Marianna De Marco Torgovnick
ON BEING WHITE, FEMALE,
AND BORN IN BENSONHURST
The Mafia protects the neighborhood , our fathers say, with that
peculiar satisfied pride with which law-abiding Italian-Americans refer to the
Mafia: the Mafia protects the neighborhood from "the coloreds." In the fifties
and sixties, I heard that information repeated, in whispers, in neighborhood
parks and in the yard at school in Bensonhurst. The same information
probably passes today in the parks (the word now "blacks," not "coloreds")
but perhaps no longer in the schoolyards. From buses each morning, from
neighborhoods outside Bensonhurst, spill children of all colors and back–
grounds - American black, West-Indian black, Hispanic, and Asian. But the
blacks are the only ones especially marked for notice. Bensonhurst is no
longer entirely protected from "the coloreds." But in a deeper sense, at least
for Italian-Americans, Bensonhurst never changes.
Italian-American life continues pretty much as I remember it. Families
with young children live side by side with older couples whose children are
long gone to the suburbs. Many of those families live "down the block" from
the last generation or, sometimes still, live together with parents or grand–
parents. When a young family leaves, as sometimes happens, for Long Is–
land or New Jersey or (very common now) for Staten Island, another ar–
rives , without any special effort being required, from Italy or a poorer
neighborhood in New York. They fill the neat but anonymous houses that
make up the mostly tree-lined streets: two-, three-, or four-family houses for
the most part (this is a working, lower to middle-middle class area, and people
need rents to pay mortgages), with a few single family or small apartment
houses tossed in at random. Tomato plants, fig trees, and plaster madonnas
often decorate small but well-tended yards which face out onto the street;
the grassy front lawn, like the grassy backyard, is relatively uncommon.
Crisscrossing the neighborhood and marking out ethnic zones - Italian,
Irish, and Jewish, for the most part, though there are some Asian-Americans
and some people (usually Protestants) called simply Americans - are the
great shopping streets: 86th Street, Kings Highway, Bay Parkway, 18th
Avenue, each with its own distinctive character. On 86th Street, crowds
