Middlesex (18 page)

   “Tool and dye,” said Lina.
   My grandmother frowned. “What is that?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “Like dyeing fabric?”
   “Maybe.”
   “Go on,” said Desdemona.
   “Cigar roller,” Lina continued.
   “I don’t like smoke.”
   “Housemaid.”
   “Lina, please. I can’t be a maid for somebody.”
   “Silk worker.”
   “What?”
   “Silk worker. That’s all it says. And an address.”
   “Silk worker? I’m a silk worker. I know everything.”
   “Then congratulations, you have a job. If it’s not gone by the time you get there.”
   An hour later, dressed for job hunting, my grandmother reluctantly left the house. Sourmelina had tried to persuade her to borrow a dress with a low neckline. “Wear this and no one will notice what kind of English you speak,” she said. But Desdemona set out for the streetcar in one of her plain dresses, gray with brown polka dots. Her shoes, hat, and handbag were each a brown that almost matched.
   Though preferable to automobiles, streetcars didn’t appeal to Desdemona either. She had trouble telling the lines apart. The fitful, ghost-powered trolleys were always making unexpected turns, shuttling her off into unknown parts of the city. When the first trolley stopped, she shouted at the conductor, “Downtown?” He nodded. She boarded, flipped down a seat, and took from her purse the address Lina had written out. When the conductor passed by, she showed it to him.
   “Hastings Street? That what you want?”
   “Yes. Hastings Street.”
   “Stay on this car to Gratiot. Then take the Gratiot car downtown. Get off at Hastings.”
   At the mention of Gratiot, Desdemona felt relieved. She and Lefty took the Gratiot line to Greektown. Now everything made sense.
So, they don’t make silk in Detroit?
she triumphantly asked her absent husband.
That’s how much you know.
The streetcar picked up speed. The storefronts of Mack Avenue passed by, more than a few closed up, windows soaped over. Desdemona pressed her face to the glass, but now, because she was alone, she had a few more words to say to Lefty.
If those policemen at Ellis Island hadn’t taken my silkworms, I could set up a cocoonery in the backyard. I wouldn’t have to get a job. We could make a lot of money. I told you so.
Passengers’ clothes, still dressy in those days, nevertheless showed wear and tear: hats gone unblocked for months, hemlines and cuffs frayed, neckties and lapels gravy-stained. On the curb a man held up a hand-painted sign:
 

WORK IS WHAT I WANT AND NOT CHARITY WHO WILL HELP ME GET A JOB. 7 YEARS IN DETROIT. NO MONEY. SENT AWAY FURNISH BEST OF REFERENCES.

Look at that poor man.
Mana!
He looks like a refugee. Might as well be Smyrna, this city. What’s the difference?
The streetcar labored on, moving away from the landmarks she knew, the greengrocer’s, the movie theater, the fire hydrants and neighborhood newspaper stands. Her village eyes, which could differentiate between trees and bushes at a glance, glazed over at the signage along the route, the meaningless roman letters swirling into one another and the ragged billboards showing American faces with the skin peeling off, faces without eyes, or with no mouth, or with nothing but a nose. When she recognized Gratiot’s diagonal swath, she stood up and called out in a ringing voice: “Sonnamabiche!” She had no idea what this English word meant. She had heard Sourmelina employ it whenever she missed her stop. As usual, it worked. The driver braked the streetcar and the passengers moved quickly aside to let her off. They seemed surprised when she smiled and thanked them.
   On the Gratiot streetcar she told the conductor, “Please, I want Hastings Street.”
   “Hastings? You sure?”
   She showed him the address and said it louder:
“Hastings Street.”
   “Okay. I’ll let you know.”
   The streetcar made for Greektown. Desdemona checked her reflection in the window and fixed her hat. Since her pregnancies she had put on weight, thickened in the waist, but her skin and hair were still beautiful and she was still an attractive woman. After looking at herself, she returned her attention to the passing scenery. What else would my grandmother have seen on the streets of Detroit in 1932? She would have seen men in floppy caps selling apples on corners. She would have seen cigar rollers stepping outside windowless factories for fresh air, their faces stained a permanent brown from tobacco dust. She would have seen workers handing out pro-union pamphlets while Pinkerton detectives tailed them. In alleyways, she might have seen union-busting goons working over those same pamphleteers. She would have seen policemen, on foot and horseback, 60 percent of whom were secretly members of the white Protestant Order of the Black Legion, who had their own methods for disposing of blacks, Communists, and Catholics. “But come on, Cal,” I hear my mother’s voice, “don’t you have anything nice to say?” Okay, all right. Detroit in 1932 was known as “The City of Trees.” More trees per square mile here than any other city in the country. To shop, you had Kern’s and Hudson’s. On Woodward Avenue the auto magnates had built the beautiful Detroit Institute of Arts, where, that very minute while Desdemona rode to her job interview, a Mexican artist named Diego Rivera was working on his own new commission: a mural depicting the new mythology of the automobile industry. On scaffolding he sat on a folding chair, sketching the great work: the four androgynous races of humankind on the upper panels, gazing down on the River Rouge assembly line, where auto workers labored, their bodies harmonized with effort. Various smaller panels showed the “germ cell” of an infant wrapped in a plant bulb, the wonder and dread of medicine, the indigenous fruits and grains of Michigan; and way over in one corner Henry Ford himself, gray-faced and tight-assed, going over the books.
   The trolley passed McDougal, Jos. Campau, and Chene, and then, with a little shiver, it crossed Hastings Street. At that moment every passenger, all of whom were white, performed a talismanic gesture. Men patted wallets, women refastened purses. The driver pulled the lever that closed the rear door. Desdemona, noticing all this, looked out to see that the streetcar had entered the Black Bottom ghetto.
   There was no roadblock, no fence. The streetcar didn’t so much as pause as it crossed the invisible barrier, but at the same time in the length of a block the world was different. The light seemed to change, growing gray as it filtered through laundry lines. The gloom of front porches and apartments without electricity seeped out into the streets, and the thundercloud of poverty that hung over the neighborhood directed attention downward toward the clarity of forlorn, shadowless objects: red bricks crumbling off a stoop, piles of trash and ham bones, used tires, crushed pinwheels from last year’s fair, someone’s old lost shoe. The derelict quiet lasted only a moment before Black Bottom erupted from all its alleys and doorways.
Look at all the children! So many!
Suddenly children were running alongside the streetcar, waving and shouting. They played chicken with it, jumping in front of the tracks. Others climbed onto the back. Desdemona put a hand to her throat.
Why do they have so many children? What’s the matter with these people? The
mavro
women should nurse their babies longer. Somebody should tell them.
Now in the alleys she saw men washing themselves at open faucets. Half-dressed women jutted out hips on second-story porches. Desdemona looked in awe and terror at all the faces filling the windows, all the bodies filling the streets, nearly a half million people squeezed into twenty-five square blocks. Ever since World War I when E. I. Weiss, manager of the Packard Motor Company, had brought, by his own report, the first “load of niggers” to the city, here in Black Bottom was where the establishment had thought to keep them. All kinds of professions now crowded in together, foundry workers and lawyers, maids and carpenters, doctors and hoodlums, but most people, this being 1932, were unemployed. Still, more and more were coming every year, every month, seeking jobs in the North. They slept on every couch in every house. They built shacks in the yards. They camped on roofs. (This state of affairs couldn’t last, of course. Over the years, Black Bottom, for all the whites’ attempts to contain it—and because of the inexorable laws of poverty and racism—would slowly spread, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, until the so-called ghetto would become the entire city itself, and by the 1970s, in the no-tax-base, white-flight, murder-capital Detroit of the Coleman Young administration, black people could finally live wherever they wanted to …)
   But now, back in 1932, something odd was happening. The streetcar was slowing down. In the middle of Black Bottom, it was stopping and—unheard of!—opening its doors. Passengers fidgeted. The conductor tapped Desdemona on the shoulder. “Lady, this is it. Hastings.”
   “Hastings Street?” She didn’t believe him. She showed him the address again. He pointed out the door.
   “Silk factory here?” she asked the conductor.
   “No telling what’s here. Not my neighborhood.”
   And so my grandmother stepped off onto Hastings Street. The streetcar pulled away, as white faces looked back at her, a woman thrown overboard. She started walking. Gripping her purse, she hurried down Hastings as though she knew where she was going. She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead. Children jumped rope on the sidewalk. At a third-story window a man tore up a piece of paper and shouted, “From now on, you can send my mail to Paris, postman.” Front porches were full of living room furniture, old couches and armchairs, people playing checkers, arguing, waving fingers, and breaking into laughter.
Always laughing, these
mavros.
Laughing, laughing, as though everything is funny. What is so funny, tell me? And what is—oh my God!—a man doing his business in the street! I won’t look.
She passed the yard of a junk artist: the Seven Wonders of the World made in bottle caps. An ancient drunk in a colorful sombrero moved in slow motion, sucking his toothless maw and holding out a hand for spare change.
But what can they do? They don’t have any plumbing. No sewers, terrible, terrible.
She walked by a barbershop where men were getting their hair straightened, wearing shower caps like women. Across the street young men were calling out to her:
   “Baby, you got so many curves you make a car crash!”
   “You must be a doughnut, baby, ’cause you make my jelly roll!”
   Laughter erupted behind her as she hurried on. Farther and farther in, past streets she didn’t know the names of. The smell of unfamiliar food in the air now, fish caught from the nearby river, pig knuckles, hominy grits, fried baloney, black-eyed peas. But also many houses where nothing was cooking, where no one was laughing or even talking, dark rooms full of weary faces and scroungy dogs. It was from a porch like this that somebody finally spoke. A woman, thank God.
   “You lost?”
   Desdemona took in the soft, molded face. “I am looking for factory. Silk factory.”
   “No factories around here. If there was they’d be closed.”
   Desdemona handed her the address.
   The lady pointed across the street. “You there.”
   And turning, what did Desdemona see? Did she see a brown brick building known until recently as McPherson Hall? A place rented out for political meetings, weddings, or demonstrations by the occasional traveling clairvoyant? Did she notice the ornamental touches around the entrance, the Roman urns spilling granite fruit, the harlequin marble? Or did her eyes focus instead on the two young black men standing at attention outside the front door? Did she notice their impeccable suits, one the light blue of a globe’s watery portions, the other the pale lavender of French pastilles? Certainly she must have noticed their military bearing, the high polish of their shoes, their vivid neckties. She must have felt the contrast between the young men’s confident air and that of the downtrodden neighborhood, but whatever she felt at that moment, her complex reaction has come down to me as a single, shocked realization.
   Fezzes. They were wearing fezzes. The soft, maroon, flat-topped headgear of my grandparents’ former tormentors. The hats named for the city in Morocco where the blood-colored dye came from, and which (on the heads of soldiers) had chased my grandparents out of Turkey, staining the earth a dark maroon. Now here they were again, in Detroit, on the heads of two handsome young Negroes. (And fezzes will appear once more in my story, on the day of a funeral, but the coincidence, being the kind of thing only real life can come up with, is too good to give away right now.)
   Tentatively, Desdemona crossed the street. She told the men she’d come about the ad. One nodded. “You have to go around back,” he said. Politely, he led her down an alley and into the well-swept backyard. At that moment, as at a discreet signal, the back door swung open and Desdemona received her second shock. Two women in chadors appeared. They looked, to my grandmother, like devout Muslims from Bursa, except for the color of their garments. They weren’t black. They were white. The chadors started at their chins and hung all the way to their ankles. White headscarves covered their hair. They wore no veils, but as they came forward, Desdemona saw brown school oxfords on their feet.
   Fezzes, chadors, and next this: a mosque. Inside, the former McPherson Hall had been redecorated according to a Moorish theme. The attendants led Desdemona over geometric tilework. They took her past thick, fringed draperies that shut out the light. There was no sound but the swishing of the women’s robes and, from far off, what sounded like a voice speaking or praying. Finally, they showed her into an office where a woman was hanging a picture.
   “I’m Sister Wanda,” the woman said, without turning around. “Supreme Captain, Temple No. 1.” She wore another sort of chador entirely, with piping and epaulettes. The picture she was hanging showed a flying saucer hovering over the skyline of New York. It was shooting out rays.
   “You come about the job?”
   “Yes. I am silk worker. Have lot experience. Farming the silk, making the cocoonery, weaving the …”
   Sister Wanda swiveled around. She scanned Desdemona’s face. “We got a problem. What you is?”
   “I’m Greek.”
   “Greek, huh. That’s a kind of white, isn’t it? You born in Greece?”
   “No. From Turkey. We come from Turkey. My husband and me, too.”
   “Turkey! Why didn’t you say so? Turkey’s a Muslim country. You a Muslim?”
   “No, Greek. Greek Church.”
   “But you born in Turkey.”
   
“Ne.”
   “What?”
   “Yes.”
   “And your people come from Turkey?”
   “Yes.”
   “So you probably mixed up a little bit, right? You not all white.”
   Desdemona hesitated.
   “See, I’m trying to see how we can work it,” Sister Wanda went on. “Minister Fard, who come to us from the Holy City of Mecca, he always be impressing on us the importance of self-reliance. Can’t rely on no white man no more. Got to do for ourself, understand?” She lowered her voice. “Problem is, nobody worth a toot come for the ad. People come in here, they
say
they know silk, but they don’t know nothing. Just hoping to get hired and fired. Get a day’s pay.” She narrowed her eyes. “That what you planning?”
   “No. I want only hire. No fire.”
   “But what you is? Greek, Turkish, or what?”
   Again Desdemona hesitated. She thought about her children. She imagined coming home to them without any food. And then she swallowed hard. “Everybody mixed. Turks, Greeks, same same.”
   “That’s what I wanted to hear.” Sister Wanda smiled broadly. “Minister Fard, he mixed, too. Let me show you what we need.”
   She led Desdemona down a long, wainscoted corridor, through a telephone operator’s office, and into another darker hallway. At the far end heavy drapes blocked off the main lobby. Two young guards stood at attention. “You come to work for us, few things you should know. Never, ever, go through them curtains. Main temple in there, where Minister Fard deliver his sermons. You stay back here in the women’s quarters. Best cover your hair, too. That hat shows your ears, which be an enticement.”