Jew Store (24 page)

Of course, there was nobody to leave me with, and this brought up the subject of “help.” It seemed to be on everybody's minds that my mother had no help.

Miss Brookie was trying to understand why my mother was so “disinclined” to have help. And it was probably true, as she said, that Concordia was abounding in Negro women who'd “bless their stars” to work for us.

The picture came promptly to my mother: Negro women carrying home their sacks. To avoid opening up a whole can of worms, she told Miss Brookie she didn't want somebody—a stranger—around all the time.

If my mother hoped this would get Miss Brookie off the subject, she hoped in vain. Miss Brookie gave a fixed stare to the road, as if an answer might turn up in the next hollow. And there it was, she saw it: She would “spare” Lizzie Maud in the afternoons. “Lord knows, she's no
stranger
.”

My mother was hard put to explain why Lizzie Maud wouldn't do either. “I ain't like you,” she said, hoping to convey that Miss Brookie's mind was a more elevated one and occupied with loftier thoughts. “I notice more little things.”

Miss Brookie instantly challenged. “What ‘little things'?”

My mother went wobbly. “Nothing,” she said to Miss Brookie. “No little things.”

After a long moment of silence, Miss Brookie said, in a plainly exasperated tone, “Look, Reba, do you want Lizzie Maud or not?”

My mother had no fight left. “Yes, I guess,” she answered.

T
he factory owner, Roscoe Pinder, was a tall man, and skinny. He was standing at the top of the factory steps, one hand holding his hat and the other out for a handshake.

In his office he took some wooden folding chairs from against a wall and opened them up. My mother sat down and quickly pulled me onto her lap. Was she giving the impression of innocent bystander? She fervently hoped so.

I looked around for some sights. There wasn't much, just a desk, a shelf holding cardboard boxes, a metal cabinet, and a couple of windows with their panes painted blue.

Pinder said it was nice to see “you ladies” and wanted to know if we should have tea now or later.

Miss Brookie suggested having it now and said we'd see the plant afterward.

“Fine,” Roscoe Pinder said, and went to the office door. Holding it open, he let out a bellow. “Horace! Oh, Horace!”

In a few seconds a red-haired boy about as old as Joey came scooting in. He pulled up in front of Pinder, peered into his face, received his orders, and scooted out.

“So here you are, Brookie,” Pinder said. “Been a while since you been out here sticking your—” He caught himself. “Well, looking us over.”

If Miss Brookie took offense, there was no way to tell.

In a few minutes the red-haired boy was back, carrying a tin tray on which were glasses of iced tea and a box of cookies. Where to put it seemed a problem. When nothing offered, he darted here and there, a small fish testing watery spaces.

My mother shoved me off her lap, then herself got up, making a place. “Here, sonny, here,” she said.

The boy dashed to put the tray on the vacated chair and shot out of the room.

Pinder made a clearing on his desk, picked up the tray, and brought it back. “You'll have to excuse the boy, Miz Bronson. Truth is these boys don't really have much sense.” He gave a laugh that seemed heartier than his spare body should have been able to produce. “I declare I thought he was going to hold on to that tray till hell froze over.” He looked a little stricken. “Beg your pardon, ladies. . . . But what I'm trying to say is . . . well, take your Joseph for comparison, Miz Bronson. I reckon he would have found a better place for this tray than your chair.” He said something about Joey being the smartest boy in school “of course,” and winked a little wink at my mother and me.

What did “of course” mean? And why the wink? Did it mean Pinder was sharing with us an “understanding” that because Joey was Jewish, he was automatically “the smartest boy in school”? My mother longed to think of Joey as making good grades because he
was
extrasmart, but my father kept trying to tell her that Joey worked hard. It was because, he said, Joey had a motivation to learn, which was, he also said, “nothing to sneeze at either.” He tried to explain this thing some Jews possessed—what we would now call a strong work ethic—by historical reasoning, but he couldn't quite do it, his learning in history being informal and his grasp of it tenuous. But even I found myself puzzled by the “Jews are born smart” thing. If this was true, and Jews had only to be Jews in order to make good grades, how come Miriam didn't get in on it? Her grades by anybody's standard were merely average. My father would have said that if it was a gene thing, Miriam, being Miriam, had genes that made her social.

That day, in deference to my father, even if my mother had been a winker, she would not have winked back at Pinder. She
just returned to her chair and pulled me once more onto her lap. Fooling around with my collar, she answered the factory owner with, “Boys just ain't very good with trays, Mr. Pinder.”

Pinder put a thumbnail in the seam of the cookie box, slit it open, and tendered it, along with glasses of tea. Miss Brookie plucked a sugar cookie from the box, poked it into her mouth, and sipped quickly at her tea. She was clearly in the grip of a terrible impatience.

In another moment, she had stood up and, with all of us to the rear, had marched out to the factory floor.

Walking opposite to the direction from which we had come, we found ourself abruptly on the floor, where we were greeted by the sound of powerful machines operating all out. The roar was so intense, it seemed a physical force that had to be struggled against. I understood immediately why Miss Brookie had thought it was dangerous for me to be there, and even as I understood this, I was seeing a dozen or more children racing around the floor and running to and from the machines.

My mother was gripping my hand tightly as we went from place to place, and I was gripping back. Miss Brookie was striding ahead. After about ten minutes she stuck into the air an authoritative forefinger, which directed us back to the office.

“Well, how you doing, Roscoe?” she asked. “Lord, by now you ought to be sitting on a pile as big as the state capitol.”

It didn't seem that Roscoe
was
—sitting on a pile, that is; as he explained, the factory was only “doing best as we can.” Pinder said it was that “gol-derned” competition from up north. This was plainly a bewilderment. Didn't the fact that he had newer machinery than theirs count for something? “It's a crying shame,” Pinder said.

If he thought that Miss Brookie was going to let him play victim, he was in for a rude awakening. She said she didn't give a hoot or a holler about who was “beating out who.” What she
did give a hoot about, she said, was that that North and South alike were hiring altogether too many children. “And altogether too young,” she told Pinder.

“Yes, ma'am,” Roscoe Pinder said.

Miss Brookie blew air, forcefully, which I recognized as an opening salvo. “You don't think it's disgraceful?”

Pinder took it well. “Truth to tell,” he answered, “the little ones don't do much but pick up scraps.”

To which Miss Brookie retorted that of course they didn't “do much but.”

“They certainly don't go to school, if that's what you mean.”

From behind his desk, Pinder gave my mother another of his winks. This one was no doubt directed to her in her role as the wife of a businessman. Surely she could understand his position, would know “how 'tis.”

“We know how 'tis when you're trying to scratch out a living, don't we, Miz Bronson?” he asked her. “You do your best to keep expenses down. That's how 'tis, ain't it?”

My mother abruptly resumed smoothing my dress collar. I knew for a fact that Jimmie Mae over in Niggertown always dealt faultlessly with our laundry—even my mother said so— so what about my collar needed
doing
?

Actually, as my mother smoothed, she was reminding herself on the one hand what my father had said about keeping out of it and on the other that Miss Brookie wanted her to get in it. She was, as she often said, being stretched, pulled, and slapped like biscuit dough—Miss Brookie on one end, my father on the other, Pinder in the middle. “Something like that,” she said into my neck, hoping to sound neutral.

In Miss Brookie's view, however, there was no such thing as neutral. Lack of support for her meant support for the enemy. She grew testier. Had she arrived at the point, I wondered, where she would wrestle Pinder to the ground? “Now you listen to me, Roscoe Pinder,” she was saying, clearly having given up
thoughts of a calm discussion. “I know all about making a living. You think my daddy came out of the womb in a sack of greenbacks?”

Miss Brookie wanted to know why Pinder couldn't hire Negroes instead of children, and Pinder answered that he didn't hire Negroes because he'd have to pay them more. And the Negroes weren't as dependable as the boys. It seemed the boys showed up no matter what act of God descended on them. If the boys didn't turn up, he just let their “daddies” know, and they would be there the next morning without fail. “Niggers always have some excuse not to come to work, and they don't do much when they do. Y'all know that well as I do.”

Did we all know that? I thought of Lizzie Maud, the “nigger” I knew best. She came to work every day without fail and did a lot. Miss Brookie didn't have to so much as put a dishrag to a teacup, as we said in Concordia.

Miss Brookie planted a look on my mother. In the heat of battle, her promise that my mother would just be along for the ride was forgotten. “Tell him, Reba, tell him,” she ordered. “Tell him how you'd like it if Joey was in this place from early morning to late night. And no schooling. Just cooped up in this airless place with the netherworld's own din to keep him company. Tell him how you'd like it, Reba.”

She wouldn't like it at all, of course. Her Joey to work the way these boys did, the way she had? She should speak out and say it was awful, a punishment, a curse.

She didn't say any of it. All at once I was being stood up and pushed forward in quick thrusts. “Hurry, Stella Ruth, move!” my mother was saying. To Miss Brookie she said, “Please, Miss Brookie, let's go!”

Miss Brookie got up, though with a last word for Roscoe Pinder, a wish that she had a law to “sic” on him. Since she didn't, she said, she'd just thank him for the tea. She sailed out ahead of us, and my mother and I rushed to catch up.

Pinder maneuvered to hold open the factory door. “Thank you for coming, ladies,” he said. He lifted my hand up. “You, too, little lady,” he added, and it made me feel that my presence had for sure brightened his day. It was Southern charm, no doubt about it. As Miss Brookie would have been quick to point out, yes, it was a delightful custom, and it would have been “truly transcendental” had it been colorblind.

Leaving Pinder at the factory door, we hurried down the steps and ran to catch up with Miss Brookie. My mother kept calling out excuses to the starched white blouse ahead of us. “I couldn't speak,” she said to it. “It all stuck in my throat.”

Miss Brookie kept walking,
marching
, to the carriage. “You were about as much help as a one-legged clothespin,” she threw out over her shoulder. “You of all people. You who could write the book on child labor, and you sit there like the cat had your tongue in a vise.”

My mother was struggling for a way to excuse herself, to find a difference between the way these boys worked and the way she had. What about that these boys didn't work on Sundays, that they didn't take bundles home? But the minute these things were out of her mouth, she knew they were “ridikalus.” Children working was children working.

Standing beside Harold Lloyd, Miss Brookie let my mother have both barrels. Was it my mother's belief that the boys slept late on Sundays and got breakfast in bed? “If so,” she said to her, “let me take the time to disabuse you of that notion.”

My mother, she said, should understand how went a factory child's Sunday. According to Miss Brookie, the first thing the child did on a Sunday morning was to get dressed in a stiff little suit—“like as not with a patch here and there because it's in its third or forth incarnation”—and go off to church, where he sat for two or three hours listening to a preacher threaten him with eternal damnation. Then he came home, had some dinner, changed his clothes, and did chores until dark. “Even without
bundles, don't you think that's a pretty hard day?” She thwacked Harold Lloyd on the rump. Poor Harold Lloyd. His mistress was angry—at Pinder, at my mother, at laws that should have been passed but hadn't been—and taking it out on him.

Miss Brookie had more: the figures. There were, she said, thousands of children spending their childhoods in mills and factories. And as many of them under twelve as over. And not just boys, but girls as well. “Girls of six and seven working thirteen hours a day,” she said to my mother. “Doesn't that give you some inclination to speak?”

She climbed into the buggy and grabbed up the reins. My mother and I had to scramble to get in before Harold Lloyd took off. “Don't think we're finished yet,” she announced to the road. “You can never tell what kind of dance they'll do once the fiddling gets to going.” She flicked the reins, hard. “Giddy-yup, Harold.”

T
he minute we got home my father knew something had gone wrong. My mother's face had
vai is mir
—woe is me—written all over it.

I thought it was because Miss Brookie had gotten mad at her. She had called my mother a “one-legged clothespin,” and from what I knew, nothing was as useless as a one-legged clothespin. So it stood to reason that Miss Brookie was seriously mad.