows gently. Anh. Onh. Anh. Onh. He said something. Cannamele laughed. "He say it sound like his woman." Pollo bent over the instrument, pressing the buttons and getting it, getting the feel of it and its sound, and in a few minutes, foot beating, the accordion huffing in an unaccustomed way between bursts of words and um-hm sounds, a rough little song came out. Cannamele screamed with pleasure. "He's the man, the singing is the man, and he's doing it to a woman and the accordion is the woman!" The accordion maker blushed as the instrument moaned against the black man's voice. How you like -- Anh My sweet corn, baby -- Onh Plenty buttah -- Anh Anh -- make you crazy -- Onh. He handed the accordion back, grinning violently. The next day the accordion maker saw the b

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Accordion Crimes opens in 1890 in Sicily as an accordion maker completes his finest instrument - nineteen polished bone buttons, sleek lacquer - and dreams of owning a music store in America. He and his eleven-year-old son, carrying little more than the green accordion, voyage to the teeming, violent port of New Orleans. Within a year, the accordion maker is murdered by an anti-Italian lynching mob, but his instrument carries Proulx's story into another community of immigrants, the German Americans, founding a town in Iowa. Again, the accordion is witness to an astonishing array of tales as Beutle, Messermacher, Loats and their families make and lose fortunes in the new land. The little green accordion falls into the hands of various immigrants who carry it from Iowa to Texas, from Maine to Louisiana, looking for a decent life. Descendants of Mexicans, Africans, Poles, Germans, Norwegians, Irish, Basques and Franco-Canadians, they work their way into a harshly racist American culture at the cost of their identity, language and traditions. The music of the accordion is their last link with the past - voice for their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance - but it, too, is forced to change.

FROM THE CRITICS

Dwight Garner

Like the outdated musical instrument it celebrates, E. Annie Proulx's ambitious new novel -- the follow-up to her wildly (almost flukily) successful The Shipping News -- makes a strange, discordant, eerily compelling kind of music. Hardly a novel at all in the traditional sense, Accordion Crimes is a set of linked stories, set from 1890 to the present, about hard-luck immigrants (Italian, Polish, Irish, German) and their inbred love of accordion music, which seems to them to be the sound of "misery suppressed, injustices born, strength in adversity, endurance."

What links these stories, beyond the accordions that wheeze and clank throughout, is Proulx's voice, which is surely among the most distinctive in American literature. Proulx's clotted sentences are a marvel; raw and unmannered, they teem with odd facts, words that aren't in ictionaries, and whimsically named characters and towns. (In Accordion Crimes, we visit places called Prank and Random, and meet major characters named Malefoot, Octave and Dolor.) Often those sentences end in long, evocative lists; one character, while listening to a late-night border radio station, pulls in ads for "plastic broncos, moon pens, zircon rings, Yellow Boy fishing lures, apron patterns, twelve styles for just one dollar, rat-killer and polystyrene gravestones." And it's hard to imagine another contemporary novelist as gifted at tossing off comic, quasi-exaggerated physical description -- witness the woman who has "furrowed and liver-spotted skin like a slipcover over a rump-sprung sofa."

The characters in Accordion Crimes, as in Proulx's earlier work, have a sturdy sense of doom hanging over them. These men and women are invariably scorned as foreigners and rubes, and are forced to take demeaning jobs; music is one of their few joys. One Mexican immigrant, a musician and waiter, is mocked during the week for "his slowness, clumsiness, stupidity," but on the weekends his tormentors "screamed with joy as they stood in the cascade of his music, touched his sleeve and spoke his name as if he were a saint."

Accordion Crimes is an easy book to admire, but a somewhat more difficult one to like. There are sentences and moments on each page that will stop you cold with their harsh, spotlit beauty, and the accumulated weight of the knowledge and lore on display here is remarkable. Far more than either Postcards or The Shipping News, Accordion Crimes makes the case that Proulx possesses a very real -- and very eccentric -- kind of genius. Yet Accordion Crimes can also seem somewhat remote and mechanical; at the end of each chapter, the characters are killed off, usually in freakish ways (by spider and rattlesnake bites, axe blows, riots, botched operations), preventing the story from building to something larger. The action scrolls by as if under a microscope, lending exactness but rarely amplitude. At one moment late in the novel, Proulx describes a roadside panorama that's lit by "the ruddy flare of brake lights giving the scene heat and feeling." Heat and feeling are what's missing, too often, from i>Accordion Crimes, an earnest and dazzling book that leaves a slight chill in the air. -- Salon

Library Journal

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Proulx (The Shipping News, Audio Reviews, LJ 1/96) combines black humor with stark tragedy in this disturbing series of vignettes centered around the adventures of a small green accordion. The accordion is used by different men as a vehicle of creativity: the instrument for musical expression of the immigrant's dream. The accordion is also something of an evil talisman; its maker is lynched by a mob in 1890, thus beginning the instrument's odyssey through America. It passes through the possession of owners who die painfully of gangrene, snake and spider bites, and suicide. The underlying theme is best stated by a character at the recording's beginning"America is a place of lies and deceit"and is grimly underscored by violence and prejudice. Although this is depressing as social commentary, the author's use of description and detail is remarkably original. Edward Herrmann's reading offers the perfect inflection. Recommended.Jacqueline Seewald, Red Bank Regional H.S. Lib., N.J.

John Sutherland