Farther down the beach, enormous old cypress trees rose from the shallow water. Cypress knees erupted from the sand and water around the base of the trees. Farther down still stood the diving tower with its three levels. Neither Bubba nor I dared to jump from even the first level. At two he was too young, and at nine I was too afraid. Mostly we played in the water across from Mother and Daddy. Or, after our lips had turned blue from the icy water, we sat in the sun making sand castles.
When I swam, I swam back and forth in the shallow water where the bottom was sandy. Swimming out to the raft meant leaving the security of the sandy bottom and swimming over long grasses, which frightened me, for I couldn’t see what might be swimming through them. Swimming anyplace where my feet even threatened to brush along the top of the grass made my heart pound.
This turned out to be our most wonderful day at Wakulla. Part of a Tarzan movie starring Johnny Weissmuller was being filmed there. And while we didn’t see it being made, just knowing that someplace in the jungle a cast and crew were busy creating another Tarzan movie thrilled me. Wakulla was supposed to be someplace in Africa. The Wakulla, a relatively straight, narrow, and short river flowing from the springs to Saint Marks, Florida, was supposed to be the Congo.
We happened onto the living evidence of the movie being made on our way back to the Lodge. There, in the shade, was a newly erected pen made of logs. On its straw-covered floor two elephants stood swinging their trunks and swatting flies with their tails. Dust rose from their hides with each swat. Bubba and I followed as Mother pushed baby Mercer over to see the elephants. Their keeper, a thin, unshaven man, stood nearby with a small group of people clustered around him listening to him talk about the movie. I waited until the crowd left and there was just the man and my family. Then hesitantly I said: “Sir?”
“Yeah?” He looked at me, his friendly face bolstering my courage.
“Where are the other elephants?” I asked.
“What other elephants?”
“The other elephants for the movie.”
“Ain’t none.” He spat a dark stream of chewing tobacco on the ground.
“But what about all those herds of elephants stampeding through the jungle?”
“Them things are done with camera tricks.”
“Camera tricks?”
“Camera tricks.”
He dug into one pants pocket, drew out a pocketknife, and opened it. With the blade he began to scrape at the dirt under his fingernails.
I swallowed my disappointment. But at least, I comforted myself, Johnny Weissmuller had ridden those very elephants who stood just feet from me, batting their lashes to chase away the gnats clustered around their runny eyes. Or at least he’d probably ridden one. I didn’t dare ask the man if this was true. I’d accepted without a problem that Wakulla was supposed to be a jungle in Africa; Wakulla was mysterious and junglelike. But until my conversation with the elephant keeper, I hadn’t been aware of the possibility of camera tricks to create the appearance of what wasn’t there at all. It was too much for me to accept that the herds of elephants were like the magic tricks that a magician had performed one day in the school auditorium. I stood in the shade of a moss-covered live oak, looking at the elephants and feeling miserably betrayed. I didn’t want to find out that Johnny Weissmuller hadn’t even laid eyes on those elephants.
Daddy thanked the elephant keeper for his attention, and we walked on up the path toward the Lodge, a 1930s stucco Spanish-style building with arched windows and doors and a red tile roof. Mother, Daddy, and Mercer went into the Lodge, where swimsuits and bare feet weren’t allowed. Bubba and I went back to the bathhouse and changed into shorts, T-shirts, and sandals before going to the soda shop for ice cream.
The Lodge always felt magical to me, with its long marble soda fountain, marble floors, and staircases. The large color photographs of cypress trees, water, and boats on opaque glass, bordered in deep frames and lit from behind, enchanted me. After having ice cream with our parents at the soda shop, Bubba and I headed to the lobby to play a game of checkers before going home. Usually there were at least a few well-dressed adults in the lobby sitting on sofas or chairs, smoking and talking softly, but that one late afternoon my brother and I were the only people there. It was more a sense of a presence than a sound that caused me to stop in midmove and look up from the checkerboard and across the broad expanse of floor. Just yards from where I sat, Johnny Weissmuller was striding silently across the lobby, bare feet on the marble floor, his tan and muscular body naked except for a loincloth.
It felt like time itself had taken note of his arrival and had slowed everything to the slowest slow motion possible. Johnny Weissmuller looked even taller and larger in person than he looked in the movies. With his dark hair and eyes, long legs, and large hands, he seemed to fill not only his body but the entire room. Here was the man who was inseparable in my mind from the Tarzan I adored, the Tarzan who roamed free in the jungle and called it home, who called to the wild animals as if they were his own family, who defied the rules of the Lodge and walked through the lobby barefooted and nearly naked, as if the Lodge was as much home to him as the jungle and the only rules were those that nature made. Here was the Tarzan who was not afraid to swim where the grasses grew long and thick; who was not afraid to dive down into and through the grasses themselves, willing and able to face whatever he might find there.
Then he turned and walked up the marble staircase and was gone.
Chapter Three
I
I DON’T REMEMBER WHAT I DID TO MAKE MY FRIEND JENNY ANGRY, BUT the way her eyes grew calm and cold under her thick, straight bangs told me that she’d come up with a way to get back at me. I braced myself.
“You’re nothing but a Jew, Margaret Richter,” she announced. “Nothing but a Jew.”
Then she turned and walked briskly away. I stood watching her back as she disappeared down the street.
Nothing but a Jew?
I felt the August heat through the soles of my sandals. No one had ever told me we were Jews. Certainly we didn’t go to a synagogue—we went to the First Baptist Church, with Jesus in the stained-glass windows and a steeple on top. Mother’s side of the family was mostly Scotch-English, and Daddy’s was German.
But were we German Jews?
Heat waves rose from the cars parked in front of Mizell’s Drugs, where Jenny and I had just eaten ice cream cones. I walked home slowly. What’s wrong with being a Jew anyway? I thought.
When Daddy came home from work, I asked him: “Daddy, are we Jews?”
He didn’t answer, but he got that secretive, evasive look he got when I asked him something about his disowned sisters, Bessie and Kate. Then he turned his eyes from mine.
“Daddy, are we Jews?” I repeated pleadingly, but again he looked away. I knew there was no hope of an answer from him. For all his weakness, Daddy was iron-willed when it came to what he would and wouldn’t talk about. But because of Jenny’s statement and Daddy’s refusal to confirm or deny it, I spent the remaining years of my childhood examining family behavior and information for evidence of the truth. I desperately wanted to know who I was.
A part of me decided that because he wouldn’t say we weren’t, we must be Jews. Also, though I heard Daddy talk about African Americans in racist language, I never heard him say a single negative word about a Jew. Doesn’t that tell me something? I asked myself. Daddy was prejudiced against a lot of people: Yankees, Catholics, people he called “white trash,” Gypsies, people who rented their houses, and the lawyer who said to him, “I’d have done it for the blackest nigger,” when Daddy thanked him for a favor.
My conviction that our family had to be Jewish strengthened when Mr. Louie Steiman was turned down for membership in the country club in a nearby town and Daddy stopped work early and drove over there to support Mr. Steiman’s appeal. Why would he have done that when he and Mr. Steiman were hardly friends? And country club membership was one of the last things to interest Dad
dy. His defending Mr. Steiman felt almost like a family affair, like the way he acted when he, Uncle Frank, and Aunt Bama would rush to one another’s aid when the need arose. And what about the Yiddish words the three of them used with one another?
After Daddy’s death I asked Mother the same question: “Mother, was Daddy’s family Jewish?”
“I really don’t know,” she replied. “I remember people referring to your father’s people as ‘those rich Richter Jews,’ but whether they said that because they had money or because they were Jews, I don’t know. They certainly acted like Jews, the way they kept so to themselves.”
My cousin Peyton, a college professor in the humanities, told me—it must have been the seventies by then—that old Dr. Walker in Cairo said on his deathbed that my father’s family was Jewish. Peyton and I were eating lunch at the Lord Jeffery Inn in Amherst, Massachusetts. He’d come to visit me, and to deliver a lecture at one of the area colleges. I don’t know what brought Dr. Walker to Peyton’s mind, but whatever it was, there we were once again talking about our Southern family.
Many years later, when I asked Peyton about our conversation in the Lord Jeffery, he swore he’d never said anything about the family being Jews. Peyton was as adamant in his denial of our previous conversation as Daddy was in turning his eyes away when I asked him a question he didn’t want to answer. The subject was forever closed. Closed for Daddy and Peyton, but it has never been closed for me.
When we were in our early sixties, I had a conversation with Jenny in which I asked her what she knew about my family being Jewish. She responded with surprise at the question, saying that she knew nothing at all about it. I didn’t remind her of our childhood conversation. But after we talked, I sat a long time, remembering how burdensome the not knowing had been all my life. More than anything, my family felt weighed down by secrets—secrets about Daddy’s sisters, secrets about Earnest Junior, and all the secrets Mother and Daddy discussed in their complex private language combining a few German words and Southern English, together with common words spelled at machine-gun rapidity, creating a code that I finally gave up trying to decipher.
When I was young, I desperately wanted the family to be Jewish. If the Richters were Jews, I reasoned, their behavior of clinging so closely together would have made sense to me, and would have made them seem heroic, or at least rational, rather than merely peculiar. Maybe being a Jew was the thing that made me feel so different from other children. The thought of having a clear reason outside myself for my feelings of alienation was comforting. And I didn’t want to be a German like the Germans spreading their monstrous cruelty throughout much of Europe.
“Heil Hitler,” Uncle Frank would bark as my little brother did the goose step up and down his lawn. Uncle Frank applauded and laughed his loud, deep laugh, encouraging Bubba to perform that deadly prance across the grass. Then he would again show us his collection of enameled buttons with swastikas, and the Nazi flag he kept folded in a drawer. It was much more comfortable to think of us as being a family of Jews rather than a family of Nazis.
At the Zebulon Theater, watching The March of Time newsreels, I saw many of the atrocities the Nazis were perpetrating. In the woods someplace in Europe, a building burst into flames. The newscaster said the building was filled with the crippled and the insane. I remember his exact words. Later I saw corpses of Jews bulldozed into a mass grave, and how they tumbled on top of one another. I’d have covered my eyes with my hands, but it was too late. I’d already taken the images into my soul. All those naked bodies knocking against one another. What if they’d been people from my own life? My timid and fearful father. My modest mother. Miss Sarah with her cats and kittens. The postman with his friendly face. The iceman. That forced nakedness, that unasked-for intimacy of bodies, that ghastly intrusion of flesh against flesh, bone against bone.
I could hardly breathe in the still air of the picture show. The EXIT sign glowed red in the front of the room, but there was no exit from what I’d just seen. Without their stories, clothes, or names, these people would nevertheless always be a part of my life. There was no way I could get them out of my memory.
No, I didn’t want to be related to the Nazis.
II
It was difficult and confusing to be a Richter. But it was the Richter side of the family I identified with, more than my mother’s family. They were the misfits in the community, echoing my own feeling of not belonging. Daddy’s family also represented the arts to me. I had a cousin who Peyton said wrote novels, and both Daddy and Aunt Bama played the piano. Peyton wrote short stories, though he never tried to get them published. He was also artistic and made wonderful puppets and models of sailing ships. His sister Roberta painted portraits, while his sister Marybell was an actress and his older brother, Ashton, was a photographer.
Daddy wrote music and did pencil drawings. As a small child I watched with fascination while he drew profile after profile on pieces of typing paper. When I was older, I began to copy him and draw profiles, as he had, though not with his skill and confidence. Throughout grade school I spent many hours drawing those faces while making up stories to go with them. When I was drawing, I could escape everything I didn’t want to see or feel. When I was drawing, I was suspended in a state of timeless contentment.
Mother and her family represented respectability, sociability, class, manners, law, and education. Her father had been a lawyer and state treasurer. Mother’s sister Sarah taught high school English and was married to a lawyer who practiced with their father and later became the county judge. Her sister Ina was a teacher married to a minister who was president of a small Baptist college. And Curtis, unmarried until middle-aged, was a math professor. Mother herself taught high school Latin before her marriage.
Then there was my great-uncle Gerard Christopher, a retired Baptist preacher who, when visiting from a nearby town, would stand and pray in our church for an unbearably long time. His tall, imposing frame towered over the Sunday-morning congregation, while church members shuffled in the pews and fanned themselves with paper fans with pictures of Jesus on one side and advertisements for the funeral homes on the other. Mother’s family was conventional and respected, a solid part of the system. They clearly belonged. The Richters were a puzzle, but I was far more interested in them.
The Richter who captured my imagination most was my great-grandfather, who immigrated to this country from Germany. I remember a few family stories about him: that in his old age, after his first wife died, he married a woman who’d advertised in a newspaper for a husband, and that one of his wives made soap by boiling rats. I don’t know how many wives he had. I do know that he fought in the Mexican-American War, participating in the bloody conquest of Veracruz in 1847; and that he served in the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Along with the question of whether or not he was a Jew, there was one other story that gave him a prominent place in the whole of my life. It was a short human-interest story from a Baltimore newspaper, brittle and yellowed with age. I found the newspaper in the bottom drawer of Mother’s mahogany secretary that stood by the front door in the living room. The article told the story of how my great-grandfather had missed his ship to America because his baggage had failed to arrive at the dock on time. The ship, Johannes, left without him. It and its three hundred or more passengers were never heard of again. He then booked passage on the Copernicus and landed safely in Baltimore after a stormy crossing of fifty-one days. Three hundred people or more had drowned in a stormy sea, while my great-grandfather had lived to fulfill his dreams in America. I read and reread the story, trying each time to take in the truth of it: I owed my very existence to the late arrival of my great-grandfather’s luggage.
It seemed to me that whole generations of human beings must be alive because of some seemingly insignificant event or circumstance. Nothing, however small, could ever be dismissed as trivial. I thought of the many people who would not have lived had my great-grandfather drowned. I imagined the m
any other people who would have never felt the effects of his presence on this earth, or my presence, and that of my children. The connections seemed endless.
But was my great-grandfather a Jew? Over the years I’ve found nothing to prove it. But after all the years of focusing on my heritage, a part of me will forever be a Jew, imagined, real, or borrowed.
III
NOVEMBER 25, 1945
I slept through everything.
I woke to find Daddy sitting on the edge of my bed, dressed in a dark suit and tie. His hands were clasped between his knees, and his head was bowed. His eyes were red and swollen, and as he began to talk, tears streamed down his face.
Uncle Frank was dead.
A fire had started in his basement and climbed the stairs to the kitchen, just like the stampeding horses he’d always threatened would climb the stairs and trample me to death if I stopped rubbing his bald head. The horses got Uncle Frank instead of me, I thought, then tried to take back the thought that came with its flood of guilt. Hadn’t he invited me to spend that very night at his house? Hadn’t I told him no? Now I was alive while Uncle Frank was dead.
The night of the fire Aunt Mary had gone to Albany to pick up a new suit for him. She’d backed her Buick out of their driveway and headed north while the furnace rumbled and the flames even then were getting ready to break free, those thunderous horses, their wide nostrils snorting fire and smoke, hooves blazing.
I was dimly aware of people talking in the living room, wandering up and down the hall, all with hushed voices. It was as if the house had become a library or a church.
“That Frank’s dead is no excuse to not eat a good breakfast,” Mother announced as she set a plate of bacon and eggs and grits in front of Daddy at the breakfast table.
The Long Journey Home Page 4