Accordion Crimes (38 page)

“Taste pretty good, boy? Must be runnin down the crack of your ass where you got all your taste.” Suddenly hands and arms were thrusting between them, seizing the ketchup bottles, the salt and pepper. She felt something like sand strike the back of her neck and started sneezing—someone had
unscrewed the cap from a pepper shaker and tossed the contents. The men were behind the counter, grabbing cream and milk, butter, pie, mayonnaise, mustard, eggs, a tiny white man seized the rancid cold cooking oil, a three-gallon stainless-steel vat, poured the entire contents over Reverend Veazie. (Later Reverend Veazie said in a sermon, “God was watchin over me because that oil MIGHT a been HOT.”)

Ida felt wet substances cascade down her neck and face, sneezed convulsively as pepper flew and mustard dripped, someone mashed an egg in her hair, another poured icy milk down her shoulder and breast, they were hurling handfuls of Wheaties, drizzling Karo syrup, throwing Jell-O bombs. “Food fight,” said the tiny man, hurling a banana at Tamonette’s mother who flinched as it struck and then began to sing “We shall NOT BE MOO-OO-OOVED,” and they sang with her, sneezing and crying, but singing and still sitting at the counter when the two cops and then some of the men in the crowd began to drag them off the stools with hard little strikes from their batons, and arm-twists and quick knee-thrusts and savage guttural promises of what they were going to do. She felt hard fingers squeezing at her breast, then wiping the mustard onto her back, saying, disgusting nigger cunt, you big fat giant ugly nigger whore, move it or I’ll shove this up your twat, jabbing with a sawed-off pool cue at her groin, hitting the pubic bone hard and painfully so that she cried out and half sank to her knees, hearing the reverend shout, be cool be cool be cool, and he was so slippery with oil they couldn’t get a grip on him but kept falling down in his slick.

She got up. The man with the cue was in the crowd, back to her, trying to get a good lick in on Reverend Veazie. With all her force she kicked him in the behind and he went down
under the boots of the others, shouting, aaah, aaah, hold it, goddammit, git off’n me, my back is broke, goddammit, git me up.

“Oh baby girl,” moaned Lamb when she came home three days later, both eyes swollen shut, skinned up and barefoot, stinking of condiments, vomit and jail. “What I tell you? Look at you, you half dead, they half kill you. I follow my first mind, would of kept you from goin. I gonna lose my job with Mrs. Astraddle she hear about this. What you doin?”

Ida stripped and washed in the cold shower Octave had rigged before he went up north, came out and pulled on old blue jeans, her run-over black sneakers, got a plastic shopping bag from under the sink and began folding her clothes and packing them in it.

“Think you doin?”

“Gettin out a here. I’m in it. They ain’t gonna stop me, neither. I’m goin with Tamonette’s boyfriend. And don’t you touch my papers and books. I be back to get ’em. We gonna look for some more sit-ins.”

“You a living example, cast your bread upon the waters, it come back moldy.”

“I’m in it.”

A year later she was out of it. She turned every sit-in into a riot, fought and kicked and shouted, jumped up slugging. Her idea of passive resistance was to lean on mean little white deputies pretending she was fainting, then claw their flesh in a hard grip while saying “where am I?”

“You don’t understand passive resistance,” a group leader told her. “You hurtin the cause. You got too much top anger,
sister. We got to channel rage, else it eat us up, destroy us too. You go home, figure out a different kind a way to help your brothers and sisters.”

She went back to Bayou Féroce, packed the books and papers under the beds into eighteen boxes and moved to Philadelphia, got a job with Foodaire, a company specializing in the preparation and packaging of airline snacks, and there she stayed for three decades, driving her little car into the south on weekends, traveling around, getting into conversations with grey-headed women and asking those questions.

(Years later in a Los Angeles hospital bed recovering from a gallbladder operation and digesting the news that she had tested positive for tuberculosis, she read the paper: in Jackson, Mississippi, a black man stopped for speeding was taken to jail and beaten dead, the coroner ruled a heart attack; on another page, forty black men had hanged themselves in Mississippi jails in six years; Mr. Bill Simpson, forced out of Vidor, Texas, back to Beaumont, was shot dead within the week. So forth and so forth and so forth. The paper slid to the floor. It never stopped. Hadn’t they done something fine back in the sixties? Hadn’t people died getting the voting and civil rights laws? And since then, what? Seemed like some had got money and power, but they’d left the others behind, curling like shrimps in the smoking fry pans of cities where bodies of children were discovered in trash compactors, blood dripped through ceilings onto somebody’s plate of dinner, babies got shot in cross fire, and the names of cities meant something deep bad, unfixable and wrong. Money was rolling in big waves but not even the foam touched the black shore. All those notebooks wouldn’t save a single one from the hot pan, all those histories of black women, those invisible suffering ones at the bottom
of the bag. Her apartment was filled with notebooks, yellow snapshots, studio photographs, diaries written on paper bags, ill-spelled pages of herbal cures illustrated with leaves and flowers and colored with dyes squeezed from stems and petals, a sharecrop account written on a shingle with a burnt stick, a letter printed on a piece of apron by a woman homesteader in Kansas describing the death of her husband, a thick manuscript in beautiful cursive script on pages fashioned from cut-up circus posters,
My So-called Life with the O.K. Minstrel Circus,
recipes written on scrap wood with a nail dipped in soot ink, the midnight thoughts of a charwoman who cleaned federal offices during the Second World War, scrawled on pages gleaned from wastebaskets, the lines of anonymous poets, scraps of lives of thousands of black women. She’d done it on her lousy salary: used-book shops, church bazaars, yard sales, dim, dusty boxes in thrift stores, trash cans and Dumpsters, asking everyone she met, you got any books or letters or whatnot about black women, any black women, everywoman? She thought of Octave and his green accordion in Chicago: was he still alive? She’d sent a letter years ago, sent it by way of Lamb,
sure would like to hear you play a little zydeco on that old green accordion.
Never heard. Wasn’t that the old evil thing, brothers and sisters losing each other? Wasn’t it the old, old thing, families torn up like scrap paper, the home place left and lost forever?)

Octave, drowsing through a bad spell that hinged on a long layoff—he’d never gotten his union ticket and there were too damn many people wanting work out there; he’d tried it all, worked fifty short jobs as a plasterer, carpenter, carpet installer,
trashman, furniture mover, taxi driver, hearse driver, grocery delivery boy, short-order cook, maintenance man, awning installer, TV deliveryman, fired or quit after a week or ten or eleven days until it got to the point where he couldn’t kill nothin and wouldn’t nothin die; everything was turning ugly and anyway he was in no shape for construction work anymore—couldn’t make out what the letter said. He discovered it again some weeks later under a chair and this time read it through. Old Green, shit, Old Green gone to the pawnshop long ago. “Yes,” he said, “too bad, baby sister, but Old Green is doin time in the pawnshop for anyway three years, know what I’m sayin?”

(He did time himself for a few years and in the clink managed to get through junior college, thought about becoming a Black Muslim and changing his name to something new, start a fresh life, start over again. He thought about money and how to get it. At first it didn’t seem there was anything but music and crime, those were his job categories, what the circumstances pegged him for. Well, he wasn’t going back fishing and couldn’t make it with zydeco or jazz or rock or any other fuckin music thing.

He started reading like a crazed bastard, read his eyes crossed, not mysteries and crap like the rest of them did, but the
Wall Street Journal
and financial magazines, small-business start-up analysis, and after a year or two of studying what the world needed, he settled on sludge. On his release in 1978, after he was turned down for loans by sixteen banks, he held up a supermarket and with this investment money went back to Louisiana, bought eighty acres and invited several metropolises to bring him their solid waste for a fee. By 1990 he owned a five-hundred-acre model landfill and was a major conduit for New York City sludge which went from him to fields in Iowa, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Colorado, Texas and California. He tracked down
Wilma, twice divorced, gave her some play, got her heated up and dropped her. He never picked up an accordion again, didn’t even like to hear it. “Only way out for me if I’d stayed up there was be a street musician, play in the cold, the subway, have a little tuna can settin on the sidewalk for dimes and quarters. Fuck that.” But he was very careful and didn’t drive at night.)

Old Mrs. Józef Przybysz had worked until she was sixty-six—“No work, no pork, no money, no baloney”—but in 1950, the same year she caught her grandson Joey smoking a cigarette from a shoplifted pack and broke his nose with her ivory darning egg from the old country, she retired, concentrated her time on church, cooking, social meetings and telling stories of the hard times they had survived.

“Tragic. We are a tragic, tragic family. All dead now but me. Yes, nothing lasts forever, my dear child. Let me change the cold cloth—ah, you will not steal coffin nails again and smoke them, will you?”

Two decades later, at eighty-six, she had outlived her oldest son, Hieronim. She was a massive woman, her furrowed and liver-spotted skin like a slipcover over a rump-sprung sofa, yet her muscled forearms and strong fingers suggested she could climb a sheer rock face without chalk. Her face was heavy, indented eyes and mouth like fingernail marks in dough, her yellow-white hair pulled up in a soufflé crown bun. Her rimless bifocals were extraordinarily reflective, flashing with the blue flame of the gas burner.

Over her rayon dresses, printed in diagonal checks, flowers, polka dots, feathers and flying birds on dark backgrounds, she wore aprons trimmed with bands of blue or Mamie Eisenhower pink, but she was so lame and bent that she could no longer search for mushrooms.

For years her son, Hieronim, and daughter-in-law, Dorothy (a real cholera of a woman), and their two sons, Rajmund and Joey, had lived with her in the tiny house on the South Side’s Karlov Avenue, a solid Polish neighborhood; the house she had purchased herself with her wages as a cigar
maker after her husband ran away, for, she said several times a day, “the person without land is like a man without legs: he crawls around but gets nowhere.” The Chez family from Pinsk lived across the street; later they changed their name to Chess, the two boys grew up to work in businesses, a junkyard, bars and nightclubs, finally making phonograph records featuring black singers moaning the blues, and by 1960 the good Polish neighborhood had also turned black on all sides. She couldn’t blame the Chess brothers, but somehow it made a connection in her thoughts—the black ones, the blues, the Chess brothers, the changing neighborhood. The Poles moved out fast when the black ones started coming in after the war and efforts to defend the neighborhood with fire and stone failed.

At first Hieronim had been a great stone thrower and urged Rajmund and Joey to throw as well.

He shouted at the black ones, “go on, get out of here, this is good hardworking Polish people here, get the hell out, nigger, you spoil our homes, go on you dog’s blood, cunts will grow on pineapple trees before you live here,” as boys had once thrown stones at him, calling him a dirty polack, a dumb hunky, get the hell back where you come from. The Irish, the Germans, the Americans.

Hieronim, with his small oval face and tiny blue eyes buried deep in their socket caves, a pinched mouth like his father but long-armed and with ropy shoulders made for hurling, went with other men to protest at the huge housing projects when they tried to open them up, Fernwood Park Homes, a few years later, the sly government putting black ones in a white neighborhood. There was a huge crowd, thousands. Hieronim kept his eyes open later, watching where they built others, and he’d go at night with men to get building materials, not to steal but to sabotage, to slow down
the work. (On one of his expeditions he fell into an empty stairwell and hurt his back. After that he limped and complained of an aching liver.) He filled Coke bottles with gasoline for Park Manor. He started an improvement association for their block, although it did no good. He saw to it that the Polish Club had a buzzer on the door, and he went back night after night to Trumbull Park Homes in 1953 when they tried to sneak in the light-skinned nigger family, until they gave up and moved out, back to the dirty slums.

A few years later the real estate man came to her door saying, “you guys better move out while you can, get a price for your house. It ain’t gonna be worth nothing pretty soon. I can get you something for it right now.” But she did not sell though the daughter-in-law complained constantly because it wasn’t safe, Hieronim not so much. He’d given up by that time, watched
The $64,000 Question
on television, shouting out wrong answers and finding fault with the ballroom accordion players in their sequined suits.

Next door in those days was the house of Zbigniew and Janina Jaworski; she remembered the day they moved in, 1941, both of them working, “…him in the steel mill, her in the ammunition factory. Oh, us women loved the war; the only time a Polish woman could get a job was when they had that World War Two.” Before the war there were thirty women for every job and the foremen wouldn’t hire them, blustered that women were demanding and troublesome. How clean were the Jaworskis’ kids, and the yard spotless, nice flowers, she went to mass, good friends, yes, he liked to drink but what man doesn’t, and many happy hours she spent with Janina, sipping coffee and swallowing that tender ginger cake. Look at the house now, inhabited by a washboard black woman in a pilled sweater and grimy slacks, shoe soles flapping and half a dozen ragged children
darting mischievously around, kicking garbage cans, prying at mailboxes, punching each other, a detritus of bottle caps, paper scraps, broken sticks, dented hubcaps, flattened tin cans spreading out in their wake, the house itself shabby and peeling, the broken windowpanes blocked with warped cardboard, anything at all. And at night the men who slouched through the loose door, shouting and singing and fighting inside, the din filling the street. Who knew what would happen next? But often, when her daughter-in-law was at work, she brought the woman cabbage rolls covered with foil, gave her ragged children cookies and the tiny tin globe from old Józef’s chest.

A few years before she grew so lame, on good days she had knotted her babushka under her chins, taken up her collecting basket and set out for Glowacka Park to search for fungi. “So many!” she whispered to herself, her basket crammed with heavy flesh, its weight pulling her left shoulder down. She routed the return journey so she would pass the Stretch-Yor-Bucks grocery, past the sidewalk displays of McIntosh and Delicious apples, baskets fitted with commercial mushrooms from the chemical cellars of Pennsylvania. She despised these smooth beige heads, the flavor of nothing, all poison sprays. Let the stupid Americans eat them! What terrible grocery stores, she muttered, thinking of the old Quality Pork & Provisions store, long ago torn down, thinking of the huge sausages in striped bags, flitches of bacon with the square brown rind like a notebook cover, a stiff, pale leg suspended by a wire loop around the hoof, the ribs slanting down the rectangular rack looking like a ravine in a landscape photographed from the air, and the terrible heads of the pigs, brows furrowed with the anguish of the last realization, the clouded burst eyes starting or sunken, the ears tattered, the stiff snouts tilted as if releasing the last exhalation. At home
she spilled her basket of mushrooms onto the white tablecloth, these delicious mushrooms that she stroked as though they were kittens: fifteen pounds of pheasantbacks, the speckled tawny fans an inch thick giving off a smell of watermelon; sacks of morels, their mazed surfaces leading the eye around and around, the hollow insides studded with glistening bumps like the plaster ceiling in church; creamy waves of oyster pleurotus with a fragrance of leaves and nutmeats, to dry, to stuff, to pickle in vinegar. And all this for nothing but the effort of the exciting search. How her heart beat the summer she discovered twenty-seven great parasol mushrooms in a clearing. But now the park was so beaten and trampled it resembled the earthy dust of an African village.

In her day she had cooked with passion and experience, a craftworker who needed no measuring cup or recipe, who held everything in her mind. She kept a garden in the handkerchief yard, tomatoes tied to old crutches she took from the Dumpster at the hospital, she made her own good sausage and sauerkraut, extra for her married son, Hieronim, when he was still alive, even after he changed his surname to Newcomer—the Americans called him Harry Newcomer—a little snack of
pierozki
and the filling soup
zurek
with mushrooms and potatoes and fermented oatmeal and good sour bread, kneading bread dough until her hands fainted, and once when someone Hieronim knew went hunting in Michigan and brought back a deer shared out among friends she had made again
bigos
(venison but not boar ham or the sweet dark meat of the Lithuanian bison which few ever tasted), crying into the pot with joy it had been so many years, and for Sunday dinner
gołąbki,
the little cabbage rolls in a sweet-sour sauce, and always a fresh-baked round
babka
or two. Józef had always recited when she made
bigos
of
American beef, smoked sausages, sauerkraut and vegetables and, of course, her wild mushrooms, he had put his hand on his breast and declaimed, “all the air is fragrant with the smell.” No wonder when her children came home they ate ravenously, said no one can cook like you. It was true. And did she bring good things to the Nuns’ Day Luncheon? Yes. She despised the American supermarkets full of bright-colored square packages and heavy cans, the terrible cookbooks Dorothy bought by made-up women with American names, Betty Crocker, Mary Lee Taylor, Virginia Roberts, Anne Marshall, Mary Lynn Woods, Martha Logan, Jane Ashley, all of them thin-lipped Protestants who served up gassy baking-mix biscuits, tasteless canned vegetables and salty canned Spam without shame, the worst food in the world. Look at her stupid daughter-in-law, Hieronim’s wife, Dorothy, that cholera, who hardly knew how to cross herself, see her open a can of soup, fry some hot dogs, buy a stale cake slicked over with evil green icing, potatoes in a cardboard box, powdered drinks and trays of nasty crackers and dips and spreads and dunks, Dorothy, who made borscht with jars of baby food, beets and carrots, had once served her mother-in-law a glass of milk with an enormous spider struggling in it. Yet the deluded woman thought she was a notable cook because she had taken part in something called The Grand American National Bake-Off, had won a set of aluminum pots with her imitation of a T-bone steak made out of hamburger and Wheaties, a carved carrot for the bone.
Smacznego.

But all that was ended. The old woman sat in the back room now, her husband long disappeared, her son dead, her daughter-in-law lording it over the kitchen and her grandsons Rajmund and Joey grown men, Joey married to Sonia, parents themselves of her two great-grandchildren, Florry and Artie.
Dorothy often knotted up her hard face and complained that Joey and Sonia never visited. She said they wouldn’t come because of the dirty blacks all around them; she couldn’t guess it was her terrible cooking.

Yes, Dorothy, her flame-shaped blue eyes winking, asked them every week, said come over Sunday, come over Saturday, come over Friday, any day, I make a nice dinner (she made also, besides the baby-food borscht and the false steak, a fish shape from cottage cheese, canned tuna and Jell-O, with a black olive eye), bring the kids over, come over and watch the television, but they never did, and now they had their own television, a portable Philco, and paying more than three dollars on it every week, Dorothy’s invitations making no more impression than if she’d been throwing peas at the wall, except on Christmas Eve they came for the
Opłatek Wigilijny
and the dinner which the old woman commanded though she could do very little of the work herself now, but last year they refused to go to midnight mass, and the old woman knew they had not fasted because the little girl left so much food on her plate and whined for pizza, bunching the hay under the tablecloth and demanding to open presents, and not Sonia, not Joey, never said nothing to her. The child had the same ash-blond hair and broad cheekbones and little ski-jump nose as Dorothy. The boy she couldn’t blame, he was only a baby and anyway a boy, but the girl needed correction. She was not too young to be enrolled in the dance class and learn the old dances. She was not too young for a little dustpan and broom.

When Joey was a boy old Mrs. Józef Przybysz had told him horrific tales of the old days. The other boy, Rajmund, would
not listen, clapped his hands over his ears and rushed out to play in the streets. Oh yes, she said, she had been there—a young girl at the time—during that terrible mass when, in the middle of the service, Maria Reks, who worked for the Irish priest, came staggering through the door crusted with dirt and blood and great red scrapes, clods of soil dropping from her torn clothes onto the wine-colored carpet. Father Delahanty shook, his mouth hung open, then he turned and fled out the back of the church. Maria staggered toward the altar, then swayed and collapsed, but as Ludwik Simac and Emil Pliska held her up and the women moaned, she told them a tale of horror in a last-act voice, the congregation standing on the pew seats to get a better view. She said that for three years she had been forced into the bed of Father Delahanty, the miserable Irisher the church had rammed down their throats, and that when, last night, she told him she was pregnant with his bastard, he tried to kill her with a kitchen knife, thought he had succeeded and buried her in a shallow grave behind his kitchen garden, behind the Egyptian onions with their heavy garlic-looking heads, but she had come to, half smothered, and clawed her way out and was here now to accuse. What an uproar! The men shouted for blood and the castration of the lying Irish priest. And within a week the hair of the entire congregation present had turned white, so that when they came together the following Sunday it was like an old folks’ home. The poor girl, though bathed and cleaned and cosseted, had delivered a malformed baby with a head shaped like a carrot and then had died of influenza when the baby was a month old. At the wake the accordion was played, though some said this was wrong, for it was through the accordion she had been seduced, as Father Delahanty was an adept player of jigs and reels.