The King of Mulberry Street by Donna Jo Napoli

necks they hung picture locketsand saint medals and keys to the homes they'd left behind. They loaded their pockets with bone fans and wood pipes and rolling pins and little bottles and all kinds of documents. A woman from Napoli took out needle and thread and sewed letters from her dead husband into the hem of her skirt. She said they were love letters. Some people locked their fingers around the handles of their suitcases and simply refused to give them up.
    Mamma's voice called, “
Tesoro? Tesoro mio?
”
    I whirled around and watched a boy run to the fat, short woman who had stolen Mamma's voice, stolen Mamma's name for me—treasure. She said, “Grab hold of my skirt and don't let go, no matter what.”
    That was what Mamma would say to me. My heart raced. I had to bite my hand to keep from screaming.
    I threw my padded crate cloth onto the baggage pile and joined the crowd on the stairs. Everyone was talking and telling everyone else to hush so they could figure out what was going on. I stayed close to Napoletani. If they understood anything and repeated it, I would understand, too.
    At the top of the stairs doctors checked fingernails and the backs of legs. They opened collars and felt necks. Women shuddered, their faces tight with fear, for they'd never been touched like that before. The doctors made everyone take off hats and kerchiefs, and they parted hair to inspect scalps. Men with pompadours were yelled at, as though they were trying to hide something in their puffed-up hair. Then the doctors took out metal hooks—like the kind people used to button their shoes—and looked inside lower eyelids. All that took only seconds.
    Children screamed constantly. Doctors wanted to make sure any child over two years old was healthy enough to walk alone, but the children clung to their mothers. So the doctors ripped them away and walked off several paces with them, then set them down to go shrieking back.
    I watched everything closely. Watch and learn and fit in—that was what Mamma said.
    Almost everyone was pushed on into the giant registration room. But now and then the doctors made a mark with colored chalk on a person's clothes. The mark was always a letter; I saw
S
,
B
,
X
,
C
,
H
,
L
,
E
,
K
,
F
,
G
,
N
. Sometimes there were two letters,
Ft
,
Pg
,
CT
,
Sc
, or sometimes an X inside a circle. All the letters meant something bad, because they were written on people a doctor had spent extra time with. A man took off his coat and turned it inside out to hide the mark on his lapel.
    The doctor who inspected me took five seconds. He touched the scabs on my arms from the barnacles on the piling pole at the dock and said something to me in English. I stood at attention, without coughing—I remembered the trick. Then he said something to the woman behind me and she shrugged. Two women in white uniforms—nurses— came up. One pulled me to the side. She did things with her hands, sticking up one finger, then five, then three, or forming an O with her thumb and index finger. The other woman mimicked her. Then the nurse turned to me and made a shape with her hand. She waited. I looked at her. The other nurse mimicked the shape. They both looked at me. And I got it; I made the shape. The first nurse took me through several shapes. Then she drew shapes on a piece of paper and I had to copy them. She smiled at me and pattedme on the back and pointed for me to go join the lines in the registration room.
    I'd passed another test. Though what it meant was beyond me. I got in line and looked back at the nurses. They were still watching me, with suspicious eyes now. So I moved ahead through the line, out of their sight, till I found two men speaking Napoletano. I stood behind them and looked up at their faces as though I knew them. After a while I snuck a glance back; the nurses were testing someone else. I heard a man say they were testing for idiocy. So they'd thought I was an idiot.
    This was the first time in my life I'd ever