Juniper Street Sketches

Excerpts from a Novel-in-Progress

For, more than what one was or did, it was common -- back there "on the other side" -- to be identified by place. Physical, mental traits might be acknowledged in the person, but they were assigned by town. It made no difference the age or sex, whether a member left or strayed or had established residence elsewhere: all shared the village character. If town members did not presently conform, there was no hurry; they would in time become so. It was just this widespread, credulous terrain Pasquale built on in the telling of a tale, that interfacing of people with their places. Thus, no one wondered that "the women in San Pietro are vain, the men short on imagination." He might just as easily have proposed other places, other traits and achieved an equally undisputed, acquiesced-to profile: in Arsino they had wide foreheads and long noses; San Martino was the home of the short chin; in Inna they were prone to warts; in Genina one would do well to count the change; and in Orla people were so contentious they fought even in their sleep.

Our village profiles were hardly different. On Sundays the arbor seethed with certain knowledge.The characterizing phrase, the instant analysis helped to illuminate the night....Beware of Montrose, they nursed a nasty grudge; Hicks, good company and good wine but watch out for "the easy touch"; Camac, fists first, talk later, the men were insanely jealous of their wives. And Juniper Street?....It may have been many things in the argot of the adjoining "hilltowns," but perhaps it was said most often that people there had little cunning and were remarkably foolish in matters of the heart....

Don't think such capsule profiles were merely fanciful, just randomly or spitefully arrived at. Quite the contrary. They were fully documented -- part family album, part oral history, a psychic log peculiar to each village, destined in our urban hilltowns to become the folklore of each block. "The block" was final arbiter of nicknames and reputations, a huge repository of even the small detail, and in its vast stores were preserved places of origin, occupations, striking or identifying hallmarks, peccadilloes, family skeletons even, all condensed and codified in the brief explanatory coda often appended to a name -- Mary from Aquila, Pete the Fruitman, Eleanor the Redhead, Tony the Hunchback, Frankie Next-Door, Hookey George, Carla the Tramp -- and these might be still remembered after surnames, circumstances, nature's endowments and proclivities were long altered and forgotten.

Diana Cavallo