Jew Store

by Suberman ,Stella

  My mother said she couldn’t understand why he would be fired when it wasn’t his fault, and Lizzie Maud gave her that you-need-looking-after look. His fault or not, she explained, he was unable to work the way a Negro was supposed to, and when folks caught sight of his limp, they thought he didn’t have his strength anymore. As she put it, “What man gwine find nigger work where he don’t have to be like Samson?”

  My mother had to accept this. She thought, What’s true is true—trouble comes to people like rust to iron (she had old shtetl sayings, too), and she decided to speak to my father.

  My father went right out to Niggertown, to Lizzie Maud’s house, to find Seth. I tagged along. Since Lizzie Maud always shooed me away when I tried to follow her home after work, this was my chance. Niggertown was also the site of Lizzie Maud’s church: Ebenezer Baptist (which turned out to be a small, patchy white structure with no steeple at all), about which I heard a lot. It was where Lizzie Maud and her family went without fail every Sunday, Lizzie Maud and her daughters not only dressed up but with their hair ironed, and where the congregation sang the songs Lizzie Maud sang around the house. I often wondered if Miss Brookie would speak to Lizzie Maud about her strict churchgoing, but to my knowledge she never did, perhaps understanding that because she herself stayed home on Sundays, her thoughts on religion were considered irrelevant by everybody in town, including Lizzie Maud. Or perhaps she did not want to cast doubt on one of Lizzie Maud’s greatest joys.

  At any rate, when Seth wasn’t at home—wasn’t in the tiny house with the four tiny rooms—my father knew where to go: to the bootlegger’s shack, an unkempt, rundown hut where the Negro men hung out on Sunday afternoons, if they were working—or all the time, if they weren’t.

  My father had been to the shack many times. Ever since he had instituted a charge system, he had to go out there when payments hadn’t been forthcoming for a while. Sometimes he went at their wives’ requests, when they would say, “See can you do something with that man of mine, Mr. Bronson,” explaining that instead of paying bills, he was just “th’owin’” his money away.

  Sometimes lack of money came from buying moonshine, after which the men got drunk and skipped work. Sometimes it was the illegal numbers game—a flourishing Niggertown racket, which conventional wisdom held was run by the Negroes themselves but in reality was controlled by a couple of white men with reputations as pillars of the community. And sometimes it was that the men couldn’t resist the Jewish peddlers who came through on their wagons on Sundays with tray after tray of jewelry.

  My father spoke to the men with some lack of conviction. He knew the kinds of jobs they had: terrible ones that made them long to get lost in something, whether drink or adornments, or to make a grab at the only hope in their lives, a numbers hit.

  So we went into the bootlegger’s shack. It was dark, the only light coming from the cracks between the siding. There were Negro men sitting at a couple of unpainted wooden tables, and they got up when we entered. Did I come in like a little white girl in a spotless dress of lawn dotted about with rosebuds and wearing shiny Mary Janes? Maybe I did.

  Anyway, Seth was there. My father spoke to him, offered him the job of handyman in the store, and Seth accepted.

  Seth’s job was to get the furnace going, take the wagon to the depot, dust and polish, and in general stay handy. “You’ll be my third arm,” my father said to him, “and leg, too.”

  Seth said my father was not to worry, that he could tend to it all. Actually, according to my father, what he said was, “Jes’ ax anybody, Mr. Bronson. They ain’t nobody can whips they feets around faster’n me, no matter what that fool train done.”

  Seth was slight, both shorter and thinner than his wife, what there was of him all sinew. His hue was like Lizzie Maud’s, what she called “magonny,” meaning that the darkness had in it a tinge of red. His eyes were especially bright, and his every action quick, injured leg notwithstanding. It was as if moving at great speed was what his body was accustomed to doing and it couldn’t change.

  He very quickly settled into his new job and became the kind of handyman who looked for ways to be handier. He got change at the bank and went out for “cherry dopes”—cokes with a shot of cherry flavor—for Vedra Broome; on rainy days he walked the lady customers to their buggies or wagons, holding an umbrella overhead, knowing this was a service from a Negro to which ladies wouldn’t object.

  As the days went on, Seth and my father worked on comic routines. There was a set piece for Friday nights—the night of getting paid. At six o’clock sharp, Seth would announce it “be Shabbos bei nacht” and say, “Nu, Mr. Bossman, it be time for my gelt.”

  My father would bend toward Seth and inspect his forehead. “Well, look here,” he would say. “Darned if them horns ain’t just about to break the skin.” He would then pull Seth’s wage envelope out of the register and hand it over with a blay gezunt, a “stay well.”

  For this Seth would give a danke schoen—a “thank you kindly”—and walk out briskly, the limp barely showing.

  It was becoming clear, however, that the store could really use another clerk. Carrie MacAllister, now seven months pregnant, could no longer be counted on, even part-time. My father told my mother that he and Vedra just weren’t enough.

  Between me and her garden and crocheting and edging receiving blankets for Carrie MacAllister’s forthcoming baby, my mother didn’t want to put in any more time at the store. She suggested Vyvid, Vedra’s sister, but my father said this was one case where one bookend was more than enough, thank you.

  Whenever my father sought solutions, he would go to the side window and, hands in pockets, would stand looking out, ruminating, as if an answer might pop out from a pinecone. Today an answer came so quickly it was clear he had had it in mind all along: Seth could handle the job. “And very nice,” he said to my mother, trying to convince her that Seth was a natural choice.

  There was nothing natural about it, and my mother knew it. “Seth?” she exclaimed, meaning, A Ne gro clerk?

  My father tried to calm her. He wasn’t going to announce it from the courthouse tower. “We’ll just ease him in so nobody notices,” he said.

  My mother wondered how Seth would not be noticed. “Like a raisin on top of a cupcake he’ll be noticed,” was the way she put it.

  When my father said finally that they had to do right by this man, my mother felt herself caving in. “Just be careful,” she warned.

  My father told Seth to wait on trade only when he and Mrs. Broome were busy and to use his head about who would accept it.

  Seth was joyful, knowing that not many Negroes got a chance like this. Going to work in a shirt and tie? My father always remembered Seth saying, “Won’t I be a sight? Everybody be sayin’, ‘There go that Sunday nigger.’ No sir, I ain’t no everyday nigger no more.” He was, he said, going to be “one good sal-es-man.” Like my father, Seth was a good mimic.

  As if to “clap the climax,” as we would say in Concordia, some few weeks later Lizzie Maud announced that she too was going to have another baby. If it was a boy, it would be named Aaron Claudius and if a girl, Reba Laverne. Lizzie Maud was unsure about this, afraid it might be something Jews didn’t allow. “You like that okay, don’t you?” she asked my mother. “I mean it ain’t against your religion or nothing, is it?”

  My mother ran it through what rules she knew. “No,” she answered, “that’s one thing that ain’t against our religion.”

  Five months later Lizzie Maud gave birth to Reba Laverne, about one month after Carrie MacAllister delivered Sarah Reba.

  I saw Sarah Reba most every afternoon, mainly because my mother and Mrs. MacAllister had taken up painting flowers on dresses. While our mothers worked with brushes and paint pots, Billy Sunday and I played house, with Sarah Reba, blond and bland-faced like her brother, as Baby.

  Reba Laverne’s first visit came when she was about a month old. Delicately formed and brightly shining, she seemed a creature
from a place I could not know.

  I allowed myself to touch her, to make the miniature finger curl around my big one, to smooth shut the eyelids, to bend the flower-stem legs. When Lizzie Maud put her in my arms, she lay there light as a feather, small as a pigeon.

  Soon I was begging to take her for walks. On one Saturday afternoon I put her in my doll carriage, and Lizzie Maud agreed we could go to the courthouse park to show her off.

  My mother walked with us as far as the park and then went on to the store.

  At the park Lizzie Maud leaned against a tree and talked to a friend while I promenaded Reba Laverne around the clay walk. The park was cool and green in the late-spring morning, and I was pleased to see a goodly number of Saturday morning bench-sitters—more than usual, I thought.

  The bench-sitters said things like, “My, you have a fine-looking baby. Who does she favor?”

  “She looks kindly like her sister Sarah Reba and kindly like her daddy Billy Sunday,” I answered them.

  After a while I noticed there was something new in the park— a wooden platform on stilts, on which a group of men were draping bunting and hanging signs.

  I pushed the carriage over to Lizzie Maud. She moved her finger slowly in the air from letter to letter on the topmost sign and made out “CONCORDIA GO-GETTERS CLUB CHARLESTON CONTEST.”

  To Lizzie Maud the Charleston was a Negro dance. So how was it that “white peoples” were “gwine do the Charleston” out here in the park?

  I had no answer, of course, but I knew the Charleston very well. Lizzie Maud had taught it to Miriam, and Miriam had taught it to her friends, and they did it “like mad,” as Miriam would say, in our house, making use of any space that could accommodate flying arms and legs.

  How Lizzie Maud learned the Charleston was by way of the trail of wagons filled with Negroes continually passing through Niggertown, some going with high spirits to Chicago, some coming with low ones from it. On Saturday nights it was a thing for Concordia Negroes to do: mix with the transients and learn from them whatever dances, games, or jokes were going on in their towns or in the big city.

  And now there was going to be a Charleston contest. I begged—nagged—Lizzie Maud to hold me so I could see.

  The men finished their hangings and took seats at the rear of the platform. Some folks were now abandoning their benches and moving forward; others were filtering through the streets in the park’s direction. Soon a dense semicircle had formed in front of the stage.

  Lizzie Maud stood her place at the front, me in her arms, Reba Laverne beside us in the doll carriage. Lizzie Maud knew her rights: A little white girl in her charge was her ticket to standing where she pleased. She could ignore the rule that Negroes must stand to the rear.

  I thought Lizzie Maud should be in the contest, but she kept saying she was the wrong color and the wrong age. Wrenching around in her arms, I kept insisting, but she just wouldn’t move. She was just so stubborn. Couldn’t budge her with a stick, she herself would have said. Finally totally provoked with me, she said I was as heavy as a “fifty-cent sack of taters” and dropped me to the ground. “I can’t be in it,” she said to me. “And you stop.”

  I ran around the platform to see what was what. Several girls were kicking and twirling furiously. All wore short skirts. All had short hair. Miriam, too. Miriam?

  Yes, there she was, in a short green pleated skirt and green sweater. But it was her hair that was the sight. It was short like the other girls’, with spit curls at the sides of her face, like the tendrils on our painted dresses. I raced back to Lizzie Maud.

  Lizzie Maud was horror-struck. She too said, “Miriam?”

  She grabbed me up with one hand, seized the handle of Reba Laverne’s carriage with the other, and we rammed our way through the crowd to the platform’s edge. From behind it, Miriam’s head was popping in and out of view.

  To which Lizzie Maud said, “Lord have mercy, it sure ’nuf be Miriam.”

  Hadn’t I told her that? “And her hair,” I said. “It’s in a bob.”

  To which Lizzie Maud said, “And your mama gwine bob her heinie.”

  Lizzie Maud may have been feeling some guilt over teaching Miriam a “nigger” dance. “Ain’t you or Reba Laverne either one watching this mess,” she said to me. “Just you get your little self together and scat!”

  She began shouting as soon as we got to the front door of the store. Miriam! In the park! Dancing for all to see!

  My mother herself loved to dance—at weddings and other family affairs—and not just the traditional circle hora, but also one-to-one with a partner, a man preferably, or, if all the men were taken, another woman. So what was Lizzie Maud telling her? That Miriam was dancing for strangers?

  My father stayed calm. He touched Reba Laverne on the cheek and pronounced her “sweet as a Hershey’s kiss.” He wondered to my mother what was so terrible about Miriam dancing. Was she dancing in her underwear? Was she doing the hootchykootchy? No? So what was the problem?

  My mother had to see for herself, so off we went to the park and rammed our way back through the crowd. Miriam was under way, legs and arms a-sail, the music of a portable Victrola playing scratchily in the background.

  She soon went into the Finish, in which you stooped over, put your hands on your knees, shoved them together and apart, and then patted your backside.

  A few other girls got up, put on a record, and danced. Like Miriam they wore sharply pleated skirts that flipped and swung and shoes with little fat heels and perky bows. “Boy howdy, are they ever beautiful,” I breathed. When all the girls had had a turn, a big, heavyset man with a perspiring face came forward. Tom Dillon.

  He gave each girl a hand, smiling at them as he did. He picked up the winner’s loving cup, held it aloft, and announced that the winner was going to be determined by the amount of clapping.

  His hand went up over girl number one. Some applause. Each girl in turn got some clapping, and when it seemed too slight, folks ratcheted it up a bit. Then the hand went over Miriam.

  I heard clapping, but also something new—cheers and whistles. I knew Miriam had won.

  Mr. Dillon beckoned to Miriam, and she moved to stand beside him. He took her hand and held it while he told the crowd the contest was a prelude to the dance that night for raising money to send a Concordia boy to college, and as “your Go-Getters Club president,” Dillon was urging the crowd to buy tickets for the cause.

  He smiled down at Miriam. “Now here’s our little winner. And a mighty nifty little dancer she is, too,” he said. He crouched down until he was eye-to-eye with her. “What’s your name, little lady?”

  “Miriam,” Miriam said.

  Tom Dillon glanced over to the crowd. “Here’s a little girl with no last name.” He looked back to Miriam. “Is that right?”

  “No, sir,” my sister said. “I have a last name.”

  “Then why don’t you let us in on it?” Still squatting, Dillon grinned out at everybody.

  It’s Bronson.”

  “Bronson?” Mr. Dillon rose slowly to his feet. “Are you one of those Bronsons?”

  Up there on the platform, Miriam realized soon enough that being “one of those Bronsons” was, in Tom Dillon’s view, not only unfortunate but perhaps deplorable. As he plopped the cup in her hands, he informed the men at the rear of the platform, loudly, that they’d let a Jew girl win their contest. He let out a big “Haw,” to show the joke was on them.

  The crowd, having gotten very quiet, heard every word. My mother knew everyone in the crowd, they were Bronson’s customers, and they knew she was among them. They were probably split down the middle: Some thought Mr. Dillon was comical as all get-out, and some thought he was a disgrace. In any case, they began leaving, glancing our way, talking softly.

  In a very few minutes the only ones left were us. We walked slowly through the park and back to the house. I pushed Reba Laverne quietly, expecting that at any moment my mother would explode at Miriam for bobbing her hai
r.

  To my surprise this didn’t happen. It might have been that my mother was actually secretly pleased: If she herself wasn’t up to “bopping,” she was perhaps glad to see that Miriam was.

  About Miriam’s dancing, my mother didn’t know how she felt. She tried to tell Miriam that dancing in public was for shiksas, not for nice Jewish girls. “Do you understand?”

  No, Miriam didn’t, not at all. “For pity’s sake, Mama,” she said, “you and your Jewish. What makes you think shiksas aren’t nice girls, too?” She named some who had danced with her in the contest. “Are you trying to tell me they’re not nice?”

  My mother knew them all, some as friends of Miriam’s, some from when they came into the store. Yes, she thought, they were nice; they were respectful, polite. She liked them. Oy, how to explain? Was it the dancing? Or was it that being made fools of by Tom Dillon made everything good about it seem bad?

  That night Miriam put the cup on our dresser, and we lay on our bed and stared at it for long minutes. And what a cup it was—huge, the size of Miss Brookie’s Chinese pots, which held her aspidistras, and all silvery shine.

  Miriam still has the cup. It rests in a big box in her home, along with other mementos and sentimental items from all periods of her life; but most of them, she will say, are from the days in Concordia.

  CHAPTER 19

  NEW YORK AUNTS

  I had plenty of playmates and, except for a few inconsequential things they did that I didn’t—like going to church—our lifestyles were similar. I was disconcerted—and envious—only when there were visits to or from relatives. It was one thing I couldn’t get in on. My family talked a lot about our New York relatives, and letters went back and forth (those that came to us always started, “How are things in ‘the sunny South’?”), but I was almost four before I laid eyes on any of them. The occasion was a visit from my mother’s sisters, my Aunt Sadie and my Aunt Hannah.