Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  She was silent, and they watched the lights of the bay. The lights of a low-flying plane were reflected in the dark waters, blinking upward like a star. Michael touched Kemala’s hand. She did not pull away.

  “Can you understand?” she asked.

  He nodded. He did not tell her that his mother’s first husband, his brother Aaron’s father, had died because he was a Jew in Odessa.

  “Go on,” he said gently.

  “My father took her death hard, but he didn’t stop his teaching and preaching, and then, six years ago, the civil rights movement finally caught up with him. ‘We only had to be patient,’ he said, oh so proudly. But I was done being patient with the South, and I came west to Berkeley. California wasn’t north and wasn’t south, I thought. Freedomland at the edge of the Pacific. My father joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He wrote me long letters quoting Gandhi and Jesus. But I was busy earning good grades to keep my scholarship and working two jobs to earn my board. I didn’t care about Gandhi or Jesus or the rights of black people. I cared about Kemala Jackson. And then last February, the same day I got his last letter, I got a telegram from North Carolina. My daddy’s body had been found in some woods just out of Greenville. The authorities said he had been killed by a hunter. An accident. The hunter probably didn’t even know he had shot anyone because he hadn’t come forward.

  “The black community knew better. My father had been at a lunch-counter sit-in that afternoon, and a couple of rednecks had followed him out. They wrote ‘accidental homicide’ on my daddy’s death certificate, but I knew that he and my mother had been killed by the same thing. Bigotry. You don’t know what it’s like when someone you love is killed because of plain, ugly, unadulterated hatred.” She fell silent now and her breath came in gasps, as though the long narrative had exhausted her.

  “But I do know,” he said, and he told her about David Goldfeder’s death. Again he heard the shot ring out across the silent desert. Again he saw his father’s blood, carmine streaks across the pale sands. They shared that much, he and Kemala. Both their fathers had been shot because of irrational hatred. A strange and improbable linkage.

  “That was different.” Her voice was unyielding. She was impatient with his tragedy, absorbed in her own grief.

  He did not argue. He remembered the paralyzing misery he had felt during those first months after David Goldfeder’s death. He had been abandoned and stood alone. He spoke to a voice that would not answer. He had thought then that he would never recover. He knew now that grief was neither negated nor obviated but eventually it was muted and soothed. He remembered, suddenly, a conversation he had with Yehuda Arnon one evening as they sat in Leah’s garden. Always Yehuda moved and spoke with forceful energy, but that night a strange, almost sorrowful lassitude had overtaken him.

  “Is something wrong, Yehuda?” Michael had asked hesitantly.

  “I lit a candle tonight. It is the anniversary of the death of my first wife. Miriam’s yahrtzeit.”

  He had told Michael then how Miriam, the mother of Danielle and Noam, had died. His voice had broken as he spoke, and tears had streaked his face. His grief had not shamed him; he had allowed himself to weep. And then, newly calmed, he had shown Michael photographs of his younger sons, of Yaakov and Amnon. His sorrow was contained. He had kept faith with the past but he would not surrender the future.

  Lydia had named her first child, Paulette, for Ferenc’s son, whose grave she could never visit. Michael had understood her choice. New lives comforted and consoled, filled lesions and linked generations. His own father, David Goldfeder, was dead, but there was a child to carry his name, to claim his dream. Michael was eager now to see his nephew, to hold that soft new bundle of life who validated his father’s promise and presence. But he could not explain all this to the beautiful black girl who sat beside him, her face frozen in grief.

  Beside him, Kemala Jackson, whose loss was still new, looked up at the star-streaked sky, and tears forged silvery paths down her dusky cheeks. He opened the champagne then and filled the two plastic glasses with the bubbly liquid. They made no toast but drank quietly, luxuriating in the wine and the silence.

  “Why are you going to Mississippi?” he asked.

  “I want to do what he would have wanted me to do. The time for change in the South is here. My father would have worked for it if he had lived, and so that’s what I’m going to work for.”

  “You want to change the world in his memory?” Michael asked.

  “I want to try.”

  “I know.” Naively, he, too, had thought he could penetrate the mystery of the forces that molded human society, that perhaps he, too, could be responsible for change. Small changes, he knew now. Jared Parks. Single candles flickering against a terrible darkness.

  “There’s so much to be done,” she said. “You’re a teacher.”

  “I’m a teacher. A spoiled, rich Jewish boy, but still a teacher.”

  “Come with me.”

  “I’ve got a job waiting for me in the fall.”

  “Come for the rest of the summer, then.”

  He considered. The summer stretched emptily before him.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “There’s a small town in Mississippi called Troy. The blacks there are small landowners, and they’ve managed to build their own school. It’s a good school. The kids there learn to read and write. They built the building themselves and maintain it themselves. They know it’s good, and they want to make it better. They want to get a library started and hold summer classes for adults. To prepare them for the literacy test. It’s a small-scale project. They’re away from most of the bigger towns where a white working with blacks would set people talking, start trouble. We had a volunteer all lined up to go, but he backed out at the last minute. Not that we were surprised.” Her lips set in a thin line of contempt, and bitterness coarsened her voice.

  “Why did he back out?” Michael asked.

  “He thought it might be dangerous.”

  “And will it be?” (Had Rebecca asked if it would be dangerous to guide that small group of children across the Mediterranean into Palestine? Had Aaron asked if it would be dangerous to join the RAF, to venture into a besieged Hungary?) Suddenly he told Kemala about his brother and sister—about their courage and their achievements.

  “Troy won’t be dangerous,” she said. “No Budapest. No war-torn Jerusalem. It’s pretty isolated. The white volunteer would stay with a black family and keep out of sight mostly. The blacks in Troy have a reputation for being peaceable. It’s the perfect place to start. For now, that is. In a couple of years we’ll have armies of teachers coming down to set up freedom schools, freedom libraries. But we’ll need federal protection for that—troops and marshals. For now we’ve got to be content with one little place at a time. Troy’s a little place.”

  “Troy, Mississippi,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind spending the summer in a place called Troy. Where will you be, Kemala?”

  “A couple of miles away. I’ll be working with one of the national organizers. Matt Williams.”

  “Will I see you?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Occasionally in Troy. A good title for a movie. I’ll pass it on to my friend Jeremy’s parents.”

  “Jeremy’s the medical student?”

  “No. He stopped being a medical student last week. He’s a doctor now.”

  “We always need doctors,” she said.

  “You always need teachers. You always need doctors. Hey, my brother’s a lawyer. Do you always need lawyers?”

  “Michael.” Her voice was grave now. “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “I wouldn’t make fun of you, Kemala.” He opened her hand and traced his name across her palm with his finger. “I wrote my name across your lifeline,” he said. “And I’m coming to Mississippi. You’re a terrific recruiter. Much better than Melanie.”

  They drank the last of the champagne. A barge drifted up the bay. They saw its lights,
heard the soft, mournful bleat of its horn. He drove her home then, and in the dim light of her entry hall he touched her cheek with his open palm. Her hand flew up and her fingers lit briefly, gently, on his lips—a butterfly gesture of farewell, a fleeting touch of welcome.

  He flew to New York the next day, leaving Jeremy and Les to pack up and sublet the apartment. He was spurred by a new and welcome sense of urgency. He went to dinner at the new fieldstone-and-wood home his brother had built not far from Leah’s house. Michael tossed small Paulette into the air, listened to her happy laughter, and held the infant David in his arms as he told his family about his summer plans.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Leah said worriedly. “Mississippi.” She could not even envisage it on a map. “Will you be welcome there? Will you be able to help?”

  “Was Charles Ferguson welcome at the Irvington Settlement House?” he asked. “Was he able to help?”

  It struck him, for the first time, that by going to Mississippi he had involved himself in a reciprocal arrangement. He was, in part, paying America back for all it had given him and his family. Charles Ferguson had come east to help educate immigrant Jews. He was going south to help educate southern blacks.

  Leah smiled. Michael’s parallel was not irrelevant. Without Charles she would never have been able to establish herself as a designer, an artist. Michael would play a similar role in other lives. She looked up at her youngest child. Understanding and love flashed between them.

  “I think that it is a wonderful thing that you are going,” Lydia said. “It is important to feel that you can make a difference, that you confront an opportunity. You may not succeed as you would wish, but you will never have to blame yourself for not trying.”

  She had not succeeded in her efforts in Budapest, but she had tried. She closed her eyes briefly, surrendering to memory. Ferenc. Paul. Vanished lives; untended graves.

  “I agree with Lydia,” Boris Zaslovsky said. “It is not the victory that counts, but that we keep faith with the struggle.” He had fought in Moscow and had carried the struggle with him to his new life.

  “But we can succeed,” Michael said. “This is America.”

  There was no NKVD, no secret police here to harass and threaten him, as Lydia had been harassed, as Boris had been threatened. He had been born into freedom, and he believed in his birthright. One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All. He might have to work hard for its realization, but he would prevail. He was, he supposed, not unlike Kemala’s father, and he found himself telling his family about her. Lydia and Leah exchanged a swift and knowing glance, and Boris drummed his long fingers on the table as he listened.

  “This girl you mentioned, Kemala Jackson,” Aaron said cautiously as he drove his brother to the airport, “are you involved with her? Is that why you’re going?”

  “She’s not even going to be in the town I’m going to,” Michael replied.

  “You didn’t answer me,” Aaron persisted. He was a lawyer, and he knew when a question was being evaded.

  “I’m not involved with her,” Michael said. “I hardly know her.” The brush of her fingers across his lips was not an involvement. The touch of her cheek against his palm was not an involvement.

  *

  ALTHOUGH they kept the window shades pulled down and a ceiling fan created a small breeze, the Troy schoolroom was stifling hot. Michael’s fingers were damp as he gripped the chalk, and his chambray shirt was blotted with patches of dark sweat. He wrote the word King on the blackboard, underlined it, circled the K, and turned to his class.

  “Who can read this word?” he asked. “Remember, we begin by sounding out the first letter.”

  A tiny white-haired woman leaned forward and said, in a quavering voice, “K-ing. King.” She looked up into his approving smile, pleased with herself. “Like Martin Luther King, who’s going to make a new world for us. Amen.”

  “Amen,” the other students echoed, and Michael nodded.

  They were an odd lot, this class that came to the Troy schoolhouse each afternoon. The woman who had read the word correctly was the wife of an elderly sharecropper. The elderly couple walked two miles to attend his class, although Michael insisted on driving them home. Two giggling teenage girls sat in the rear of the room—Lizzie, her hair plaited in corn rows, pregnant with her second child, and Norma Anne, a mill worker who had left school when she was eight. “I didn’t leave,” she said. “The teacher left and there was no more school that year, and the next year my mama was sick so I didn’t go back.” Two middle-aged women in white uniforms who worked as cooks in the large, white-pillared mansions that rimmed the nearby town of Lynnewood wrote everything down in new black-and-white-speckled copybooks. They hid their notebooks beneath the ironing they carried home each night. If their “ladies” discovered them, they would lose their jobs, they told Michael. An unlikely class, but within two weeks they had all learned their letters and were recognizing words, constructing sentences.

  “They say you’re a real good teacher,” Mrs. Mason told him.

  Michael lived in the Masons’ house because it was set well back from the road, and his car could be parked in an unused outbuilding. He slept in a tiny room, and he had lived there for three days before he discovered that the room belonged to the Masons’ youngest son, Rodney.

  “I didn’t mean to displace him,” he had protested, but Mrs. Mason waved her hands disparagingly.

  “You ain’t displacing him. It’s only right,” she said. Michael was white and Rodney was black. It was only right that the white stranger who had come to help them should get the best bed, privacy, the choicest bits of meat from the fragrant stews she cooked, the heel of the bread she baked each night after coming home from work. The Masons’ hospitality both touched and embarrassed him.

  He turned back to the blackboard now and wrote the word FREEDOM.

  “Sound it out,” he told the class.

  Their mouths twisted into tortuous knots. Norma Anne pursed her lips, worked her way through the first syllable.

  “F-R-EE,” she said hesitantly, and then her voice rose as she forged the letters together into a word.

  “Free—I see it now—free. D-OM. Freedom! You wrote freedom on the blackboard, and I can read it.”

  The others were nodding. They, too, studied the word, mouthed it silently, whispered it tentatively and slowly, gave it voice. At last they all repeated it in unison.

  “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” Their mingled voices became a shared shout of triumph, and he added his voice to theirs. “Freedom!” He was suffused with a strange and unfamiliar happiness, a newly discovered sense of pride, of elation.

  “Amen,” Lizzie said in her high, squeaky voice.

  “Amen,” a soft musical voice echoed.

  “Kemala.”

  He had seen her infrequently since his arrival in Troy, but a few nights ago they had had dinner together in the tiny apartment she shared with two other civil rights volunteers, who were not home that evening. They had smiled at each other across the small bridge table cluttered with unmatched crockery and the chipped jelly jars that served as glasses for the red wine he had brought. They had spoken rapidly, as though fearful that there would not be time to complete their thoughts, to share their feelings. The wine had warmed and relaxed them, and again he felt the electric rapport that had shimmered between them on the incline above the San Francisco Bay.

  Tired at evening’s end, he had stretched out on the floor and listened to her singing softly as she washed the few plates and utensils. When she sat down beside him her hands were damp and smelled of soap suds. He pressed them to his forehead and was instantly cooled. When he left he kissed her, and her lips were petal-soft against his own. She was like a flower, he thought, a delicate blossom; she had to be gently treated lest she bruise and wither. The sudden tears in her eyes were as luminous as morning dew.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’m just
tired and confused. It’s so hard to sort things out.”

  “Of course it is,” he had replied. Her work, after all, was in the beginning stage, and Matt Williams, with whom she worked, was insistent and demanding. Her fatigue and confusion were natural. He felt himself imbued with an obscure wisdom that could tolerate and assimilate her ambivalences. Her tears vested him with the power of the comforter, and he encircled her with his arms and wound her long dark braid about his wrist.

  But now her eyes were calm as she leaned easily, comfortably, against the whitewashed wall of the small classroom.

  His class turned to look at her, but they did not smile when they turned back to him. When he dismissed them, they filed quickly out of the room and averted their eyes as they passed Kemala.

  She looked after them regretfully.

  “It was a mistake to come,” she said. “Matt Williams was right. He told me to stay away.”

  “Why was it a mistake?”

  “Because you’re white and I’m black. It may come as a shock to you but blacks aren’t any crazier over black girls being with white men than whites are. In fact they hate it even more, I think.”