One More River

by Mary Glickman

  Mickey Moe realized that Laura Anne frightened him a little. Here was a woman outside his experience, a woman of vision with the resolve to achieve things. He had no idea what those things were and that was the scary part. But her passion filled up his heart, and he wanted more than anything to give her whatever she needed to be whomever she chose.

  This was a revelation. He knew the Negroes and other minorities were clamoring for rights they might have trouble handling. He was one of those boys who thought change should come for the colored folk. The way the men got blamed for every little thing that went missing or broke, the way their women had to be careful not to catch the wrong white man’s eye was downright sinful, but the Negroes could get themselves burned up in the process of everybody’s adjustment if change came too quickly. There were boys about, those Hicks in the southeast part of town for example, and their cousins, the Turners, who cheered like apes on a picnic whenever ugly news hit the papers or the TV about civil rights organizers gone missing or some poor old Negro found floatin’ in the river whupped and naked. By contrast, he hadn’t heard a whisper about any movement afoot to free women of their bonds. He wasn’t aware they had any. Womanhood looked to him like a free ride, at least until the babies came or there was a household to run. He knew plenty of females who worked alongside their men in shops and pasture, worked hard, too, and were good at what they did. To his mind, they were good at what they did because the responsibility and the worry didn’t lay heavy on their shoulders, which freed up their energies to help them focus on the task at hand. Now, there were obviously exceptions. His mama, for example, learned as a young widow to take charge, because her daddy was feeble, her brothers mostly off at war. There was no choice for her. She learned to grip her domain in a stranglehold, so you either did what Mama wanted or you choked to death. He’d escaped her fearsome ways in large part because he was the man of the house, but not his sisters. After schooling them in every nuance of domestic management, she’d picked out husbands for Sophie and Rachel Marie, threw the genders together, and dared them to defy her wisdom on the subject. They didn’t, although they did move out-of-state as soon as they could convince their husbands to do so and were seen only on the most important holidays. She chose to keep Eudora Jean to home as her companion, and look how that turned out. Never was a daughter so much under her mama’s thumb, thought Mickey Moe. That sister of mine is the complete opposite of my darlin’ Laura Anne, who can be intimidatin’, but who thrills me no end. She’s my belle, he thought as he nuzzled her neck, my very own belle. He decided right there while being stroked in a most pleasurable manner by the lady in question that his future bride could liberate herself to the limits of her imagination and he would not care, which was a provident decision.

  As luck would have it, Beadie had her canasta club that afternoon. No event, not even the appearance on her doorstep of her baby boy’s deranged paramour, could forestall canasta club. Better luck, it was not her week to host the game. Aunt Lucille picked her up at twelve-thirty o’clock, so she was out of the house not long after Laura Anne went for her lie-down. Before she left, she instructed her daughter to keep an eye on the couple during her absence to preserve the household’s honor.

  Not five minutes later, Eudora Jean found an urgent reason to leave, taking the maid with her. It was her first overt act of defiance in thirty years, and it felt good. She sped off in Mama’s car with Sara Kate installed in the front seat beside her. There was a smile on her face as broad as a moonbeam when that old man is at full on a clear night. She went to the hardware store and bought a plunger in case she needed proof of emergency. Since they’d need to feed Laura Anne later on, they drove next to the butcher where she obtained an extra cut of chicken breast and another of brisket and had the man pack the meat in lots of ice as she didn’t plan to go home directly. Instead, she took Sara Kate to the village to visit her people. Eudora Jean spent a good chunk of the afternoon drinking lemonade outside the shack of Annie Althea, the Negro dressmaker, while fanning herself with an out-of-date fashion magazine. There she chatted with the dressmaker’s help, young black girls every one, whenever they took a break from the heat inside. They talked about innocuous subjects, about the weather, which fabrics the trendsetters of Guilford were planning to use for fall, who had a new baby, and who had passed. Nonchalant, she inquired after old Bald Horace, asked was he still alive and where he might be living these days.

  Oh, he’s mostly alright, she was told, with Mama Jo Baylin takin’ care of him over to her house.

  It was the most fun Eudora Jean had in a dog’s age.

  Meanwhile, Mickey Moe and Laura Anne made love for the first time in a bed. After the front- and backseats of his LTD and a blanket spread on the riverbank, such luxury was enough to send them straight to paradise. In a kind of dizzy euphoria, they drank the ambrosia of each other’s kisses and inhaled the incense of each other’s sweat, their expressions dazed yet solemn as the grave. It was a stroke of luck they heard the car pull up outside. Laura Anne quickly got into her underclothes and daytime shift. She made it to the hallway eons before he did, but that was alright. It looked as if she’d never even come near his room and had just risen from her nap in Eudora Jean’s.

  After all their hurry, it was Eudora Jean who had returned home, not Mama as they feared.

  O Mick, his sister said, I found out where Bald Horace is. She told him where to go while Laura Anne freshened up a little.

  Sara Kate made the lovers sandwiches they could take with to eat on the ride to the village, as it was getting on in the afternoon and it wouldn’t be right to intrude on anyone’s home, black or white, too close to suppertime.

  Don’t worry, Eudora Jean said. I’ll tell Mama you’re showin’ Laura Anne the town.

  They set off.

  When they turned down the dusty dirt road that led to the village, Laura Anne said, Now it’s startin’ to look like home around here. I’ve been wonderin’ where you all kept the colored folk. In Greenville, there’s more of them than there are of us. Can’t sleepwalk without runnin’ into one. Why there must be four of them to every one of us, and black homes mixed in with the white on every street. Daddy’s always jokin’, what we gonna do if they decide to revolt? But here in Guilford, I didn’t see more’n five or six in my walk over to your house and all of them were in the bus station.

  He stopped the car in front of a battered mobile home, a 1957 Spartan Imperial with sheets of tin peaked over its roof to run off the rain. There was an expando porch at the rear. Tall herbs, their leaves feathered or spiked, sprouted from window boxes bolted through the main structure’s sides. Next to the front steps, there was a vegetable garden, green with spring growth under a chuppah’s worth of chicken wire as protection against night critters. There was a separate fenced-off area out the back where a pack of skinny dogs barked incessant welcome, and some thirty yards beyond that were the remains of the tar-paper shack Bald Horace lived in when Mickey Moe was a child. It looked blasted apart by a rogue tornado, scavenged, and left like a war memorial in a twisted heap. Mickey Moe ascended the cinder-block staircase with Laura Anne holding the hand he stuck behind him and knocked with the other.

  A tiny black woman answered, barefoot, dressed in a loose housecoat of carnation pink. Small as she was, her hands and feet were long and knobby. Her face was set with hard, sharp features carved into taut skin like initials on the trunk of a tree, etched there by a bundle of time and troubles. She swung the door open, stepped back, and dropped her gaze to study her caller’s boots. This was a habit she’d lately acquired when white folk came by in case they were kluckers come to pay a nasty call. It was an invitation to misery to look kluckers in the eye.

  Mama Jo, Mama Jo, her visitor said, look up, it’s me, Mickey Moe Levy, come to say hey to Bald Horace on a Tuesday afternoon.

  The old woman raised her head to see if this was true, if this was himself come knocking. When she saw indeed it was, her face broke into an expression of relief
, lighting up as if a handful of holiday sparklers had been set off all around her mean, dim doorway.

  Oh Mr. Levy, how wonderful it is to see you. How kind it is of you to call. How fine you look, how grown-up, fit, and strong! She was in mid-praise of the wonder of his jaw, which had not softened to the naked eye, not at all at all and he was how old nowadays? Twenty-five? My, my, and him so polished, so mature lookin’ when he interrupted in an effort to get her to cease her rambling flattery.

  Mama Jo, I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Miss Laura Anne Needleman, of Greenville.

  Now Laura Anne was in for the hyperbole bath.

  Why, this lovely gal is going to marry our Mr. Levy? Well, ain’t she just a princess fit for a prince, then. What eyes you have, child! They’re like the glitterin’ dawn of a newborn world.

  More of the same came out of her mouth until Laura Anne burned to clap her hand over it to get her to stop. What she did do was plaster a grin on her face then push herself past the other two to gain uninvited entry into the trailer. She craned her neck to take it all in, curious as if she had entered a museum of the exotic, studying what she could glimpse of the chopped-up rooms within. Not looking where she was going, she twisted her ankle in a pothole of linoleum warped and ripped through by the elements, artfully concealed beneath a strip of plywood and a scrap of rug. Mercifully, her stumble startled Mama Jo Baylin out of her litany, and an entirely different woman emerged, one who took charge of every situation she found herself in because without her help the world hurtled headlong to ruin.

  Lord Almighty, child, I might have told you to watch your step there if you’d given me a minute, she said, her irritation clear. You alright?

  I think so.

  The girl hobbled over to an easy chair, covered against dust and common use with a bedsheet, and sunk into it. An open Bible was on a reading table next to the chair’s arm. Above that a portrait of Jesus in a pose of sacral suffering hung on the wall, hovering forgiveness over her as if she represented the whole of reckless humanity. Mama Jo hurried to the icebox, wrapped a handful of frosty shards in a towel, then sat on a footstool in front of the chair. She removed Laura Anne’s shoe and placed her foot in her lap, pressing the frigid towel against her ankle.

  Please, I’m sorry. You don’t have to do that. I’m alright, I’m just havin’ terrible luck with my feet today, Laura Anne begged, genuinely uncomfortable from the woman’s ministrations, but Mama Jo ignored her. She bent over her foot and examined it from side to side, up and down.

  You’ll live, she said, you’ll walk upright out of here. But set with me for a bit like this for safety’s sake.

  Mickey Moe was left standing anxiously in the middle of the room. May I? he asked, gesturing toward the couch and, gaining permission, sat himself down.

  Mama Jo, I’m sorry to trouble you this way. Our visit is obviously ill-starred. But I was lookin’ for Bald Horace. I had a mind to chat with him about the past.

  Mama Jo’s chin tilted upward in a prideful manner.

  Well, he ain’t here right now. Every Tuesday afternoon, I take him over to the hospital for his treatment. We’re so regular, they don’t even make him wait much. I pick him up after five. Then once he’s home, he needs his rest.

  Disappointment flooded him. The prospect of waiting another day for an interview with the man who could hold the key to his happiness was a torment. Impatience pricked his memory. A long-ago image of that sometimes wife of Bald Horace, Aurora Mae, who claimed to know his daddy better than anyone, came to his mind. The thought of her lit his imagination afire. Yes! he thought. Yes! Aurora Mae would be the key to everything, he just knew it. There could be no doubt. He swallowed his excitement and asked, as politely, as he could manage,

  And Bald Horace’s wife, is she still around here?

  The woman’s brow creased with puzzlement.

  Bald Horace got no wife I ever saw.

  Sure he does. Great big tall woman. Wide, too. Aurora Mae’s her name, I believe.

  No, no. Don’t know anyone like that.

  Mickey Moe’s heart sank; the fire fizzled and smoked. His best lead was lost to time. It never occurred to him that Mama Jo might lie.

  They stayed another quarter hour, making pleasantries. When they were ready to leave, Laura Anne got up and put weight on her foot without pain, but Mama Jo insisted on a treatment of herbs plucked fresh from one of her window boxes. She placed them in a ring around the girl’s ankle to assure that swelling didn’t kick in later then secured all with a plaited rag of haint blue to keep evil spirits away. Mickey Moe told her they’d be back the next morning.

  When they got home, Mama was waiting in her front room with her mouth in a twist. Where’d you get that? she asked straight off, pointing to the rag on the girl’s ankle.

  Sara Kate never hesitated to bedevil Miss Beadie if she could get away from it. She piped up from a doorway. I put that on ’er, Miss Beadie. I thought it best if she was stuffin’ those poor li’l feet back into her shoes so quick.

  And it was so very kind of you, I thank you so much, Laura Anne quickly said, with a nod of gratitude to her co-conspirator.

  Mama held up a hand to silence them. She had a pronouncement to make. She’d decided that Laura Anne Needleman could stay in the house for two nights and two nights only, so’s they could get to know each other, but only on condition that she phone her parents immediately to let them know where she was.

  Laura Anne did so.

  Hello, Mama? She said into the phone as cousin Patricia Ellen snickered on the other end of the line but not loud enough for the hovering Beadie Sassaport Levy to hear. Why deception is easy, Laura Anne thought, when in the name of a good cause.

  Oh yes, the girl thought she was the most clever woman alive; the strongest, most determined, invincible female ever to walk the streets of Greenville and Guilford. She spent her time under Beadie’s roof with her chin held high, a demeanor of unshakable self-confidence coloring everything she said or did. The phrase noblesse oblige, a phrase she’d learned from the educational channel on the TV, resounded through her head whenever she spoke with her future mother-in-law. She related to that woman with a winning humility that barely hit skin-deep but worked wonders nonetheless. For two days, she proved to Mickey Moe that she could be a bulwark of strength for him, a wellspring of support, a partner in arms. For two days, their plans went extraordinarily well.

  And then her daddy showed up.

  VII

  Memphis, Tennessee–Saint Louis, Missouri, 1918–1923

  BERNARD QUIT SCHOOL WHEN HE was thirteen. His grandmama made sure he had something resembling a bar mitzvah that year. The part that stuck was not putting his hand on the Torah while the traveling rabbi read for him, nor the sugar cake they all ate afterward, nor was it the astonishing sight of Caroline Levy up, washed, and dressed before the middle of the afternoon sitting in the front row of the Memphis synagogue with an alert expression in her eyes. The part that stuck warmed his heart so much his toes curled inside his shoes. Now you are a man, the rabbi said. A man! Bernard thought, a man! A man gets to go wherever he likes, make money, and keep it. A man doesn’t have to fetch beer for Mama’s friends or clean their boots. A man doesn’t get cuffed on the ear unless he goes lookin’ for it. A man kicks the man who kicks him back. Sweet dang. I am now a man, and now I am free.

  The Monday after the ceremony, Bernard went to school to tell Miss Maple good-bye. She did not try to dissuade him. She gave him a good hug and wished him well. When she did, he clung to her longer than was manly and walked away with something hard in his throat. He went directly to his grandparents’ store and told them his plan to go to the levee and get a job on a riverboat, any kind of job, stoker, swabbie, pot scraper. It didn’t matter as long as he saw a wage and some of the world ’til he could figure out what to do with his life. Grandmama moaned and groaned and beat her chest, but there wasn’t much else she could do about his decision. Boys younger than he went out on their own at tha
t time. Granddaddy slipped him ten dollars on the q.t. If he was careful, the old man pointed out, it was a sum that would get him by for a time. He didn’t have to take the first backbreaking, mind-numbing piece of work that came along. He could study things around him, ponder a bit before enslaving himself to a cruel taskmaster. Grandaddy also gave him a parcel of wisdom.

  Son, he said. Don’t forget you’re a Jew. Things is easy for us most times here, that is true. Especially when compared to up North or in the old countries. But when there’s trouble, folks always seek to remind you of what you are. You can bet on it. So don’t forget. They won’t.

  It wasn’t so long before that Leo Frank had been lynched by a mob in Marietta, Georgia, after Governor Slaton commuted his death sentence for the murder of little Mary Phagan, a charge for which he’d clearly been railroaded. The incident sent a shiver down the spines of every Jew in the South, including young Bernard’s. He shook his head as gravely as any man and promised he would not forget he was a Jew.

  Grandmama meanwhile packed him a kerchief full of food for the road. She knotted it, then stuck a sprig of sage underneath the knot for luck.

  Big Bette used to do that for me when I was a child, she explained. I had to walk an awful ways through the woods to the only schoolhouse in two counties. She swore on all her ghosts that li’l piece of green gave the innocent a heap of protection. She’d put it in my lunch and after I ate, I’d stick it in my drawers like she told me. That, she’d say, is where a young girl requires fortification. I tell you, it itched some, but nothin’ out there ever hurt me. So I suspect she was right on all counts. You, when you finish up what you got to et in this bundle, you stick it, I would think, in your shirt near the heart.