Jew Store (10 page)

If my mother was unnerved by it all, Lizzie Maud was unnerved by none of it. Shopping at the U-Tote-'Em was something she did most every day, and, ever since Miss Brookie had begun to welcome guests in her house, she had shopped with them and indeed had taken over their entire orientation. She fussed with her mistress about the extra trouble guests imposed on her, but by now it was only a habit, and in truth she had long since lost the capacity to be surprised, disturbed, or vexed by her mistress.

Her attitude toward guests was a reflection of Miss Brookie's. If Miss Brookie found the invited ones in some way disappointing—too uncommunicative, too unhygienic, too pious—and showed them the door, Lizzie Maud packed them a lunch and waved a cool good-bye.

Now thirty-one, Lizzie Maud had been with the Simmons family from the age of fourteen as “cook”—in the South a catchall title understood to mean the Negro woman who did everything. Since Miss Brookie was a total incompetent when it came to running the house—couldn't boil water without a recipe, as we might put it in Concordia—after the elder Simmonses had died, Lizzie Maud had also assumed the role of parent, though she had a family of her own, a husband, Seth, who worked for the railroad, and five children.

For Lizzie Maud there was much to be gained from working in so intimate a way with such a powerful town presence as Miss Brookie, and her personality—bossy, opinionated, unconquerable—was clearly an adaptation of her mistress's. For a black person of those times, with power so hard to come by, parenting a white woman like Miss Brookie and telling white visitors how and what to do was about as good as you could get.

S
o it was on the same day that my father came back from his unsatisfactory meeting with Tom Dillon that my mother came back from her unnerving shopping. When my father arrived home, my mother was already sitting on the back porch in an old rocker with a broken rush seat and staring absently into the backyard.

In the backyard was an abandoned outhouse (the “privy,” T called it), the gray of raw wood showing through the old white paint, the sagging door ajar, the windows broken. Farther back was a small stable, which now sheltered both Willy and Miss Brookie's horse, Harold (for Harold Lloyd), plus the buggy from which Harold had been unhitched. There was no room in the stable for our wagon, which stood outside, open to the elements.

When my father came out on the porch with the story of his meeting with Tom Dillon, my mother immediately thought of Dillon not only as a
momzer
, as my father had, but also as a kulak, the Russian farmer-peasant, the man Jewish villagers most loved to hate. “A
momzer
Dillon was, naturally,” my mother always said, “but, I ask you, wasn't he also the same like a kulak?”

It was a sentiment no one could argue with, though it was true that in certain ways kulaks had the edge. They were not just anti-Jewish, they were actively so: They worked Jews from sunup to sundown, rented them hovels to live in, and, during pogroms, when the Cossacks came swooping into town on horseback to plague Jews and maybe to kill them, they made a great show of hiding the Jews and then betraying them. Still, in basic attitudes toward Jews, kulaks and Tom Dillon were blood brothers.

Out there on the back porch, as my mother sat and rocked, these were the things she turned over and over.

N
o call had come through from Dillon, and my father was getting fidgety. He had thought the wait would be but a day or two, but then it was a week, and then it was a second one. All that time he could only sit on the back porch and reread the local weekly, the
Sentinel
, until it softened in his hands.

My mother was more anxious than my father. “
Oy
, what a stubborn man,” she said to him after one long day of waiting. “He ain't no different than Szymanski.”

My father floundered. Who was this guy Szymanski? And how did he come into it?

He came into it because he was my mother's first boss, the one who had fired her when he caught her eating matzos.

Joey, if he didn't share my parents' anxiety, has remembered sharing my mother's hostility to Dillon. Dillon, he had concluded back then, was meaner than the man in the black hat and black beard who was forever trying to outwit Tom Mix. “That Mr. Dillon's so mean,” he said to my father, “he ought to live in a hollow log and drink muddy water.”

To which my father said, “
Oy
, that poor man Dillon's got the
curse of the Bronsons on him. I sure wouldn't take no chances if I was him.”

Finally my father had read the newspaper until his eyes glazed over. How could he stand one more reading of the story of the Baileys' new baby and Louise Caldwell's wedding shower? Was Mrs. Sterling Yancey's tea for her church circle, at which the Mmes. Josiah Jones and Billy Upton staffed the table and poured (“at both ends,” the paper reported), so riveting that he should read about it again and again? All right, he was somewhat interested that the north road out of town had been reoiled, but he had taken in, digested, and expelled every word about it several times. Enough was enough. He repeated to himself one of his favorite sayings—that roast chickens don't fly into your mouth— then put down the paper, rose from the chair, went into the house to get his hat and coat, and headed for First Street.

First Street was, as my father now knew, the three-block, cobblestoned street where all the stores were. Some of the stores sold things, and some provided services. The important ones were on the second block, most notably—at least from my father's point of view—the palatial Dalrymple-Eaton's Department Store. Also on this block were the First National Bank and the furniture store. The first block had, besides Tom Dillon's store, other establishments, like the barber shop, where I got my hair cut, and the Cinderella Beauty Parlor, where Miriam had her hair variously marcelled, bobbed, or shingled, depending on the fashion of the moment. The third block wound down to the picture show and the train depot. Beyond the railroad crossing was the blacksmith shop and New Bethel Baptist Church, but you couldn't see them very well from First Street.

First Street divided white Concordia on the west from black Concordia on the east, which was called, as in Savannah, “Niggertown.” As far as I knew, that was its name. All the town's Negroes lived there, in the shacks, and there was a bootlegger's hut
at the edge of it. The streets were dark brown dirt because, unlike the west side of town, where the dirt streets were occasionally treated to a scattering of gravel, which lightened them, Niggertown streets were never treated to anything. Niggertown did, however, have one thing the west side didn't have, and that was a “sugar ditch,” where raw sewage ran.

On First Street my father walked past the bank and the drugstore and traversed the cobblestones. Between Suggs's Feed and Lovett's Hardware, he came upon a little window fronting an insurance and real estate office. He went in.

In the office he talked to Herman Tucker.

The man was built to the pattern of Tom Dillon—large, beefy, with rolls of midtorso flesh. If Dillon was combative, Tucker was all amiability. When he smiled, which was all the time, his dentures protruded so far my father figured that if the man coughed, his teeth would fly out and make a landing on him. The man was a fake, my father decided at once, all fake.

In the small, dark office, Tucker sat behind a desk. He occasionally let his smile go into eclipse while he swigged at a Coca-Cola bottle. In between being swigged at, the bottle sat on the dust and grit of the desktop. Tucker didn't seem surprised to see my father, and my father guessed that Tucker and Tom Dillon had had a little conversation about his arrival in town.

Tucker said he had a couple of “real nice places,” and though my father said a wry “uh-huh” under his breath, aloud he said he was all ears. He spotted a wooden folding chair against a wall, pulled it open, sat down across the desk, and told Tucker, “You got my attention complete.”

It was no surprise to my father that Tucker's first suggestion was an abandoned blacksmith shop, which Tucker described as needing only a floor to turn into a palace.

Sure, my father thought, put a floor in a blacksmith shop and it turns into a palace; and put wheels on me and I turn into a wagon. “A blacksmith shop?” he said aloud.

Tucker trained his dentures on my father and offered that “you people”—meaning Jews—were so “enterprising,” they could “pure” work miracles.

In his throat my father gave another “uh-huh.”

The other place used to be a “nigger” church that had been foreclosed on but already had an upstairs and only needed to have the benches taken out to make my father “mighty proud.” Tucker said to him, “As I say, you Jews are so . . .”

Yes, yes, my father knew all about how Jews were so this and so that: so smart, so energetic, so whatever. This man's choice had been “enterprising.” My father had finally gotten it into his head that when people said these things what they meant was that Jews were different, and he had no doubt that among themselves there was an understanding that Jews were “not like you and me.” That people thought he was different didn't bother him so much. People were all different in one way or another, and if some didn't like in what way he was different, well, what could he do about it?

But for dealing with this man Tucker, he plucked an old Jewish saying from his bag of old Jewish sayings—one having to do with not spitting in the well you might have to drink from later—and kept these thoughts to himself. Out loud he wondered if those two listings were all Tucker had.

From the way Tucker shifted around, my father knew a game plan was already operating, one in which this son of a bitch with the teeth was being coached by the
momzer
with the sweaty face. For how could a man call himself a realtor (which my father pronounced “relator” like everybody else in town) and have only these preposterous listings? No, something was going on here.

My father figured it was time to counter. He told Tucker he'd think it over, that he'd come in in a few days to have another talk.

Two days later he once more meandered up and down First
Street. The day was hot, without hint of breeze. Under his woollen coat, my father's armpits pooled with sweat, and wet patches showed dark along his hatband. He went into Redfearn's Drugstore and Soda Fountain and, under a ceiling fan “trying its best to quit altogether,” as my father described it, bought some Camels and attempted to engage the clerk in conversation.

The clerk stood behind boxes of cough medicines stacked chest high on the counter. Above him, on a horizontal piece of bare wood resting on rickety posts, were some red rubber hot-water bottles. The clerk bent his head and, through the narrowed opening, squinted up at my father. “What's that you say?”

My father repeated that there wouldn't be many calls for hot-water bottles at that time of year. There being no rejoinder, my father said uncomfortably to the clerk, “You know . . . it being so hot, uh, and all that.”

The clerk was uninterested. Summer, winter, didn't mean “diddly” to him, and, anyway, he didn't go in for doing something different “every time the weatherman farts.” (Whenever a memory called for words my father judged unsuitable, he added an automatic, “Excuse me, children,” and decades later he was still adding it.) The drugstore clerk, having delivered himself of this sentiment, went back to washing glasses at the fountain.

My father went out. To waste some more time, he crossed the street and put himself on view in front of Spivey's Furniture Store, where he feigned a fascination with the window display. There was in fact no display, only haphazard heaps of furniture called “Grand Rapids,” a generic term for the kind of cheap, mass-produced stuff pioneered in that Michigan city. A jungle, my father thought. It was obvious that the guy had to get rid of some trees or find a new clearing. Was it possible he had in mind a new location?

Before he knew it, he had opened the door. A bell tinkled. Then he was squeezing past overstuffed chairs to a path leading
to a desk. Behind the rolltop sat a man with gold-rimmed spectacles on a nose “only a bone,” as my father said.

My father held out his hand and gave his name. The man responded with neither hand nor name but with a look that my father always described as like ice forming.

My father said to the man, “I was wondering . . .” The man answered, “Ain't nothing for you to wonder about in here.” The man said further that he knew why my father was in town, had known ever since he got there. (Were spies hanging from Miss Brookie's crape myrtle?) And, the man wanted to know, wasn't it true that Tom Dillon had my father under lock and key?

My father said nobody had him under lock and key.