The Color of Water (7 page)

We were right at the intersection where the road from Norfolk and Portsmouth came into Suffolk. That intersection always had a lot of traffic on it. I don't mean traffic like you see today. In those days, two or three cars was traffic. Or people on foot. Or farmers leading mules hauling peanut crops on a wagon. Or soldiers on trucks from the bases in Norfolk. Or men in chain gangs. People got about any way they could in those days
.

I was sitting behind the counter of the store one afternoon and a car full of men wearing white sheets drove past. They had white hats covering their faces, with two little eyeholes cut out so they could see. They were driving those old black tin lizzietype cars, the Model A types, with two men in the open section up front and two in the cab section behind. Car after car of them drove by, so many it was like a parade. We came from behind the counter and stood outside the store to look at them. “What the heck is that?” Dee-Dee asked. “I don't know,” I said
.

That was the Ku Klux Klan riding through
.

I didn't know the Ku Klux Klan from Cracker Jacks, but our black customers slipped out and dashed into their homes as soon as they caught sight of them. They kept out of sight and low key, very low key when the Klan showed up. The Klan would ride right up Main Street in broad daylight and no one did a thing about it. It seemed to me death was always around Suffolk. I was always hearing about somebody found hanged or floating in the wharf. And we were uneasy too, my family, because in the South there was always a lot of liquor and drinking, and
Jews weren't popular. Tateh kept a loaded pistol underneath the counter next to the cashier. He cleaned that gun more than he cleaned his own trousers, and he had it ready for anyone who tried to fool with his money. He trusted no one. He thought black folks were always trying to steal from him. He'd sit my mother next to the door and say in Yiddish, “Watch the
shvartses.”
He was robbing these folks blind, charging them a hundred percent markup on his cheap goods, and he was worried about them stealing from him
!

I was always worried that Tateh's gun would go off and accidentally kill him while he was cleaning it. Although I was afraid of him, I didn't want anything to happen to him. We had a neighbor, Mrs. Brown, a white woman who had a puffed-up middle finger from some infection she had gotten—in those days, folks got infections and lost their fingers and teeth like it was lunch. In fact, my mother and father both had false teeth. My mother got ‘em first, and later ol' Tateh, he snuck off and got him a pair. He barked an order at me one day, something like, “Pick up those soap bars,” and I looked in his mouth and saw a brand-new set of white chompers. I said to myself, “I knew he was sounding funny.” Anyhow, Mrs. Brown was one of the few white folks in Suffolk that was nice to me. She had a daughter named Marilyn and a son named Simon. Simon was an alcoholic who used to come teetering home at night. He got killed by a drunk who climbed onto his porch and drove a knife down his neck. Marilyn, she worked downtown and her boss was cleaning his pistol in his office and accidentally shot himself to death, and Marilyn had to step over his body to get out of there. That shook her up bad, and it shook me up too, because Tateh was always cleaning his gun, and if it went
off and accidentally killed him I sure wasn't gonna step over his body to get out. I'd jump out the window first and he'd have to lay there and gather flies till somebody else got him. I never did like dead people and I never did like guns. That's why I never let my children play with toy guns
.

But in those days, people used guns to hunt and live. This was the thirties, the depression, and folks were poor and they used guns and fishing rods to survive. If you got sick, God help you because you just died. Tuberculosis and double pneumonia were raging in those days, and Mameh had a great fear one of her kids would catch that, because in Europe one of her brothers died in a flu epidemic. But after we got that store going we made money and could afford a doctor. Black folks, our customers, they'd come into the store and buy BC powder, fill up on that, that was their doctor. That was the old powder you bought and took like aspirin. It was a brand name. BC powder. It cost twenty-five cents and came in a little blue-and-white packet. Folks said it made them feel better and pepped them up. Of course it had cocaine in it back then, but folks didn't know that. They'd take BC for any ailment. In fact, if somebody came in buying too much of it for his wife or child, you got concerned, because somebody taking that much BC was mighty sick and probably dying. Folks got sick and died back in them days like it was a new dance coming out. Plop! Dead as a doornail
.

I wish some of these black kids today could see how the black folks in Suffolk lived then. Lord, you wouldn't believe it. Shacks with no running water, no foundations, no bathrooms, outhouses. No paved roads, no electricity. Sometimes Mameh and I would walk down those dirt roads
behind the store and so many of those roads dead-ended into woods. That's how life was for blacks down there. A dead end
.

They didn't complain about it. Who would they complain to? The cops? The cops wouldn't ride back there, you crazy? They were scared to or didn't want to. But what always struck me about black folks was that every Sunday they'd get dressed up so clean for church I wouldn't recognize them. I liked that. They seemed to have such a purpose come Sunday morning. Their families were together and although they were poor, they seemed happy. Tateh hated black people. He'd call the little children bad names in Yiddish and make fun of their parents, too. “Look at them laughing,” he'd say in Yiddish. “They don't have a dime in their pocket and they're always laughing.” But he had plenty money and we were all miserable. My brother Sam, he couldn't take it and ran off as soon as he got big enough
.

Sam was like a shadow. He was short and stocky, with a heavy head of hair, thick eyebrows, and heavy arms and legs. Because he was two years older than me, he had plenty power over me and Dee-Dee, yet he didn't use his older-brother status over us. He was quiet and submissive. Mameh doted on him, but Tateh put the fear of God into him. Every evening after supper Tateh would sit me and Sam down and make us study the Old Testament. Dee-Dee was too young for that, but me and Sam weren't. He'd read the words to us and make us repeat them back to him. The book of Ecclesiastes was Tateh's favorite. “I said in my heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked; for there is a time for every purpose and every work.” That's Ecclesiastes. I still know those verses, but I learned them out of…not out of love for God but just out of
…
what?…I don't know. Duty. My father was a rabbi, right? Shouldn't his kids know the Old Testament? We hated those sessions. Tateh had no patience, and he'd often stop you in the middle of your verse to scold or slap you if you showed disinterest in the Bible. Sometimes the scolding made you feel worse than the hitting. “You're stupid. You're nothing but a fool. A sinner. You're unredeemed before God,” he'd say. Sam was his main target. He'd make Sam sit in the corner for hours and read Hebrew. He never showed any love toward his son
.

You know, any rabbi who visited town, we'd have to put him up and feed him. Tateh would say, “You go show such and such around town,” and we'd have to drag this old rabbi, some old fart, around and do what he told us. We hated that. Of course the alternative was Tateh would pull his belt off and skin you alive
.

I liked to play dominoes with Sam when we were little, but as he got bigger, he had no time to play. Tateh worked Sam harder than me and Dee-Dee. Sam worked like a man when he was a boy. We'd open up the store at seven
A.M.
and Sam would saw lumber, cut ice, stack the meats out, stock the shelves, feed the cow in the backyard, all before we left for school. He hated that store. After school he went right to work. When he wanted to get out of working in the store, he wouldn't show up after school until almost dark, and Tateh would scold and punish him by making him work even longer hours. Sam had poor grades in school and low self-esteem from all that treatment. He had few friends because he was shy, and even if he did make a friend, we weren't allowed to have gentile friends. That was forbidden
, aveyre.

He got bar mitzvahed when he was thirteen. They put a picture of
him and Tateh in the paper and Mameh was proud of him. That was the only time I ever remember seeing him smile, because he made his mother happy. Then a couple of years later he ran off. This was around 1934. He just left home and never came back. He was about fifteen or so. He went to Chicago and wrote Mameh a letter from there. The letter was written in English, which Mameh didn't read or speak, but I read it for her. It said, “I am fine. I got a job working as a clerk in a store.” He got a job working for Montgomery Ward or J. C. Penney, one of those stores. He didn't know a soul in Chicago and made it there on his own. Mameh was beside herself with that letter. “Write him back,” she told me. “Write him back now and tell him to come home.” So I did. I wrote Sam and told him to come home, but he never did come home and I never did see him again
.

He joined the army and got killed in World War II, my brother Sam. I didn't find out what happened to him till long after the fact, when your daddy died in 1957. I had seven kids and was pregnant with you and I called one of my aunts to ask for help and she said, “Your brother died in the war.” I asked her what happened, and she said, “Stay out of our lives. You've been out. Stay out.” And she hung up on me, so there was nothing I could do for Sam but pray for him
.

Mommy's house was orchestrated chaos and as the eighth of twelve children, I was lost in the sauce, so to speak. I was neither the prettiest, nor the youngest, nor the brightest. In a house where there was little money and little food, your power was derived from who you could order around. I was what Mommy called a “Little Kid,” one of five young'uns, microscopic dots on the power grid of the household, thus fit to be tied, tortured, tickled, tormented, ignored, and commanded to suffer all sorts of indignities at the hands of the “Big Kids,” who didn't have to go to bed early, didn't believe in the tooth fairy, and were appointed denizens of power by Mommy, who of course wielded ultimate power.

My brothers and sisters were my best friends, but when
it came to food, they were my enemies. There were so many of us we were constantly hungry, scavenging for food in the empty refrigerator and cabinets. We would hide food from one another, squirreling away a precious grilled cheese or fried bologna sandwich, but the hiding places were known to all and foraged by all and the precious commodity was usually discovered and devoured before it got cold. Entire plots were hatched around swiping food, complete with double-crossing, backstabbing, intrigue, outright robbery, and gobbled evidence. Back in the projects in Red Hook, before we moved to Queens, Mommy would disappear in the morning and return later with huge cans of peanut butter which some benevolent agency had distributed from some basement area in the housing projects. We'd gather around the cans, open them, and spoon up the peanut butter like soup, giggling as our mouths stuck closed with the gooey stuff. When Mommy left for work, we dipped white bread in syrup for lunch, or ate brown sugar raw out of the box, which was a good hunger killer. We had a toaster that shocked you every time you touched it; we called our toast
shock
toast and we got shocked so much our hair stood on end like Buckwheat's. Ma often lamented the fact that she could not afford to buy us fruit, sometimes for weeks at a time, but we didn't mind. We spent every penny we had on junk food. “If you eat that stuff your teeth will drop out,” Mommy warned. We ignored her. “If you chew gum and swallow it, your behind will close
up,” she said. We listened and never swallowed gum. We learned to eat standing up, sitting down, lying down, and half asleep, because there were never enough places at the table for everyone to sit, and there was always a mad scramble for Ma's purse when she showed up at two a.m. from work. The cafeteria at the Chase Manhattan Bank where she worked served dinner to the employees for free, so she would load up with bologna sandwiches, cheese, cakes, whatever she could pillage, and bring it home for the hordes to devour. If you were the first to grab the purse when she got home, you ate. If you missed it, well, sleep tight.

The food she brought from work was delicious, particularly when compared to the food she cooked. Mommy could not cook to save her life. Her grits tasted like sand and butter, with big lumps inside that caught in your teeth and stuck in your gums. Her pancakes had white goo and egg shells in them. Her stew would send my little brother Henry upstairs in disgust. “Prison stew,” he'd sniff, coming back a few minutes later to help himself before the masses devoured it. She had little time to cook anyway. When she got home from work she was exhausted. We'd come downstairs in the morning to find her still dressed and fast asleep at the kitchen table, her head resting on the pages of someone's homework, a cold cup of coffee next to her sleeping head. Her housework rivaled her cooking. “I'm the worst housekeeper I've ever seen,” she declared, and that was no
lie. Our house looked like a hurricane hit it. Books, papers, shoes, football helmets, baseball bats, dolls, trucks, bicycles, musical instruments, lay everywhere and were used by everyone. All the boys slept in one room, girls slept in another, but the labels “boys' room” and “girls' room” meant nothing. We snuck into each other's rooms by night to trade secrets, argue, commiserate, spy, and continue chess games and monopoly games that had begun days earlier. Four of us played the same clarinet, handing it off to one another in the hallway at school like halfbacks on a football field. Same with coats, hats, sneakers, clean socks, and gym uniforms. One washcloth was used by all. A solitary toothbrush would cover five sets of teeth and gums. We all swore it belonged to us personally. Our furniture consisted of two beautiful rocking chairs that Ma bought from Macy's because on television she saw her hero President John F. Kennedy use one to rock his kids, a living room couch, and an assortment of chairs, tables, dressers, and beds. The old black-and-white TV set worked—sometimes. It wasn't high on Mommy's list of things to fix. She called it “the boob tube” and rarely allowed us to watch it. We didn't need to.