I watched “Big Pete” treat them like Greeks for half a day, and I did not discover that such treatment saved a man from being geared to the highest notch and made to work incessantly, while “Big Pete” watched and cursed to help the pace.
The same night that they arrived, some of the young boys were looked over by the men of the Greek colony, who had assisted them to come, and whose labour was theirs until the passage money was paid, and paid with interest. The next morning they began their tutelage in blacking boots in so-called parlours, whose walls are covered by chromos depicting Greek wars in which the Greeks are always the victors and the Turks are slaughtered like sheep at the stockyards; there are also one or two pictures of classic ruins.
In such surroundings, and seemingly unconscious of the life about them, these boys will blacken boots for eighteen hours a day, with heart, mind and soul in Greece; and their fingers in America only when they handle our coin. They will attempt no conversation, even after they know our speech, literally obeying the Scriptural injunction to say “Yea, yea and nay, nay,” and not much else if they can help it. They are not nearly so communicative as the Italians, and although a smile sits well on a Greek face, I have rarely seen one there.
The confectionery stores which are outside of New Greece, are open all the time, at least so long as a customer may be expected, and although these customers are nearly all Americans, the Greeks have few friends among them. They all return to New Greece as often as possible, and there their virtues unfold, and “their soul delights itself in fatness.” They are not exceeded even by the Chinese in that loyalty to native food which I call the patriotism of the stomach, and a Greek grocery store is filled from one end to the other with food from the classic isles. There are dried vegetables whose present form does not betray their natural shape, but which taste luscious, because the flavour of the native soil clings to them; fish, dried, pickled and preserved in some form, and cheese made from the milk of goats whose horns butted broken classic vases instead of modern tin cans.
The smells seem ancient, too; but in these the Greek revels, and here he is at home.