Jew Store (26 page)

I had no answer, of course, but I knew the Charleston very well. Lizzie Maud had taught it to Miriam, and Miriam had taught it to her friends, and they did it “like mad,” as Miriam would say, in our house, making use of any space that could accommodate flying arms and legs.

How Lizzie Maud learned the Charleston was by way of the
trail of wagons filled with Negroes continually passing through Niggertown, some going with high spirits
to
Chicago, some coming with low ones
from
it. On Saturday nights it was a thing for Concordia Negroes to do: mix with the transients and learn from them whatever dances, games, or jokes were going on in their towns or in the big city.

And now there was going to be a Charleston
contest
. I begged—nagged—Lizzie Maud to hold me so I could see.

The men finished their hangings and took seats at the rear of the platform. Some folks were now abandoning their benches and moving forward; others were filtering through the streets in the park's direction. Soon a dense semicircle had formed in front of the stage.

Lizzie Maud stood her place at the front, me in her arms, Reba Laverne beside us in the doll carriage. Lizzie Maud knew her rights: A little white girl in her charge was her ticket to standing where she pleased. She could ignore the rule that Negroes must stand to the rear.

I thought Lizzie Maud should be in the contest, but she kept saying she was the wrong color and the wrong age. Wrenching around in her arms, I kept insisting, but she just wouldn't move. She was just so
stubborn
. Couldn't budge her with a stick, she herself would have said. Finally totally provoked with me, she said I was as heavy as a “fifty-cent sack of taters” and dropped me to the ground. “I can't be in it,” she said to me. “And you stop.”

I ran around the platform to see what was what. Several girls were kicking and twirling furiously. All wore short skirts. All had short hair. Miriam, too.
Miriam
?

Yes, there she was, in a short green pleated skirt and green sweater. But it was her hair that was the sight. It was short like the other girls', with spit curls at the sides of her face, like the tendrils on our painted dresses. I raced back to Lizzie Maud.

Lizzie Maud was horror-struck. She too said,
“Miriam
?”

She grabbed me up with one hand, seized the handle of Reba Laverne's carriage with the other, and we rammed our way through the crowd to the platform's edge. From behind it, Miriam's head was popping in and out of view.

To which Lizzie Maud said, “Lord have mercy, it sure 'nuf be Miriam.”

Hadn't I told her that? “And her hair,” I said. “It's in a bob.”

To which Lizzie Maud said, “And your mama gwine bob her heinie.”

Lizzie Maud may have been feeling some guilt over teaching Miriam a “nigger” dance. “Ain't you or Reba Laverne either one watching this mess,” she said to me. “Just you get your little self together and
scat
!”

She began shouting as soon as we got to the front door of the store. Miriam! In the park! Dancing for all to see!

My mother herself loved to dance—at weddings and other family affairs—and not just the traditional circle hora, but also one-to-one with a partner, a man preferably, or, if all the men were taken, another woman. So what was Lizzie Maud telling her? That Miriam was dancing for
strangers
?

My father stayed calm. He touched Reba Laverne on the cheek and pronounced her “sweet as a Hershey's kiss.” He wondered to my mother what was so terrible about Miriam dancing. Was she dancing in her underwear? Was she doing the hootchykootchy? No? So what was the problem?

My mother had to see for herself, so off we went to the park and rammed our way back through the crowd. Miriam was under way, legs and arms a-sail, the music of a portable Victrola playing scratchily in the background.

She soon went into the Finish, in which you stooped over, put your hands on your knees, shoved them together and apart, and then patted your backside.

A few other girls got up, put on a record, and danced. Like Miriam they wore sharply pleated skirts that flipped and swung
and shoes with little fat heels and perky bows. “Boy howdy, are they ever beautiful,” I breathed. When all the girls had had a turn, a big, heavyset man with a perspiring face came forward. Tom Dillon.

He gave each girl a hand, smiling at them as he did. He picked up the winner's loving cup, held it aloft, and announced that the winner was going to be determined by the amount of clapping.

His hand went up over girl number one. Some applause. Each girl in turn got some clapping, and when it seemed too slight, folks ratcheted it up a bit. Then the hand went over Miriam.

I heard clapping, but also something new—cheers and whistles. I knew Miriam had won.

Mr. Dillon beckoned to Miriam, and she moved to stand beside him. He took her hand and held it while he told the crowd the contest was a prelude to the dance that night for raising money to send a Concordia boy to college, and as “your Go-Getters Club president,” Dillon was urging the crowd to buy tickets for the cause.

He smiled down at Miriam. “Now here's our little winner. And a mighty nifty little dancer she is, too,” he said. He crouched down until he was eye-to-eye with her. “What's your name, little lady?”

“Miriam,” Miriam said.

Tom Dillon glanced over to the crowd. “Here's a little girl with no last name.” He looked back to Miriam. “Is that right?”

“No, sir,” my sister said. “I have a last name.”

“Then why don't you let us in on it?” Still squatting, Dillon grinned out at everybody.

It's Bronson.”

“Bronson?” Mr. Dillon rose slowly to his feet. “Are you one of those Bronsons?”

Up there on the platform, Miriam realized soon enough that being “one of those Bronsons” was, in Tom Dillon's view, not only unfortunate but perhaps deplorable. As he plopped the cup in her hands, he informed the men at the rear of the platform, loudly, that they'd let a Jew girl win their contest. He let out a big “Haw,” to show the joke was on
them
.

The crowd, having gotten very quiet, heard every word. My mother knew everyone in the crowd, they were Bronson's customers, and they knew she was among them. They were probably split down the middle: Some thought Mr. Dillon was comical as all get-out, and some thought he was a disgrace. In any case, they began leaving, glancing our way, talking softly.

In a very few minutes the only ones left were us. We walked slowly through the park and back to the house. I pushed Reba Laverne quietly, expecting that at any moment my mother would explode at Miriam for bobbing her hair.

To my surprise this didn't happen. It might have been that my mother was actually secretly pleased: If she herself wasn't up to “bopping,” she was perhaps glad to see that Miriam was.

About Miriam's dancing, my mother didn't know how she felt. She tried to tell Miriam that dancing in public was for shiksas, not for nice Jewish girls. “Do you understand?”

No, Miriam didn't, not at all. “For pity's sake, Mama,” she said, “you and your Jewish. What makes you think shiksas aren't nice girls, too?” She named some who had danced with her in the contest. “Are you trying to tell me they're not
nice
?”

My mother knew them all, some as friends of Miriam's, some from when they came into the store. Yes, she thought, they were nice; they were respectful, polite. She liked them.
Oy
, how to explain? Was it the dancing? Or was it that being made fools of by Tom Dillon made everything good about it seem bad?

That night Miriam put the cup on our dresser, and we lay on our bed and stared at it for long minutes. And what a cup it
was—huge, the size of Miss Brookie's Chinese pots, which held her aspidistras, and all silvery shine.

M
iriam still has the cup. It rests in a big box in her home, along with other mementos and sentimental items from all periods of her life; but most of them, she will say, are from the days in Concordia.

I
had plenty of playmates and, except for a few inconsequential things they did that I didn't—like going to church—our lifestyles were similar. I was disconcerted—and envious—only when there were visits to or from relatives. It was one thing I couldn't get in on. My family talked a lot about our New York relatives, and letters went back and forth (those that came to us always started, “How are things in ‘the sunny South'?”), but I was almost four before I laid eyes on any of them. The occasion was a visit from my mother's sisters, my Aunt Sadie and my Aunt Hannah.

The visit was part of that scenario of my mother's in which Aunt Hannah and Manny Rastow would meet, fall in love, get married, and settle down in Sidalia. Each time she saw Manny, her conviction that this was a wonderful idea was reinforced. She finally broached the subject to my father. “Here's a man would work out perfect with Hannah,” she said to him.

My father gave a jokey answer. “You mean they're both so short they could stand on the wedding cake themselves?”

My mother said wasn't it funny that she and my father both had been thinking about them getting married.

“So that's what I was thinking?” my father answered her.

My mother decided to go ahead and write to Aunt Hannah and send money for the ticket. And just
mention
Manny. No fuss about him. And no announcements in Concordia. Her sister was coming and that's all anybody had to know. “Ain't we entitled to a visit from somebody in my family?” she would say.

When word came back from New York, Aunt Hannah
and
Aunt Sadie were coming. My mother said she should have known. And how could she tell Sadie not to come? One word from her and Hannah wouldn't be coming either. “You could believe me,” she said to anybody listening.

Oh, boy, my aunts were coming. Nobody else had aunts from New York. And one of my aunts might get married and live here!

The impending visit became the pivot and focus of our lives. Logistics and support apparatuses were worked out as for a World War battle. Sleeping arrangements had my aunts in our room, and us in Joey's room, bedding down on the skinny bed feet to head, as my mother and Hannah had done as girls. This dumped Joey on our sofa. Yes, yet again a sofa for Joey.

If Joey could be relegated to the front room, his erector set, which he and T played with almost daily, could not. In the end it was posted to the front porch.

To honor the aunts Joey and T dedicated themselves to a construction to represent New York and went out onto the cold porch every afternoon to build the old Washington Bridge, which crossed the Harlem River from Manhattan to the Bronx, where, Joey told T, the aunts lived. The geography books from Uncle Philip were brought out, and the bridge pinpointed.

T was intrigued by the name “Bronx,” and took it upon himself to research it in Joey's
Book of Knowledge
. Pleased that he was able to impart some “book” information, he told Joey that it had come from a Danish family named Bronck who had owned most of the land. When T spoke of New York matters in
his rural Southern accent, it was no doubt marvelous to hear, and on this occasion, T explained that “the Bronx” had evolved from “the Broncks.” According to Joey, the way he told it was, “Like as not, them Manhattan folks would say to one nother, ‘Y'all reckon we ought to go up yonder and pay a call on the Broncks?'”

Lizzie Maud had been borrowed from Miss Brookie for two full days extra. It had been an awkward negotiation, taking place on the telephone. When it was over, my mother had hung up the receiver slowly, feeling the heaviness in her chest. She'd sat for a moment at the little telephone table and then gotten up and put two begonia plants on the windowsill in Miriam's and my bedroom.

F
inally, they were here: Aunt Sadie, her longish nose bridged by rimless glasses, and Aunt Hannah, littler even than my mother. I felt like Erv Medlin: I could scarcely speak, only gaze. These were
my aunts, my relatives
.

Aunt Hannah, full of dimpled smiles, was obviously glad to be with us. “
Oy
,” she said, “how I been looking forward.”

Aunt Sadie, on the other hand, let us know that the trip was a burdensome thing for which Aunt Hannah was to blame. “Hannah nagged and nagged,” she said to us. “So could I let her come by herself? How she loves to be on the go is nobody's business.”

My mother tried to figure out how Aunt Hannah could be “on the go” when surely she went only to work or to the relatives. Or was it “on the go” to visit the cemeteries in Brooklyn or Queens, a cruel schlep, in which on your day off you rose at dawn, negotiated a maze of subway and trolley connections, milled around the cemetery trying to find the graves, and had time only to glance at them before they closed the gates? Still, with Hannah, you never knew.

Actually Hannah was the family “darling,”which was a category.
Hannah looked like a darling—small and soft with thick curls the color of new pennies; she acted like a darling, always trying to please, worried that she might
dis
please. Too much worried, my father always said. In the family she was called Hovvah-leb. Hannah-dear.

She was the youngest daughter and, having finished high school, worked as an assistant to a bookkeeper. Still, as with all darlings, her life was her family. She was especially close to Philip, the youngest sibling, and indeed the family called her his second mother. It was a title that pleased her very much.

“Anyway, so here we are,” Aunt Sadie said. “But I ain't making no promises.”

My mother struggled to project innocence. With Aunt Sadie the modus operandi was never to suggest you had an idea that she didn't have first. “Promises about what?” she asked her.