Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  “She wore space shoes,” Kemala told Mindell, and they laughed with the pride of young women who encase their narrow feet in slender strapped sandals.

  But they never spoke of Michael Goldfeder, not even that afternoon as his gentle voice hummed patiently through the wall that separated the clinic and the schoolroom.

  “Did you see Michael?” Matt asked her now. Matt had no trepidation about discussing Michael. Increasingly that summer, he had prodded Kemala to talk about him and about the Goldfeder family. He teased her with a controlled bitterness about her visits to Troy. Seldom now did he offer to drive her.

  “Only briefly. I helped Mindell in the clinic. But I asked you what was going on here.”

  She had sensed a grimness as soon as she entered the office. The two organizers in the rear of the room were speaking in soft, desperate tones, and Danny Green, the Harvard law student who served as their legal adviser, was on the phone.

  “You must show cause,” Danny was saying. “This is still the United States of America. You cannot make an arbitrary arrest.” He listened and then said again, “The law is clear. You must show cause.” His voice was weary, and he wiped his forehead with a red calico handkerchief. Kemala wondered why all the legal volunteers were addicted to those handkerchiefs. Perhaps it made them feel more authentic, more indigenous to the scene on which they had descended. Still, it was a harmless enough affectation, and Danny Green worked very hard and weathered Matt’s sarcasm with relative ease.

  “They pulled over a car on the Fayette road. Arrested three of our kids and smacked them around pretty badly,” Matt said. “Three nice black Tougaloo boys. One of them was beaten senseless.”

  Kemala sat down and braced herself against a wave of nausea. The summer’s casualties were mounting. Two freedom riders had been pulled off a bus the previous week and pistol-whipped. A small boy had been beaten by a gang of white teenagers for distributing voter-registration materials. He was still in a coma in the Bolivar County Hospital. She touched Matt’s hand. His face was a mask of grief.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “We’re all sorry. We’ve got to stop being sorry and start doing something.” His fists clenched and unclenched, and she thought that this was how he must have looked when he learned about the fire that took his parents’ lives.

  One by one the others left the office, speaking softly, as though they were withdrawing from a house of mourning.

  “I don’t know what we can do unless Kennedy sends some federal marshals down. It would help if those arrests and beatings got some coverage. Nothing seems to happen in this country unless there’s a media blitz,” Danny Green said as he left. He was only a law student, but already he had lost faith in the law.

  “Well, we’re going to do something,” Matt said. “Goddamn it, I recruited two of those kids myself.”

  “What are you going to do, Matt?” Kemala asked when they were alone.

  “We’re going to make sure that the next time an arrest is made, the kids who are arrested are white. And important enough so that the news of their arrests gets out of this state and hits a couple of wire services and national networks.”

  She shivered suddenly, although the evening was warm. She reached for her light blue cashmere cardigan and draped it over her shoulders. Her fingers caressed the soft wool, played with the tiny pearl buttons.

  “There are assignments that your friend Michael Goldfeder could undertake for us,” Matt continued. “This is his third summer in Mississippi. It’s time he got out of the schoolroom and onto the highway. Didn’t you tell me that he wanted to be a hero like his lawyer brother? We’ll do him a favor, Kemala. We’ll give him his chance.”

  “I can’t let you do that.” Her voice was a whisper.

  “Listen to me, Kemala.” He whirled her about so that she faced him. The light blue sweater, Michael’s gift, fell to the floor. Matt’s fingers cut into her shoulders, and she saw the lines of pain etched across his face, the shadow of sorrow in his eyes. “We cannot go on playing games. You are not a little girl, balancing on a seesaw, deciding to go up one minute and down another. You have to make a decision, demonstrate a commitment. Where do you belong? Are you with me, or are you going to continue playing house with Dr. Michael Goldfeder, who lends us two months of his life each summer?”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, but she heard the uncertainty in her protest. As always she swayed beneath the relentless fury of Matt’s argument. As always she perceived the pain that engendered his desperate anger.

  “Do you understand yourself?” he retorted and slammed out of the office.

  She watched from the window as he strode down the street. She saw how thin he had become. In recent weeks he had developed a slight facial tic. Often, in the night, he cried out in subdued anguish. The others saw his strength, felt his power, but Kemala felt his sorrow and understood the source of his zealous intensity. His moods became Kemala’s own. His needs hypnotized her.

  She bent and picked the sweater up, brushed away the specks of dirt that clung to it. Michael had chosen it carefully. He cared for her, protected her, but her struggle in the end was not his struggle. Leah, his mother, had said as much that distant Thanksgiving day. “My people…your people…” Leah Goldfeder had seen the separations between them, the borders they could neither erase nor cross.

  And Michael did not need her as Matt did. Michael had his career, his family. Matt had only his cause and Kemala herself. He was right. The time of choice had come. She stood at the crossroads she had so often dreamed about and she knew, with absolute certainty, which path she would choose.

  *

  “MINDELL.” Michael’s voice was very soft. He did not want to wake the two Mason girls who slept beside her in the tiny room. She did not stir, and he touched her shoulder. She blinked resistantly into the predawn darkness and smiled, caught still in a lingering dream. He shook her lightly, and she awakened at last and stared up at him. He waited until the recognition and understanding of wakefulness overtook her, lifted his finger to his lips, and tiptoed out of the room.

  Of course. She remembered now that they had agreed with Matt Williams that it would be safer and cooler to start out before daylight. Swiftly, silently, she dressed and washed. Jeans and a T-shirt. An extra pair of underpants, her toothbrush, and a small tube of toothpaste (“The prison size, we call it,” Kemala had said, giving it to her) in her bag just in case of arrest. There was no real danger, of course. She and Michael were simply driving from Troy to Meridian to pick up a shipment of books for the new district Freedom Library. Still, Mindell’s weeks in Mississippi had taught her that there were no simple excursions. Only last week two Brandeis students had been arrested for driving two miles over the speed limit in Madison. They had been held for seventy-two hours and released after the movement office had paid a hundred-dollar fine. The girl had left the state the next day, her face bloated with grief. Some said that she had been raped by a guard. Others said she had merely been threatened, terrorized. Mindell wanted to tell them that a very thin line separated terror from realization and that in some cases the terror was worse. Let them kill me. I’m so tired of being afraid, a woman had screamed into the darkness of the barracks.

  The Brandeis boy had developed a facial tic. He could not walk down the road without twisting his head in an involuntary spastic gesture.

  “Nerves,” Mindell had said brusquely when he came to the clinic to see her. She had given him a sedative, advised him to sleep more.

  “I’m afraid to sleep,” he said fiercely. In the night specters of his own fear visited him, controlled him. Huge roaches had crept across his body in the Madison jail. He had been placed in a cell with a half-crazed felon who had threatened him. “I’ll get you, you nigger lover. I’ll cut your balls off, you bastard. Go home before we send you home in a crate.” The man had spat at him, urinated on him, and now the smell of sour breath and rancid wastes permeated his dreams.

  Remember
ing him now, Mindell put a small box of raisins in her bag and added a chocolate bar. A survival hint from Rebecca, who had also moved covertly through the darkness in Palestine during illegal immigration operations. It occurred to her that a childhood spent in Auschwitz and Mandate Palestine was not bad training for Mississippi in the sixties. She took up her medical bag and tiptoed out of the room, closing the door softly against the throaty whisper of fourteen-year-old Dora Lee Mason, who often talked and sang in her sleep.

  Michael checked the car carefully before they started out. Water. Gas tank full. Spare tire and repair kit neatly in place. He moved methodically, talking to himself as he checked off each chore. Rebecca had the same habit, Mindell remembered. Leah’s children were so different from each other, yet in so many ways, in so many small habits, they were eerily alike.

  Michael checked the jerry can in which he carried extra gasoline. They could not risk running out of fuel on a lonely Delta road where a New York license plate meant an enemy vehicle. Mindell understood now why Michael obscured his plates with mud.

  “Do you need that?” he asked, pointing to her medical bag.

  “Jeremy said never to travel without it,” she replied.

  He did not answer, and she wondered vaguely why he never asked her about Jeremy, who was, after all, his closest friend, his roommate. It was curious, she thought, that Jeremy, who had been raised in a household so bereft of Jewishness, should have become so involved in Judaism. But perhaps people searched for that which had been denied them—perhaps that was what had brought Michael to Mississippi. His own instinctive fairness and humanity coupled with a desire to break free of the net of security that had entrapped him from birth. That and Kemala.

  “Look!” she cried, pointing skyward. “The morning star.”

  A phosphoreal taper of light ignited the darkness; moody Venus flirted with sleepbound Earth.

  A fortunate omen, she decided, and sat back and tried to relax as Michael drove down the road, slowly because he did not want to be stopped for speeding, but not too slowly because civil rights workers had been arrested for driving below a requisite speed. They were diligent students of a lexicon of fear and caution. Keep your eyes on the speedometer. Don’t stop for gas. If you must stop, speak as little as possible. Accents were revealing. Never pick up hitchhikers, black or white. Too often, hitchhikers were planted by the sheriff and made accusations of molestation, a charge that was almost impossible to disprove.

  They drove westward and watched the darkness lift languorously; layer by layer it drifted from an ever-lightening mist into a dazzling lucency. The meadowlands were blanketed with white and yellow dwarf dandelions, black-eyed susans, and purple wood violets. Droplets of dew hovered tenuously on the fragile flowers, and hooded warblers sang teasingly to one another from clusters of mountain laurel. Their days in Mississippi were so consumed by work and meetings, so preoccupied with feelings of fear and desperation, courage and hope, that there was no time to notice the beauty of the countryside. Mindell remembered suddenly the day of her liberation from the camp. As she was carried out of the barracks, she had stared at a rosebush that grew just outside the stark and terrible building. The guards had passed the flowers as they entered and left the building, but the beauty and fragrance of the blossoms had not softened them. Once a brave prisoner had covertly plucked a flower, and it had been given to the children hidden in the tunnel. They had passed it from hand to hand, and small Shlomo, who had been with her when she entered Palestine, had wept when it wilted and faded. Shlomo now lived in a moshav, a small collective, on the Lebanese border, and many rosebushes grew in his garden. His flowers won prizes in the Israel Horticultural Competition, but none of them, he complained to Mindell, were as beautiful as the flower of freedom they had caressed in the darkness of their hiding place. The roses of Auschwitz had been pink, she remembered, with golden tendrils at their hearts; red and white roses of a rare fullness and fragrance grew in the meadow where Michael eventually stopped for breakfast.

  “I’ve never seen roses like these before,” she said.

  “Cherokee roses.” He handed her a hard-boiled egg and a slice of the corn bread that Mrs. Mason baked late each night. Kemala had taught him the names of the blossoms. The women of her father’s family had crushed the petals, dried them, and used them for sachet bags.

  “They’re beautiful,” Mindell said. She had the desert dweller’s reverence for flowers.

  He plucked one from a laden bush and handed it to her. The bramble tore his skin. She threaded it through her hair, and he saw that its redness blended with the blush that rose slowly from her neck and crested at her cheeks.

  “You’re bleeding,” she said, looking at his finger.

  “It’s nothing.”

  But she took his hand in her own, studied the small cut, and reached for her medical bag. Gently, she dabbed at it with peroxide and affixed a small Band-Aid to it. Her fingers were deft and flew across his skin lightly, easily. The tiniest ribbon of blood escaped the Band-Aid, and she licked it away.

  “Your blood tastes terrible,” she said.

  “Your tongue feels good,” he replied, and at once they both averted their eyes, as though they had strayed past an invisible boundary.

  “Are you glad you stayed in Mississippi, Mindell?” he asked.

  The question broke the silence that had grown between them.

  She leaned back and considered.

  “Not glad. Not sorry. I know only that I could not have left. You know, when I was a small girl, I used to make a list of all the people who had died. My parents. My sister and brother. Cousins. Friends. My list went on forever. Then I would think: if they all died and I was saved, perhaps there was a reason for it. Maybe I was spared for some purpose. And then it developed that I had a gift for healing. I was ten, and Danielle and I shared a kid—a small black-and-white speckled goat. It broke its leg, and the veterinarian was in Beersheba. I set it myself and it mended, and everyone was surprised because the animal walked almost without a limp. I thought then: ah, I was saved to help the goat. Once in medical school I drew the night shift. A little girl went into cardiac arrest, a Bedouin child with a congenital defect. I was on the pediatric ward and there wasn’t a minute to spare. I slit the thoracic cavity, exposed the heart, and massaged it back into life. I thought again: ah, I was saved to help this child. Very egocentric, I know, but I was young and I had invested a lot of emotional energy into making up those lists. After my second year on the wards I stopped thinking like that. I wouldn’t let myself. That first day in Neshoba, at the bus station, I felt that I was being pushed back in time. I wasn’t in Mississippi, in the United States. I was in Auschwitz, in Poland. And that night at the party when Andrea, the girl from Radcliffe, spoke about the need for a clinic, the thought came back for the first time in years: I was saved to help with this clinic. Kemala told me that she’s in Mississippi, working with Matt, because of her father. I think I’m really here because of my parents. Because you can’t walk away from hatred, from any kind of hatred. If you do, you become an accessory to it. I don’t want to become part of the they who never saw the smoke from the chimneys or smelled the burning flesh or who skipped over the Reuters reports on the ‘actions’ against Jews. I don’t want to be part of the they who sat in waiting rooms and read signs that said ‘No Jews or Dogs Allowed.’ I had to stay. Perhaps I didn’t accomplish much, but I was here, I did something. My being saved mattered.”

  She thought back now to the work she had done during her brief weeks in Troy. She had opened the clinic and treated a stream of civil rights workers for diarrhea and depression. (“What drugs do you need?” Jeremy had asked in their initial conversation. “Pepto-Bismol and Valium,” she had told him. He had sent them in equal quantities, and she had dispensed them in equal quantities.) She had held workshops in nutrition and first aid for the black community.

  She had announced that she would conduct a well-baby clinic on consecutive Mondays.

&
nbsp; The first week, only one fifteen-year-old girl had wandered in, carrying an infant who cried incessantly.

  “I reckon he’s got the colic,” the girl, who was no more than a child herself, had said.

  Mindell had taken the child’s fever, studied his inflamed throat, and administered an antibiotic that Jeremy had luckily included. Two days later the baby was chortling happily, the fever broken, the throat normal. The next week ten women appeared at the well-baby clinic with their children, and the third week there was a line when she arrived.

  She had stitched up the split forehead of a Harvard senior who had been attacked as he walked home through the darkened streets after distributing voter-registration pamphlets. He had never seen his attackers, only heard their strident voices.

  “Go home, nigger lover.”

  “Hey, commie, tell Meredith this is what’s waiting for him the day he tries to register at Ole Miss.”

  She had sewn eleven stitches, working carefully, but the youth would always carry a scar to remind him of his nocturnal walk through Troy. What would happen to James Meredith, the first black student to be admitted to the University of Mississippi, when he tried to register that fall? she wondered.

  Throughout those weeks she had watched Michael Goldfeder. She had watched his eyes light up when Kemala Jackson came to Troy, and she had seen his eyes darken when Kemala left.

  “I’m so tired,” Kemala had said to Mindell one heat-bound afternoon and Mindell had understood that Kemala was complaining not of ordinary fatigue but of a deep inner exhaustion. She was like a swimmer battling the undertow of the past, the inexorable waves of the future, unable to float on the brief calm of the present. Matt and Michael each called to her, and she grew weary of trying to please and placate. Soon, Mindell knew, Kemala would make a choice. Soon, Michael would have to recognize what had for so long been apparent.

  Her heart turned for Michael, who was so caring, so good. She watched him teach his classes, watched him teach the serious-eyed boy from Sebastopol who wrote poetry but could not spell, watched him teach Dora Lee Mason how to do long division, his fingers guiding hers because she had never learned to hold a pencil properly.