Jew Store

by Suberman ,Stella

  My father’s banter was unflagging: “You the one with that nice-looking farm out on the south road?” he might say. “With that fine stand of cotton? And the cows everybody says give such good milk? Well, you’ll want some shirts I got in mind. You don’t want those cows to be handsomer than you. Right over here, sir.” The customers, perhaps reserved at first, ended up laughing, joking back, buying.

  Miss Brookie was taking it all in, but my father knew she was thinking that yes, it was nice to see all the farmers, but if the Klan turned thumbs down, they wouldn’t be seeing them for long. As for the factory workers, they wouldn’t even appear until the Klan said it was okay.

  So as he turned from one customer to the other, my father would say he had one eye fixed on First Street, and once or twice he thought he saw sheeted figures on the cobblestones.

  The day wore on, the farmer families came in fewer numbers. Tom Dillon came in, Miss Brookie gave him a word, and he gave a word back. After a sweeping look, he walked out again.

  Did Miss Brookie have any ideas on Dillon? “I notice he didn’t drop any money on us,” my father told her.

  Miss Brookie thought Dillon was probably just looking to see who was there. And hoping to find the store empty. And it was a kind of shame that it wasn’t because if nobody was there, he might decide it wasn’t worth the trouble.

  Trouble? My father felt a renewed paleness.

  The trouble it took to start up the Klan, Miss Brookie said.

  This was new information: Tom Dillon was a Kluxer? “Him?”

  “Sure, him. He’s a leading light. When he gives the word, sheets start flapping.” Apparently there wasn’t a “white soul in town” who didn’t “run with” the Klan—farmers, factory workers, the lot. Miss Brookie had the ultimate example: the Baptist minister who had been the Klan chaplain. There was a story that went with this—the man had eloped with the choir soloist, leaving behind a wife and four children. It was a story that, had it come from Carrie MacAllister, Miss Brookie would have called gossip, but since it came from her, she called an illustration of the town’s sociology.

  Six o’clock neared. If anything was going to happen, it would happen pretty soon. My father thought Joey and Miriam would be better off in the picture show, but what if they got busy (was it possible they would get busy?) and needed them?

  They waited, Miss Brookie in the shoe department holding Billy Sunday in her lap; Mrs. MacAllister having an exchange with a customer; Vedra Broome upstairs eating; my mother sitting rigidly on her register stool; and my father, whenever free, positioning himself at the front door.

  He was there when the door pushed open and a stranger in a blue shirt and dark pants came in, trailed immediately by a wife and several children.

  Miss Brookie, Billy Sunday held in front of her like an offering, darted forward. From her lips came an impassioned cry. “Wister! Wister Rankin! Why bless your heart!”

  Wister Rankin, though clearly puzzled by this ardent welcome, got out a big-toothed grin that opened up most of his face.

  Mrs. Rankin grinned also. The children glued their eyes to Miss Brookie, plainly hoping she would do something else outrageous.

  Miss Brookie’s greeting was endless. “It’s just so good to see you!” She grabbed Miriam’s box. “Here, take some pretties.”

  “Already got some,” Mrs. Rankin said.

  “Then take some more.”

  Wister offered that they had been looking forward to the opening like to Christmas. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, “And I’ll probably spend my last dime here, too.” He laughed.

  Miss Brookie laughed with him, heartily, as if he had made the funniest possible joke. “That’s really so funny,” she said, and laughed harder still.

  What Miss Brookie was laughing at, my father, standing beside her and listening, had no clue. What did this wild laughter mean? Could it be that Miss Brookie was going to pieces? Had she at last, as she had always predicted, been pushed over the edge by the people she had to deal with, people who had the imagination of that concrete orb in her yard, as she would say?

  Wister was expressing a desire to meet “the man”; and Miss Brookie swallowed hard and at last got her laughter under control. She reached out and pulled my father into the group.

  When she did the introductions, she also mentioned—nailing my father, he later said, with a look about as delicate as “a klop to the chops”—that Wister worked at the shoe factory. So the Klan had come to their decision, and it had been to do nothing. It was then that my father was able to fathom Miss Brookie’s hitherto unfathomable laughter. It had been the laughter of relief.

  My father’s hand went forward and he said to Wister, “A real pleasure… . What can I show you?”

  Miss Brookie asked Wister to excuse them and pulled my father into the shoe department, where she stood looking at him. They exchanged victory smiles. “You did it, Aaron, you did it,” she said.

  That night there were plenty of sales for all. Nobody, of course, had more than my father. As the evening wore on, he took off his coat, and in his shirtsleeves with the rubber band on the sleeves to hold the cuffs up and keep them clean, he was here, there, everywhere. It was nothing for him to outfit the whole family from father to baby, then to go outside to the family wagon, pull out Grandma and Grandpa, and outfit them as well. He was a sal-es-man doing what a sal-es-man did best.

  In the kitchen that night, Miss Brookie had one more instructional tale. As she passed around Lizzie Maud’s pineapple upside-down cake, she told everybody she had “divined” the reason the Klan hadn’t marched, that it had to do with the competition between Dillon and Spivey. “Thing’s this,” she said. “In the Klan Spivey’s got muscles about as big as Tom’s.” And since Dillon and Spivey got along “like spinach and peach preserves in the same jar,” if Dillon wanted the Klan to march, Spivey would be hell-bent to see that they didn’t.

  It sounded plausible, but my father had another theory. His had to do with the “accordin’ thing” that Spivey had tacked on to the lease. With the “accordin’ thing” operating, if my father did well, Spivey did well. It was as simple as that. Anyway, he told Miss Brookie, whatever was the reason, it was a good night.

  To which Miss Brookie laughed and said, no, it was not a good night entirely.

  So why not an entirely good night?

  Because, Miss Brookie said, my father now had to pay her four dollars a week rent. “Into each life some rain must fall,” she said, and gave my father a wink.

  My father used to say there wasn’t much Miss Brookie could tell him about rain falling that he didn’t already know, but on this night, with all the money that was in the register and all the customers who had left happy, he didn’t point this out, just winked back, and said, “My pleasure.”

  And when my father went to bed that night and thought it all over, what he really wanted to believe was that the Klan hadn’t marched because Concordia truly needed a Jew store.

  CHAPTER 13

  IN CHRIST’S NAME, AMEN

  I’ve been told that in the days following the store’s opening, business stayed up and anxieties went down, though of course my mother always had a little stock of anxieties she could turn to, and she now turned to Joey’s school. In Tennessee, children started school at seven, Joey was seven, and the first day of school was approaching. The opening date, however, was later than in New York, as in Tennessee harvest time was taken into account.

  She was anxious about all manner of things: first of all, whether the teachers would like Joey, though, as she said to her invisible third person while giving Joey’s cheek a forceful pinch, “What could there be about my Joey not to like except he’s Jewish?”—at the same time trying to ignore my father’s look. She fretted about who Joey would play with, knowing the answer—Gentiles, of course; and about what, in this little town, the children wore to school. In New York pupils wore uniforms—navy blue knickers, white shirts, and ties blue or red; girls wore navy blue skirts, white
middie blouses, and also red or blue ties. But here? Did they dress as if for church? Or was it farm clothes? In which case were shoes considered an urban affectation?

  T arrived on the first morning of school, to see to things. Though himself in starched and sharply ironed overalls and high-topped, thick-soled shoes, he pronounced Joey’s corduroy knickers and high-topped, thin-soled shoes “fitting.” Erv was dressed the same as T. Though not a pupil in the technical sense, Erv was allowed to be in school and share T’s seat. He wouldn’t go “for real” until next year.

  My mother spotted another opportunity for worry: T was carrying a book satchel. When my mother looked stricken, Miss Brookie rushed around and found a satchel in her attic. Its leather was dry, its color like bread mold, its buckles rusted. My mother gave it a quick scrub job, scouring it with Old Dutch Cleanser, then finishing off with neat’s-foot oil from an old bottle Lizzie Maud had found.

  My brother has always said he was of two minds about the satchel: It was pitiful looking, he remembers—and Miriam has backed him up on this—but he knew my mother was eager that he have what the others had. Maybe it was true, as my mother thought for as long as she lived, that Joey had a special way of feeling her feelings, as they say now; it was obvious to all of us that even if he didn’t exactly share her feelings, he always took them into account. Perhaps the fact that he looked like my mother—he had her freckly fair skin and short features—carried with it this responsibility. So he said yes, Mama, he would carry the satchel.

  “And it’s clean enough they won’t call you ‘dirty Jew,’” she said, out of anybody’s hearing, specifically out of my father’s.

  My mother was going along to school to register Joey. She had wanted my father to do this, but he was busy at the store and anyway would have said that she should “take every opportunity” to meet people.

  The school, called Westerly, was three blocks away. My mother and the boys walked to it as a little band, T in front with Joey, Erv a pace behind, my mother trailing.

  The school was a stubby building of red brick, set on about two acres of land. The principal, a large woman with dark hair tucked over an encircling “rat” and with a shirtfront stiffly protruding, met the little band at the door. “Mattie Barksdale,” she said to my mother. “How do.”

  My mother said “How do” back.

  Miss Mattie, as she was called even in my day—though in the intervening years she had married and was no longer “Miss” at all—took my mother and Joey into her office while T and Erv went on. When my mother told Miss Mattie that Joey had been born in New York, Miss Mattie said to her, “Mercy, such a lot he’ll have to tell the others.”

  And they’ll have such a lot to tell him, my mother thought. “Yes, maybe,” she said to Miss Mattie.

  The very next question was about church. Miss Mattie said she “understood” that Joey was Jewish. “Too bad we have no church for him here in Concordia,” she said to my mother.

  She laughed then and said that Concordia had every church “known to man” except a Jewish one. This was not quite true, as there was no Catholic Church in Concordia, but if she meant every Protestant church, she was on firmer ground, though there was no Episcopal one. “He’ll just have to wait till a Jewish church gets built, I reckon,” Miss Mattie said to my mother.

  That eventuality, in my mother’s view, was so unlikely as to be nothing to talk about. She knew, and she knew this lady knew, there was not going to be any Jewish “church.” And it was at that moment, my mother always suggested, that she understood with piercing clarity that among the great ships in the religious Concordia mainstream, the Bronsons didn’t even have a rowboat.

  After the registration my mother left, and Joey followed Miss Mattie out into the square hall. Four rooms—for grades one through four—came off it. Miss Mattie led him into the first-grade room and handed him over to Miss Nannie Temple—the same Miss Nannie Temple who would later preside over my first grade—and she motioned for him to sit in an empty seat at the back.

  After Miss Nannie had added Joey’s name to her roll, the class went out to recess, which was a period in the morning when the pupils were let out to play in the yard. It had been arranged that T, who was in the second grade, was going to “spring” Joey at this time.

  Joey went out with the others, aware that they were whispering and shooting him looks. After what seemed to him a very long time, Miss Mattie climbed up the school’s back stairs. On the landing she clapped her hands, and everyone gathered. She had several announcements, the first being that Friday was to be a field day that would take them to the firehouse and the icehouse. The pupils were to pack lunches, though not sliced tomatoes. If any of their mothers still had tomatoes, Miss Mattie said, they were not to slice them, since sliced tomatoes “squish bad.”

  The next announcement was that there was a lost-and-found something. Miss Mattie held it up, and Joey saw a chain on which dangled a small object. In the bright morning light, he made out the small object to be a cross.

  Miss Mattie asked, “Who lost this pretty thing?” and a hand went up. As the cross and chain were passed along to a reunion with their owner, Joey, who was always pleased to have a chance to check out anything animal, vegetable, or mineral, held it for a moment. This was interesting, he thought—his first hands-on experience with a cross. After he had gleaned whatever information the cross had to offer him, he set it to swinging on its chain and passed it on. A simple thing, he thought; just two rods, one horizontal, one vertical, in this case stamped out of a nice piece of silver.

  There were a couple of other announcements, the most important being that Chautauqua was coming to town, the signs for which Joey had already seen on that first trip out to the shoe factory. Chautauqua continued on in my time. It was where we heard classical music and saw plays that weren’t acted by locals, and heard about such things as the latest in Egyptian tomb finds. This year, according to Miss Mattie, there was to be a talk on the principle of radio waves, and she thought everybody ought to make a “special effort,” though everybody always went to Chautauqua, with or without Miss Mattie’s reminder.

  Up on the landing Miss Mattie motioned for T to join her, and he bounded up the stairs. Even if everybody already knew Joseph Bronson was in school, T said, there was still a surprise. He pointed to Joey, told him to hold up his hand, and proclaimed, according to Joey, “Doggone if you ain’t lookin’ at a Jewboy!”

  All heads turned. Joey has always said his arm went up, but then, as if it had a mind of its own, went right back down. After a bit, heads turned back to T, but instead of the cheers that T had clearly expected, there were only murmurs.

  If T was elated to include a “Jewboy” on the school’s rolls, it was a feeling directly attributable to the mentoring of Miss Brookie, though T had perhaps missed the lecture that cautioned against saying “Jewboy.” By this point in his life T was convinced that everything his “cudden” Brookie did or thought was exactly how to do or think, as if it were not a man’s world but Cudden Brookie’s. She said “Nigra” instead of “nigger”? He was already working up to “Nigra,” with “darky” as a transition. She had gone to college? He aspired to the same. She liked strangers? Well, so did he.

  James Lovelace, on the other hand, had not been mentored by Miss Brookie but by his farmer father, Ollie Lovelace, who would have said that the school was not so much lucky to have a “Jewboy” as doomed. Standing among the pupils, the son was now delivering this thought, along with a gratuitous blast at T. “You don’t have no more upstairs than a field nigger, T Medlin,” he was saying. And then came his main message: “Don’t you know all them Jews is Catholics?”

  At this murmurs went up—some of agreement, some no doubt of bewilderment—and James Lovelace continued on. “And everybody knows a Catholic takes his orders from Rome,” he said. “From the Pope. Just ask my daddy.”

  Miss Mattie pushed past T and, perhaps seeking to drive as small a wedge as possible between James and his f
ather but also seeking to shed some light, said gently that Jews were Jews and Catholics were Catholics, and, furthermore, not everybody went to the churches they went to. “There’s lots of other religions in this world,” she said to the pupils. Joey wondered at the time if she would make some sort of judgment about this, as my mother might have thought, but the principal said nothing more.

  Mary Cantey Dalrymple raised her hand. The talk was about religion, and, as everybody knew, Mary Cantey had a special problem in this area, her family being Episcopalians in a town where there was no Episcopal church, and they were therefore forced to go to the Methodist one. “We could be anything we want,” Joey has recalled Mary Cantey saying, “but Mama says the Episcopal Church is where we belong… . You know, us being so rich and all.”

  Miss Mattie then bowed her head and called upon the others to do the same. When she began, “We beseech you, O Lord … ,” Joey moved to the fringes of the crowd, and he heard her say, “We ask this in Christ’s name, amen,” just as the bell clanged, ending recess.

  According to Miriam, on the day Joey registered for school, Miss Brookie had rescued her from a fate worse than death—having no one to play with. As the others had struck out for Westerly, Miriam has remembered being left sitting on the platform swing feeling “utterly forsaken”—an expression she learned from Miss Brookie and has never let go of.

  Miriam had been thinking that maybe girls were not allowed to go to school in Concordia, but Miss Brookie assured her that they were, even if, she said, some folks had “grievous misgivings.”

  She had a suggestion: Miriam would become a “Sunshine Girl.” “Honey,” she said, “we’re going to have us a high old time. Just you let these old boys go their way.”

  The Sunshine Girls turned out to be an important part of Miriam’s life and, later, of mine. It was where Miriam met the girls she played with, the same girls who matured into the crowd she “ran with.” It was where I played with my friends as well, though I never “ran with” any of them, as I left Concordia before I got old enough to be said to “run with” anybody.