Marching to Zion (4 page)

How kind of you, George, to invite us, Fishbein said as soon as introductions were accomplished. He reached inside his suit jacket and presented Mags with an envelope. With our best wishes, he said, executing a courtly little bow of his head.

Mags’s cheeks warmed. She thanked him. George did too, then beckoned to Miss Emily that he might introduce their hostess as well. The room slowly returned to its genial hubbub. Minerva fidgeted at her father’s side, uninterested in either the bride or groom. Her eyes darted about the parlor until Magnus Bailey came in from the kitchen bearing a tray of glasses he set upon a side table. The girl caught her breath and held it until he noticed her. He waved a greeting, at which her high, round chest exhaled in a thin stream as if she’d been punctured there by a sharp instrument. Mags found this curious but assumed the girl was nervous to be in a Negro rooming house, and the sight of a familiar face calmed her. Anyway, the bride had much more on her mind and did not pause long about it.

They had tea sandwiches, hard lemonade, and honey cake after the ceremony. Chesty had a little too much of the drink and began to sing hymns in a loud, happy voice. That turned out alright, because it was a good voice overall. Somewhere along the way, the hymns turned to love songs both gay and sorry. The rug got rolled up, a harmonica and a squeeze box were produced, and people started in to dance, even Miss Minnie with her hands raised up high to sit on the shoulders of Magnus Bailey, who shook the floor with his fast-moving feet tapping and sweeping in time to the tune. Her daddy looked on with a kind of somber longing. After Minnie, Magnus gave Aurora Mae a turn. That was a sight to see, the dandy and the goddess half a head taller than him giving it a go. Magnus was done up in silks and cottons more costly than the bridal costume. Aurora Mae wore a plain clean dress the color of butter. It was the best she owned, and against her black skin it took on the look of gold. She danced with pride and ineffable grace while her hair snaked down her back and bounced about like a thing alive. After their dance, Fishbein’s daughter went straight up to Bailey and tugged his jacket for another round.

Aurora Mae and Mags went off to have the talk her mother would have given her had she been alive. Aurora Mae, who was virginal as far as the bride knew, gave her what wisdom she possessed from listening to the complaints of wives who came to her for something to start their bleeding or something to stop it, for draughts that might renew their husband’s interest or for others that might keep him away. Be careful how you start out, she told her. Men don’t like change. How you start out is how you’ll end.

Once evening fell, Mags and George stood in the doorway about to leave. She threw her bouquet. It hit Tawny in the chest, bounced off, and fell into old Aunt Lily’s lap as she sat nearby, a wallflower sitting all by herself nodding her head. Everyone laughed. The party went on long after the bridal couple left.

That first night, Aurora Mae’s words of advice echoed in Mags’s head. They cautioned her as she undressed behind the closet door and put on the nightgown the ladies of Miss Emily’s had given her, the sum of her trousseau. The words rattled her as she fiddled with its straps, trying to get the thing to hang right so that her small breasts weren’t swamped in satin and lace. The words burned into her with a roiling heat as George McCallum took his time to open her up and ready her. They paled to a whisper as their lovemaking became a joining of two who wished to please each other, not just the one eager male making it up as he went along, loving trial by gentle error. Then Aurora Mae’s words came crashing back when the screams of Fishbein! Fishbein! Fishbein! started, followed by the sounds of smashing and breaking, the great knocking of toppled furniture and hurled objects upstairs. How you start is how you’ll end, the rhythm of splintered wood and shattered glass warned above the ruckus. How you start is how you’ll end.

Alarmed, George and Mags McCallum stopped and held each other, gasping for breath and staring at the ceiling, waiting for the clamor to cease, which it did soon enough. They murmured a decision to ignore the girl’s tantrums from now on, and they finished what they’d set out to do, although Mags McCallum was some distracted, thinking again and again, how you start is how you end. She wondered what kind of omen Miss Minnie’s fit had delivered, but she did not want to hurt her husband’s feelings, so she kept her worries to herself.

Despite Miss Minnie’s outburst, the marriage got off to a good start. They spent their days at work, the evenings were full of tenderness. They had no visitors. Fishbein’s was not a place people visited by choice, which was just fine with the McCallums. They were getting to know each other and found, as luck was with them, that a loving life was as easy to achieve as falling off a log. Their nights and times off were a mirror image of the workday. They did everything together, the cleaning, the shopping, the cooking, the laundry. If she picked up a dust rag, he picked up a broom. If she broke an egg of a morning, he pulled out the coffee. When Mags tried to make George just sit and let her do for him, he’d say, I don’t want to be away from you. And she’d think she was the luckiest woman alive. For a while, she was.

Until the United States plodded its way into the Great War, the only blot on their lives was Minerva Fishbein. While her eruptions were few and far between, she found occasion to unnerve them regularly. Sometimes, while they sat on their little porch, rocking, devoted to low, loving conversation, an odd snuffling noise from the balcony above disturbed them. They knew it was Miss Minnie, eavesdropping. Another time, they’d be making their dinner and the patter of Miss Minnie running down the kitchen steps and throwing open the door would startle them. She never said hello, just nodded while she went to the ice chest to grab a bite of whatever appealed, or opened the breadbox to pilfer something there. And it was pilfering. Fishbein had his own kitchen up there on the second floor and no victuals kept on the first belonged to him or his daughter. Following her husband’s example on such occasion, Mags would smile and say, Why good day, Miss Minnie, although there was never more response than a grunt before the girl went back upstairs, her footsteps as heavy and plodding in ascent as they’d been rapid and light on the way down.

Minnie had tutors coming and going every day but the Fishbein Sabbath and on that day, Saturdays, they would often hear her wail with boredom or frustration. Come winter, she began music lessons. On Wednesdays they could count on listening to Miss Minnie attack a piano as if it had murdered her mother and she sought annihilating vengeance. On such occasions, George McCallum would say to his wife, That child’s not right. And Mags would say, What do you think it is? George would only shake his head and return to helping her do. Over time, Mags learned to accept Miss Minnie’s mercurial presence in her life the way she accepted the unexpected arrival of thunder and lightning or a snow squall.

As for the girl’s daddy, she never saw him at all nor heard him anymore for that matter. George went up to the second floor weekly to collect their wages and report on the business below. How’s Mr. Fishbein? Mags asked afterward. And George would say, The same. She’d picture that sad face, the hunched shoulders, the spindly arms, crossed as if protecting his wounded, bleeding heart, and ask no more.

Every once in a while, George McCallum was required to go to the rail station to pick up special-order coffins, chemical supplies, maybe the bones of a son of East St. Louis who’d sought his fortune elsewhere. Mags went with him whenever their schedule permitted. Her interest in the feminine arts had not waned since life had taken her talents in an unexpected direction. She enjoyed watching the people on the platform. She studied the hairstyles and costumes of the ladies from far-off cities as they disembarked and regarded critically the careful toilettes of women who paced the waiting room searching with darting eyes the arrival of a lover, son, or husband. When she went home from such expeditions, she’d rearrange her hair and sew onto her sleeve or bodice a gewgaw, a ribbon, a dime-store bauble she thought echoed the new fashion she’d observed. She kept a modest store of such treasures in a cigar box under the bed that allowed her imagination to soar. Once satisfied, she’d parade her transformation in front of George for a man’s opinion. He nearly always praised her. When he did not and she pressed him, he talked in a roundabout way so as not to hurt her feelings.

The train was late one day toward the end of March 1917, barely a week before war was declared. A high wind came in from the river. The colored waiting room, a place established by routine rather than law as it was elsewhere, was cold and uncommonly crowded. Negroes pressed up against one another on every square inch of space. The ones who couldn’t fit were outside, shivering and stamping their feet. George was outside. He was not the sort who would take a woman’s spot to avoid the elements. Mags watched him blow on his hands and tap-dance, then duck his angular head inside his jacket when the wind came up. She felt proud, and she felt happy.

On the way home that day, she thought about the scene on the platform, especially when the train arrived and the passenger cars emptied. Did you notice, she asked George, how many colored men got into town today? There musta been a hundred of ’em gettin’ out of that one car, poor boys in cotton shirts and no jackets luggin’ bundles tied in string. It’s been like that for a while. There’s twice as many of ’em comin’ as before. What’s it all about, do you think?

She looked up at her husband in the way she had, full of admiration and trust. It seared his heart when she looked at him that way. On occasion, he gave detailed opinion on subjects he barely knew about, because he could not bear to disappoint her and risk lowering himself in her eyes. This time, he was sure of his answer.

It’s a lot a things. Boys been comin’ up here in droves since the Delta flood last year, for one. Between the flood and the weevil, there just ain’t the work what used to be. I told you about them factories sendin’ train cars south and offerin’ the cousins free passage north to streets paved with gold. Life got so desperate down there, more boys ’n ever fall for that one. But mostly, it’s that war ’crost the ocean. We’re goin’ to be in it very soon now, they say, the way those Germans keep sinkin’ our ships for no good reason but meanness. And it’s no lie there’s new jobs ’round here with the factories gettin’ ready for war. Good jobs, white men’s jobs, at near white men’s wages. Lots of them Germans and Poles used to work ’em went back home to fight their war. The ones that stay are angry folk, always strikin’, always complainin’. The bosses don’t mind replacin’ them with folk who’ll work for less and be grateful for it. Why shouldn’t the cousins come up here for work? Sure beats pickin’ beans and cotton while the boss plagues your wife and the babies starve. Why I heard there’s more’n a thousand a week come up t’ here.

Mags shook her head and told him how lucky she was to have a well-established husband whose boss took no unseemly interest in her. Our baby will never starve, she said.

George McCallum pulled up the rented wagon loaded with chemical bins. What baby? he asked.

Why, our baby, she said, smiling and patting her belly. While cars honked and horses whipped into speed dashed around them, George, being the kind of man he was, embraced her there in the street and wept.

Remembering that day and telling her daughter, Sara Kate, about it years later, Mags would say if it wasn’t for the war, life would have gone on from there like a happy dream. But she didn’t mean the war across the sea. She meant the one waged in chaos and blood on the streets of East St. Louis.

War, even a war
fought on the other side of the world, intensifies life on the home front. Every dawn brings anxiety, an expectation of no one knows what. The hours that follow are spent in heightened awareness, that sharp mental state in which every gesture, every word may harbor a clue of what comes next. Significance is attached to routine events if only to dispel the constant, fretful waiting for sirens, for telegrams, for howls in the night, for betrayals, for pronouncement, for orders, for release. After such a day, sleep is either rock solid or agitated by spidered dreams. At first light, suspense begins again.

For Mags, pregnancy exaggerated everything. One day she was lighthearted, celebrating her news with George, the next she was heavy with anxious anticipation, imagining all the things that could go wrong when a woman is in such a condition at such a time. The morning St. Louis held its draft registration, she awoke to the sounds of church bells, train whistles, brass bands, cannon shot calling all men to the registry. A terror filled her that never quite left, even after George was rejected due to the miracle of her pregnancy, while so many of the able-bodied Negro men she knew were snatched up quick as you please and eager they were too for the job of soldier. George said they wanted to prove they were as brave and patriotic as white men.

The Army needs cooks and ditch diggers as much as pilots and sharpshooters, he said. So there they are, lining up for the chance to face cannon with a dishrag in their hands.

He spit off the porch railing, grumbling that none of them remembered the Spanish War, so why should anyone remember the Indian Wars? What happened both times was bound to occur again.

Remind me, George, what happened then, Mags said with her gaze averted, embarrassed by her ignorance.

Oh, well, darlin’, of course they put the colored men at the front wherever the fightin’ was the most hopeless and let the enemy use up their ammunition on ’em. Like them buffalo soldiers comin’ up Kettle Hill over to San Juan. Nothin’ but fodder they were. Then the white boys rode over the dead and dying to fair advantage.

Mags worried that if the war got worse, they might start taking anybody they could find, including those with dependent wives and children. For sure, they’d start with the Negro fathers and exhaust them before the whites were chosen. That was the way things always went when there was a hard, dangerous job to do, wasn’t it?

In the month of May, there was trouble—big, ugly trouble. Rumor had it that black men and white women had fraternized at a union meeting of workers badgering Aluminum Ore Company and American Steel. Soon enough, a mob of white men gathered downtown looking for Negroes to rob of life and treasure. No one much cared if the local boys beat up a few blacks, but when they set to destroying buildings, the authorities were called in. Peace was restored, but it was a shaky one.

June came and went. It was hot. Mags was six months along, showing now, confined to Fishbein’s Funeral Home at the insistence of George McCallum. He did not want her on the streets, especially their street, because there was more than one kind of heat, he told her, and both of them together made fire. He didn’t have to say more. She knew what he meant. She didn’t have to go so far as the curb in front of Fishbein’s to feel the burn. When she swept the front porch, the eyes across the street were on her, Polish eyes, German eyes, all of ’em blazing eyes, cutting into her back like brands. Men and boys jabbered in words she could not understand, but their message was clear, spitting sparks of hate into the scorched air as June melted into July.

Like the calm before a storm, business got quiet around the same time. It wasn’t, George said, that people stopped dyin’ or all the Negroes had packed up and moved away. Thanks to the war jobs, the town was bustin’ at the seams. People lived on top of one another. Everyone you met had a new-arrived relative or two stickin’ out of their side pocket. There were more coloreds in East St. Louis than there ever were. But folk were taking care of their dead in the old way, in the country way, rather than come to Fishbein’s, where things just didn’t feel right that close to the color line. Everyone on both sides of that line waited for something awful to happen, for the match to strike the tinderbox, for the fire to start, and then as it had to, as it was destined to, it did.

For the rest of her life Mags wondered what would have happened if she’d gone with George to the train station that day. She’d been cooped up so long without much to do, she was about to tear her hair. She tried everything she could to get him to take her. She cajoled, she pouted, she pushed out her belly and stroked the baby while peeping up at him with her big eyes pleading. Nothing worked. In the end, she would never be able to say if that was a good thing or a bad one. It wasn’t an hour after he was gone that the trouble started.

She sat between two open windows to catch a summer’s breeze when the noise of glass shattering distracted her from her sewing. She got up slowly, with care, in the way of women heavy with child, one hand upon a table, the other at the small of her back, and lumbered over to a window where she saw them, the mob, the white mob, twenty or thirty men with sleeves rolled up and brickbats and clubs and knives, big ones that dripped something red, in their hands. They were at the top of Fishbein’s street, advancing, steadily, with ruinous purpose, breaking everything they passed, yelling in that rough, piercing language she did not know. They seemed headed for Fishbein’s particularly. She screamed.

The man upstairs ran down from the second floor to the parlor, Magnus Bailey and Miss Minnie quick behind him. Minnie grabbed Mags by the hand and pulled her away from the window, then all of them hurried down into the basement, where a single dressed and painted corpse awaited transport to Georgia for burial. The big black fancy man, the small redheaded young woman, and the pregnant country one stood in front of Mr. Fishbein, trying to ignore the defeat in his slumped shoulders, the helplessness of his haunted features. He was their leader. They looked to him for instruction, for wisdom, a plan, anything. They held their breath as he looked back at them from his sad eyes and shook his head. I do not know, he said. I do not know. His lips trembled. He took his daughter’s hand and placed it inside the palm of Magnus Bailey. Save her, he said. Take her across the river to where is safe. I cannot.

The mob had not yet reached the funeral home, but the noise of them grew louder. Magnus moved toward the bulkhead door, pulling Minerva Fishbein roughly down the passage to their escape and grabbing onto Mags along the way. She wrested from his grasp.

No! I’m waitin’ on George.

Bailey grabbed at her again. Fishbein’s daughter reached out and held on to her skirt.

No! Mags twisted, wrapped her arms around a support beam that stood in the middle of the preparation room. I will not go.

Above them, a tumult began. The crashes of furniture. The voices of intruders. Cries for blood. The locked door to the basement rattled, then something rammed into it.

Suit yourself, Bailey said. With Minnie Fishbein behind him, he raced through the corridor to the bulkhead door, flung it open. The two climbed up the stairs. Without so much as a glance behind them, they disappeared into the warren of alleyways beyond George’s little patch of backyard grass where herbs grew heedless as wildflowers in a meadow, ignorant of their post at the gateway to death.

Three thumps landed hard against the basement door. It cracked.

Mr. Fishbein went to the bulkhead, closed and bolted it. He put a hand on Mags’s elbow. His breath was heavy in her ear. We must hide, he said. Murmuring unintelligible encouragements as one might to a child or a pet, he guided her to a storage room, where coffins of varying sizes and quality were stacked. Quilts were draped between the coffins to protect the wood from scratch and stain. Here, he said, here we will wait for George. He took her to a middle row of adult coffins and lifted the bottom quilt from a stack three coffins high. See? Is like a tent, he said in his strange accent that continued to lilt supportively though there was a tremor in it. We will pretend we are in the woods on a camping expedition. Yes?

She nodded.

The only thing Mags was sure of was that Fishbein was not murderous and that the men upstairs certainly were. She ducked under the quilt and knelt beside him to await her fate, to await her baby’s fate, to wait for George. While she waited, she prayed continuously, begging Jesus to save them all, even the mad Jew beside her.

Mayhem broke out around them. The basement door split open. There were cheers. Boots ran down the stairs. A rank odor of sweat and blood and rage strong enough to obliterate the usual scent of chemicals and decay seeped through the coffin-room door. Fishbein put his arm around Mags and held her close. They shook against each other in fear. In the next room, orders were shouted. There were shrieks, bellows, the hurling of cabinets to the floor. Men burst into their sanctuary, banged on coffin lids with their bats, and left quickly. These men wanted flesh to rip. Finding none, they ran off. After a time, the house grew quiet. The two fugitives remained huddled together in the close dark, motionless, afraid to breathe. At last, Fishbein said, I think we can maybe leave.

He held up the quilt, and using his body as a steadying post, Mags drew herself up. She felt faint and leaned against the wall. Fishbein got up and began to bob from the waist, up and down to as low as his knees, muttering in a language with harsh sounds and mournful rhythms. Tears fell to his jaw, beading there while soft, deep moans escaped from his throat. Having never seen a Jew pray before, she thought he might be having some kind of a fit. She reached out to touch him, to try to help, when suddenly he stopped. Taking a handkerchief from his pants pocket, he wiped his face, blew his nose, and groaned.

Oy, mine Gott,
he said.
Mine Gott
. Now we must wait. Yes? Now we must wait. For news of your husband and for news of my little girl.

They left the coffin room. They picked their way through the debris of the workroom, leaning on each other, weak from the sights they saw. Absolute carnage had been wreaked upon the place. The poor boy waiting to go home to Georgia had been ripped from his box, his clothes torn off, his body mutilated as if his violators thought a boy could die twice. When she saw him, Mags sank to her knees. Mr. Fishbein lifted her up. Things were no better on the first floor or in the living quarters on the second. The devastation could not have been worse had a bomb gone off. When the smoke and smell of gunshot came to them through the broken places, they realized they had been lucky.

Whatever control of emotion Mags had managed that day out of the need to survive melted. No, no, no, she wept, as she paced through the parlor over sharp bits of debris that cut into the thin soles of her shoes. Fishbein watched her helplessly. He trembled and slapped his hands against his cheeks in a slow, steady rhythm.

What is happening? Mags asked the walls, the smoke blowing through the ruined house. Guns went off not too far away. Oh, George, where are you? Where?

Fishbein moaned and swayed and slapped his cheeks.

There was an explosion somewhere nearby. The sound shattered the jagged glass that remained in the windows of the first floor. Screams came to them. Not the screams of the terrified but the screams of the tortured, the kind of screams that pierce the ears like needles, rip the spine, and rattle teeth.

Hearing them, Fishbein returned to himself. He took Mags to the bedroom off the kitchen. The covers of her marriage bed were full of shards. He tore the linens off. He turned the mattress and sat her on its edge and begged her to lie down, to rest. That he did this in his own tongue made no difference. She understood him and complied. She lay on her back, stared at the ceiling while holding her belly.

What is happening? she asked again.

A pogrom, Fishbein said.

What is a pogrom?

A festival of evil.

She shuddered. Her mouth was very dry. It was difficult to speak. She coughed. Fishbein left the room and returned with water in a teacup. She drank.

What do we do?

What we are doing. We hide. We wait. They will go forwards, they will not come back. This is what we must believe and hope. To pray also wouldn’t hurt.

He lay in bed beside her. She reached out a hand, and he took it.

I will protect you with mine own life, he said.

Why would you do that? she asked, mystified by the idea that a white man would endanger himself for her. For George?

Yes, for George. Of course, for George. But more than him and more than you and more than the child you carry, I will do it for mine dead.

Mags was confounded. His dead? Those who stopped at Fishbein Funeral Home on their way to the cold ground? For them? It made no sense. So she asked, What dead?

He exhaled in the weary sigh of a man who lays down a burden he has carried too long. He muttered in cadences that rose and fell as if he were deciding whether to bend and take the burden up again.
Nu,
he muttered, but to whom it was impossible to tell.
Nu,
I shall tell, why not? There may be no more chances. Here is a good woman with child, who is much beloved. Who better to absolve me?