Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  “Why more?”

  “It’s a reminder, I suppose, of all the times they haven’t had any choice—all the times when their women were forced to go off with the whites—all the yellow-skinned babies with straight hair.”

  “We’re different,” he said harshly. “You and me. Kemala and Michael.”

  “All right, we’re different.” Her voice was oddly despondent. “Let’s take a walk,” she said. “It’s suffocating in here.”

  “Well, this year we got the Britannica. Next year we’ll think about air conditioning,” he said. “Come. Let’s walk.”

  He guided her down a ribbon of shade formed by a brace of persimmon trees. The thin-skinned fruit dangled in silken, sun-colored bulbs on the slender, dark-leafed branches. They looked down on waves of white cotton plants—an endless sea of growth, but the fields were deserted. The workers of Troy, who had risen at dawn to avoid the day’s fierce heat, were asleep in their homes, protected against the invasion of light by the closely drawn black window shades. They passed two small children, a barefoot coffee-colored boy and a little girl whose skin shone like ebony, asleep in an envelope of shade formed by the branches of a tupelo tree. The children had drawn very close to each other, in pursuit of the soothing shadow.

  “They both come to my reading readiness class,” Michael said. “Their first-grade teacher is in for a surprise.”

  “We’ll need a lot of surprises to make any difference in this state,” she said bitterly.

  “Hey. You’re the one who sings a different song. Remember? One step at a time. This summer a couple of classes in a safe place like Troy. Next year or the year after a network of freedom schools, a freedom library.” he reminded her. “What happened?”

  “A couple of weeks in Mississippi happened,” she said. “You’re cloistered here m Troy, but I see what’s going on. Last week they arrested a whole load of freedom riders. I saw it. The cops were beating down on the kids with hoses and clubs, and the kids were doing all the things they’d been taught. They covered their heads and curled themselves up as though they were about to be born, not about to die.”

  “They won’t die,” he said.

  “Not this time. Although there was a lot of blood and one Harvard kid got a broken arm. But how long do you think it will be before one of them gets killed? Matt says it’s only a matter of time.”

  “Matt?” It was the second time she had mentioned his name.

  “Matt Williams. You know, the organizer I’m working with. You’ve got to read the manifesto he wrote for The New Leader. He says we’ve got to be ready to break down all the barriers—to organize in such strength that we’ll force the whites back.”

  “Not all whites are against you.”

  She did not answer.

  “I’m white,” he added.

  “You’re different.”

  “And so are a lot of other whites. The freedom riders. The Harvard boy who broke his arm. People you don’t know.” He thought of his mother, who had sent him a generous check to be used to buy supplies for the Troy school; of Charles Ferguson, who had sent a package of art materials; of Les Anderson, who was covering a freedom ride for his magazine. Melanie had written him a jubilant letter from the Kennedy campaign trail: “Everyone knows that he will make a difference. We can feel the changes already.” Melanie had enclosed a snapshot of her fellow campaign workers at a barbecue—a smiling crew of black and white young people wearing Kennedy buttons and waving ears of corn. Changes were coming. The promise of the new decade would not be betrayed.

  “We’ve got to stop talking about breaking down and start talking about building up,” he said.

  “Oh, you talk like a child,” she retorted impatiently. “You remind me of my father. Read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty every night. Study the Bill of Rights. Remain patiently at a lunch counter during a sit-in. Teach a couple of classes, touch a couple of hearts, and get shot down in a Carolina meadow.”

  “Do I talk like a child?” he asked angrily. He was speaking as she had spoken to him as they sat in Golden Gate Park and watched the lights on the bay, only a few short weeks ago. His words echoed her own. Her denial of them was a betrayal, a repudiation. He could not believe she had changed so much in so short a time. Who was this Matt Williams, who had exerted such power over her? A sudden jealousy suffused him.

  Kemala did not answer him but kicked a flat stone out before her and shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans. They had reached a stripped cottonwood field and stood beneath a magnolia tree on which a few mournful blossoms lingered.

  “Like a child?” he repeated. Her accusation was translated into a taunting question that fed his new fury.

  He took her into his arms and felt her body tremble, heard her whispers of protest. He tightened his hold and pressed her lips into silence against his own. A new determination ripped through him. He would still her bitterness, vanquish her sorrow and his own new uneasiness.

  “Kemala.” He crooned her name, he loved her name. “Kemala.”

  He cradled her gently, took the silken braid of her hair and wrapped it about his wrist. She was his prisoner, yet he was her captive—they were bound in mysterious symbiosis. Her fingers flashed across the buttons of his shirt, her satin-smooth hands slid across his chest, his back. They came together on a litter of decaying magnolia petals. Afterward, lying amid the fragrant debris, he looked up and saw a wide-winged crow scissor its way blackly across the heat-streaked sky. A mockingbird sang softly into the glare. He closed his eyes against the mingled omens. Kemala lay still beside him; her hand reached up to brush away a heart-shaped leaf that had drifted onto his shoulder.

  A TALL WEST INDIAN MAN waited for her at the Troy schoolhouse. Sweat glittered in diamond droplets on his dark skin. His face was very narrow, cruelly beautiful. Kemala introduced them.

  “Matt Williams,” she said. “Michael Goldfeder.”

  A smile carved its way across Matt Williams’s face.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said but did not extend his hand. “Your school’s pretty well outfitted.”

  “My mother helped,” Michael said and wondered why he should feel defensive rather than proud.

  “Nice to have a rich mama. I had a poor mama. Is it your mama who owns S. Hart, Inc.?”

  “My mother does some work for them. My uncle and cousin own it,” Michael said stiffly.

  “Your mama’s got an interest. You surprised that I know that?” Matt asked. “Why shouldn’t I know that? I didn’t go to the Harvard School of Business Administration for nothing. I read my Business Week regularly. We do our research, you know.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Michael said heavily.

  “We have to go, Kemala. It’s a long ride back.”

  “Yes. I know. Goodbye, Michael.”

  “Goodbye, Kemala.” He tried to read the message in her golden eyes. A plea for silence? For understanding? Fear? He could not tell.

  He wrote long letters that night to his mother, to Aaron, to Rebecca in Israel. He told them about his small school, the library he was trying to build, the Mason family, who shared their home and their lives with him. He described the strange, cool stillness of the Mississippi dawn and how he had seen a white-tailed deer glide across the cotton fields at dusk. But he did not mention Kemala—Kemala, who danced through his dreams that night, a circlet of magnolia blossoms aglow on her dark, slender wrist.

  *

  KEMALA came to Troy once a week after that initial visit. She looked forward to those afternoons with Michael, although she knew that Matt, in his silent, brooding way, disapproved of them. She spent more and more time with Matt at work, following his directions, coordinating his efforts. He was a daring, innovative planner, and she had a talent for detail, for meticulous follow-up. Matt conceived of a meeting of southern academics who were sympathetic to voter registration reforms. He journeyed from campus to campus to meet with them. His strong, insistent voice subdued their doubts, his anger negated their
hesitancy. But it was Kemala who arranged for meeting rooms, for travel arrangements, for the distribution of agendas and press releases. It was Kemala who reminded him of his appointments, maintained his calendar, brought him cups of black coffee when he worked on a speech or a proposal. His energy fascinated her, his intellectual verve excited her.

  “This is wonderful, Matt,” she said as she edited a speech.

  “And what do you think of this?” He flashed a newly completed article at her and paced the room restlessly as she read it. He worked at a frenetic pace and was impatient with those who lingered behind him. The white volunteers cowered beneath his sarcastic tongue-lashings. Black students exaggerated their militancy in a desire for his approval. But Kemala was always honest with him, considered in her assessments, deliberate in her decisions. She read his article carefully.

  “I’m not sure about it.”

  Her uncertainty angered him.

  “Why? Why aren’t you sure?” He mimicked her tone, gripped her shoulder as she explained her doubts. Here he had expressed himself too strongly, and in the following paragraph he had failed to clarify salient points. The pressure of his fingers on her skin intensified; he countered her arguments with a strident defense, yet in the end he made the changes and smiled brilliantly at her—the white flash of his teeth a grimace of gratitude.

  He grew increasingly demanding of her, and she made no effort to evade the dark orbit of his authority. She admired, even envied, his anger. It counterposed her father’s acquiescence and passivity. Matt Williams would not wait for change—he would cause it to happen.

  Still, his fierce abrasiveness wearied her. She took refuge against Matt’s driving fury in thoughts of Michael’s gentleness, his reasoned earnestness. She did not speak of Michael to Matt, but she occasionally allowed him to drive her to Troy. She turned her face from him when she greeted Michael so that he would not see the gladness in her eyes. Matt would count that as a betrayal, she knew, and she did not want to wound him. She was at once frightened of him and fearful for him.

  She was more at ease when she came to Troy alone and she and Michael spent the long, hot afternoons together. Once they drove to the Bienville National Forest and walked through the dark velvet paths of patterned shade cast by the giant pines. There, in the tree-shadowed cool, they linked fingers and almost forgot that they were in Mississippi. They did not think of the harsh epithets a white motorist had shouted at them from a passing car:

  “You like dark meat, you commie bastard!”

  Kemala had not turned her head, but her hands, clasped on her lap, had trembled. Michael burned with rage and gripped the steering wheel tightly. Would Aaron have challenged the man? he wondered. No. Aaron, too, would have driven on. They talked a great deal that afternoon, in the forest. Again, Kemala told him of her father. Again, he spoke of his brother and sister, of his own self-doubts. Yet this summer he had learned that he, too, possessed secret sources of strength. He, too, had a cause and was prepared to fight for it. Kemala told him of her work with Matt, of their efforts to establish grassroots leadership in Mississippi.

  “In the end it’s the people who live in the state who will have to change things. There is a limit to the participation of white volunteers.”

  “Isn’t that a kind of racism in reverse?” he asked.

  “We don’t think so,” she replied. By “we,” he knew she meant herself and Matt Williams, although by tacit agreement, they did not mention him by name.

  Michael, of course, had learned something about the slender West Indian. Stories traveled swiftly through the ranks of the movement. Legend was soft currency, and the authentically minted and the counterfeit were passed with equal ease. A single incident created a reputation. The briefest retreat into fear destroyed one. Matt Williams’s reputation had preceded his arrival in Mississippi.

  His parents had come to New York from the West Indies, determined to succeed. His father had been a skilled garage mechanic and his mother a restaurant cook. Matt was targeted early by observant teachers as a gifted student. He was in the top ten percent of his class at Stuyvesant High School and won a scholarship to Columbia University.

  “You see,” his father told a reporter at his graduation, “hard work is the answer in this country.” A picture of the smiling parents, flanking the shyly smiling undergraduate, appeared in the afternoon edition of the New York Post. “Proud Dad Says Hard Work Is the Answer.”

  The garage mechanic himself worked two shifts, and his wife clocked as many overtime hours as she could manage. Their dream was in sight. On a spring day during Matt’s junior year at Columbia, his father put on his only suit, a white shirt and a tie, and traveled to St. Albans, a small residential neighborhood in the borough of Queens. There he made the down payment on a small frame house. He was warned that he would be the first black to move onto that street. He was unperturbed. He believed, as he had always told his only son, that hard work and pleasant manners triumphed. He wept when he signed the contract. He was the first person in his family to own property. The family moved in on the last day of June. On the first day of July a cross was burned on the neatly mowed tiny square of lawn.

  Neighbors saw teenagers running from the scene. An adolescent prank, they said. Summer mischief. One man even crossed the street to express his sympathy. Matt’s father smiled, raked the lawn up, and planted new grass where the ugly burn had seared the soil itself. Two nights later a stone was thrown through an upstairs window.

  This time no one offered sympathy. He replaced the windowpane. He smiled at the grim-faced neighbors, who did not smile back.

  In August, he painted the trim on the neat little house. The bright green paint was barely dry when rags soaked in kerosene were set afire and tossed through the living room windows. Matt’s mother, asleep on the couch, died almost at once, the pathologist said. The torch had consumed the synthetic fibers within minutes. The street smelled for hours of charred flesh, simmering human fat. His father was burned over ninety percent of his body and died weeks later, whimpering like a baby. The president of the St. Albans Civic Association sent Matt a letter of regret, which he did not acknowledge. He did answer the phone.

  “Move, nigger,” one caller said.

  “We’ll be back,” another caller warned.

  Matt sold the house to a white family, completed his Columbia degree, and took advantage of the scholarship he had won to the Harvard Business School. Major corporations offered him jobs. His credentials were impeccable, his organizational abilities formidable. But Matt decided to become a professional organizer for the civil rights movement. He no longer believed in hard work and pleasant manners. He believed in direct action, fierce confrontation. He was not popular in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was not moderate. Sarcasm had replaced the courtesy so prized by his father (who had died whimpering, apologetic even about his pain). He made no effort to get along with white volunteers. He sounded a call for grass-roots leadership, for black power. There were rumors that he planned a more militant breakaway organization. But he was a brilliant organizer, a dynamic speaker. He was promoted to positions of leadership where he was more visible and thus more easily watched.

  When Michael drove Kemala back from the Bienville Forest, Matt was waiting in the doorway of the schoolhouse. Michael noticed that she stiffened and that her face grew grave, her manner distant. He wondered at the power that Matt exerted over her.

  Still, she was in Troy on the day Lizzie read her first complete sentence, and she was there the day the elderly sharecropper bravely made his way to the courthouse, took the literacy test, and passed. And Kemala was there the day Norma Anne failed.

  “You’ll pass the next time,” she assured the weeping girl.

  “I ain’t gonna try no more,” Norma Anne protested.

  “Yes, you are.” Michael was firm. “I’ll be back next summer, and we’ll start earlier.” His students’ challenge had become his own. He designed new materials, new exercises.
Kemala had ignited his interest, his enthusiasm, but it blazed independent of her now.

  Kemala was in Troy the day Yehuda Arnon visited the school. Michael had known that Yehuda was in the South at a conference, but he had been surprised when his brother-in-law walked into his classroom, touched that Yehuda would drive miles out of his way through the torpid heat to visit him. He introduced him to his class.

  “Mr. Arnon is here from Israel,” he said and saw the bewilderment on their faces. An ideal opportunity for a geography lesson had presented itself. He unfurled the map and showed them where Israel was situated.

  “What’s it like over there in Israel land?” the elderly sharecropper asked.

  “As hot as it is here,” Yehuda said, and they all laughed. Briefly, then, he told them about Israel’s history, about the displaced persons who had been smuggled into the country, and of the battles that had been fought for the independence of the new Jewish state.

  “Those who had been slaves in the concentration camps became warriors determined to protect their freedom, their right to live and survive as other free peoples in the world live and survive.”

  “Amen,” Norma Anne shouted, and the others turned to one another and nodded vigorously.

  They had listened carefully to the man with earth-colored hair whose hands were as callused as their own. They recognized his story. They understood the need to fight for survival, to do battle for equality. They had recognized their own history in Yehuda Arnon’s words—the passage from slavery to freedom, from trauma to normality. They, too, would live as others lived. There would not always be black shades on their windows.

  Lizzie’s rich contralto led the sudden burst of song:

  “Go down Moses, way down to Egypt land. Tell old Pharaoh to let my people go.”

  Kemala stood in the rear of the room and joined her voice softly to theirs. She was sorry that Matt had not been there to listen to Yehuda Arnon. They would have understood each other, she knew. They were both men who were not content to accept the decrees of history but would forge their own destinies and those of their people.