Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  “There are signs in the South,” Michael said, “that say ‘No Dogs or Negroes Allowed.’”

  “There were signs in Germany that said ‘No Jews or Dogs Allowed.’”

  “A curious parallel.”

  “Perhaps that is why so many Jews are involved in the civil rights movement—because they remember,” she said.

  “Most of the Jews I know in the movement don’t think much about their Jewishness,” he observed.

  “It’s not what they think, it’s what they feel.” Mindell’s voice was vague, as though she were sifting her own feelings. “Do you have many friends here, Michael?”

  “Well, it is my third summer in Mississippi, so I know a lot of people.” His third summer of sleeping in a back room in the Masons’ tiny house, of seeing Kemala at her whim, of teaching his strange assortment of students in the sweltering classroom, which he had slowly improved each year. He had added bulletin boards and bookshelves, sanded the floors, and painted the walls. This summer he would add a small room to serve as a library. Books were being solicited in the North. And things had slowly happened. Four of his students had passed the literacy test and would vote this fall. Elementary school students were opting for academic courses in high school. That spring James Meredith, whom Michael had met at a party, had been accepted as the first black student at the University of Mississippi, and he was scheduled to enroll in the fall. Of course, Governor Ross Barnett had vowed to keep him out, but there was little doubt that he would be registered. Robert Kennedy had said as much, and this wasn’t even an election year.

  Michael no longer berated himself for the schizophrenic quality of his life—summers teaching the students of the Delta, whose lives were bounded by poverty and desperation, and the rest of the year teaching at Hutchinson College, where his students were born to privilege and wealth. The Hutchinson coeds’ gleaming teeth had been straightened by expensive orthodontists, their skin tended by armies of dermatologists, their gentle minds cultivated in wide-windowed rooms by soft-voiced teachers, comforting mentors who encouraged them to read Dickinson and Hesse. They were kind girls. The Hutchinson Student Council had underwritten the library he was building at the Troy schoolhouse. The family of a Hutchinson girl would underwrite a scholarship for a Delta child at a progressive northern preparatory school. In certain ways Michael’s separate experiences merged.

  In Mississippi he slept in the rear of the Masons’ house and avoided the cars of the White Citizens Council members, who routinely cruised the roads. In New York he lived in the Eldridge Street apartment with Jeremy and Les. He went to parties with them and danced with beautiful young women with long, clean hair who did research for American Heritage, answered letters for Newsweek, worked as teachers and social workers. Occasionally he went to bed with a girl whose name he could not remember the next week. In Mississippi he waited stoically for Kemala to appear in the doorway, for a scavenged hour, a stolen afternoon or evening. . He had inured himself to his family’s unarticulated disapproval of his life.

  “Mama’s not happy about your going back to Mississippi,” Aaron had told him just before he left for the South. Across the room Lydia worked a jigsaw puzzle with Paulette and looked at Aaron warningly. Small David toddled about the room pulling a wooden toy crafted by one of Michael’s Hutchinson students.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he had replied. “Was she happy when you crossed the border and went to Canada to enlist? When Rebecca went to Israel? When you went to Hungary? Did her unhappiness stop either of you?” His voice was bitter, accusatory. Was the cause he had found less worthy than those that had claimed his sister and brother? Was his work less important?

  “That was different.” Aaron’s voice was tense, controlled.

  “Was it? How?” Michael was skillful with the Socratic technique of the classroom—a question answered with a question, improbable parallels suggested, surprising balances revealed.

  “Never mind.” Wearily, Aaron accepted defeat. He had no appetite for intricate argument, for harsh dissent. He had, at last, found peace and happiness, and he would not endanger it. Always, when he entered his home, he was newly surprised by the sounds of his children’s laughter, by Lydia’s soft voice. The fragrance of his garden in the spring, of meat cooking on his barbecue, moved him to tears.

  He wanted his brother and sister to share his contentment, his ease. But Rebecca’s letters were redolent with melancholy. She had lived for so long at the edge of danger. The death of Yehuda’s son, Noam, whom she had raised to young manhood, had stricken her with a fear so oppressive that she thought it might crush her. “We miss Noam terribly,” she wrote to her family in America, and Aaron, who had always understood his younger sister so well, knew that Noam’s death haunted her as past and portent. She and Yehuda had two young sons of their own, Yaakov and Amnon. They, too, would be soldiers in Israel’s army. They, too, would court death. And Michael, whose life they had thought would be so calm, so safe, was caught up in the civil rights movement, vaulting closer to danger each year. There would soon be an end to songs and prayer vigils. Freedom riders were being beaten, but there would soon be deaths. Aaron wondered still if Michael would be as drawn to the South if Kemala were not there, but he did not raise the question. The uneasy peace between the brothers was built on a bridge of silence, and he would not jeopardize its fragile suspension.

  “Be careful, Mikey,” he had said, although it had been years since he had used the affectionate nickname. And when Mindell left to join him, Lydia prepared a food package for her to take south.

  “Michael has a weakness for my stuffed cabbage,” Lydia had said, and Mindell had not objected, although the food parcel was heavier than her knapsack.

  “Lydia sent you a feast,” she told Michael now, pointing to the box that he had placed between them in the car.

  “Good,” he said, smiling. “We’ll have a party tonight. Lydia’s cabbages and my mother’s gefilte fish will make for a change in the diet down here. I’ll call Neshoba and some of the kids’ll come along. You’ll like them, Mindell.”

  “I’m sure I will,” she said.

  He smiled. He thought her accent charming, and he was oddly proud of her beauty.

  *

  MICHAEL’S FRIENDS from Neshoba and from other neighboring towns gathered in the Troy schoolhouse that night, and Michael introduced Mindell to them. She smiled shyly at beautiful Kemala and shook hands with Matt Williams, who stared hard at her. She blushed beneath his arrogant, open appraisal and turned her eyes away.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You seem uncomfortable.”

  “In my country men do not stare at women like that,” she replied.

  “In your country. Ah yes, in the land of the Jews,” he said. His melodic West Indian accent was not without a discernible hardness. “I am told that in your country women do army service.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And did you do army service?”

  “Before my medical studies.” She did not like to discuss her army service. She had disliked the regimentation, the discipline, and she had never been able to overcome her aversion to uniforms. She had spent her childhood hiding from uniformed men and women. Even in Israel the presence of uniformed soldiers made her uncomfortable, and she had to remind herself that Jewish stars, not swastikas, adorned the epaulets of the military garb worn by the soldiers she saw on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Uniforms meant war, and war meant death. Even her own uniform repelled her. The other girls in her unit adjusted their maroon berets to a jaunty angle, smoothed their collars, but Mindell never looked in the mirror. Once she had caught sight of her own reflection in a shop window on Dizingoff Street, and the image of her uniformed self caused her palms to sweat, her throat to go dry.

  “Did you learn self-defense?” Matt Williams persisted.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you shoot a rifle?”

  “And a handgun,” she said harshly. She turned her back on him an
d joined a group of volunteers who were discussing the summer program.

  “We have to reach as many people as we can,” a girl wearing a Radcliffe sweatshirt said. “This is the last year of groundwork before we begin our real campaign. I wish we could do some basic medical training. Nutrition. First aid. That sort of thing. We’ll need it when a full-scale freedom school program gets under way.”

  “King and Rustin are talking about a march on Washington next year. They think they can get almost a hundred thousand people to demonstrate,” said a tall blond youth who wore his long hair in a ponytail.

  “It will never happen.” Kemala walked to the window and lifted the black shade that they had carefully pulled down. A car cruised the lonely road, slowing perceptibly as it passed the Troy school-house. “We can’t even have a party in a black township with just a couple of blacks and whites without pulling down the shades and shivering whenever a car goes by. Do you think in a year’s time we’re going to be ready and able to march on Washington?”

  “I think so,” the Radcliffe girl said quietly.

  She picked up a guitar and began to sing in a piercingly sweet voice. Other voices joined her and, in soft chorus, they finished the gentle, weary song and looked at one another, smiling sadly. The song exposed their hope and their uncertainty, and they had traveled so far to sing it together in this tiny schoolhouse. They had journeyed from Massachusetts and California, from Maine and Texas. They had confronted their parents’ fears and disappointments, the cynical derisiveness of their peers. They had been frightened and ashamed of their fear. The Radcliffe girl slept always in a fetal position, training herself for the day of passive resistance when she would curl up to protect herself from police truncheons. The tall blond boy, a premed student at Swarthmore, had spent three days in a Delta prison because the registration of his car had somehow been questionable. He had spoken to no one for a week after his release, and a strange glaze had settled over his blue eyes. Yet he had stayed in Mississippi and had pledged to return again.

  “A great song,” Michael said when the room was quiet again.

  “Well, you know what the Republicans said about the Spanish Civil War?” Matt Williams’s sardonic voice shattered the mood. “They used to say, ‘How come the Fascists won the war when we had the best songs?’” He laughed, and the hollow sound of his bitter mirth echoed against their embarrassed silence.

  “Come on, Kemala,” he said, and Mindell was surprised at how docilely Kemala put down her glass, pushed away her half-finished plate of food, and followed him out, pausing only for a moment to whisper something to Michael.

  “They have to drive to Fayette,” Michael said, as though an explanation were necessary, but Mindell did not reply. She had seen the hurt in Michael’s eyes as Kemala hurried after Matt.

  That night, she told Michael that she had decided to give up her cross-country trip and stay in Mississippi for the summer.

  “But why?” he asked, although he felt a rush of pleasure.

  “I’m not sure myself. Let me try to explain, though. In the camp, at night, the women used to whisper. ‘Why can’t they help? Why don’t they do something?’ Sometimes the whispers were moans. They. They. They. I used to wonder who they were. I knew only the prisoners and the guards. Later I realized, of course, that they were all those not in the camps—those who had freedom, the power to help, to protest. Tonight when I listened to your friends, I realized that now I am part of that mysterious they. It’s a trick of history. Now I have freedom and I have some power. My medical training. I can do something. I can help set up the clinic, the nutrition program. I’ll call Jeremy. He can get me supplies—he might even come down and help me organize. I think it will be a better way to see and understand America than riding a Greyhound bus from one national park to another.” She smiled. There was no doubt in her decision, only a tinge of wonder that she had arrived at it with such clarity.

  “What will Rebecca say?” Michael asked. His sister had wanted Mindell’s stay in America to be careless and carefree, a respite from the danger and stress that had haunted her life.

  “Rebecca’s not my mother,” she replied shortly. “Hitler gave me my independence. I don’t need anyone’s permission or approval.”

  He walked her to the village store then and watched from the counter as she called Jeremy in New York. Her voice was soft and her cheeks were very pink. She laughed twice and held the phone very close to her face, as he did when he spoke to Kemala.

  “I’ll be careful,” he heard her say.

  “Me too,” he heard her whisper.

  He turned away.

  “Jeremy’s a wonderful person,” he said as they walked back to the Masons’ house through the honeysuckle-scented darkness.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I came to know him well when he visited Israel. He’s so warm, so giving.”

  Michael wondered, as he held her arm so that she would not trip over the exposed root of a yucca plant, why her swift acquiescence to his own observation annoyed him.

  *

  THE POST arrived at Sha’arei ha-Negev after lunch, but it was not sorted until the late afternoon. Rebecca collected the Arnon family’s mail after she had finished working at her studio. She read Mindell’s letter as early-evening shadows slatted the sand crater. A hawk lazily circled the twin Christ’s-thorn trees, and she shivered and reread the letter, struggling against an inexplicable sense of apprehension.

  She passed the letter to Yehuda, who smiled at her. She was working on a skyscape, and her black hair was speckled with the same azulene blue that streaked her smock. A small carmine smudge on her cheek gave her the look of a small girl. His Becca. His long-legged, paint-spattered wife.

  “Do you think Mindell is doing the right thing?” Rebecca asked worriedly. She had missed the softness in Yehuda’s eyes, the stretch of his hand toward her. “It’s dangerous in Mississippi.” She read between the lines of Michael’s letters, and she was victim to the transplanted American’s addiction to the international edition of Time.

  “Rivka—we can’t hide from danger,” Yehuda said tiredly. “You step off a curb on a London street, a motorcycle comes too fast, and you’re in danger. You swim in the ocean and there is a sudden wave, an undertow.” He shrugged, held his hands open in stoic acceptance. Slowly, he had reconciled himself to Noam’s death. Noam had died wearing a uniform, but uncertainty and hazard hovered everywhere. There was no sanctuary from the dark forces of chance, the teasing vagaries of fortune. Soldiers returned from wars unscathed; a child chased after a ball on a quiet street and was crushed to death by a speeding car.

  “But Mindell is so vulnerable, so trusting,” Rebecca said. “Still, it is her life. And she is so excited, so enthusiastic.” I feel my work in Mississippi can make a difference, Mindell had written. Rebecca had written a similar letter to her mother when she had decided to stay on in Israel and help with the illegal immigration, so many years ago. Leah had not protested then. Rebecca would not protest now.

  “I’ll tell you what, Rivka,” Yehuda said. “I will be in the States this summer. There is a conference in Washington on terrorism. I’ll go down to Mississippi again to see our Mindell. Does that make you feel better?”

  She nodded and turned away so that he would not see the hurt in her eyes. He had not mentioned this trip to America before, nor had he asked her to join him. He bent to kiss the carmine smudge on her cheek, but she averted her head.

  She wrote cheerful letters to Michael and Mindell that night, enclosing sketches of the kibbutz—the children on the swings in their desert playground, the shadowed peace of the avocado grove at dusk.

  *

  Matt was standing at the window when Kemala entered, a glass of ice water in his hand. They kept a supply of beer in the battered refrigerator, but Matt Williams drank only water, filling glass after glass from the discolored plastic jug that squatted amid the disorder of his desk.

  “Beer’s a luxury,” he’d said wryly once. “When I
don’t have to be in control of my thoughts twenty-four hours a day, I’ll indulge.”

  “What’s happening?” Kemala asked now. She was sensitive to the atmosphere in the office and knew that something had happened during her absence.

  She had been in Troy all afternoon, helping Mindell in the clinic while Michael tutored Rodney Mason for the Stevens School scholarship examination. She spent more and more time with Mindell during her visits to Troy. A natural rapport existed between Kemala and the young Israeli woman. They were both orphaned survivors of hatred. They recognized the dangers that confronted them and their own vulnerability, yet they did not retreat to safety. Shortly after Mindell’s arrival they had walked down Neshoba’s Main Street together, aware of the leering stares of the young men who lingered on the corner during the lazy, hot afternoons. Contempt and desire mingled in damp eyes; harsh laughter and graphic gesture trailed them. They did not break their pace, nor did they look back.

  “Are you frightened?” Mindell had asked Kemala.

  “Of course.”

  They had laughed in acknowledgment of both their fear and their power. They held their heads erect, but their hands trembled.

  Often, during recent weeks, they had talked about their childhoods with intense intimacy. They had traded sweet memories, secret dreams. Mindell told Kemala how she had once imagined herself in love with a Swedish volunteer who had spent a winter on the kibbutz. Kemala confided that she had once written long letters that she never sent to a distinguished Berkeley professor. She had even hidden behind a tree near his home and had caught a glimpse of his wife, who was surprisingly unattractive.