MILLICENT 13ELL
39
The pattern is there from the start when an accordion maker from
Sicily brings his ancient craft and native music to "La Merica" at the turn
of the century. But our expectations of more story are cut off, like his
hopes, by a lynch mob in New Orleans; his beloved accordion is lost, and
his son, "burning with hatred for Sicilians," escapes into the melting pot,
casting off his name, "Silvano," and calling himself "Bob Joe." Next, three
immigrant Germans arrive in an abandoned prairie town where they will
settle, send for their German brides, become through toil and skill the
most prosperous farmers in the region but, wi th the advent of World War
I, find themselves victims of anti-German persecution. For only a short
while their special way of living and feeling, their German habits and
tastes, have flourished, and the little accordion, which has turned up in a
Keokuk lumberyard, has helped to bring German band music into the
American space. The wandering squeeze box travels on. It will appear in
Texas as the favorite instrument of a great Latino player of "conjunto"
music who works as a busboy and whose children suffer the humiliations
and cultural mutilations of non-Anglo selfhood. Growing a little more
battered with each transfer, the accordion is the sole legacy from an
unknown French father left to an abandoned child who grows up in an
orphanage in Maine; he has no other clue than his name, "Dolor" (mean–
ing sorrow), to the music, the identi
ty,
which he strives and fails to recover.
Still capable of song, the instrument falls into the hands of a black "zyde–
co" player who pawns it in Chicago when his luck runs out. It moves on
to further sojourns, each time wi tnessing the wrenching loss of heri tage,
the shame that succeeds pride for Polish slaughterhouse workers and cigar
rollers, or for a Basque sheep herder, or a Norwegian lumberjack whose
son scavenges throw-out junk for flea market sale but finally makes a for–
tune out of a dismantled funeral home and buys a ranch in Montana and
a beach house in Tahiti.
One of the best chapters plunges us into the integral communal
world of Polish immigrants who hate blacks no poorer than themselves
in Chicago's "back of the yards." Accordions play polkas at picnics and
weddings until rock bands take up a polka beat. In the end, a second–
generation Polish accordion player and his wife weary of the grueling
music-contest circuit, the stop-offs at sleazy motels with carsick kids, the
ripoffs and disappointment of the road. They move "first to Koskiusco,
Texas, then to Panna Maria, where Joey started a catfish farm, branched out
into raising ladybugs for the organic garden market, and in a decade made
a modest fortune but showed he wasn't proud by still shopping at the
Smoga store." When they leave Chicago the little accordion goes onto the
yard sale table,
