I don’t understand nothin’ about Jews! she said. Except that I’m beginnin’ to know why folks keep away from ’em much as they can do.
George surprised her. Now, now, he said. That’s right harsh. Mr. Fishbein just wanted to get a look at you after I told him how fine you were workin’ out.
Caught between pleasure at his compliment and the bit of pique she’d worked herself up to, Mags floundered and changed the subject.
You know this daughter of his?
I’ve seen her.
What’s wrong with her anyway?
George McCallum’s back was to her as he bent over his table to remove the shoes of a poor, mangled boy who’d been caught in the street between a motorcar and a team of horses pulling a fire wagon.
She’s small and redheaded and angry, he said. I don’t know why. Maybe because her daddy put her to live in a house of the dead. It was none of his family’s business. He came to town ten year ago, and he bought it from my auntie, whose husband, the man what trained me, passed. He knew nothin’ about the work. He asked me to run things, and I stayed on. Miss Minnie weren’t much more than a squallin’ redheaded baby mess in those times. I apologize I didn’t tell about her before, but you know, she’s been quiet a long time these days. I thought maybe she’s cured of whatever it is ails her. I need your help here to straighten this poor chappie’s arm.
It was a longer speech and more information than Mags had ever had from George McCallum at one spill. She fell to helping him without question. Her mind drifted to her interview upstairs, where the sad man called her George’s Mags. Thinking on it lent a certain spice to their activities. She got gooseflesh when George McCallum stood up tight next to her as they bore down to break the poor chappie’s bones then lay them down neat inside the shirt and jacket of his Sunday suit. George either noticed her condition or shared it, because after they were done and gone upstairs to cull the fading blossoms from the fresh out of the vases in the viewing room, he took a yellow rose just starting to brown at the tips of its outermost petals and stuck it in her hair on the right side, where her thick plaits would hold it in good. They both smiled, and he kissed her.
They liked each other. There was nothing standing in their way. In that day, folk didn’t hem and haw about such matters. Within weeks, they decided to marry at the end of the month, knowing each other pretty well in some ways and not at all in others. George lived at the funeral home, in the back, in the two great rooms off the right side of the kitchen. He had a small porch of his own with a rocking chair. There was a little strip of green before the alleyways took over where he grew cooking herbs in a box. He bought another rocking chair for Mags and a little table to put between the rockers as an engagement present. He paid off her remaining debt to Magnus Bailey as well. He did all of this with few words and fewer gestures. There were no more kisses in the workrooms, which they decided was beyond improper, but each day when their labors were over, she made them a supper then carried it on a tray to the porch as the season permitted such. They ate with the little table between them in a warm glow of waiting for what George called ‘the big day.’ When they were done eating, George would tell her to rest while he did the cleaning up. Later, they sat and watched the moon rise over buildings so tall Mags thought she’d never get used to them. They held hands over the tabletop until she’d start to yawn, at which time George would walk her home. Still holding her hand, he’d take her all the way to Miss Emily’s front door, where he’d kiss her good night three times, once on the forehead, once on her cheek, and last on her lips.
Mags had reason beyond romance to be grateful for his company. The first two blocks of her walk home were not the safest, limned as they were by plain, crowded apartment buildings inhabited by foreign factory workers, white ones from Poland and Germany, her future husband told her. Their children loitered on stoops and called out to her in their mamas’ tongues things she did not understand. Until George McCallum started looking after her, she thought they were calling to one another. Once he was at her side nightly, she saw how he kept between her and them, stiffening his body, alert with tension. His grip on her hand was tight until they turned the corner two blocks up and walked deep into a territory of wooden shacks and the dark, familiar faces of home where he loosed his hold on her in a manner as telling as a sigh. She would have thought about it more, but she’d grown up expecting both the condescension and enmity of white people. It might’ve helped her to know racial tensions in East St. Louis approached a boiling point. At many of the factories, white union workers were on strike. The scabs the bosses hired were Negroes fresh off the train from down south, where recruiters painted rosy pictures of generous wages and freedom from Jim Crow up north—paid their fare, too. They arrived, many of them, shoeless and poor in the Missouri winter, shackled as much by need to their place on the line as they had been by law and custom back home. They lived stuffed into miserable tenements at inflated rents, their wages a fraction of what a white man, even a half-literate immigrant, might earn at the same job, and they faced daily the seething hatred of those they had replaced.
Mags knew none of this. Her life had taken on such a burnish of light and love, her mind turned away from common unpleasantries and toward all that was George McCallum and the future he promised. It was not as if copies of the Chicago Defender, the Negro newspaper that reported on civil unrest and such, piled up on her doorstep. Nothing of her neighbors’ hostility seemed out of the ordinary to her.
They had the wedding in Miss Emily’s parlor. Neither of them wanted a party, really. They were reserved people who kept their feelings close. But Miss Emily insisted. All of the girls were there—Chesty, Rain, Charly, Bobsy, Tawny, and the rest—and Magnus Bailey, too, along with the three blood relatives George McCallum had in the world, his old aunt Lily and cousins Sam and Jack, both of whom came with wives. Aurora Mae and her brother, Horace, traveled up for the occasion, along with cousins Alice and Jefferson. George was in his best black suit, the one he wore for funerals of the most important people Fishbein’s had to bury. Mags wore a homemade bridal costume, created with the help of her fellow boarders. Cream-colored, it had a closely tailored bodice, long lace-edged sleeves, and a gently flowing skirt with a handkerchief hem around which was sewn a double row of teardrop beads of shimmering nacre to match those sewn on her smartly conceived headband with its stylish short veil. The couple dressed early and received their guests together as they arrived. Before long, Miss Emily’s parlor was full of warm greetings and merry voices when two white faces appeared among the black and brown. There was quiet, confusion, and then George said, Mr. Fishbein! And Miss Minnie! How good of you to come! Ignoring the watchful silence around them, he took Mags by the hand and brought her to the Fishbeins’ side for an introduction to his employer’s daughter, whom she had not yet had occasion to meet.
Minerva Fishbein was a slender, wild-eyed girl with a shoulder-length mane of curly red hair. She was not quite so little as George had led his bride to believe, more like a ripe fourteen or even sixteen. She wore a fitted green dress and gray jacket molding high, round breasts that had just begun to bud. She was on the short side, coming up to Mags’s shoulder, and Mags herself was not especially tall. Fishbein was dressed in an undertaker’s black suit with an old-fashioned swatch of black silk tied in a loose, loopy bow at his neck. He wore a top hat too, and carried a walking stick with a gold knob. He stood behind his girl, hovering over her, as if in protection.
How kind of you, George, to invite us, Fishbein said as soon as introductions were accomplished. He reached inside his suit jacket and presented Mags with an envelope. With our best wishes, he said, executing a courtly little bow of his head.
Mags’s cheeks warmed. She thanked him. George did too, then beckoned to Miss Emily that he might introduce their hostess as well. The room slowly returned to its genial hubbub. Minerva fidgeted at her father’s side, uninterested in either the bride or groo
m. Her eyes darted about the parlor until Magnus Bailey came in from the kitchen bearing a tray of glasses he set upon a side table. The girl caught her breath and held it until he noticed her. He waved a greeting, at which her high, round chest exhaled in a thin stream as if she’d been punctured there by a sharp instrument. Mags found this curious but assumed the girl was nervous to be in a Negro rooming house, and the sight of a familiar face calmed her. Anyway, the bride had much more on her mind and did not pause long about it.
They had tea sandwiches, hard lemonade, and honey cake after the ceremony. Chesty had a little too much of the drink and began to sing hymns in a loud, happy voice. That turned out alright, because it was a good voice overall. Somewhere along the way, the hymns turned to love songs both gay and sorry. The rug got rolled up, a harmonica and a squeeze box were produced, and people started in to dance, even Miss Minnie with her hands raised up high to sit on the shoulders of Magnus Bailey, who shook the floor with his fast-moving feet tapping and sweeping in time to the tune. Her daddy looked on with a kind of somber longing. After Minnie, Magnus gave Aurora Mae a turn. That was a sight to see, the dandy and the goddess half a head taller than him giving it a go. Magnus was done up in silks and cottons more costly than the bridal costume. Aurora Mae wore a plain clean dress the color of butter. It was the best she owned, and against her black skin it took on the look of gold. She danced with pride and ineffable grace while her hair snaked down her back and bounced about like a thing alive. After their dance, Fishbein’s daughter went straight up to Bailey and tugged his jacket for another round.
Aurora Mae and Mags went off to have the talk her mother would have given her had she been alive. Aurora Mae, who was virginal as far as the bride knew, gave her what wisdom she possessed from listening to the complaints of wives who came to her for something to start their bleeding or something to stop it, for draughts that might renew their husband’s interest or for others that might keep him away. Be careful how you start out, she told her. Men don’t like change. How you start out is how you’ll end.
Once evening fell, Mags and George stood in the doorway about to leave. She threw her bouquet. It hit Tawny in the chest, bounced off, and fell into old Aunt Lily’s lap as she sat nearby, a wallflower sitting all by herself nodding her head. Everyone laughed. The party went on long after the bridal couple left.
That first night, Aurora Mae’s words of advice echoed in Mags’s head. They cautioned her as she undressed behind the closet door and put on the nightgown the ladies of Miss Emily’s had given her, the sum of her trousseau. The words rattled her as she fiddled with its straps, trying to get the thing to hang right so that her small breasts weren’t swamped in satin and lace. The words burned into her with a roiling heat as George McCallum took his time to open her up and ready her. They paled to a whisper as their lovemaking became a joining of two who wished to please each other, not just the one eager male making it up as he went along, loving trial by gentle error. Then Aurora Mae’s words came crashing back when the screams of Fishbein! Fishbein! Fishbein! started, followed by the sounds of smashing and breaking, the great knocking of toppled furniture and hurled objects upstairs. How you start is how you’ll end, the rhythm of splintered wood and shattered glass warned above the ruckus. How you start is how you’ll end.
Alarmed, George and Mags McCallum stopped and held each other, gasping for breath and staring at the ceiling, waiting for the clamor to cease, which it did soon enough. They murmured a decision to ignore the girl’s tantrums from now on, and they finished what they’d set out to do, although Mags McCallum was some distracted, thinking again and again, how you start is how you end. She wondered what kind of omen Miss Minnie’s fit had delivered, but she did not want to hurt her husband’s feelings, so she kept her worries to herself.
Despite Miss Minnie’s outburst, the marriage got off to a good start. They spent their days at work, the evenings were full of tenderness. They had no visitors. Fishbein’s was not a place people visited by choice, which was just fine with the McCallums. They were getting to know each other and found, as luck was with them, that a loving life was as easy to achieve as falling off a log. Their nights and times off were a mirror image of the workday. They did everything together, the cleaning, the shopping, the cooking, the laundry. If she picked up a dust rag, he picked up a broom. If she broke an egg of a morning, he pulled out the coffee. When Mags tried to make George just sit and let her do for him, he’d say, I don’t want to be away from you. And she’d think she was the luckiest woman alive. For a while, she was.
Until the United States plodded its way into the Great War, the only blot on their lives was Minerva Fishbein. While her eruptions were few and far between, she found occasion to unnerve them regularly. Sometimes, while they sat on their little porch, rocking, devoted to low, loving conversation, an odd snuffling noise from the balcony above disturbed them. They knew it was Miss Minnie, eavesdropping. Another time, they’d be making their dinner and the patter of Miss Minnie running down the kitchen steps and throwing open the door would startle them. She never said hello, just nodded while she went to the ice chest to grab a bite of whatever appealed, or opened the breadbox to pilfer something there. And it was pilfering. Fishbein had his own kitchen up there on the second floor and no victuals kept on the first belonged to him or his daughter. Following her husband’s example on such occasion, Mags would smile and say, Why good day, Miss Minnie, although there was never more response than a grunt before the girl went back upstairs, her footsteps as heavy and plodding in ascent as they’d been rapid and light on the way down.
Minnie had tutors coming and going every day but the Fishbein Sabbath and on that day, Saturdays, they would often hear her wail with boredom or frustration. Come winter, she began music lessons. On Wednesdays they could count on listening to Miss Minnie attack a piano as if it had murdered her mother and she sought annihilating vengeance. On such occasions, George McCallum would say to his wife, That child’s not right. And Mags would say, What do you think it is? George would only shake his head and return to helping her do. Over time, Mags learned to accept Miss Minnie’s mercurial presence in her life the way she accepted the unexpected arrival of thunder and lightning or a snow squall.
As for the girl’s daddy, she never saw him at all nor heard him anymore for that matter. George went up to the second floor weekly to collect their wages and report on the business below. How’s Mr. Fishbein? Mags asked afterward. And George would say, The same. She’d picture that sad face, the hunched shoulders, the spindly arms, crossed as if protecting his wounded, bleeding heart, and ask no more.
Every once in a while, George McCallum was required to go to the rail station to pick up special-order coffins, chemical supplies, maybe the bones of a son of East St. Louis who’d sought his fortune elsewhere. Mags went with him whenever their schedule permitted. Her interest in the feminine arts had not waned since life had taken her talents in an unexpected direction. She enjoyed watching the people on the platform. She studied the hairstyles and costumes of the ladies from far-off cities as they disembarked and regarded critically the careful toilettes of women who paced the waiting room searching with darting eyes the arrival of a lover, son, or husband. When she went home from such expeditions, she’d rearrange her hair and sew onto her sleeve or bodice a gewgaw, a ribbon, a dime-store bauble she thought echoed the new fashion she’d observed. She kept a modest store of such treasures in a cigar box under the bed that allowed her imagination to soar. Once satisfied, she’d parade her transformation in front of George for a man’s opinion. He nearly always praised her. When he did not and she pressed him, he talked in a roundabout way so as not to hurt her feelings.
The train was late one day toward the end of March 1917, barely a week before war was declared. A high wind came in from the river. The colored waiting room, a place established by routine rather than law as it was elsewhere, was cold and uncommonly crowded. Negroes pressed up against one ano
ther on every square inch of space. The ones who couldn’t fit were outside, shivering and stamping their feet. George was outside. He was not the sort who would take a woman’s spot to avoid the elements. Mags watched him blow on his hands and tap-dance, then duck his angular head inside his jacket when the wind came up. She felt proud, and she felt happy.
On the way home that day, she thought about the scene on the platform, especially when the train arrived and the passenger cars emptied. Did you notice, she asked George, how many colored men got into town today? There musta been a hundred of ’em gettin’ out of that one car, poor boys in cotton shirts and no jackets luggin’ bundles tied in string. It’s been like that for a while. There’s twice as many of ’em comin’ as before. What’s it all about, do you think?
She looked up at her husband in the way she had, full of admiration and trust. It seared his heart when she looked at him that way. On occasion, he gave detailed opinion on subjects he barely knew about, because he could not bear to disappoint her and risk lowering himself in her eyes. This time, he was sure of his answer.
It’s a lot a things. Boys been comin’ up here in droves since the Delta flood last year, for one. Between the flood and the weevil, there just ain’t the work what used to be. I told you about them factories sendin’ train cars south and offerin’ the cousins free passage north to streets paved with gold. Life got so desperate down there, more boys ’n ever fall for that one. But mostly, it’s that war ’crost the ocean. We’re goin’ to be in it very soon now, they say, the way those Germans keep sinkin’ our ships for no good reason but meanness. And it’s no lie there’s new jobs ’round here with the factories gettin’ ready for war. Good jobs, white men’s jobs, at near white men’s wages. Lots of them Germans and Poles used to work ’em went back home to fight their war. The ones that stay are angry folk, always strikin’, always complainin’. The bosses don’t mind replacin’ them with folk who’ll work for less and be grateful for it. Why shouldn’t the cousins come up here for work? Sure beats pickin’ beans and cotton while the boss plagues your wife and the babies starve. Why I heard there’s more’n a thousand a week come up t’ here.
Marching to Zion Page 4
