Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  Michael was a born teacher. Even when he played softball with the small black children in the evening cool, he taught. “Toss it a little higher, a little wider. Bend those knees when you run. Come on Timmy, Rodney! Make believe you’ve got wings on those sneakers.” Always, she would remember Michael teaching the children of Troy how to hold a bat, how to leap for a fly ball. Always, she would remember Michael, lithe and fleet-footed, flashing past the whitewashed base marks he had painted into the dry red earth.

  “Yes, I’m glad I stayed,” she said, answering his question at last.

  “I’m glad you did also,” he said quietly. How careful and caring Mindell was. And how brave. She had volunteered at once to take this trip with him when Matt Williams discussed it.

  “It’s a simple enough operation,” Matt had said. “We want to move these books from Meridian to Neshoba, and you’ve got a car available, Michael. The school can spare you for a day, I think.” Always, when Matt spoke to him, Michael sensed the West Indian’s parched contempt, his thinly veiled condescension.

  “I imagine so,” he said, trying to match the dryness of Matt’s tone.

  “We’d like someone to go with you. Not that we anticipate any problem, but we like our people to travel in teams. Just in case.”

  He did not specify the possibilities, but they had been in Mississippi long enough to predict them. Just in case you are arrested and beaten. Just in case one of you is hurt. Just in case of an accident, an incident, a disappearance.

  Michael’s eyes had found Kemala’s. She stared back at him and turned back to the mysterious lists she was forever compiling on yellow legal pads. Lists of professors who could be solicited to endorse national advertisements urging Ross Barnett not to violate academic freedom and to peaceably admit James Meredith to Ole Miss; lists of registered voters in various townships; lists of editors of local newspapers and the key advertisers in those newspapers.

  “Kemala’s too busy,” Matt Williams said. “We’re drafting a petition asking Burke Marshall to give us more federal assistance. Let the FBI stop trying to find out if Martin Luther sleeps with someone besides Coretta and use that talent on freedom-rider protection.”

  “Are you too busy, Kemala?” Michael asked.

  “I’m too busy.” Her voice was throaty, very low.

  “Maybe the lady doctor,” Matt suggested.

  “Of course, I’ll go with you, Michael.” Mindell’s assent had been immediate, and she surprised herself. It was the first assignment she had undertaken outside the clinic, but she had seen the hurt in Michael’s eyes when Kemala spoke.

  “Good. That’s settled, then.” Matt had given them maps, instructions, directions. For the first time, he was almost pleasant; he shed his cynical veneer and allowed them to see his humor, the genuineness of his involvement. It had occurred to Mindell that the books could be shipped, but she had said nothing. They had their reasons, she supposed, and besides, she had begun to look forward to the respite from clinic chores, to the excursion with Michael. And her anticipation had not been misplaced. There was a holiday quality to the day—their shared picnic breakfast, the brightly hued Cherokee rose, which she pinned more firmly now into the golden coil of her braid.

  They had no trouble finding the address in Meridian. The boxes of books filled the trunk, and they piled the remaining cartons onto the back seat and the floor of the car. Somehow their bulk reassured Mindell. They had not been shipped because the cost of shipping would have been prohibitive. Books overflowed the corrugated carton containers. She smiled at the titles. A full set of the Oz books. She had not known that there were others besides the story of the Wizard that she had read in Hebrew. The children of the kibbutz had once put on a play based on the Oz story. Perhaps the other volumes had not been translated into Hebrew. Huckleberry Finn. Yehuda Arnon’s son, Noam, had loved Huckleberry Finn and his confederate, Tom Sawyer. Noam and his best friend, Yair, had played at being Huck and Tom, even building a raft, which they pretended to sail on the sands of the Negev. But Noam was dead and Yair limped badly as a result of a wound sustained during the same attack that had taken his friend’s life. The innocence of their boyhood had been betrayed by the terrible reality of their young manhood. Mindell stood on the Mississippi road and grieved anew for the fallen soldier who had been like a brother to her.

  Abruptly, she banished her grief and asked the Meridian volunteer for some rope. She and Michael tied together the loose volumes of the Childcraft encyclopedia (donated by the children of Hastings, New York, to the children of Troy, Mississippi), so that they would not slide about. There were ten paperback copies of the United States Constitution and twenty more of the constitution of the state of Mississippi. These were needed, she knew, because the Troy registrar administered an examination on a section of the state constitution to prospective voters.

  “Goddamn it, we’ll get our people to memorize them if we have to,” Michael had exploded angrily when a black woman whom he had coached for the third summer failed yet again. The copies of the constitution had headed the list of books he had requested.

  They ate lunch with the Meridian volunteers, who were scrupulous about pulling down the shades and moving the table away from the windows.

  “Someone fired at the window for no damn reason, just last week,” Amos, a black lawyer from Chicago, said wearily. “I guess they’re all in training for September, getting their target practice in. The word is that Ross Barnett has called on every Mississippian to do battle to preserve the honor of their schools. They’re planning a big ‘Save Our Schools’ rally sometime soon. Drive carefully on your way back.”

  “I’m not worried,” Michael replied. “I’m an American citizen traveling at the correct speed limit in an inspected, licensed vehicle filled with copies of Huckleberry Finn and the Constitution of these United States.”

  “Oh, you’d be safe all right if you were in the United States,” Amos said. “But you’re in Mississippi. We had a volunteer arrested here two summers ago for walking down the street. ‘Parading without a permit,’ the charge read. I had to keep from busting out laughing in the middle of my argument. ‘Parading without a permit.’”

  They all laughed, but Mindell noticed that the Meridian team stayed inside when she and Michael left. Real fear concealed itself beneath their laughter.

  The full heat of the afternoon hit them as they drove back. Mindell’s cotton T-shirt clung to her body, and Michael’s blue chambray shirt was stained with dark patches of sweat. They took a different route now and passed no meadowlands blanketed with wildflowers.

  “Not too much longer,” Michael said as they passed the Okatibee Reservation. His eyes were glazed and red-rimmed.

  “Do you want me to drive?” she asked.

  “No, I’m fine.” His voice was weary but firm, and she was relieved. A torpid drowsiness had been trailing her, and she submitted to it now and allowed herself to doze off. Her head rested on Michael’s shoulder, and she thought she felt his hand gently stroke her hair, rest lightly on the red rose, wilted now but still bravely fragrant. The rose of Auschwitz had also kept is fragrance long after its petals had wilted and faded. She slept then, rocked by the motion of the car; she surrendered herself to the vagrant, brief dreams of the sleeping traveler. They drifted in sequential tableau.

  She was a child dashing across the sandy dunes of Sha’arei ha-Negev. She was chasing after Noam, but he was too swift for her. He wore his summer scout uniform with a pale blue ascot knotted at his neck. He tossed the ascot to her, and she used it to wipe her tears. Why was she crying? “Noam!” she called, but he did not turn, and she understood that she wept because Noam was dead.

  She was a young woman standing beside a cypress tree on a Jerusalem hillside. She wore her white medical jacket over her reservist uniform. Why was she dressed in such a manner? Did she need a uniform to protect her from the beauty of the evening, from the urgent entreaty of the young soldier who stood beside her? Yair. Noam’s friend. Po
or crippled Yair, who had loved her from childhood. He had wanted to marry her. He had not wanted her to leave Israel. He pulled her to him, and the khaki fabric of his shirt was harsh against her cheek. “I’m sorry, Yair.”

  Uniforms trailed her everywhere, haunted her. A man strode through the mists of her dream, a stern-featured man, red-faced, wearing a gray uniform, carrying a black leather truncheon. The insignia of the death’s head glinted at his epaulets. His voice was harsh, terrible. He would make small Shlomo cry. But he was not speaking German. He was speaking English. A strange and slow and terrible English that she struggled to comprehend.

  Her eyes opened. He did not belong to the dream. He belonged to reality—to the reality of the unremitting heat, the cracked red earth, the total silence and desolation of the Delta landscape. And the reality, too, of Michael’s hand, gentle on her shoulder (as it had been gentle that morning when he awakened her, and gentle on her hair as she drifted into the odd, dreamlike sleep). Michael’s voice was controlled, although she saw the tremor in his fingers, the rim of sweat that mustached his mouth. Her own heart beat rapidly, arrhythmically, and her throat was dry. A knot of nausea was entangled at the pit of her stomach.

  “Come on, Mindell. Let’s get out. It will be all right. We haven’t done anything.”

  Neither had the Harvard senior, she thought. Neither had the boy and girl from Brandeis. Neither, she thought irrelevantly, had her parents. It was not necessary to have done anything, she knew. But she nodded and followed him out of the car into the seething heat, the dazzling daylight.

  “Up against the car!”

  The orders were issued by one officer, but three others were waiting as they emerged from the car—three red-faced men, sweating freely in the oppressive heat, the dark pants of their uniforms clinging to their thick thighs, their pale stomachs spilling out of white shirts buttoned to the neck. Their neat black ties, too, were firmly in place, but their leather shoulder holsters were empty. They held their service revolvers cocked and aimed at Michael and Mindell. Their eyes glinted with hatred.

  “What y’got there, girl?”

  Instinctively, she had seized her black leather bag.

  “My medical bag. I’m a doctor.” She held it tighter.

  “Yeah. And I’m president of the Yew-Nited States.” His club smashed down on her wrist. She screamed with pain and dropped the bag.

  “Hey!” Michael lurched forward, but two of the men grabbed him and held him back, twisting his arms behind his back.

  “I’m all right, Michael,” she said. The pain was searing, but no bones were broken. She moved her wrist, flexed her fingers, and wondered that she did not cry.

  “Are you armed, boy?”

  They were both pressed up against the car now, and the officers’ hands were prowling their bodies, probing at fabric and skin. They removed Michael’s driver’s license but did not open it. He was relieved that his identity was still unknown.

  Mindell felt the officer’s fingers against her breasts, beneath her arms. An animal’s paws against her body’s vulnerable softness. (“Always I think of them as animals, not as humans,” a woman prisoner in the camp had said. “An animal cannot insult me, humiliate me.”) The Mississippi officer was an animal, and thus she felt neither violated nor repelled. As though sensing her indifference, he thrust her aside. Beads of saliva foamed at the corners of his mouth. He searched the car now, overturning the carefully packed cartons. A child’s picture book flew open. Cinderella in her chariot. His booted foot came down on the golden coach. He spat, and a gob of green phlegm spread across the bright jacket of The Wizard of Oz.

  “You’re under arrest,” he said.

  “On what charge?” Michael, the American, demanded his rights. Mindell, the child of Auschwitz, had forgotten she had any.

  “Title ninety-seven of the Mississippi Code of Law. Transporting obscene literature across the state.”

  “Cinderella. The Wizard of Oz. The Constitution of the United States—obscene literature?” Michael asked. Honest amusement lightened his tone. He invited them to smile with him, to see how ridiculous the charge was.

  “Shut up, Jewboy!”

  The bull club slammed down across his kidneys. Once. Again. Waves of pain washed over him. Again. He had screamed, he knew, because his throat was raw, but the soft weeping he heard, he acknowledged with relief, was not his own but Mindell’s.

  “Don’t touch her.”

  He thought his voice could only emerge as a whisper, but it was strong, almost imperious, and he was briefly proud of his own courage. Their reply was immediate, spontaneous. A fist crashed down on his mouth. He tasted his own blood, moved his tongue about, relieved that his teeth were still in place. Someone else struck him on the forehead, just missing his eye. Mindell was crying, sobbing.

  “I’m all right, Mindy,” he whispered and slid to the ground. “Call Aaron.” Had he said the words or only thought them?

  The red earth was strangely soft and yielding. He wondered, as his mind slipped into darkness, how they had known he was Jewish when they had not even opened his driver’s license.

  *

  YEHUDA ARNON sat on the patio that Aaron and Lydia had recently added to their home and gratefully sipped a tall tomato juice.

  “Was it as hot as this in Washington?” Lydia asked and removed the pale blue sweatband from her forehead. She and Aaron still wore their tennis whites although they had abandoned their game after playing a single set. It was, they decided, the hottest day of a very hot summer.

  “I’d say so. In every way,” Yehuda replied. He shifted uncomfortably in the white wrought-iron chair. The air conditioning on the Eastern shuttle had stopped operating as they soared over Philadelphia, and his seersucker suit was drenched. He would finish his drink, place a call to Rebecca, shower, and change. “Some of the congressional advisers lost their perspective during the discussion.”

  “Still refusing to acknowledge the threat of internal terrorism?” Aaron asked shrewdly.

  “Still clinging to the ‘it can’t happen here’ theory of history. They’re ready to accept the fact that civilian terrorism is on the rise all over the world. They know all about Algeria and Argentina, bombs on Jerusalem buses, explosions in Dublin factories. But the United States is presumed to be invulnerable to that kind of violence. They tell me that the Ku Klux Klan is a lunatic fringe group and doesn’t amount to much on a national scale. And they do not believe me when I tell them that in the next decade terrorism and mob violence are going to increase dangerously.”

  “The balance has shifted in the South,” Aaron said. “Martin Luther King’s people are not going to be frightened away by hooded terrorists. There’s bound to be a forceful reaction from southern extremists. We’re beginning to see it already—the White Citizens Council, self-appointed vigilante groups. They say that in Mississippi it’s not simply a question of law enforcement authorities turning a blind eye to harassment—it’s more an established fact that sheriffs and their deputies are cooperating openly with the extremists.”

  He sighed and watched his children at play. Paulette, wearing a bright green sundress that Leah had designed and sewn for her, valiantly tried to teach David to play ring-around-a-rosie. Again and again the child tumbled over at the wrong time until Paulette, haughty with the righteous impatience of the older child, flounced away.

  Yehuda, too, watched the children. It was night in Israel now, and his own sons were asleep in the children’s house. He knew that at some point during the night, Rebecca would tiptoe through the darkness and stand silently beside their beds, as she had almost every night since Noam’s death. What reassurance did that brief nocturnal vigil offer her? he wondered, but he had never asked her about it. It occurred to him now that the number of things that he and Rebecca did not speak of accrued dangerously with each passing year.

  “The question is, Yehuda, can anything be done about that kind of civilian violence?” Lydia asked. She plucked a leaf out of Pa
ulette’s hair and showed the child how it exactly matched her dress.

  “I think so. We’ve made some progress in Israel. There can be infiltration of such groups. Your FBI has been successful in infiltrating other organizations. Why not do the same with the White Citizens Council, the Klan, Ross Barnett’s ‘Save Our Schools’ movement, black extremist groups if they arise? The federal government ought to be a visible presence in the South—teams of marshals, National Guardsmen. There should be an education program for southern judges and police officers. In Israel we have learned that there must be a policy of no compromise with terror, and the same can apply here. I tried to make this clear to Burke Marshall’s people, but I don’t think they were impressed. They probably labeled me a paranoid ‘Jewboy.’” He shrugged. “I’ll have a clearer picture after I visit Mindell and Michael in Troy.”

  He smiled down at Seth, the baby, who crawled toward him across the patio. The baby’s fingers gripped at his ankles, and Yehuda picked him up. Seth’s tousled black curls filled him with a painful yearning for Rebecca and his own children. He decided suddenly that he would not return to Washington to report on his observations in Mississippi. He would send a report and leave for Israel.

  The phone rang, and Lydia and Aaron looked at each other apprehensively.

  “Damn,” Aaron said. “You take it, Lydia. If it’s the office, tell them I’m off on a three-day hike. Same thing if it’s the university asking for my fall semester reading list.”

  “Take it yourself,” Lydia retorted. “If it’s the lab, tell them that all the children have chicken pox and I’ve run away from home.”

  The second ring came as David fell and scraped his knee. Lydia picked the child up, and Aaron strode toward the phone, catching it on the third insistent ring. The patio door was open and they heard him clearly, saw him automatically grope for a pad and pencil.