Jew Store (18 page)

“And it's clean enough they won't call you ‘dirty Jew,'” she said, out of anybody's hearing, specifically out of my father's.

My mother was going along to school to register Joey. She had wanted my father to do this, but he was busy at the store and anyway would have said that she should “take every opportunity” to meet people.

The school, called Westerly, was three blocks away. My mother and the boys walked to it as a little band, T in front with Joey, Erv a pace behind, my mother trailing.

The school was a stubby building of red brick, set on about two acres of land. The principal, a large woman with dark hair tucked over an encircling “rat” and with a shirtfront stiffly protruding, met the little band at the door. “Mattie Barksdale,” she said to my mother. “How do.”

My mother said “How do” back.

Miss Mattie, as she was called even in my day—though in the intervening years she had married and was no longer “Miss” at all—took my mother and Joey into her office while T and Erv went on. When my mother told Miss Mattie that Joey had been born in New York, Miss Mattie said to her, “Mercy, such a lot he'll have to tell the others.”

And they'll have such a lot to tell
him
, my mother thought. “Yes, maybe,” she said to Miss Mattie.

The very next question was about church. Miss Mattie said she “understood” that Joey was Jewish. “Too bad we have no church for him here in Concordia,” she said to my mother.

She laughed then and said that Concordia had every church “known to man” except a Jewish one. This was not quite true, as there was no Catholic Church in Concordia, but if she meant every
Protestant
church, she was on firmer ground, though there was no Episcopal one. “He'll just have to wait till a Jewish church gets built, I reckon,” Miss Mattie said to my mother.

That eventuality, in my mother's view, was so unlikely as to be nothing to talk about. She knew, and she knew this lady knew, there was not going to be any Jewish “church.” And it was at that moment, my mother always suggested, that she understood with piercing clarity that among the great ships in the religious Concordia mainstream, the Bronsons didn't even have a rowboat.

After the registration my mother left, and Joey followed Miss Mattie out into the square hall. Four rooms—for grades one through four—came off it. Miss Mattie led him into the first-grade room and handed him over to Miss Nannie Temple—the same Miss Nannie Temple who would later preside over my first
grade—and she motioned for him to sit in an empty seat at the back.

After Miss Nannie had added Joey's name to her roll, the class went out to recess, which was a period in the morning when the pupils were let out to play in the yard. It had been arranged that T, who was in the second grade, was going to “spring” Joey at this time.

Joey went out with the others, aware that they were whispering and shooting him looks. After what seemed to him a very long time, Miss Mattie climbed up the school's back stairs. On the landing she clapped her hands, and everyone gathered. She had several announcements, the first being that Friday was to be a field day that would take them to the firehouse and the icehouse. The pupils were to pack lunches, though not sliced tomatoes. If any of their mothers still had tomatoes, Miss Mattie said, they were not to slice them, since sliced tomatoes “squish bad.”

The next announcement was that there was a lost-and-found something. Miss Mattie held it up, and Joey saw a chain on which dangled a small object. In the bright morning light, he made out the small object to be a cross.

Miss Mattie asked, “Who lost this pretty thing?” and a hand went up. As the cross and chain were passed along to a reunion with their owner, Joey, who was always pleased to have a chance to check out anything animal, vegetable, or mineral, held it for a moment. This was interesting, he thought—his first hands-on experience with a cross. After he had gleaned whatever information the cross had to offer him, he set it to swinging on its chain and passed it on. A simple thing, he thought; just two rods, one horizontal, one vertical, in this case stamped out of a nice piece of silver.

There were a couple of other announcements, the most important being that Chautauqua was coming to town, the signs for which Joey had already seen on that first trip out to the shoe
factory. Chautauqua continued on in my time. It was where we heard classical music and saw plays that weren't acted by locals, and heard about such things as the latest in Egyptian tomb finds. This year, according to Miss Mattie, there was to be a talk on the principle of radio waves, and she thought everybody ought to make a “special effort,” though everybody always went to Chautauqua, with or without Miss Mattie's reminder.

Up on the landing Miss Mattie motioned for T to join her, and he bounded up the stairs. Even if everybody already knew Joseph Bronson was in school, T said, there was still a surprise. He pointed to Joey, told him to hold up his hand, and proclaimed, according to Joey, “Doggone if you ain't lookin' at a Jewboy!”

All heads turned. Joey has always said his arm went up, but then, as if it had a mind of its own, went right back down. After a bit, heads turned back to T, but instead of the cheers that T had clearly expected, there were only murmurs.

If T was elated to include a “Jewboy” on the school's rolls, it was a feeling directly attributable to the mentoring of Miss Brookie, though T had perhaps missed the lecture that cautioned against saying “Jewboy.” By this point in his life T was convinced that everything his “cudden” Brookie did or thought was exactly how to do or think, as if it were not a man's world but Cudden Brookie's. She said “Nigra” instead of “nigger”? He was already working up to “Nigra,” with “darky” as a transition. She had gone to college? He aspired to the same. She liked strangers? Well, so did he.

James Lovelace, on the other hand, had not been mentored by Miss Brookie but by his farmer father, Ollie Lovelace, who would have said that the school was not so much lucky to have a “Jewboy” as doomed. Standing among the pupils, the son was now delivering this thought, along with a gratuitous blast at T. “You don't have no more upstairs than a field nigger, T Medlin,” he was saying. And then came his main message: “Don't you know all them Jews is
Catholics?
”

At this murmurs went up—some of agreement, some no doubt of bewilderment—and James Lovelace continued on. “And everybody knows a Catholic takes his orders from Rome,” he said. “From the Pope. Just ask my daddy.”

Miss Mattie pushed past T and, perhaps seeking to drive as small a wedge as possible between James and his father but also seeking to shed some light, said gently that Jews were Jews and Catholics were Catholics, and, furthermore, not everybody went to the churches they went to. “There's lots of other religions in this world,” she said to the pupils. Joey wondered at the time if she would make some sort of judgment about this, as my mother might have thought, but the principal said nothing more.

Mary Cantey Dalrymple raised her hand. The talk was about religion, and, as everybody knew, Mary Cantey had a special problem in this area, her family being Episcopalians in a town where there was no Episcopal church, and they were therefore forced to go to the Methodist one. “We could be anything we want,” Joey has recalled Mary Cantey saying, “but Mama says the Episcopal Church is where we belong. . . . You know, us being so rich and all.”

Miss Mattie then bowed her head and called upon the others to do the same. When she began, “We beseech you, O Lord . . . ,” Joey moved to the fringes of the crowd, and he heard her say, “We ask this in Christ's name, amen,” just as the bell clanged, ending recess.

A
ccording to Miriam, on the day Joey registered for school, Miss Brookie had rescued her from a fate worse than death—having no one to play with. As the others had struck out for Westerly, Miriam has remembered being left sitting on the platform swing feeling “utterly forsaken”—an expression she learned from Miss Brookie and has never let go of.

Miriam had been thinking that maybe girls were not allowed
to go to school in Concordia, but Miss Brookie assured her that they were, even if, she said, some folks had “grievous misgivings.”

She had a suggestion: Miriam would become a “Sunshine Girl.” “Honey,” she said, “we're going to have us a high old time. Just you let these old boys go their way.”

The Sunshine Girls turned out to be an important part of Miriam's life and, later, of mine. It was where Miriam met the girls she played with, the same girls who matured into the crowd she “ran with.” It was where I played with my friends as well, though I never “ran with” any of them, as I left Concordia before I got old enough to be said to “run with” anybody.

Sunshine Girls was a kind of club for girls who were too young for school. It gathered every weekday morning for arts and crafts, which consisted sometimes of pasting pieces of wallpaper to jars, outlining the pieces in India ink, and calling the result a vase; and sometimes of winding and gluing straw or yarn around and around until we claimed it had turned into something.

At any rate, on this first day of Joey's school, when Miss Brookie said, “Let's go, precious,” Miriam jumped off the swing, took Miss Brookie's hand, and headed with her for the Sunshine Girls.

They walked quickly through several streets before stopping in front of a tall white building with a long thin pole rising into the sky.

“First Presbyterian Church,” Miss Brookie announced.

They descended into the basement and into a large room where ten or twelve little girls were sitting in a circle on the floor. As Miriam and Miss Brookie entered, the girls lifted their heads and stared. The room was murky, as if a fog had entered and never left, and Miss Brookie declared it a “mighty curious setting” for Sunshine Girls.

She introduced Miriam to the lady sitting in the chair—Miss Clara—then waved to Miriam, and went out.

Miss Clara asked Miriam to tell about herself—her last name, what she liked to do, what church she was in, and “like that.”

A lot of questions for a five-year-old, but Miriam tried. “Bronson,” she said in answer to the first item on Miss Clara's list and set herself to thinking what the next one had been. Oh, yes. “And I like to play,” she said. Now for the last one, about the church. In the event Miss Clara was testing how smart she was, Miriam tried to remember what Miss Brookie had told her and answered, “I'm in the First Presbit.”

This is a joke the family always enjoyed: Miriam would say to us, “Well, wasn't I
in
the First ‘Presbit' Church?” and we would all agree that she had been.

Of course, Miss Clara wasn't asking about what church Miriam was presently
sheltered
in but what church she
attended
. And when she asked if Miriam was a Presbyterian, Miriam reports herself as having been “totally nonplussed.”

The girls were no help. They were just staring at her, waiting for her answer. “Not this one?” she asked Miss Clara.

“If you do, you're a Presbyterian.”

Miriam thought that didn't sound right.

“Then what are you? A Baptist? A Methodist? An Episcopalian?”

None of those sounded right either.

“You're not Jewish by any chance?”

Finally! “Yes,” Miriam cried. “Jewish!”

“Then you can't go to this church,” Miss Clara said to her. “You have to go to the Jewish church. Once you're Jewish, you're always Jewish, and that's the church you have to go to.”

Miriam felt her heart falling. “Then I can't play here?”

She held her breath until Miss Clara answered, until Miss Clara said, “Course you can.”

“Here, here!” yelled one little girl in the circle of girls—who turned out to be Vadah Fay Pridgen, one of the enduring members of Miriam's crowd—and she patted the spot next to her.

W
hen Miriam got home, according to how she has told it through the years, she went straightaway to Miss Brookie and told her what Miss Clara had said, that since she was Jewish, she would stay that way. She had been turning the thought over, that something was
forever
. Was it like my mother's freckles, Miriam wondered, which no creams rubbed off and my mother saying that she guessed she'd die with them?

Miss Brookie worked hard at clearing up for Miriam what Miss Clara had told her. Though Miriam has always claimed to be able to remember
exactly
what Miss Brookie said, she will, when challenged, say that it was what Miss Brookie “most assuredly
would
have said.” At any rate, what Miss Brookie was said to have said was that Protestants could change religions but Jews weren't allowed that privilege. As Miriam has told it, Miss Brookie said, “Protestants can join and unjoin churches like they're samplin' preserves at the fair, but if a Jew becomes a Hottentot and takes to stammerin', folks will say he's still a Jew and always will be.” If Miss Brookie didn't say exactly this, we all agreed that she
might
have.

M
y mother always said that I was born because Lizzie Maud said I should be. Where Lizzie Maud had said this was on the porch, on which my mother had taken to sitting for lack of anything to occupy her since Joey and Miriam were in school, and since, though the store was thriving in the year since it had opened, she was needed there only on Saturdays and rush days. She had spoken to my father about this wish for something to do, and was he any help? No, he had said she had a job—to be happy.

Miss Brookie was not much help either. With an “I'm gone,” she was out of the house and on one of her missions. On the day of Lizzie Maud's suggestion she was down at the depot picking up her three-times-a-year order of books, and then going on to deposit them in the library—actually a one-room house near the courthouse. She herself had established the library and hired Miss Wilma as librarian, though she was not entirely satisfied with Miss Wilma: Miss Wilma refused to reject the religious tracts and treatises people kept dropping off (“The library looks for all the world like the waiting room for God's own office,” Miss Brookie would say), and Miss Wilma's view of a book's
suitability did not always coincide with hers. As to the latter, Miss Brookie made a habit of dropping by the library
unexpectedly
to make sure the books she had placed on the shelves were still on them.