Jew Store (15 page)

At the fringes of the field Joey and T were in a game with a baseball and Miriam was playing Drop the Handkerchief. My mother spotted my father standing near the platform with a group of men dressed in suits and hats but whether he was doing any talking she could not determine. She finally located Miss Brookie: She was talking to Roscoe Pinder and looking as if she had been set upon by bees.

And then all at once Miss Brookie had broken off and was marching back. Then she had dragged a chair over, plopped herself down, and delivered herself of a “double dog damn.”

My mother waited.

“We've got us a very bent hairpin here,” Miss Brookie said, and my mother knew she must wait some more. Finally Miss Brookie said plainly that Roscoe Pinder was most certainly going to hire children. “And work them long hours, too.” She stared darkly out across the field. “If that don't blister it, I don't know what does.”

Children? Working? In Concordia?
Though it seemed incredible to her later, my mother said she had never until that moment entertained the thought that behind those blind blue windows children would be working.

“Everybody knows it's a vile practice and that it's wrong,” Miss Brookie said to my mother, “but there's no
law
, nothing to sic on the man.”

My mother suddenly began to see that it was not so different from how it was in the factories in New York. She confessed to Miss Brookie, though she was reluctant to do it, it not being anything she liked to talk about, that as a girl, as a
child
, she had worked in factories. And then, after the day's work, there were the bundles.

Bundles were items from the factory brought home to work on. In my mother's case the bundles were from the ladies' dress
factory where Aunt Sadie worked before she was married. Aunt Sadie brought home bundles of belts and buttons, and at night the women of the family turned the belts and sewed on the buttons, for which they were paid fifteen cents a bundle. “We made a little money that way,” my mother told Miss Brookie.

“
Very
little, I'd be inclined to say,” Miss Brookie answered her. “Slave labor was all in the world it was.” Next question. And how old was my mother when she did this?

Not quite eleven she had been. What had a young child been doing in a factory? my mother suddenly asked herself. A
child
in those awful places? Those crowded, airless, roaring lofts? Those places with the smells from unwashed bodies, from the same clothes worn day after day, from the foul toilets? My mother would say that out there on the picnic grounds, she had to give her head a good shake, to rid her ears of the noises and her nose of the smells.

In later years my mother often spoke of how she survived those days. It was because, first of all, all the children were doing it, not just her; then with the bundles, her family was around her; and when she got older, she was working with flowers, or at least what she saw as flowers. Or maybe, she said, it was that she had seen worse in the old country. In Russia children would have been glad to work, “to have what to eat,” she explained. “But it was not right, none of it,” she would say. “Children should have
naches
all day long, not
tsores
.” Joy, not trouble.

M
y father was approaching the picnic table. Like the other men, he was dressed in a black serge suit and vest and a black fedora hat, but somehow he looked, well, softer around the edges. The others—their hats, pants, even their faces—seemed sharply creased, as if, my mother said, they had stretched out on ironing boards and been ironed.

The speeches were about to start, and Roscoe Pinder had already mounted the bunting-draped platform. As the crowd gathered,
he declared himself grateful for the turnout, for the show of support, for the good wishes of friends and neighbors. He introduced Brother Jones, the minister of the First Congregational Church—a new church name for my mother.

She wondered to Miss Brookie if, being a minister, Brother Jones might speak out against hiring children.

“If you believe that, you believe the Easter bunny lays candy eggs with pink and green dots,” Miss Brookie answered her.

My mother's eyes were on the ground all through what Brother Jones had to say, as he called upon God to bestow His blessings on the new factory and asked Him to do the same for the owner and the men. (“Why just men?” Miss Brookie was hissing. “Why leave out the
children
?”)

Brother Jones had words about the goodness of honest toil (“And long hours?” Miss Brookie asked him sotto voce) and got all wrapped up in the joyous farmer with his plow and the happy carpenter with his saw, the latter “in the way of our Lord Himself,” he said. When he arrived at “Let us bow our heads in prayer,” my mother just kept her head down. He finally said, “In Jesus's name,” and when everybody looked up, she did, too.

The preacher moved to the back of the platform, and from the grounds some kind of group all in white moved toward it. A play? my mother wondered. But what kind of play was this, with everybody in the same costumes and pointy hats down over their faces with just a couple of eyeholes? She nudged Miss Brookie.

“That bunch?” Miss Brookie expelled a “Foot!”—a word whose spelling is unknown to me but for expressing vexation, a favorite of Miss Brookie's and of all Concordians—and shot them a glance that would curdle milk, as Miss Brookie herself would have said. “The bedsheet brigade,” she muttered to my mother.

There were about thirty bedsheets in all.

My father knew exactly who they were. They were the Ku Klux Klan. He had heard about them in Nashville, where there
was talk that these Negro-hating, Jew-hating, Catholic-hating groups were coming back to life after a long period of dormancy. When my father had heard the talk, he had taken only a little notice, vaguely picturing them as operating in some faraway place, somewhere way out in the country. Uh oh, he suddenly thought. Wasn't he now
in
that faraway place, in that somewhere way out in the country?

He studied this curious bunch. Why the disguises? Even the Cossacks didn't wear disguises.

Ku Kluxers, in order to inspire fear, had to operate differently from Cossacks. Cossacks had only to be Cossacks to intimidate: They were tough soldiers who lived in barracks; Kluxers, being the guys next door, had to don sheets with eyeholes to transform the little man who delivered your milk into something that could scare somebody.

Miss Brookie scoffed at the disguises. She wondered how “old Vermin—excuse me,
Vernon
—Prendergast” expected to be anonymous. “Lord, that lumbago of his makes him walk like an anteater,” she said.

One of the white-sheeted figures detached itself from the group and climbed the platform stairs. After a moment, a high voice filtered out through the sheet and greeted the crowd with “My white Christian brothers and sisters.” It was a salutation that chilled my parents to the bone.

The voice then imparted how grateful was the community for the new facility, how thankful for “a place in which white Christians can labor and prosper.” It concluded with the thought that “the Klan accepts proudly the responsibility for the factory staying forever free of foreign agitators who might want to upset our traditional ways.” All was said “for God and the glory of His Kingdom and in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ.”

At last the figure reached a hand out from the sheet, touched the cone hat in a salute, lifted the skirts, and moved down the stairs.

My father first had to know what “white Christians” laboring and prospering meant. Why limit the hoped-for prosperity to whites? Did it perhaps mean there were to be no jobs for Negroes? If so, this would mean a Jew store without solid Negro trade, and this was impossible. The jitters starting, my father asked Miss Brookie, “No jobs for Negroes?”

No “white men's” jobs, Miss Brookie explained. There would still be Negro ones. “Toting crates and like that,” she said.

And the salutation to “Christians”? “We sure ain't Christians,” my father said. His elatedness of earlier was declining fast. And what about the dark reference to “foreigners”? “Ain't we foreigners?” he asked Miss Brookie. He had a small hope that by some formula the Bronsons would fall outside that description.

Miss Brookie was of some comfort. “Foreign agitators,” Miss Brookie explained, was just a phrase the Klan had picked up from the pamphlets the organization sent around. “Truth is they wouldn't know a foreign agitator if one bit 'em on the rear while they were hymn-singing in church.”

But all things considered, it seemed to my father that the Klan could take a very hard line on trading with him. “Ain't I got that correct?” he asked Miss Brookie.

This time all Miss Brookie said was, “We'll have to wait and see.”

There was reason for her unwillingness to make a prediction. The opinion about Jews, not just among the Klan but among the town's general population, was very unsettled. On the one hand there was “this doggone international conspiracy,” as people said, among Jewish bankers to control the world and those “infernal orders” Jews were under to kill all Christian babies. And of course there was the worst charge of all—that Jews had killed their Lord.

On the other hand there were the mitigating factors: the fact that their Lord was born Jewish and the fact that their Old Testament told them that Jews were God's chosen people. All this
back and forthing, as Miss Brookie would have said, put their britches in a pretty serious knot.

Miss Brookie told my father that the local Kluxers
might
just carry out their Klan duty by exhorting folks to stay vigilant. “That's the going word—
vigilant
,” she said. Her advice to him was to hope they forgot all about him, since they all knew they really needed a Jew store.

In the middle of all the conjecturing, picnickers were beginning to come around to get some of Miss Brookie's pie. “We always like to see what Brookie's whomped up,” one woman said to my mother. “Her lemon meringue's a town treasure . . . like Minnie Horner's six-toed cat.” The woman did a guffaw and winked at my mother.

My mother's eyelid defied a return wink. The best she could do was pull her lips up.

Still, she did think it strange that the pie was talked of as Miss Brookie's when she knew for a fact that Lizzie Maud had made it—
fixed
it. She had watched Lizzie Maud at work, even saw the lard going into the crust. I had early on appointed myself the Lizzie Maud mimic, and what I imagined she had said in a severe teacher's tone on this occasion was, “Don't you be sassin' my lard, Miz Reva. You gots to have lard. With lard your crust don't stay in your mouth long enough to say ‘How do.'”

Miss Brookie handed out slices of the pie—doing it slowly to ensure that the towering white meringue not come loose from its pale yellow moorings—while having a word with each seeker. “How you doing, Otis?” she would say. “Your new barn up yet?”

Meanwhile, my father was mulling things over. The Klan didn't like Catholics either. Could it be that the Klan would concentrate on Catholics and leave him alone? Not that he wished this bunch on anybody, but he certainly didn't wish it on
him
. Anyway, it was a foolish thought, as there were no Catholics in Concordia, had never been any, and perhaps never would be. Still, this didn't stop Concordians from believing Catholics to
be a threat, and so Christians—Catholics were not considered Christians—must be constantly on guard.

The day had gone to twilight too quickly. What was my father to think about what had happened? It was different here in Concordia, he was finding out, different from Savannah and Nashville.

O
n the way home he stared silently at the road, feeling no desire now to offer encomiums to the beauties of the countryside. The others were quiet as well, and Harold Lloyd was back to desultory plodding, paying little attention to any light flicks my father might send his way.

My father could finally stand the gloom no longer. He put on a cheerful face and invited Miss Brookie to supper. He tempted her with gefilte fish. “How long's it been since you've had some?” he asked her.

“Too long,” Miss Brookie answered him. And she would “adore” to come.

My father told my mother she had customers. As he found out, he had said the wrong thing.

My mother said yes, she had customers, but, feeling as cheerless as the darkening landscape, added, “Now let's hope you get some, too.” But because this sounded too much like one of those little cold stones that she had hoped would never fall from her mouth again, she lifted up the corners of her mouth and said, “It will be all right, Aaron.” But in her head she was saying, And if it ain't, then “tem-po-rary” will be sooner than later.

A
ccording to Joey, he got up an hour early every day during the week before the store was to open and went out by himself in the wagon to pass out the handbills announcing the opening day. He says he studied the handbills beforehand, memorizing exactly what they said so that he could inform those unable to read. He did not want people just to accept one and then put it in the outhouse for further use.

It took him a long time. The houses in town were easy, and the factory was a snap—just a ride out to it. He left a pile there with Roscoe Pinder, who didn't exactly say he'd see that the men got them but didn't exactly say he wouldn't. Anyway, most of the men lived out in the country, and Joey was delivering out there as well. He also distributed the handbills to the churches and left some at the picture show.

On the farms, locating someone to hand the handbills
to
took a bit of doing. Sometimes the ladies of the house were not in the house but hanging out wash, or hoeing the garden, or slopping the pigs; the men might be out in the back forty behind a plow. Still, whether they read the handbill for themselves or had Joey read it to them, they were interested, though it could
have been, Joey thought, that what interested them the most was the note at the bottom of the handbill, which said
FREE SOUVENIRS
, or, to be accurate,
FREE SOUVENIERS
.