Since the Lord created us in His image and we make mistakes, I have to assume that God does, too, and one of them, obviously, was slavery. A person who takes every word of Scripture literally might think slavery’s okay because it’s in the Bible. But if you’re a decent human being, especially if your grandparents knew the lash, you likely condemn “the peculiar institution” of human bondage. So why did slavery make it into our sacred text? I can’t prove it but I’m pretty sure God kept His mistakes in there to test us. I think He’s challenging us to see the wrong and correct it. He can’t do everything Himself. Some stuff God wants us to fix. It might even be the main reason He put us on this earth. So here’s the question I want to leave you with today: Which wrong is God waiting for you to make right? It took folks too long to fix slavery. What else needs fixing right now?
That talk—and the very idea that God could be wrong about anything—caused a stir among Ifs’s conservative parishioners but that reaction was nothing compared to the impact of his sermon about Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians:
I’ve always had trouble with what Paul says about wives—the part about how they have to submit to their husbands. It makes no sense to me. I know—we all know—hundreds of wives in this very church who are smart and strong and who work hard to make a better life for their families and communities. Doesn’t seem right that these fine women should have to bend to the will of some dang fool husband just so he can feel big in his britches.
I hope this doesn’t embarrass you, Althea, but since tomorrow’s our twenty-fifth anniversary, I want to say something about you, about my wife in particular. Althea Scott is an extraordinary woman—a devoted wife, a wonderful mother, and an invaluable partner in my ministry. I have never believed the good Lord wanted me to rule over her; I believe He sent me Althea to love, honor, cherish, and respect. For a quarter century, I’ve done just that—and she’s done the same to me. I will always be grateful to the Almighty for bringing us together, and to you, Althea, for agreeing to become my wife.
Finally, I want to address myself to the men in our congregation. Please take time during the silent devotion to think about the most important woman in your life. If you love her, ask yourself if it’s better for her to feel strong or servile. Because a person can’t be both. If Saint Paul knew my wife, or your wife, or any of the great ladies of our church, I’m sure he would change his mind about that submission thing. He might even send them a special blessing for their good works and unfailing grace.
Amen.
The reverend sent a soft smile to the first pew where his wife and daughters sat beaming. “Praise Gods,” and “A-mens” hummed through the chapel, and when Cleo turned around, the paper fans fluttering in affirmation looked like butterflies. She later heard that a few men found fault with her father’s message; two of them, calling it heresy, left the church over it, taking their wives with them. But most parishioners felt God must have approved of Ifs’s sermon because women walked taller afterward, and some of the most troubled marriages in town seemed visibly improved. Cleo asked her father for his manuscript so she could transcribe every word of the sermon into her journal. She did not yet understand how remarkable her daddy was but even as a child, she knew that what he said in the pulpit was worth putting in a book.
She was ten when Ifs Scott died. A cerebral aneurysm, the doctor called it, a weak spot in a brain artery—bursts like an inner tube. These things just happen.
That afternoon, Cleo and her sister Clementine, twelve years older and recently divorced, had gone to church to help their mother setup for a cake sale. Ifs was at his desk writing a sermon and keeping one eye on Josie, Clem’s baby, who was napping in the portable crib by the window. The women returned two hours later to find a note scribbled on Ifs’s desk pad: “Took J. to Dairy Dream. Yes, I changed her.”
Witnesses at Dairy Dream reported that before he collapsed, Reverend Scott’s last words were: “After much discussion, the young lady and I have decided we’d like strawberry ice cream cones with rainbow sprinkles.”
ALTHEA HAD A short time to find a new home for herself and her grieving family before the new pastor was due to take over the parsonage. Money was tight. The cash proceeds of Ifs’s life insurance and small savings account weren’t enough to cover rent and living expenses for the four of them. Clementine had been deserted years before by Josie’s father, so there was no support from that quarter. Clem had a job at the plant nursery that paid minimum wage, and at ten, Cleo was in no position to contribute to the family income. It was up to their mother to find a way to keep them afloat.
Swallowing her pride, Althea Scott put an ad in the weekly Pennysaver: “Pastor’s widow seeks live-in domestic work: cooking, cleaning, minding children. Reliable. Industrious. Trustworthy. Lodging required for widow, two daughters, one toddler. Salary negotiable.”
Sophie Bergman saw the ad the day after her unmarried sister, who’d been caring for the house and the Bergman’s twin boys, ran off with the Electrolux man. The Bergmans, who owned a dry goods store, had an old icehouse in the yard behind their home that could easily be converted into living quarters. Althea Scott brought a loaf of her homemade cinnamon bread to her first interview. When that went well, she suggested that Mrs. Bergman come to the parsonage the next day to meet Clem, Cleo, and Josie because they were part of the package and a potential employer had a right to approve of them, too. Althea also wanted Sophie to come to the parsonage before the Scotts had to vacate so she could see for herself that Althea kept a neat, tasteful, and orderly house.
Indeed her cinnamon bread, spotless kitchen and parlor, and cheerful girls had all contributed to Althea’s being offered the position at the close of the second interview. Sophie Bergman hadn’t even felt the need to consult her husband, Morris; she knew a fine family when she saw one. For her part, Althea accepted the job without asking to see the old “icehouse,” whatever that was, because she couldn’t imagine anyone else in Memphis taking her in along with Clem, Cleo, and Josie. As Sophie described it, the icehouse had “three rooms with cute windows,” which caused Althea to conjure a dingy shack with windows the size of slits and leftover hand trucks and ice tongs strewn about. In any event, it would have to do, she told her daughters; they needed a roof over their heads.
Two weeks later, Althea and her girls moved into a spanking clean, simply furnished cottage, with an open kitchen, a small bedroom for Althea, and one for Cleo and Clem with just enough space for Josie’s crib. It wasn’t their home, but it was a house. An hour or so after they’d unpacked their clothes, dishes, linens, and other personal effects, both Bergmans stopped by to make sure they were settling in well.
“If the curtains aren’t your taste, Mrs. Scott, just go down to our store and exchange them for some you like better,” Sophie said, tweaking the tiebacks. “I promise I won’t be insulted.” Her husband Morris, a chunky man with a bushy mustache, noticed Clem and Cleo laboring to assemble Josie’s crib and insisted on finishing the job for them.
Althea started work that Monday. The front door of the icehouse led to the Bergmans’ back door by way of a brick path that meandered through their garden. Over the next seven years, until Cleo left for Wellesley College, the path seemed to shorten between the two homes as the tender, bustling woman with the flyaway hair became her second mother, her Jewish mother, not at all meddlesome but rather the sort of woman who is happiest when making others happy. Whether working beside Morris waiting on customers in the dry goods store, taking care of their twin toddlers, Jeff and Alan, ferrying a friend to the hospital for cancer treatments, or soliciting donations for one of her Jewish charities, Sophie was always trying, as she put it, “to be of use.”
The relationship between Sophie and Althea evolved with a natural ease unusual for two women whose circumstances were intrinsically unequal, a delicate dance of the domestically intimate and economically transactional. Sophie didn’t treat Althea “like a member of the family,” a claim some household employers p
roudly assert, albeit with one-sided evidence. Rather, she treated Althea with underlying awareness of the venerable social role of which the widow had been summarily stripped by her husband’s sudden death. For her part, Althea marveled at the alternate reality in which she found herself since Ifs’s death. On the one hand, she was being paid for things she used to do for love—cooking, cleaning, and being nice to visitors. On the other hand, she used to be the mistress of her own home and now she was a servant in someone else’s.
Sophie dropped in on the Scotts regularly, careful not to cross the permeable membrane of their privacy without a reasonable excuse: either she had just finished this month’s Redbook and thought Althea might like to have it, or the garden had produced a surfeit of zucchini and she hoped Althea would take the extra bushel. Once Cleo turned thirteen, Sophie hired her a couple of times a month to babysit for the twins and paid her fifty cents an hour, seventy-five after midnight, the top rates at the time. During one of her visits to the icehouse, Sophie noticed Cleo poring over a map of Europe in her textbook. “May I help you find something?”
Cleo explained she had to write a history paper on how the boundaries of Europe changed between 1939 and 1945 but the maps were so small, she could hardly make out the countries’ names. Peering over her shoulder, Sophie said, “You’re right. Me neither.”
Shortly after Sophie left, Cleo answered a knock on the door. A delivery boy from the store handed her a package. “Mrs. B. said I should give you this.”
Inside was an oversized atlas with an inscription: “To Cleo, who deserves the world. With love from the Bergmans.”
Such generosities continued through the years. When Cleo’s permanent teeth came in crooked, Mr. and Mrs. B. paid for her braces. When Althea was sick and couldn’t work, Sophie brought her chicken soup and fruit salad. On the fifth anniversary of Althea’s employment, the Bergmans gave her a big raise and a dishwasher for the icehouse kitchen.
Althea told her employers, “To know you and Mr. B. is to understand why the Jews are the chosen people.”
“Yeah,” Sophie responded. “Chosen to suffer.”
Cleo, who’d been listening to their exchange, winced. When Sophie left, Cleo turned to Althea. “You don’t have to be so obsequious, Mom. You work hard. You deserve everything they give you. Stop being so grateful that you get to clean their toilets!”
“You are fifteen, Cleo,” said Althea, “and you have a lot to learn.”
Althea went into her room and closed the door. That was the first of many conversations in which Cleo Scott took up the mantle of her activist father and challenged the accommodations she saw being made by her mother’s generation. Ever practical, Althea modeled her belief that all work has dignity when the worker is treated with respect—but a piece of her was proud to see her husband’s fire and courage alive in their daughter.
Not every Jew who crossed Cleo’s path in those years was like Mr. or Mrs. B. Even the Bergman family had a clinker. She would always remember when Sophie’s northern relatives came down to spend Passover with them and Althea recruited Cleo to help prepare and serve the seder meal. That was the year Cleo learned to make chicken soup, matzoh balls, and haroses, the mixture of apples, nuts, and sweet wine that Mrs. B. explained was meant to symbolize the mortar the Hebrew slaves used to build the pyramids. After the family had finished reciting the Passover story from their haggadah booklets, they sang a round of Hebrew songs and shouted, “Next year in Jerusalem!” and then most of them proceeded into the living room where they would be served dessert, coffee, and tea. Sophie was arranging a platter of macaroons when she noticed her Great Uncle Max still at the table. Stooped, with age-mottled hands, a straggly beard, and rimless glasses, the old man was methodically pouring the leftover wine from everyone’s glasses into an empty Manischewitz bottle.
“What are you doing, Max?” Sophie asked.
“Wine shouldn’t go to waste. I’m collecting it for the girl,” he said, pointing to Althea, who was setting cups and saucers on a silver tray.
“No, you’re not! She is not drinking our dregs! And she’s not a girl.” With a pained glance at Althea, Sophie retrieved the bottle from her uncle and gave it to Cleo to pour down the kitchen drain. “Please forgive him, Mrs. Scott. He saves everything. He meant well.”
Althea said, “Don’t worry, it’s okay.” But it wasn’t; it stung.
“It most certainly is not okay.” Sophie smiled with her mouth, but her eyes revealed a distressed shame. She ran to the sideboard, grabbed an unopened box of Barton’s chocolate creams and an untouched honey cake (kosher for Passover), and gave them to Althea to take back to the icehouse.
“Happy Easter,” Sophie said. “Enjoy.”
WHILE LISTENING TO half the people in the New School lecture hall respond to the woman who wanted to know what to do about her nanny, Cleo had been hurled back to that long-ago Passover. Mrs. B. never needed advice; she treated everyone with dignity. But not everyone treated her or Mr. B. with comparable respect. Long before the Black-Jewish Coalition was a glint in its founders’ eyes, Cleo had witnessed the challenges faced by a Jewish family living as a distinct minority in a Southern city. On top of that, her work as a radio journalist had given her a front-row seat on the eruptions between blacks and Jews over the years. She had observed their Rashomon-like perceptions of identical events. She had moderated contentious panels on affirmative action, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and other flashpoint issues between blacks and Jews. She had seen their battles up close, and sometimes been caught in the crossfire. But she’d never experienced anything as vitriolic or venomous as the on-air fiasco she came to think of as the Shameful Show.
Marcus Charlton, her producer, had facilitated the ordeal; he may even have orchestrated it, Cleo thought, recalling his recent association with Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. She should have anticipated his mischief. A producer’s job was to research a topic, book guests in advance, and, on the night of the show, screen calls and run interference for the host before putting people through to her earphones. That night, though, rather than filter out the loony birds, Marcus had released a flock of them into her live air. And where were the Jewish callers or other outraged listeners? She’d seen the station’s market research report; she knew her audience was diverse and included a large percentage of Jews.
During a commercial break the night of the Shameful Show, she had demanded that Marcus do a better job of screening. He’d shot back that it wasn’t his fault that Jews weren’t calling. At any rate, blaming one’s producer was a cop-out, Cleo knew that. Marcus worked for her. The red button was on her console. With the flick of a finger, she could have cut off the bigots, deep-sixed the crazies. Instead, she had let the hatemongers derail her. Replaying the audiotape, she registered a dozen missed opportunities when she could have gone on the attack. She could have reminded the caller who screamed “Zionism is racism” that Dr. King once responded to a hostile question, “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism.” She could have noted how often Dr. King was likened to Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. She knew those facts; why didn’t she use them?
The Shameful Show was the nadir of Cleo’s broadcasting career. Until then, she’d seen herself as a tough interlocutor and a voice for the voiceless. Whenever she guest lectured in journalism classes, she pointedly disavowed the label “objective journalist” because, in her opinion, no one with a brain, heart, and rudimentary grasp of history should pretend to approach certain stories with a blank slate. She faulted broadcasters for giving equal time to saints and scumbags; back in the sixties, for instance, a racist like Bull Connor—the Alabama police chief who used attack dogs and cattle prods against peaceful black demonstrators—should not have been allowed on the air. Yet when the anti-Semitic pit bulls were chewing up her phone lines the other night, she had failed to shut them down.
A simple apology would not suffice. Cleo decided to make reparations and respond immediately to
the protests flooding the station by affording her Jewish listeners the chance to even the score on the following week’s program. She had seen the power of reconciliation first hand. Besides being the daughter of two civil rights activists, at age eleven, the day before Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Cleo had gone with Althea to the Mason Temple to hear his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” sermon (and Dr. King had given her a hug afterward). She had stood vigil with her mother and sister outside the Lorraine Motel after Dr. King was killed. She’d worked for the panthers’ children’s breakfast programs when she was in high school. And through all the phases of the movement—nonviolent resistance and black power—she had retained a soft spot for the Jewish people, mirroring Ifs’s gratitude to his mentor and Althea’s affection for Sophie and Morris Bergman.
Cleo’s reparations show made headlines far beyond the New York market. Pundits dubbed her “courageous,” and applauded her prompt effort to publicly rectify an offense. Talking heads debated whether hate speech should be muzzled or have First Amendment protection. Jewish organizations sent thank you notes. Prominent African Americans said they wished more white people would respond to racism the way Cleo had responded to anti-Semitic bigotry. (She ignored the letters and phone calls from blacks who accused her of being an “Aunt Tom,” and she threw out the funereal lilies that arrived in a long box with a death threat on the gift card.) Jeremiah Birmingham, who happened to be listening both weeks, later claimed that the two shows, obviously for different reasons, had inspired him to approach Rabbi Kahn with the idea of cofounding the Black-Jewish Coalition.
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