The Color of Water (19 page)

College was my way out. My eldest brother's wife, Becky, had gone to Oberlin College in Ohio and she told me I should apply because they had a great liberal arts school, a conservatory of music, and most of all, scholarship money. My high school grades were sour, my SATs low, but my musical and writing abilities were strong and I had good recommendations. To my utter amazement, the school accepted
me. Mommy was completely happy when I told her the news. She hugged me and beamed, put the acceptance letter in her shoebox under her bed, and bragged to anyone she saw, in the supermarkets, at the library, “My son's going to Oberlin. You never heard of Oberlin? Oh, let me tell you …” I was the eighth straight child she sent to college. The seven before me all graduated and most went on for higher degrees.

On a cloudy, rainy day in September 1975, I packed everything I owned into an old green duffel bag and Ma drove me to the Greyhound bus station. As usual, she was broke, dumping single dollar bills, change, pennies on the counter to pay for the one-way ticket to Ohio. As I stepped on the bus she squeezed a bunch of bills and change into my hand. “It's all I have,” she said. I counted it. Fourteen dollars. “Thanks, Ma.” I kissed her and got on the bus quickly to hide my own tears. I felt I was abandoning her—she hated Delaware and I had talked her into staying there, and now I was leaving. Yet she wanted me to go. As I sat down on the bus and looked for her through the window, it occurred to me that since I was a little boy, she had always wanted me to go. She was always sending me off on a bus someplace, to elementary school, to camp, to relatives in Kentucky, to college. She pushed me away from her just as she'd pushed my elder siblings away when we lived in New
York, literally shoving them out the front door when they left for college. She would not hear of it when they applied to schools that were near home. “If you stay here, you'll fool around,” she'd say. “Go away and learn to live on your own.” Yet she'd wipe her eyes with the back of her hand and watch silently through the living room window as they smiled and waved goodbye from the sidewalk, straining under the weight of the same cheap duffel bag that now lay in the belly of the Greyhound bus, holding my things. She always cried when they left, though never in front of us. She'd retreat to her room for that. I was actually worried she would cry when I boarded the bus, but when I looked at her through the window I was relieved to see she wasn't crying at all. She was pacing, puckering her lips, frowning, making faces. She paced this way and that, hands in her pockets, as the wind blew swirls of leaves and discarded paper cups about her feet. She was wearing a brown raincoat and a scarf over her head, a lone white woman marching back and forth on a dim street in front of the dilapidated bus station in Wilmington, Delaware, beneath a rumbling Amtrak train trestle and a cloudy sky. She seemed so agitated and jumpy I remember wondering if she had to go to the bathroom. As the bus engine rumbled to life, she didn't wave but rather gave a quick flip of the hand that said, “Go! Go on!” and hurried away. The bus pulled off and she was out of sight for a moment, but after we turned the corner I saw her from
the window across the aisle and she had broken down. She was leaning on the wall beneath the train trestle, head bowed, one hand squeezing her eyes, as if the tears that flowed out of them could be squeezed into oblivion.

After my adventures with Rocky I was done with the fast life. I got a job at a diner serving food to customers, and after a couple of weeks Dennis called on me again and we started going out. He was a real serious man, thoughtful and solid, different from Rocky and the other men I had seen in Harlem who hung around Small's Paradise. Dennis was a violinist who had come to New York from High Point, North Carolina. He came to New York in his middle twenties, which was a late age for most folks to leave home in those days, but he was an only child and his mother, Etta, didn't want him to leave home. She'd had a few miscarriages and Dennis was her only son, but he went to New York because he wanted to pursue music. He played violin and read music and composed it, mostly classical and religious music. Your father came from the same town and went to the same high school as John Coltrane, but he was
ahead of Coltrane in age. Dennis used to sit around with stacks of sheet music when I first met him, scribbling at it and scoring it out. He played the violin beautifully and I'd often ask him to play various songs for me. He also was a good singer and sang in the Metropolitan Baptist Church choir in Harlem
.

Dennis almost starved to death fooling around with that music, which is why I never wanted you fooling around with it when you decided to make a living at it. They wouldn't hire a black man for the orchestras or anything like that in those days and he scuffled around and slept in flophouses. What saved him were some friends from his hometown in High Point, Curtis and Minnie Ware. Curtis worked as a superintendent in an apartment house in Manhattan and he and Minnie were well-off compared to most black folks who came up from the South, because they lived rent-free. Curtis and Minnie housed and fed whole families that had migrated north from High Point, but Dennis was too proud to look them up. Only after he was starving and sleeping in flophouses did he tell them, “I've got no money and noplace to go,” and they were angry with him. They said, “You should have come to us sooner.” They had four other friends and a sister from the South, all crammed in their apartment. At mealtimes there was a huge round table, filled with all kinds of southern cooking, baked goods, and cold drinks. After Dennis got on his feet and got a job at my Aunt Mary's leather factory and we started going out, he brought me by there and said, “I want y'all to meet a friend of mine,” and their eyes kind of popped out when I walked into the room
.

This was around 1940 and black and white didn't do what me
and Dennis were doing, walking around and such. Some folks did it, but it was all secret, or they were good-time, partying folks like Rocky's friends at Small's Paradise. But Dennis was a Christian man and a serious man and so were his friends. This was no joking matter to them
.

Well, once they managed to pull their jaws from off the floor, they said, “Our house is your house. Sit down and eat.” And I didn't have any problem with them, or with any of Dennis's family. They took me in with open hearts and made me one of their own; the only thing was it sometimes took a minute for them to get over the shock of seeing a black and white together—like Aunt Candis, Dennis's aunt. Aunt Candis was Dennis's favorite. She was the grandchild of slaves. When I first came to North Carolina and walked into her house, she said, “I just hope you excuse me for looking at you so hard, because I've never had a white person in my house before, and I've never been this close to a white person before.” And I said, “All right,” and she was my friend till she died. I'll never forget her as long as I live. She lived to be nearly a hundred. We wouldn't have made it without Aunt Candis. She came up from North Carolina and cared for y'all after Dennis died, because I was grieving and lost and I couldn't move. I couldn't move. She took the train all the way up to New York from North Carolina and took care of all eight of you, including you, James, and you weren't but a tiny child. She had never been to the city before. She'd never seen so much cement and so many tall buildings in her life. Your stepfather, he bought her a big gold watch after he married me and she left to go home to North Carolina. He said, “That's some woman,” and he was right. She was some woman
.

Well, Dennis was a solid, clean Christian man. He seemed to understand
me and see right through me. It wasn't long before I fell in love with him and after a few months we started thinking of getting married. Well
, I
was thinking of getting married. Dennis hemmed and hawed on it and finally he said, “Let's live together as husband and wife. We don't need the world to know we're married. The world isn't ready for us yet.” That excuse was okay for me—for the time being—so we rented a room in the Port Royal on 129th Street. We had a room in a three-bedroom apartment run by a lady named Mrs. Ellis. She and her husband had one bedroom and they rented the other two out and we shared the kitchen and bathroom
.

Just like that I left home. I left Bubeh's apartment one day and never came back. See, Bubeh was old and she had diabetes and couldn't control me, and it wasn't like my aunts were calling to check on me or anything like that. They had their own lives and they didn't care about me. I was grown, child. I wasn't no baby then. “Get out there and do your own thing,” that was their attitude. So I did my own thing. I moved in with Dennis and I didn't regret it. He continued to work for my Aunt Mary while I was living with him, and she never knew it
.

It was a scandal, don't you think? But I did miss my mother. I missed her terribly and would think of her and my sister Dee-Dee often. One day I had a feeling, I just wanted to talk to Mameh, even though I knew she didn't agree with how I was living, so I got a pile of coins together and I went outside our little room on 129th Street to a pay phone and called Suffolk. Since Dennis and I lived in a room in somebody's apartment, to use the phone you had to sit in the woman's living room. I couldn't call my mother and talk Yiddish on the lady's phone. It
seemed too odd to do. I was too embarrassed. So I went outside. It was a big deal to call long-distance in those days. When I called, Tateh picked up the line and he told me, “I don't know what you're doing up there, but your mother's sick and I need help with the store.” So I came back to Suffolk. I didn't want to, but since Mameh was sick, I needed to go back. I told Dennis I was going home for a few weeks and he said he would write and send me money, which he did
.

When I got to Virginia I told Tateh, “I'll help out for a while, but I'm not staying.” He ignored that. One of the first things he did was take me out to Portsmouth to one of his Jewish merchant friends, supposedly to “do business,” and introduce me to this man's son. He was pressing me to marry this fat guy whom I didn't even know. But I had no plans on that. I'd come home for Mameh. She was getting more ill. [She had become nearly blind in her left eye and would black out.] She wasn't a total cripple, not even when she was ill was she truly crippled. She would cook all day and also darn socks. She could chop fish, meat, and vegetables on a butcher-block cutting board—all with one hand. She was a good Jewish wife who kept true to her religious faith, and she let a lot roll off her back over the years because her husband wasn't worth a dime and she had no choice. The way Tateh treated her, they'd call her an “abused woman” today. Back then they just called you “wife.” And a man could do anything he wanted to his wife in the South. Especially if she's a Jew who's crippled and he's a so-called rabbi. He can yell at her, make fun of her, curse her, slap her. He can even go out with another woman right in front of her face
.

She tried to ignore that, too, as long as she could, and I don't think
she knew for a while because Tateh was always a little strange anyway, you know, and secretive. He never told us anything, like where he was born, or if he had any family or relatives. Every summer he'd disappear for a few weeks to Europe. He'd say, “I'm going to see my
landsman,”
and off he'd go on a steamer to France someplace
. “Landsman”
in Jewish is somebody from your hometown. We'd run the store in his absence, me, Dee-Dee, and Mameh. To this day I don't know exactly where he went, but a few weeks later he'd strut into the store, put down his bags, and say, “Where's my money?” We'd give it to him and he'd sit down and count it. Even before he took off his jacket, he'd count his money. He knew just how much he was supposed to earn a week, more or less. He was serious about his money
.

This big fat white lady started showing up at the store around 1939 or 1940. She had a behind as big as this living room. She lived not far from us up the road. Her husband was serving time in the county jail across the street for being drunk or some petty crime like that. She wasn't Jewish and she had four or five kids. Tateh would talk to her in the store and try to act like it was casual; then on Friday nights, the Sabbath, Mr. Rabbi would go out. Me, Dee-Dee, and Mameh would light the candles and say our prayers to begin the Sabbath, and Tateh would pack a bag of groceries and throw them in his car while Mameh watched him. He'd say to her in Yiddish, “I'm going out.” Then he'd say to me in English, “I won't be back till Monday. Open up the store Sunday morning.”

Then Mameh would ask me, “What did he say?”

“Nothing,” I'd say
.

Their marriage was falling apart and I was in the middle. I'd
translate, or not translate, between them. Tateh's affair became full-blown very quickly, the way I remember it. Before I knew it he'd moved her and her kids across the North Carolina line someplace about an hour's drive from Suffolk, and he once even dragged me down there and made me wait outside the woman's house while he ran inside. He started bothering me to get Mameh to give him a divorce, trying to talk to her through me. She refused, and I could understand her dilemma. She was in her early forties then, and there was nobody to look out for her. She was handicapped. She was sick. She had no other home. She was not giving him a divorce. Never. I don't think she had one friend down in Suffolk at that time either, not that I remember. Except for her mother she had nobody to turn to, because her sisters never cared for her that much. She was just a crippled thing to them, and they rarely wrote to her and never gave her any credit for the good things she had done. Their way of being kind to her was to take me in during the summers and by then they were done with me because I wasn't a child anymore. And here Tateh wanted to divorce her so he could marry his fat girlfriend, this woman who was bigger and taller than him and who wasn't even Jewish. A
goye.
It was all so disgusting I could hardly stand it
.