Sofia Colicchioisa dark-eyed animal, a quick runner, a loud shouter. She is best friends with Antonia Russo, who lives next door. They live in Brooklyn, in a neighbourhood called Red Hook, which is bordered by the neighbourhood that will become Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. Red Hook is younger than Lower Manhattan, but older than Canarsie and Harlem, those wild outskirts where almost anything goes. Many of the buildings are low wooden lean-tos near the river, but the rooftops climb higher away from the waterfront, toward still-low but more permanent brick townhouses, everything a dark grey from the wind and the rain and the soot in the air.
Sofia’s and Antonia’s families moved to Red Hook on the instructions of their father’s boss, Tommy Fianzo. Tommy lives in Manhattan, but he needs help managing his operations in Brooklyn. When their neighbours ask Carlo and Joey what they do, Carlo and Joey say, this and that. They say, importing and exporting. Sometimes they say, we’re in the business of helping people. Then their new neighbours understand and do not ask any more questions.
They communicate via snapped-shut window shade, and by telling their children, it’s none of our concern, loudly, in the hallway. The other people in the neighbourhood are Italian and Irish; they work the docks; they build the skyscrapers sprouting like beanstalks from the Manhattan landscape. Though the violence has abated since the adults in this neighbourhood were children, it is still there, hovering in the spaces between street-lamp circles.
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