A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by Her Bastard Son

by Clancy Sigal

  That animal Sigal—my dad.

  Jennie was single and thirty-one when she had me. As usual, my father was not around at the time.

  There is some dispute where I was born. My birth certificate indicates Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, but my cousin Esther—who married a semipro wrestler who fought the Japanese in the Aleutians (and who’s the daughter of Jennie’s favorite brother Arkeh)—told me, “That Chicago certificate is a phony. Your father paid somebody off, or scared somebody into faking it. He knew how to manage such things. You were born in Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn. I was there. Why else were you and your mother in Brighton Beach?” Then Esther clammed up.

  At some point, I was placed in an institution for homeless boys, whose high wooden fence and regular meals calmed me down for a while. When Jennie eventually came to claim me, I screamed bloody murder and grabbed ahold of the iron bedstead of my cot and begged the other orphans to rescue me. Matron had to pry my fingers loose before turning me over to Jennie, who got down on her knees to me.

  “Aren’t you glad to see me?” she begged.

  I stared at her coldly. Why was she taking me away from my friends?

  “I want to stay here.” I squirmed out of her embrace.

  Ma let go, looked at me calmly, and offered a bribe: “Let’s take a train.”

  “Is it a Pullman?” I asked.

  “Of course! And we’ll never get off.”

  “Promise?” I loved trains more than anything.

  She nodded, got to her feet, took me by the hand, bade goodbye to Matron, and hustled us off to the railroad station for what turned out to be the first of mysterious stopovers in Buffalo, Detroit, Flint, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Cape Girardoux, Cairo, Winston-Salem to …

  3 Jennie, Dowun Sowuth

  1931—Frankenstein a box-office boffo. Scottsboro Boys framed on a rape charge in Alabama. German millionaires support the 800,000-strong Nazi party, edging Hitler to power.

  WHEN I WAS A little boy Jennie and I spent a lot of time riding soot-filled railroad coaches, sleeping cradled against each other on wicker-lattice reversible seats in our home on wheels. Lackawanna, Pennsylvania Central, Virginia & Blue Mountain, Central Pacific, Georgia Southern. The names on the passing freight cars rolling by helped teach me to read as I picked out the letters—B&O, MOP, OK, SAP. Best of all, when we had the money, I loved “going Pullman,” scampering up the hooked ladder to an upper berth in a thrilling ascent second only to looping the loop in a wartime Spad like my cartoon-strip hero, Smilin’ Jack. Warm and cozy, a cocoon of crisp clean white sheets and pillow slips (smelling faintly of Clorox) and tightly tucked hospital-corner brown blanket with the “property of the Pullman Company” logo on it, no bedbugs, ticks, or cockroaches, the noise of the wheels as soothing as a South Sea breeze to Tahitians. Back then, all “colored” porters—members of A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Railway Porters—were called “George,” businessmen smelling of Barbasol and wearing black-white-and-brown wingtip shoes lounged over manhattans in the rear observation car, and the Baldwin steam locomotives up front actually did go clickety-clack on iron tracks in the fastness of the American night.

  There is hardly a third-rate hotel we didn’t stay at in that broad lonely landscape trisecting the Great Plains, Memphis, and New York. The concept of child care was unknown. When Jennie arrived in a new town on one of her mystic missions—now I know it was clandestine organizing for the United Textile Workers or a sister union—she’d often deposit me with a passing stranger in the squalid (but to me glamorous) potted-palm lobbies of flophouses that flaunted names like Excelsior or Grand or Regal. I’d happily loll about all day on my own—sly, observant, lonely, chattering a mile a minute to the bell captain and the Prince Albert cigar stand girl, or gaping at the “prossies” who sometimes adopted me as a mascot, or annoying the “drummers” (traveling salesmen), and scooting out from under the flat feet of the omnipresent house dick—an off duty or discharged-for-cause local cop. My red and black $2 tin toy roulette wheel—a sort of 1931 Nintendo—and I were inseparable.

  Blue curling smoke from Five Cent Mild & Mellow cigars and the prossies’ Woolworth’s perfume was a heady mixture to a chubby, chattery five-year-old who had already seen his mama hit upside the head by a police billy club and knew what an “agotiation” was and would soon spend time in jail alongside his mother.

  Being a labor organizer’s son was a kick. I was part of something bigger than myself even if I didn’t understand what it was. And there were those secrets, the elixir of childhood. My main responsibility was to keep my mouth shut, because one “misspoke” from me, my mother advised, and our house of cards could come crashing down. There were strict rules: my little overnight satchel was never to be completely unpacked; lies told to strangers were relative; you told the truth to landlords, policemen, and bill collectors at your peril; you didn’t arrive in a new town without a “local contact,” usually an undercover union sympathizer—someone to guide you through the human geography and point out company stooges. Stool pigeons—squealers—were to be identified and stepped around like sidewalk snot.

  Strategies for coping with the vertigo of terror you had to figure out for yourself. You showed no fear, ever, under any circumstance.

  Confusion was my element, chaos almost comforting. If Dad suddenly showed up, he and Ma would toss me back and forth between them depending on who won the argument. Before we reached Chattanooga and grumbling a bit, Dad took me along in a borrowed LaSalle roadster to Flint, Detroit, and Cleveland when he made a circuit of the barbers, bakers, and Hebrew Trades hat blockers, candy-makers, and laundry workers he had earlier set up in union locals and from whom he collected dues (twenty cents a week). In a new town, he liked to use me as part of his sales pitch, nobody—including off duty cops—objecting when I accompanied Dad inside a smoky tavern. When the guys at the bar chuckled over his cute kid, Dad used the opening to talk up the union. (“This child is no dummy. He can tell the difference between a living wage and what you’re getting….”) I loved these times with him, including when he got into a fight with a man twice his size in a saloon and knocked him down with his first punch. I blinked the way Brandon de Wilde does in Shane when Alan Ladd shows him how to fire a six-gun—holy cow, that’s my dad!

  But then he had to hit the road again without me and I went back to being Ma’s boy.

  Chattanooga, in the far southeast corner of Tennessee, was Bessie Smith’s hometown. Despite the bad times, it was a thriving industrial city, built on and around hills, with a tense labor and race history. Everyone was armed, even the streetcar conductors, who wore pistols in braided holsters to enforce the rigid color line. Bayonet-slashing National Guardsmen and imported scabs were routinely called out to strikes that erupted all over the nearby textile towns—Erwin, Harriman, Kingsport—whose workers, down from the hollows, were just as likely to shoot back. This was Bible Belt country where a back-to-the-past evangelist like Billy Sunday was a bigger draw than Clark Gable, “blue laws” were strictly upheld, and African-Americans careful to be off the streets after sundown. The first trial ever broadcast nationwide, the sensational Scopes “monkey trial” with Clarence Darrow arguing for science against creationist and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, had been held a few miles away in a sweltering Dayton, Tennessee, courtroom.

  About the time Ma and I came to Chattanooga the local newspapers were full of the Scottsboro case in which nine young blacks just across the Alabama state line were falsely accused of raping two white hookers. Sam Liebowitz, the defense attorney, would be chased out of town by the prosecutor screaming “Jew lawyer!” at him.

  Unpacking our bags in Chattanooga Jennie suggested it might not be a propitious time to reveal that we were Jewish and that I had been named for Clarence Darrow.

  It didn’t matter. I was five, and in love with Chattanooga.

  I, Clarence Demarest.

  We took fake names whatever new town we moved to.
Depending on circumstance, I was Carl, Caspar, Caleb, Calvin, Charles, or Christopher—anything with a “C,” I guess, to hold onto a faint shred of my own identity and, through mine, to honor Jennie’s father Kalman, who had been killed in a beer wagon accident. (Several of my maternal cousins—Coleman, Clem, Carl—have “C” first names.) Surnames for us Ma chose playfully at random from a roster of Hollywood B-list actors; at the moment, she was fond of the Paramount comic William Demarest.

  Was all this name changing really necessary? In the abstract, probably not. Somewhere in the South there must have been Jewish organizers who kept their real names. But over time and road trips, it had become second nature for Ma and me, a dodge to maximize safety, a travel accessory, almost. I thought, very cool.

  It was a game of shadows, fictitious trails, bogus resumés improvised on the spot or well rehearsed depending on the location. Jennie was a lollapalooza liar; labor organizers, especially below the Mason-Dixon Line, lived that way then. If either of us made a slip, Ma repeatedly warned, there would be “consequences.” That house of cards again. On this particular stop, in Chattanooga, I’d be attending a mainly Baptist public school at the top of Pine Street where we rented a room. The school, like most local businesses, closed on General Robert E. Lee’s birthday. The Civil War was the War between the States. Ma’s instructions were clear and precise. “Practice your new name. Don’t argue. Don’t talk religion. Stay out of fights. And smile, always smile.”

  “Couldn’t I be called Tom for once?” I wheedled—for cowboy star Tom Mix. Jennie replied that Tom wasn’t a Jewish name. “But we’re gentiles now,” I reminded her. “Forget it, Mr. Demarest, Esquire,” she said giving me her famous “no more arguments” look. “Go out, make friends—and keep smiling,” she snapped.

  The conspiracy of the necessary lie between us endured beyond the era of the small towns we lived in or passed through. Later, as we settled in Chicago—repeating in various neighborhoods the restless pattern we had established in the industrial South and elsewhere, moving always moving, from street to street, room to room—the secret complicity between us grew into a habit. What once had been explicit and unambiguous—taking new names, disguises, surviving by denial—became implied, ingrained, as we both operated on the same silent assumption: Wherever we went, we would always be waiting for Dad to show up. This was unquestioned. He was The Man.

  So that was The Deal. If Jennie did not insanely scream or break down—not her style—I was to follow her example by showing zero fear or anxiety no matter what fix we found ourselves in. If I saw her being whupped by a cop (Flint), I was to look the other way and pretend she was a stranger; if we had to make a midnight flit down a hotel fire escape (Wilkes-Barre), I was not to pester her later with “why?”. Today, I’m amazed when my son Joe confesses, “Poppy, I’m scared” of this or that. Unthinkable for Jennie and me, preposterous if Dad was around. In our improvised home movie I played the Tough Guy, with style; she played the Gun Moll, with class; Dad, in those rare times with us, prowled like a caged animal, growling, biting his tongue so hard I feared he’d get lockjaw, a werewolf without a moon to howl to.

  Nigger nigger

  Pull a trigger

  Up and down the Trissy river

  Snotty nose

  Raggy clothes

  That’s the way the nigger goes

  is the first poem I ever learned. At five, my best friends Billy Wilson, J. C., and Cecil taught me that poem and how to whistle “Dixie” between the spaces in my front teeth and how to bait a rusty safety pin with earthworms and tongue-wet lumps of moldy bread to catch minnows when we went pole fishing. All that Chattanooga year, Ma let me run loose and wild and barefoot, chewing three-leaf clover for its salty taste on the banks of the “Trissy” river below Lookout Mountain, or schmucking downtown alone to goggle at the passersby who took no notice of a raggedy-ass child with no shoes but lots of freckles (like Ma). Almost every summer day, I took the two-cents-a-ride cable car up the incline to the mountaintop, where old Confederate veterans sat on benches gazing out across the mist-shrouded mountains, past Missionary Ridge and Pulpit Rock; you could see all the way into Georgia and Alabama out toward Sand Mountain. A kid could hunt the battlefield for minié balls that were sunk (behind wire mesh) in the oaks still standing from the time when Hooker’s Army of the Cumberland, with their Parrotts cannons and bayonets, had charged uphill and carried the day against Bragg’s dug-in rifle pits during Grant’s Great Siege of Chattanooga.

  When Jennie enrolled me in a Baptist Sunday school I ran home thrilled because teacher picked me to play Joseph with his Coat of Many Colors in the Easter play. “Do we believe in Jesus Christ? Do we, do we?” I begged. Ma took out a Pall Mall and slowly lit it, blowing a smoke ring that hung in the air for what seemed hours.

  “Yes,” she decided for safety’s sake.

  I demanded, “Did Jews kill Jesus like they say?”

  She turned away. “Not all the precincts are in,” she replied.

  Chattanooga was a boys’ paradise and the days were never full enough. Jennie’s “cover” as a clandestine union organizer was clerking at the grocery store kitty-corner from our Pine Street room, both store and house owned by our landlord, another uncle, this time “Uncle Schwartz.” He was Jennie’s “local contact,” a thickset, hairy, taciturn man with a permanently stubbled chin. For the first and only time, I had my own room. In the middle of the night Ma would go somewhere else to sleep but she would always be there in the morning, in bed with me or on a cot alongside. Every day, before school, I waited for the mailman to bring a letter from Dad, who wrote now and then, and I’d tear off the corner of the envelope embossed by a two-cent Minuteman stamp so I could start a collection. I’d stopped asking Ma when he’d come for us.

  Our next-door neighbor was the Hamilton County sheriff, a kindly old soul with a white handlebar mustache who seemed to spend the whole day on his front porch rocking in his chair and bidding hello to passing townspeople. He always had a friendly word for Clarence Demarest.

  The game of shadows bothered me not in the slightest. I wanted it to go on forever, except that the shadows kept changing shape and sometimes it was hard to know what was real and what was not.

  One day on my way home from school, Uncle Schwartz was waiting for me outside his store and invited me in and lifted me atop an ice cream freezer, refrigerating my butt, and for the first time kissed me. Until now, we’d kept miles between us. He said he’d keep on kissing me until I stopped wiping his slobber away with the back of my hand. “I’ll give you a Fudgsicle,” he promised, if only I would speak on his behalf to my mother, to whom he wanted to propose marriage. “I’ll be good to her,” Schwartz vowed. “You be sure to tell her that. I’ll give you as many Fudgsicles you want. What kind of husband leaves his wife and child? Go tell her.” Slobber smooch smooch. I kicked and squirmed out of his grasp and, grabbing the Fudgsicle, ran home across the street and said no such thing to my mother. Dad would come today, tomorrow, soon.

  But she found out about the other thing soon enough.

  Billy Wilson, my best friend, Huck to my Tom, lived up the street in a nice house behind a picket fence. He was the boss bully of my pack of wild Chattanooga five-to-six-year-olds that included my other best friends, toothpick-thin Cecil and J. C., so-called maybe because he was the hawk-spitting image of the adorable movie juvenile, Jackie Cooper. We four played truant all the time, rambling around downtown in our bare feet and hooking rides on the tramcars, where the motormen wore live-round pistols, or lying in open spaces staring into the smoky sun to blind ourselves. Longing for acceptance, I learned to talk “suthin” by copying their thick border accents; “spoke race” like them; and fearlessly baited my safety pin hook with worms we found on creek banks. Following their lead, I handled spiders, bugs, and lizards like a Conjure Man; today, they repel me.

  Then it happened. Maybe there was next-door gossip about the black working women who came to our back porch in the middle of
the night for long talks with Ma. The custom was that African-Americans always used rear entrances of white folks and never stayed after supper or sundown, whichever came first. Ma’s black friends, probably hosiery mill workers, came after supper. She’d let them in, then step outside as if breathing in fresh air but really to see which neighbors were spying. She would go back inside and they’d sit around the kitchen table, the black women not washing or cooking but speaking in low, urgent tones. A strict rule was that I wasn’t to come into the kitchen at such times, but of course I peeked. I paid it all little mind, but I reckon now that Ma had just about the most dangerous job there was in the South at the time—a white woman helping organize black women into a union. The timing was right, I’ve looked it up, Congress had just passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act outlawing the infamous “yellow dog contract” that required workers to agree as a condition of employment never to join a union. So the working-class South was rising again.

  It so happened that one day Billy Wilson challenged me to a wrestle in the school yard. You were in only if you fought to stay in, but because Jennie had ordered me never to get into fights I fled home chased by Billy leading a posse of J. C. and Cecil yelling, “Sis-see! Yellabelly!” And of course the dreaded epithet Ma had done so much to avoid, “Nigger lover!”

  From then on for days afterwards, Billy, as if licensed by God himself, bashed, battered, hammered, thumped, slapped, pinched, and tripped me whenever he had a mind to. In class he shook his fist at me, making my stomach flop. His betrayal upset me more than his threats. At home I vomited, got constipated, ran a fever, and, finally, chose death before dishonor. Tom Mix—my cowboy hero and gosh I wished I could ride away on his Wonder Horse Tony—could not do otherwise. One afternoon after school I hid in a passageway between two houses, a half-brick in my hand, and smashed it down on Billy’s head as he passed, chasing him like a devil-hound and cracking his skull again and again with the brick and making the blood gush until he stumbled sobbing through his front gate. When I ambled home to Uncle Schwartz’s house, Jennie was pale as death, she’d got the news faster than semaphore. She said, “We’re finished here,” and grabbed my hand to drag me, kicking and screaming in pained outrage, down to Mrs. Wilson’s house, where on their doorstep Ma made me apologize to Billy, who was still whimpering but brightening because I was in for it. His mother just stared at my mother while wiping Billy’s head with a blood-smudged towel. I refused to say I was sorry, but Jennie squeezed my hand so hard an inaudible repentance somehow tumbled out. Mrs. Wilson slammed the door in our faces.