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

  So we began packing, again.

  My apology to Billy Wilson—a shame and resentment that still burns—set in motion an unstoppable chain of events. All my fault.

  Soon after I walloped Billy Wilson, two of the next-door sheriff’s deputies, in Sam Browne belts over their crisp khaki uniforms, came to our door. They wore big revolvers in braided holsters like the streetcar motormen. My insides froze, I feared that it must be Billy Wilson croaked. The deputies took us across the street to Uncle Schwartz’s general store where the sawdust on the floor was blood-dappled. Must be Billy had made it to the store and collapsed? My head exploded with relief when the sheriff himself showed up and said it was only that Schwartz had been stabbed in the neck with an ice pick by the coal-and-ice man. Jennie wanted to go to the hospital to see Schwartz, but they wouldn’t let her.

  I figured and figured how two such violent incidents so close together had to be connected and I was the cause, but it happened too fast to think. I wondered if the coal-and-ice man who attacked Uncle Schwartz had been Billy’s father out to take revenge.

  The deputies took us home and waited while we packed. Jennie stood by the window staring down the hill and chain smoking while I squashed and squirmed the suitcases to cram everything in; I was an expert fast packer. I badly wanted Ma to say something and blame me and have it over with, but she just put this mask on her face she always wore when there was trouble, and she expected me to do the same. Schwartz was no longer the issue; he’d get better or die, but what would happen to us?

  Then we were taken in the police car to the courthouse, where Ma was booked into the city jail as a material witness or something like that, or just because we were strangers in town; and because they didn’t have a matron, I was put in the holding tank with her.

  In the jail cage with us and our suitcases was a black woman in a flowered housedress with a bruised and bloodied face. Up to now, Jennie had been extra careful about socializing openly with “nigras” except to let them in the back door at night for their long serious talks. She’d kept her peace at my clever “Nigger nigger pull a trigger …” and all the other casually racist remarks I’d dropped around her, I suppose not wanting to blow her cover. But now there was nothing to lose. She went over and sat with the woman. “Ma!” I stage-whispered, “why you talkin’ to th’ nigger?” Jennie hunched in closer to the black woman, who looked over at me and nodded like she was agreeing with something Ma said. I was really confused. What had I done wrong? Again.

  In a way, jail was like the Pullman train. The cots hung from chains hammered into the cement wall and you had to do a little climbing to get into one, but no one named George came by to announce first serving in the dining car. That night, Jennie snuggled me into her own lower cot and covered us with her coat. I was hungry.

  Next morning a deputy, big and fair-haired and right chivalrous, unlocked us and drove us to the train station. He put two tickets in Jennie’s hand—she always wore gloves in public situations—and said, “Now you get on that train, Mrs. Demarest, and don’t you never come back to Tennessee, hear?” He bent down to me. “And you mind your mother. If she forgets, and wants to come back here, you say no never she’s not welcome, okay, little friend?” Yessir. Ma was very strict about me being nice to policemen.

  We got off the train at Chicago’s Dearborn Street station, in a raging subzero blizzard, where my father in a Homburg hat and English-style drape topcoat was waiting for us. Dad lifted me up, rubbed his unshaven cheek against mine, appraised me, and set me down, while tensely waiting for my mother’s signal yes or no to them staying together. My mind was elsewhere because my Buster Brown shoes, which I hardly ever wore in Chattanooga, pinched like Hell gone mad. I had only summer clothes on and immediately began coughing, the start of a long bronchial career. My mother, surrendering, finally said, “Get us out of the cold, Leo.”

  In the rooming house on Wells Street that Dad rented for us, the first thing Jennie did, even before unpacking, was march me straight down the hall into the common bathroom, grab my neck—yowl—and force it down to the sink where, like a crazy woman, she scrubbed out my mouth with a bar of Lifebuoy soap. Jesus, it stung. “What’s that for?” I struggled in her grasp.

  She cooled down. Composed, unflappable.

  She shook the wet Lifebuoy at me like the red finger of God. “Don’t I ever hear you using that word again!”

  I knew what word she meant.

  I never did.

  And I was Clarence Sigal again.

  For a while, at least.

  My son Joe tells me I “talk funny” on first meeting people. “Hi y’all,” he’ll imitate me and laugh. The South left its imprint on me. I came away thinking somehow we’d always live in Chattanooga, Billy Wilson would always lend me his bent-branch fishing pole, the sheriff of Hamilton County would sit rocking while twirling his wonderful mustache, and the three-leaf clovers along the Trissy river would never lose their salt. For me they never did.

  P.S. Ma left her seed behind in Tennessee. After we were kicked out, Southern textile workers right across the Bible Belt exploded in the three-week General Strike that mill owners dealt with savagely. In Honea Path, South Carolina, seven textile hands were murdered; others elsewhere were shot, beaten, fired. The strike was lost.

  The Underground Stream

  Both Jennie Persily and Leo Sigal were part of an underground stream in American life that for long periods seems to vanish without trace before suddenly resurfacing, then submerges and rises in no particular cyclical pattern but rolls on, sometimes merging with the mainstream, at other times diverging, even reversing direction, and apparently getting smaller and smaller, until it dries up altogether only to burst back onto the landscape strong and certain. Underground streamers are indispensable to the health of the nation because without them very little good would be accomplished: they have whatever it takes to go against the currents of ignorance, superstition, ugliness, and injustice.

  Jennie and Leo never really accommodated to the way things are. In the race to social respectability something held them back, something other than bad luck. They were un-American because they never took advantage of their advantages of personal magnetism, nimble tongues, an ability to think fast on their feet, and a gift for close-in combat and (in Ma’s case) timely compromise. My parents stayed poor out of a deep faith that a working person’s destiny was to “Rise with your class, not from it,” a phrase that was as close to a rosary as Jennie ever made.

  I was privileged as a kid to sit in on some of Ma’s negotiating sessions, where I closely watched her turn her emotions on and off as a strictly tactical move, like an infinitely patient chess champion. Like my father, she could thunder, pound the table, weep, and threaten, but at the core she was dead calm, tenacious, goal-oriented, lacing her conversational gambits with ironic humor that sometimes had company executives throwing up their hands in exasperation. “Oh, I give up Jennie, have it your way, you’re giving me a bad case of indigestion.” At such moments, clinching a contract, she was poetry in motion. It was like watching Sandy Koufax work on his 382nd strikeout or Navratilova playing on her best day.

  Jennie’s world, and thus mine, was inherently violent, pitting the union’s raw muscle against an employer’s reflex to disorganize, disenfranchise, and demonize his worker. But machine minders like her had nothing to bargain with except their bodies and she understood that, when the impassioned rhetoric floated away, it all came down to buying and selling. In the end, there has to be a deal; that’s what unions are about. In the garment trade, where Jennie worked most of her life, there was also an ethic, to which bosses and unions once subscribed, that the workplace was family, dysfunctional and cruel but a family, nevertheless, who needed each other. It made a kind of Talmudic sense. “He’ll settle,” Ma always said, “because he has to. And we’ll settle because a long strike is a lost strike no matter how you slice it.” Jennie Persily would have made a great Special Forces ranger—go in fast and hard
and get out before you take unacceptable casualties.

  4 Windy City Blues

  Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town

  Chicago, Chicago, I’ll show you around

  Bet your bottom dollar you’ll lose the blues

  In Chicago, Chicago….

  CHICAGO FOR MY MOTHER was like living on a western frontier outpost, except that the savage Indians (Chicagoans) were inside the fort. She always felt in exile from her family and away from the source of all the world’s excitement, New York. The “Big Stink,” as Native Americans called the sprawl by Lake Michigan for its swampy odor, was for Jennie an unwholesome stew of grey winters and dull-witted people, a backward pioneer settlement barely out of coonskin caps. But for my dad, Chicago was like Paris for an artist; the happening city, the front line, labor’s Command Central, a fresh start after he lost his prestigious job for punching out the president of the Butchers’ International over some anti-Jewish remarks.

  In the labor wars that shook America from 1870 to 1940, Chicago was the place you went to make your mark as an organizer. If, like Leo Sigal, you were full of zip and salesmanship and had the fists to make your pitch credible, you made it in the Big Stink or not at all. Chicago was tough, challenging, open, meritocratic, radical, violent, and ethnic. It was also American labor’s Gettysburg, where the bloodiest battles between workers and capital were fought in the streets and alleys. Sheridan Drive, from Fort Sheridan to the Loop downtown, was built specifically to speed U.S. troops to labor “trouble spots.”

  1877, Battle of the Viaduct, federal troops kill thirty workers in a railroad strike.

  1886, Haymarket Riot, seven policemen blasted, four anarchists hanged.

  1893, Columbian World Exposition torched in Pullman strike.

  1894, federal troops kill another thirty-four union men in strike.

  What a magnificent, crooked, opportunistic, exuberant, hellish place to grow up in. Welcome to the meeting, Brother, Sister!

  Venus at The Dressing Table

  1935—Detroit beats Cubs in World Series. Hitler in power passes anti-Jewish laws. First meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Congress for Industrial Organization (CIO) breaks away from the more traditional American Federation of Labor (AFL); CIO leader John L. Lewis punches AFL carpenters union boss Hutcheson in front of cameras to make it official.

  I have few photographs of my mother. Those I do have show a woman with hooded eyes, a full figure, and an almost military bearing, her eyes sending a strong, defiant, sexual message, at least to me. It’s the same look that commanded me not to die after the Brighton Beach dog-biting accident, not ever to say nigger again, and to respect my absent father wherever and whatever he was.

  On the road, in hotel rooms or Pullmans, her body, plump and succulent, is always there, impossible to avoid in the cramped spaces we share. With her silent agreement I’ll sit, from toddler age, to one side of her small makeup travel case, chin cupped in my chubby hands, watching her study herself in the mirror. Each time we step off a train or bus she is pumped up for her public performance, a traveling stage actress skilled in her lines—and at reading an audience, a flair she passed on to me—in most of the languages they speak (German, Yiddish, Russian, American English, Polish, bits of Magyar, Italian, Slovak). Her role model is not the impassioned un-chic Emma Goldman, whom she counts as a friend, but the slinky soigné movie star Carole Lombard in her shimmering silvery gowns trailing the marble dance floor of a Hollywood sound stage. In Ma’s mind, dowdy is unrevolutionary.

  Jennie’s backstage prep fascinates me.

  Her genius is to use loads of makeup—powder, rouge, lipstick, scent—without appearing “cheap” or “common,” the foulest words in her vocabulary. Trade names like Max Factor, Helena Rubenstein, and Elizabeth Arden are as familiar to me as Radio Flyer and Lionel Train. Jennie would rather die than not shave her leg or confront a scab feeling underdressed. It has to do with personal pride and union solidarity, the same principles that make bushy-browed John L. Lewis, the mine workers’ leader, proudly flaunt a chauffeur-driven limousine as his way of educating the membership that they deserve no less than the best.

  To me, Ma’s flesh communicates a more immediate language than words, a language I spend my childhood deciphering. Rich, abundant, cascading, engulfing flesh, product of a fast-developing puberty, its physical mass caged and trapped in the mandatory undergarments of her time. The hospital-pink, iron-buckled corset, with its thousand hooks and straps, the strangulating scar-leaving girdle, the D-cup brassiere laying siege to her nipples, the shroud-like Belgian silk slip, the thigh-length silk stockings held in place by snap-ons attached to bloomer-like panties, and a flowered dress from Lane Bryant’s “styles for the stout,” defined, dignified, and garroted Jennie’s “form-fitting” figure. A warrior queen.

  Fetching Ma her lipstick and eye shadow, I pretended to be Prince Valiant, squire to royalty, before galloping off to the great jousting tournaments known as labor meetings.

  That’s where the private and public Jennies come together.

  There was always a hall, an auditorium, a Labor Lyceum where the great public dramas unfolded. Fireworks of speechmaking, grand gestures, fierce denunciations, wily maneuvers, sometimes fist fights and riots. It was a theater of hope, striving, collective dream, and personal ambition in which I, a stage brat like young Buster Keaton or Mickey Rooney, was expected to step into a full-grown role soon. Of course I was bored witless by all the “I move the resolution back to committee, Brother Chairman” rituals so important to the members, most of whom had escaped foreign tyranny where Robert’s Rules of Order came from the stinging slash of an overseer’s whip or the barrel of a Cossack’s rifle. But it soaked into me like blood, the debating sacraments, the haggling, factionalizing, shouted Gospel songs of redemption, call-and-response, tactical debates, strategizing, and maneuvering and name-calling. It’s still in my veins. Perhaps that’s why today I get along so well with Christian evangelicals and fundamentalist preachers’ kids.

  Since child care did not exist for the poor and we were often in strange towns far from friends or family, Ma had no choice but to haul me along to these amazing, tedious, earsplittingly loud, revival jubilation jamborees. I had a front-row seat at a show that made cowboy hero Charles Starrett’s Blazing Six Shooters look tame.

  Jennie could organize anybody and anything except my absent father.

  Behind a podium, in a crowded hall, she was dynamite on a slow fuse. “Comrades—brothers and sisters!—” She could drag tears from a corpse and raise Lazarus from his grave by a mere curl of her eyebrow, an ironic twitch of her full lips. Style unhysterical, manner composed, tone subdued building to a spine-tingling climax, hers was a pitch from a credible heart. People listened to Jennie because she communicated that she was one of them—yet not one of them. In her theatrical body language she dramatized the sweatshop issues—lousy wages, goneff bosses, poorly ventilated fire traps to live and work in, a humiliating and dishonest piece-work system. But, her ringing modulated speaking style also affirmed, I am better than the system. And she dressed the part, her frills, veils, gloves, and cosmetics sending a message: Don’t let yourself down.

  On a speaker’s platform, she appeared taller, more imposing, than the five feet four inches inside her tightly corseted, iron-girdled, Sunday-special frock and Hattie Carnegie knockoff brimmed hat with veil flung back. This go-to-meeting outfit might consist of a rayon pleated dress, navy blue with polka dots, a white collar she would take off, wash, iron, and painstakingly sew back on, the ensemble held in by a shiny oilcloth belt that sometimes cracked and peeled. Lisle hose, nothing sheer, and modestly “sensible” shoes, not the “Cuban heels” she adored wearing to parties. Customarily, she wore gloves to union meetings, as she did to a social date or police bust.

  Jennie’s combination of crisp eloquence and strong feeling had a mesmerizing power to draw from her audience their respect, even awe. (“Your mother, a mouth on her like a river of fi
re,” my father ruefully told me years later.) Men and women workers sat up straighter for her, cupping their ears to catch every word, their eyes occasionally glistening with tears. She was a fund-raising genius (for causes, not for us), knowing instinctively how, with imagery and cadence, to bring her audience to its feet cheering.

  By contrast:

  Within moments of opening a speech, my father looked as if he’d been through a laundry mangle. Shirt hanging out, dark hair unkempt, eyes blazing, a cigar stub jammed between his tobacco-stained teeth, stalking up and down the platform pounding a fist into his hand, he was a dynamo, a fierce black hole of flash-tempered energy. Ma’s gift was unflustered persuasion; Dad was brutal ardent fury. She played her audiences like a harp; he harangued, and practically beat them up with his mouth. You had a feeling he might jump down from the stage and kick your brains out if you raised a point of order. This wasn’t just my fantasy. One night in a crowded smoky meeting hall above Carl’s Restaurant on Roosevelt Road in Chicago, as Dad paced up and down pounding home his points, an object dropped to the platform when he pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket. A man sitting next to me in the front row quietly rose and handed it back to Dad, who replaced it in his pocket without either him or the audience skipping a beat. The object was a pistol, which until then I didn’t know Dad carried. But none of the other men and women in the hall seemed surprised that their featured speaker packed. I looked around and examined the lined, worn faces of these ordinary working people, the Fishbeins and Wagners and Grossmans, and wondered for the first time what kind of people they were. A few nights later I asked Dad why he had a gun and he brushed me off. “It was my cigar case. You see too many movies.”