SOUTHERN EXPOSURE: AN ITALIAN VILLAGE IN SOUTH JAMAICA, QUEENS

Our block, 116th Drive, just down the street from Sutphin Boulevard and around the corner from Foch Boulevard, had a row of neat little houses on our side of the street that resembled the most modest real estate used in Monopoly, a game rarely played in our house.

Instead, Chinese checkers was our game. Maybe it was a gift from Mrs. Chang, my parents' Chinese friend who cooked my brother's pet duck and even a rabbit once. I can't imagine why people gave kids rabbits, chicks and ducklings at Easter time, but as soon as these creatures were too big for lap sitting, they ended their lives in a pot fueling the obvious truth – Italians are not very sentimental about pets.

Thelma Briggs was our next-door neighbor in South Jamaica. Our houses were close – red-shingled with little peak roofs topping the second floors with narrow stoops in the front of each house. The alleyways were narrow enough for people to lean out their windows and exchange intimacies.

My after-school snack was not milk and cookies. It was crusty, Italian bread smothered with olive oil, salt, pepper and oregano (my favorite spice). The olive oil reminded me of the fragrance of my father's forehead. The kids said it looked like bugs on bread. I feigned superiority. I couldn't say their food wasn't good because I liked Southern food like fried chicken and black-eyed peas and West Indian coconut bread. These kids just did not know Italian food and were therefore unfortunate. I felt this way about many aspects of life – my grandmother had me convinced that the world was made up of Italians and those who wished they were. The best way to win friends was, of course, through gastronomy. I knew I could convert them if only they would try my snack. I could usually convince one kid at a time to taste it.

By the early ‘60s, there were three or four white families including ours on the block, my aunt's on the edge of Baisley Pond Park, that of my mother's best friend, Jean, who ran the beauty parlor around the corner, and the antipatico Germans, the Schmiegles with the snappy German shepherd who took a bite out of my thigh when my grandfather and I helped ourselves to the wild white berries growing over their fence.

Only white women patronized Jean's Beauty Parlor - a mix of Jews and Italians who moved to the suburbs but returned to the “old neighborhood” for their hairdresser and gossip.

Black women processed their hair at Sylvia's, a beauty parlor that specialized in taming kinky hair to straight, so women's heads resembled that of seals, while white women went to Jean's to crimp their very soft Caucasian hair into tootsie roll curled permanents.

As far as I could tell, they all tortured their hair pouring acrid-smelling chemicals on their heads. If I close my eyes, I can still smell the difference between the chemicals used in the two salons.

The black beauty parlor was more mysterious, so I went inside with my friend Cheryl to take a look. She never straightened her hair, wore it in neat cornrows and dressed it up with ribbons and barrettes. Thelma smoothed her hair. I guessed it was something black women did as adults.

Like many Italian girls, I grew up with long hair down to my waist. When I slept over Cheryl's house, I asked Thelma if she would braid my hair in cornrows like Cheryl's. She’d use petroleum jelly to form the rows and divide Cheryl’s thick hair.

The jelly left Thelma's hands satiny and smooth. I loved how Thelma smelled – a mix of cocoa butter, coconut and baby powder – a feeling of moistness. Thelma just laughed and said that was one thing that would have to be cleared with my parents. She tried to explain how our hair was different, a situation I could see and touch but refused to understand why we could not look more alike.

Thelma was a current of calm that did not exist in our house, which was a collection of three generations all chattering in Calabrese dialect and broken English. It's not a big secret that Italians tend to raise their voices and it doesn't mean violence is about to follow, it's just a decibel thing. You think your cousin, even if he does seem hopelessly stupid, will agree with you if you can shout above him or her.

Separated only by an alleyway, too narrow to handle a car, Thelma leaned out of her kitchen window when she talked to my mother – it was private even though it was the alleyway where we jumped rope. I have no recollection of the two of them sitting in each other's kitchens and chatting over coffee. I wanted them to. Wanted them to be close like Cheryl and me, but there was some invisible chasm – some borderline that was never crossed.

Like our other black neighbors, Thelma called my grandmother, “Mamma.” When we eventually moved to a house in the suburbs, an Irish Catholic neighborhood where we were called “niggers and spics” for the first time, we lost touch with Thelma and Cheryl.

Finally, my grandmother was hospitalized. Thelma visited her, but not before a white nurse stopped her in the hallway to inquire where she thought she was going. At the same time Thelma saw my grandmother in bed and hugged her calling her “Mamma,” I would have loved to see that nurse’s face.

It was no secret, my grandmother hated our new neighborhood and warned my mother about sending me to Catholic school where the Irish Catholic nuns reigned over a place where no one would ever call her “Mamma.”