Jew Store (25 page)

Still, this was not my father's primary concern. No, it was that Pinder and Miss Brookie had had a fight, and my mother could have been seen as her accomplice.

T
hat day at the factory brought about some changes. A definite coolness set in between my mother and Miss Brookie, and she no longer put in appearances at our house. But Miriam still went to her house for piano lessons, and Lizzie Maud was coming to us on Saturdays and for two hours every afternoon.

When Lizzie Maud first began to come on a daily basis, her paper sack loomed large, so large that whenever Lizzie Maud was in the house, my mother used to say the sack was “a corn always between my toes.”

One day, still feeling the stress of the factory incident, she could stand the tension no longer. Her terror at bringing the subject up was finally overwhelmed by her need to know, and at the end of one particular day she did it—she asked Lizzie Maud what was in her “bag.” This was a give-and-take with Lizzie Maud my mother would always say she was imparting to us
exactly
.

According to my mother, Lizzie Maud stopped at the back door, held out her sack, and took the time to make a vocabulary correction. “You mean this here
sack
?”

My mother, her heart in her mouth, nodded.

“Nothin' but stuff be in here,” Lizzie Maud said.

“What kind of stuff?”

“You know. Totin' stuff.”

As my mother had no clue as to what “totin' stuff” was, there was only one thing left to do: look in the bag. She steeled herself. “Let me have a look,” she said to Lizzie Maud.

Lizzie Maud didn't move. My mother said that for the first time she was seeing honest-to-goodness anger in Lizzie Maud's eyes. “You think I be thievin'?” she asked my mother.

Her hands trembling, my mother took the sack from Lizzie Maud and looked inside.

What she saw were three pieces of bread showing mold, a jar with some jelly under the lip, a chicken drumstick that smelled, as my mother said later, like it had died a long time ago, and a cooking pot with a cracked side, unsuitable even for a plant.

“You be satisfied?” Lizzie Maud asked, and my mother said she wanted to hide where no one could find her for the fore-seeable future. She rattled away. “Nobody told me. I didn't know. . . . If I had known . . .”

Lizzie Maud let my mother go on making a fool of herself. When she finally relented, it was with a look that said that someone so ignorant should have a keeper.

This was the day of my mother's introduction to the time-honored practice of “totin' privileges.”

“Don't you know I has totin' privileges?” Lizzie Maud asked her.

It seemed all the “cooks” did. As Lizzie Maud put it, “You gots to have your totin' privileges.” That way, she said, “You gets to tote home dabs of leftover or wore-out somethin's.”

Lizzie Maud had no trouble reading my mother's mind. “I know what you be thinking,” she said. “You be thinking totin' privileges be a way for colored peoples to steal.”

Well, she said, maybe they did. If somebody had to eat off
some old dented pie tin and drink out of a chipped jelly jar and was paid three dollars a week “for the honor,” while having all “them hungry mouths” at home, she'd be “blessed” if that person — meaning my mother — wouldn't do some stealing, too.

And this, my mother always acknowledged, somehow managed to be the important lesson—more important than totin' privileges, or how to “fix” fried chicken or tea-dye curtains.

Finally, finally, Lizzie Maud asked her, “Have I done said enough?”

And my mother said yes, yes, she had said enough.

T
he paper sack matter finally settled, attitudes relaxed. So when Lizzie Maud came in one afternoon and said, “Has you heard?” my mother prepared herself for the latest in gossip. But no, Lizzie Maud had a personal problem: Her husband, Seth, had been laid off from his job at the railroad. A train had backed into him. He now needed a job, and though Miss Brookie had offered to let him work at this and that, he wanted more than make-do work.

My mother said she couldn't understand why he would be fired when it wasn't his fault, and Lizzie Maud gave her that you-need-looking-after look. His fault or not, she explained, he was unable to work the way a Negro was supposed to, and when folks caught sight of his limp, they thought he didn't have his strength anymore. As she put it, “What man gwine find nigger work where he don't have to be like Samson?”

My mother had to accept this. She thought, What's true is true—trouble comes to people like rust to iron (she had old shtetl sayings, too), and she decided to speak to my father.

My father went right out to Niggertown, to Lizzie Maud's house, to find Seth. I tagged along. Since Lizzie Maud always shooed me away when I tried to follow her home after work, this was my chance. Niggertown was also the site of Lizzie
Maud's church: Ebenezer Baptist (which turned out to be a small, patchy white structure with no steeple at all), about which I heard a lot. It was where Lizzie Maud and her family went without fail every Sunday, Lizzie Maud and her daughters not only dressed up but with their hair ironed, and where the congregation sang the songs Lizzie Maud sang around the house. I often wondered if Miss Brookie would speak to Lizzie Maud about her strict churchgoing, but to my knowledge she never did, perhaps understanding that because she herself stayed home on Sundays, her thoughts on religion were considered irrelevant by everybody in town, including Lizzie Maud. Or perhaps she did not want to cast doubt on one of Lizzie Maud's greatest joys.

At any rate, when Seth wasn't at home—wasn't in the tiny house with the four tiny rooms—my father knew where to go: to the bootlegger's shack, an unkempt, rundown hut where the Negro men hung out on Sunday afternoons, if they were working—or all the time, if they weren't.

My father had been to the shack many times. Ever since he had instituted a charge system, he had to go out there when payments hadn't been forthcoming for a while. Sometimes he went at their wives' requests, when they would say, “See can you do something with that man of mine, Mr. Bronson,” explaining that instead of paying bills, he was just “th'owin'” his money away.

Sometimes lack of money came from buying moonshine, after which the men got drunk and skipped work. Sometimes it was the illegal numbers game—a flourishing Niggertown racket, which conventional wisdom held was run by the Negroes themselves but in reality was controlled by a couple of white men with reputations as pillars of the community. And sometimes it was that the men couldn't resist the Jewish peddlers who came through on their wagons on Sundays with tray after tray of jewelry.

My father spoke to the men with some lack of conviction. He
knew the kinds of jobs they had: terrible ones that made them long to get lost in something, whether drink or adornments, or to make a grab at the only hope in their lives, a numbers hit.

So we went into the bootlegger's shack. It was dark, the only light coming from the cracks between the siding. There were Negro men sitting at a couple of unpainted wooden tables, and they got up when we entered. Did I come in like a little white girl in a spotless dress of lawn dotted about with rosebuds and wearing shiny Mary Janes? Maybe I did.

Anyway, Seth was there. My father spoke to him, offered him the job of handyman in the store, and Seth accepted.

Seth's job was to get the furnace going, take the wagon to the depot, dust and polish, and in general stay handy. “You'll be my third arm,” my father said to him, “and leg, too.”

Seth said my father was not to worry, that he could tend to it all. Actually, according to my father, what he said was, “Jes' ax anybody, Mr. Bronson. They ain't nobody can whips they feets around faster'n me, no matter what that fool train done.”

Seth was slight, both shorter and thinner than his wife, what there was of him all sinew. His hue was like Lizzie Maud's, what she called “magonny,” meaning that the darkness had in it a tinge of red. His eyes were especially bright, and his every action quick, injured leg notwithstanding. It was as if moving at great speed was what his body was accustomed to doing and it couldn't change.

He very quickly settled into his new job and became the kind of handyman who looked for ways to be handier. He got change at the bank and went out for “cherry dopes”—cokes with a shot of cherry flavor—for Vedra Broome; on rainy days he walked the lady customers to their buggies or wagons, holding an umbrella overhead, knowing this was a service from a Negro to which ladies wouldn't object.

As the days went on, Seth and my father worked on comic routines. There was a set piece for Friday nights—the night of
getting paid. At six o'clock sharp, Seth would announce it “be
Shabbos bei nacht
” and say, “
Nu
, Mr. Bossman, it be time for my
gelt
.”

My father would bend toward Seth and inspect his forehead. “Well, look here,” he would say. “Darned if them horns ain't just about to break the skin.” He would then pull Seth's wage envelope out of the register and hand it over with a
blay gezunt
, a “stay well.”

For this Seth would give a
danke schoen
—a “thank you kindly”—and walk out briskly, the limp barely showing.

It was becoming clear, however, that the store could really use another clerk. Carrie MacAllister, now seven months pregnant, could no longer be counted on, even part-time. My father told my mother that he and Vedra just weren't enough.

Between me and her garden and crocheting and edging receiving blankets for Carrie MacAllister's forthcoming baby, my mother didn't want to put in any more time at the store. She suggested Vyvid, Vedra's sister, but my father said this was one case where one bookend was more than enough, thank you.

Whenever my father sought solutions, he would go to the side window and, hands in pockets, would stand looking out, ruminating, as if an answer might pop out from a pinecone. Today an answer came so quickly it was clear he had had it in mind all along: Seth could handle the job. “And very nice,” he said to my mother, trying to convince her that Seth was a natural choice.

There was nothing natural about it, and my mother knew it. “
Seth
?” she exclaimed, meaning, A Ne gro
clerk
?

My father tried to calm her. He wasn't going to announce it from the courthouse tower. “We'll just ease him in so nobody notices,” he said.

My mother wondered how Seth would not be noticed. “Like a raisin on top of a cupcake he'll be noticed,” was the way she put it.

When my father said finally that they had to do right by this man, my mother felt herself caving in. “Just be careful,” she warned.

M
y father told Seth to wait on trade only when he and Mrs. Broome were busy and to use his head about who would accept it.

Seth was joyful, knowing that not many Negroes got a chance like this. Going to work in a shirt and tie? My father always remembered Seth saying, “Won't I be a sight? Everybody be sayin', ‘There go that Sunday nigger.' No sir, I ain't no everyday nigger no more.” He was, he said, going to be “one good sal-es-man.” Like my father, Seth was a good mimic.

As if to “clap the climax,” as we would say in Concordia, some few weeks later Lizzie Maud announced that she too was going to have another baby. If it was a boy, it would be named Aaron Claudius and if a girl, Reba Laverne. Lizzie Maud was unsure about this, afraid it might be something Jews didn't allow. “You like that okay, don't you?” she asked my mother. “I mean it ain't against your religion or nothing, is it?”

My mother ran it through what rules she knew. “No,” she answered, “that's one thing that ain't against our religion.”

F
ive months later Lizzie Maud gave birth to Reba Laverne, about one month after Carrie MacAllister delivered Sarah Reba.

I saw Sarah Reba most every afternoon, mainly because my mother and Mrs. MacAllister had taken up painting flowers on dresses. While our mothers worked with brushes and paint pots, Billy Sunday and I played house, with Sarah Reba, blond and bland-faced like her brother, as Baby.

Reba Laverne's first visit came when she was about a month old. Delicately formed and brightly shining, she seemed a creature from a place I could not know.

I allowed myself to touch her, to make the miniature finger curl around my big one, to smooth shut the eyelids, to bend the flower-stem legs. When Lizzie Maud put her in my arms, she lay there light as a feather, small as a pigeon.

Soon I was begging to take her for walks. On one Saturday afternoon I put her in my doll carriage, and Lizzie Maud agreed we could go to the courthouse park to show her off.

My mother walked with us as far as the park and then went on to the store.

At the park Lizzie Maud leaned against a tree and talked to a friend while I promenaded Reba Laverne around the clay walk. The park was cool and green in the late-spring morning, and I was pleased to see a goodly number of Saturday morning bench-sitters—more than usual, I thought.

The bench-sitters said things like, “My, you have a fine-looking baby. Who does she favor?”

“She looks kindly like her sister Sarah Reba and kindly like her daddy Billy Sunday,” I answered them.

After a while I noticed there was something new in the park— a wooden platform on stilts, on which a group of men were draping bunting and hanging signs.

I pushed the carriage over to Lizzie Maud. She moved her finger slowly in the air from letter to letter on the topmost sign and made out “
CONCORDIA GO-GETTERS CLUB CHARLESTON CONTEST
.”

To Lizzie Maud the Charleston was a Negro dance. So how was it that “white peoples” were “gwine do the Charleston” out here in the park?