Miss Simmons was abruptly ready for action. In my home I have a box of snapshots from those Concordia days, my share from the big box my mother kept, and among them is one of Miss Brookie standing in a half-turn at the top of her steps, looking into the sun and shielding her eyes with her hand, giving whoever is taking the picture a look that says “All right, you’ve got me; snap the fool thing and let me get on with what needs doing.” And what needed “doing” at this moment was to telephone her cousin Tom.
CHAPTER 7
XENOPHOBIA
A“misdriven nail” Miss Brookie had called Tom Dillon, and for good reason, my father was finding out. Here was a man to whom he could say nothing right.
It was immediately clear that Tom Dillon hated Yankees and hated Jews, so a YankeeJew, which he pronounced as one word, was no doubt as abominable a creature as he could imagine— not, I suppose, that he knew all that many. “I’m not sure our folks will want a store run by a YankeeJew,” he informed my father.
Tom Dillon was a large overweight man about fifteen years younger than his cousin Brookie. Extra poundage, a grandmother, and college degrees—hers from the University of Chicago, his from the University of Tennessee—were about all the cousins shared, except for one personality trait: Both were bent on prevailing. Still, what they hoped to prevail in were vastly different. If Miss Simmons struggled to bring enlightenment, Tom Dillon gave his all to maintaining the status quo. Miss Brookie, who was perhaps the only one in town who knew the word, called him a “xenophobe,” which in Tom Dillon’s case meant that he was suspicious of anybody who wasn’t Southern, white, and Protestant. As Concordia’s leading property owner and a longtime pillar of the church, he was one of the town’s biggest big shots, and though Miss Brookie prevailed occasionally, his score for prevailing was probably somewhere around a hundred percent.
Dillon had an especially heavy and moist face, and as he came out with his objections one-two-three, a handkerchief gripped in his hand swiped at it. If there was indeed a Southern tradition of civility, as my father had observed there was in Savannah, Tom Dillon did not subscribe to it. He again expressed the thought, without any discernible attempt to gussy it up, that there hadn’t been any Jews to speak of around Concordia and he wasn’t sure the town was going to want any.
My father held up his hands as if to physically block Dillon’s objections. Hoping to banter with the man, he said, “Why don’t I take that worry off your hands? Why not say it’s my worry?”
What did my father mean—his worry? Dillon wanted to know. He, Tom Dillon, was the one who stood to lose if the store failed. About the extras my father wanted, hellfire, they cost dollars, his dollars. Adding the upstairs my father had talked about, for instance, meant calling in “Poindexter and his bunch of idiots” to put a door in, and then after Poindexter put it in backward, he, Tom Dillon, that’s who, would have to fight with him over who was to pay to turn it around. And, anyway, an upstairs in a Jew store was just “by damn, showing off,” wasn’t it?
Dillon’s store was narrow and dark, with a single display window for natural light and a ceiling too high for electric lights to help out much. It had all the appeal of a cave. My father said to Dillon, as diplomatically as he could, that the store “ain’t too big, as I’m sure you know,” and outlined how he planned to put the men’s suits and men’s dressing rooms upstairs, away from the women’s department downstairs. He also had the hope, unexpressed, to have dressing rooms that were better than the ones at Edelstein’s, which were two humble cubbyholes separated from the store and each other by curtains, with pinned-on hand printed paper signs reading WHITE MEN on one and WHITE LADIES on the other.
My father’s hopes did not extend to dressing rooms for Negroes, as he had learned that in the South Negroes did not try on in stores; they tried on at home. Still, unlike in better stores, where returns from Negroes were not tolerated for any reason, in Jew stores the owner would at least meet a Negro customer at the back door and arrange there for a return or exchange.
My father said that at the words “ain’t too big,” Dillon took an annoyed swipe at his big, sweaty face, at the overloading beads of perspiration, and, as if sincerely seeking information, said to him, “Tell me something—why in hell did you YankeeJews come here anyway?”
A momzer, my father thought, a real, no-doubt-about-it bastard. And was he supposed to take the bastard’s question seriously? Ponder it and give an answer?
No, Dillon seemed neither to invite nor require a rejoinder. It was Brookie Simmons’s business, he was saying, if she wanted YankeeJews in her house, but the town had done fine without them and he expected it would continue doing fine. My father kept trying to interrupt, but Dillon just raised his voice and continued on. He was now letting my father in on the fact that YankeeJews spoil a town. “You know that, Bronson?” he said, as if he had been doing research on the subject.
My father wondered if the bastard expected him to agree, even give a few huzzahs, to shout “You said it!” and then do him a favor and leave town. Out loud he said, “You think so?”
Dillon answered soberly that he did and gave reasons why this was so. “A YankeeJew merchant comes and turns First Street into a cutthroat place and pretty soon everybody in town is miserable,” he explained. He fell silent and shook his head, as if his vision had left him completely depressed.
So where did that leave my father and the store? “About the store,” my father said.
“Oh, yeah,” Dillon said, coming out of his gloomy trance. “I’ll think it over and let you know.”
As I have understood it, my mother had come out on the porch at the very moment Miss Brookie had used the phrase “Jew store” on the telephone with Tom Dillon, before my father’s meeting with Dillon. Miss Brookie had used it as shorthand for the kind of business my father had in mind, had used it with Dillon because, as an owner of business properties, he would know the expression and it would tell him that this was not to be another Dalrymple-Eaton’s, which was a store for the well-to-do, of which one was enough, there not being all that many well-to-do in Concordia. But all my mother knew at that moment was that Miss Brookie had said the unsayable—had said “Jew store.” “How did I know?” my mother asked in later years. “How could I know she wasn’t always big with the ‘Jew’ this and ‘Jew’ that?”
In my mother’s mind the word Jew used all by itself, nakedly, as it were, was not a word but a curse. She believed it was used only by people who hated Jews. If it had its three letters—its “-ish”—on the end, ah, that made the difference. If I said that someone was a Jew, my mother would ask me, “So what is he? A no-goodnik? A gangster?” On that day, however, when she had heard “Jew store,” she had not protested. She could believe she was back with the girls at the table in the factory.
Before Miss Brookie had come back from the telephone, my mother had plunked down on the step next to my father, and he had said, hoping it was true, “Like a baby you slept, Reba.”
My mother could only think it would be terrible if a baby slept as she had. Oy, such dreams she had had—dreams of her long-dead grandmother running around with hair “wild like an animal’s” and screaming that everybody and everything had gone crazy.
On the porch with my father, she had wondered if Joey and Miriam had eaten. “Don’t tell me what,” she had said, and my father had replied that his lips were pasted shut. And who had made their breakfast? And when my father had answered “Lizzie Maud,” my mother had remembered that the lady had mentioned somebody with this name the day before.
“Miss Brookie”—my mother had heard my father call the lady this and knew that she must too—had come back from the phone and now sat down below them on the steps. After telling my father that Tom Dillon would meet with him, she had begun addressing my mother in a blue streak, her words, my mother said when she told this story, like “flies that wouldn’t light.” Miss Brookie had wanted my mother to go with this Lizzie Maud to some place called the U-Tote-’E
m—where she could buy her own “wherewithals” and then use the kitchen.
My father had thought my mother should go, but my mother had thought no, she didn’t want to go to the U-Tote-’Em. The only place she had wanted to go was back to bed.
In the end, while my father had gone to meet Tom Dillon, my mother had gone grocery shopping with Lizzie Maud.
My mother had had an unnerving morning at the U-Tote-’Em. First of all, Lizzie Maud had turned out to be a Negro. Oy. She had to shop with a Negro and she would have to cook next to her, too. Then, when she had looked at the meats in the grocery store icebox, just like one in a house except bigger, although she had known not to expect kosher, where was the lamb, the veal, the calves’ liver? Didn’t they know there was other meat in the world besides pork? This was not exactly a fair question, as there were certainly beef and chickens in the box, not to mention kid. But when my mother had asked the butcher—not really a butcher, just the man who ran the grocery store—for a brisket, he had looked at her as if she had brought into his store the word for the flesh from a newly evolved animal.The man had said, “Don’t have no call for that, Mizriz … Mizriz … Bronson, ain’t it?” “Mizriz,” as my mother would find out, was for many Concordians the pronunciation of choice for “Mrs.” but now sounded to her only like misery.
If my mother was unnerved by it all, Lizzie Maud was unnerved by none of it. Shopping at the U-Tote-’Em was something she did most every day, and, ever since Miss Brookie had begun to welcome guests in her house, she had shopped with them and indeed had taken over their entire orientation. She fussed with her mistress about the extra trouble guests imposed on her, but by now it was only a habit, and in truth she had long since lost the capacity to be surprised, disturbed, or vexed by her mistress.
Her attitude toward guests was a reflection of Miss Brookie’s. If Miss Brookie found the invited ones in some way disappointing—too uncommunicative, too unhygienic, too pious—and showed them the door, Lizzie Maud packed them a lunch and waved a cool goodbye.
Now thirty-one, Lizzie Maud had been with the Simmons family from the age of fourteen as “cook”—in the South a catchall title understood to mean the Negro woman who did everything. Since Miss Brookie was a total incompetent when it came to running the house—couldn’t boil water without a recipe, as we might put it in Concordia—after the elder Simmonses had died, Lizzie Maud had also assumed the role of parent, though she had a family of her own, a husband, Seth, who worked for the railroad, and five children.
For Lizzie Maud there was much to be gained from working in so intimate a way with such a powerful town presence as Miss Brookie, and her personality—bossy, opinionated, unconquerable—was clearly an adaptation of her mistress’s. For a black person of those times, with power so hard to come by, parenting a white woman like Miss Brookie and telling white visitors how and what to do was about as good as you could get.
So it was on the same day that my father came back from his unsatisfactory meeting with Tom Dillon that my mother came back from her unnerving shopping. When my father arrived home, my mother was already sitting on the back porch in an old rocker with a broken rush seat and staring absently into the backyard.
In the backyard was an abandoned outhouse (the “privy,” T called it), the gray of raw wood showing through the old white paint, the sagging door ajar, the windows broken. Farther back was a small stable, which now sheltered both Willy and Miss Brookie’s horse, Harold (for Harold Lloyd), plus the buggy from which Harold had been unhitched. There was no room in the stable for our wagon, which stood outside, open to the elements.
When my father came out on the porch with the story of his meeting with Tom Dillon, my mother immediately thought of Dillon not only as a momzer, as my father had, but also as a kulak, the Russian farmer-peasant, the man Jewish villagers most loved to hate. “A momzer Dillon was, naturally,” my mother always said, “but, I ask you, wasn’t he also the same like a kulak?”
It was a sentiment no one could argue with, though it was true that in certain ways kulaks had the edge. They were not just anti-Jewish, they were actively so: They worked Jews from sunup to sundown, rented them hovels to live in, and, during pogroms, when the Cossacks came swooping into town on horseback to plague Jews and maybe to kill them, they made a great show of hiding the Jews and then betraying them. Still, in basic attitudes toward Jews, kulaks and Tom Dillon were blood brothers.
Out there on the back porch, as my mother sat and rocked, these were the things she turned over and over.
CHAPTER 8
MY FATHER’S FANCY FOOTWORK
No call had come through from Dillon, and my father was getting fidgety. He had thought the wait would be but a day or two, but then it was a week, and then it was a second one. All that time he could only sit on the back porch and reread the local weekly, the Sentinel, until it softened in his hands.
My mother was more anxious than my father. “Oy, what a stubborn man,” she said to him after one long day of waiting. “He ain’t no different than Szymanski.”
My father floundered. Who was this guy Szymanski? And how did he come into it?
He came into it because he was my mother’s first boss, the one who had fired her when he caught her eating matzos.
Joey, if he didn’t share my parents’ anxiety, has remembered sharing my mother’s hostility to Dillon. Dillon, he had concluded back then, was meaner than the man in the black hat and black beard who was forever trying to outwit Tom Mix. “That Mr. Dillon’s so mean,” he said to my father, “he ought to live in a hollow log and drink muddy water.”
To which my father said, “Oy, that poor man Dillon’s got the curse of the Bronsons on him. I sure wouldn’t take no chances if I was him.”
Finally my father had read the newspaper until his eyes glazed over. How could he stand one more reading of the story of the Baileys’ new baby and Louise Caldwell’s wedding shower? Was Mrs. Sterling Yancey’s tea for her church circle, at which the Mmes. Josiah Jones and Billy Upton staffed the table and poured (“at both ends,” the paper reported), so riveting that he should read about it again and again? All right, he was somewhat interested that the north road out of town had been reoiled, but he had taken in, digested, and expelled every word about it several times. Enough was enough. He repeated to himself one of his favorite sayings—that roast chickens don’t fly into your mouth— then put down the paper, rose from the chair, went into the house to get his hat and coat, and headed for First Street.
First Street was, as my father now knew, the three-block, cobblestoned street where all the stores were. Some of the stores sold things, and some provided services. The important ones were on the second block, most notably—at least from my father’s point of view—the palatial Dalrymple-Eaton’s Department Store. Also on this block were the First National Bank and the furniture store. The first block had, besides Tom Dillon’s store, other establishments, like the barber shop, where I got my hair cut, and the Cinderella Beauty Parlor, where Miriam had her hair variously marcelled, bobbed, or shingled, depending on the fashion of the moment. The third block wound down to the picture show and the train depot. Beyond the railroad crossing was the blacksmith shop and New Bethel Baptist Church, but you couldn’t see them very well from First Street.
First Street divided white Concordia on the west from black Concordia on the east, which was called, as in Savannah, “Niggertown.” As far as I knew, that was its name. All the town’s Negroes lived there, in the shacks, and there was a bootlegger’s hut at the edge of it. The streets were dark brown dirt because, unlike the west side of town, where the dirt streets were occasionally treated to a scattering of gravel, which lightened them, Niggertown streets were never treated to anything. Niggertown did, however, have one thing the west side didn’t have, and that was a “sugar ditch,” where raw sewage ran.
On First Street my father walked past the bank and the drugstore and traversed the cobblestones. Between Suggs’s Feed and Lovett’s Hardware, he
came upon a little window fronting an insurance and real estate office. He went in.
In the office he talked to Herman Tucker.
The man was built to the pattern of Tom Dillon—large, beefy, with rolls of midtorso flesh. If Dillon was combative, Tucker was all amiability. When he smiled, which was all the time, his dentures protruded so far my father figured that if the man coughed, his teeth would fly out and make a landing on him. The man was a fake, my father decided at once, all fake.
In the small, dark office, Tucker sat behind a desk. He occasionally let his smile go into eclipse while he swigged at a Coca-Cola bottle. In between being swigged at, the bottle sat on the dust and grit of the desktop. Tucker didn’t seem surprised to see my father, and my father guessed that Tucker and Tom Dillon had had a little conversation about his arrival in town.
Tucker said he had a couple of “real nice places,” and though my father said a wry “uh-huh” under his breath, aloud he said he was all ears. He spotted a wooden folding chair against a wall, pulled it open, sat down across the desk, and told Tucker, “You got my attention complete.”
It was no surprise to my father that Tucker’s first suggestion was an abandoned blacksmith shop, which Tucker described as needing only a floor to turn into a palace.
Sure, my father thought, put a floor in a blacksmith shop and it turns into a palace; and put wheels on me and I turn into a wagon. “A blacksmith shop?” he said aloud.
Tucker trained his dentures on my father and offered that “you people”—meaning Jews—were so “enterprising,” they could “pure” work miracles.
In his throat my father gave another “uh-huh.”
The other place used to be a “nigger” church that had been foreclosed on but already had an upstairs and only needed to have the benches taken out to make my father “mighty proud.” Tucker said to him, “As I say, you Jews are so …”
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