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Carlo Silvestrini, Child of Sunnyside Got a habanero heart and it ain’t no wonder. Raised in the habanero heat of Delta summer. I’s born in ’21 on Sunnyside Plantation. Grandpa drug the family here in 1899. The mayor of Rome, Prince Ruspoli, said Arkansas a land of many plenty. “Here, sign the planter’s contract. It’s okay you can’t read English.” He told Italian peasants the cotton was endless, and shimmer like sun stunning on the blue. “Sunnyside,” ha! Mighty pretty picture what he drew. She fertile, that much true, ten thousand acre of the best damn cotton country mixed up by the Maker. With Memphis upriver and New Orleans down south, she good for crop and shipping, ain’t a lick a doubt. But Sunnyside a crooked country all her own, a twenty-mile smug smile of ground, lipped off by the banks of the Mississippi and a great big lake, except for a crack at the southeast corner, but even in the midnight black, toothy goons with guns bite down on the border. The prince never bother telling my grandfather how the planter own your soul ’fore you ever cross the water, else Grandpa never would a left the Marche. In debt in the Delta, dago can’t flee the farm. Who say? Law say! Even if the reason he leaving be to earn some pay—unsnap the trap of sharecrop debt— while his family stay behind to keep the cotton on track. 55 Gnaw gnaw, prince never mention that, or how you work barefoot and hungry sun to sun, slaving when it’s too hot to see, then spend all fall scrapping every last lock. He never spoke of sultry summer Europe can’t match, hotter’n two mice fucking in a wool sock. Never told how every face at Sunnyside, codger to the youngin, turn clear as a onion, then yellow, then green as the stinking drinking water from the swamp. Or how every glassy eye squint for a future through a fever, mosquitoes fogging by the millions like a shadow-black halo, biting piles of Italians to the dark dirt forever. Never. 56 ...

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