The question of race was like the power of the moon in my house. It’s what made the river flow, the ocean swell, and the tide rise, but it was a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable, and thus completely ignorable. Mommy kept us at a frantic living pace that left no time for the problem. We thrived on thought, books, music, and art, which she fed to us instead of food. At every opportunity she loaded five or six of us onto the subway, paying one fare and pushing the rest of us through the turnstiles while the token-booth clerks frowned and subway riders stared, parading us to every free event New York City offered: festivals, zoos, parades, block parties, libraries, concerts. We walked for hours through the city, long meandering walks that took in whole neighborhoods which we would pass through without buying a thing or speaking to anyone. Twice a year she marched us to the Guggenheim dental clinic in Manhattan for free care, where foreign dental students wearing tunics and armed with drills, picks, and no novocaine, manned a row of dental chairs and reduced each of us to a screaming mass of tears while the others waited in line, watching, horrified. They pulled teeth like maniacs, barking at us in whatever their native tongues were while they yanked our heads back and forth like rag dolls’. They once pulled my brother Billy’s tooth and then sent him out to Ma in the waiting room, whereupon she looked into the mouth full of gauze and blood and discovered they had yanked the wrong tooth. She marched back in and went wild. In summer she was the Pied Piper, leading the whole pack of us to public swimming pools, stripping down to her one-piece bathing suit and plunging into the water like a walrus, the rest of us following her like seals, splashing and gurgling in terror behind her as Mommy flailed along, seemingly barely able to swim herself until one of us coughed and sputtered, at which time she whipped through the water and grabbed the offending child, pulling him out and slapping him on the back, laughing. We did not consider ourselves poor or deprived, or depressed, for the rules of the outside world seemed meaningless to us as children. But as we grew up and fanned out into the world as teenagers and college students, we brought the outside world home with us, and the world that Mommy had so painstakingly created began to fall apart.
The sixties roared through my house like a tidal wave. My sister Helen’s decision to drop out of school and run off at age fifteen, though she returned home five years later with a nursing degree and a baby girl, was the first sign of impending doom. Now the others began to act out, and the sense of justice and desire for equal rights that Mommy and my father had imparted to us began to backfire. Kind, gentle, Sunday school children who had been taught to say proudly, “I am a Negro,” and recite the deeds of Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson now turned to Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown and Martin Luther King for inspiration. Mommy was the wrong color for black pride and black power, which nearly rent my house in two.
One by one, my elder siblings broke with her rules, coming home bearing fruits of their own confusion, which we jokingly called their “revolution.” An elder brother disappeared to Europe. Another sister had an affair at college and came home with a love child, fairly big news in 1967. My brother Richie got married at eighteen over Mommy’s objections, divorced, then entered college, and was home on summer break when he got stopped by two cops while walking down the street with a friend. A group of boys who were walking about ten yards in front of Richie and his friend had ditched what appeared to be a bag of heroin as the cop car approached. The cops grouped the boys together, lined them up against a fence, and demanded to know which of them had jettisoned the bag, which later turned out to be filled with quinine, not heroin. All denied it, so the cops searched them all and found ninety dollars of Richie’s college-bank-loan money in his pocket. When the policeman asked him where he got the money from, Richie told him it was his college money and he’d forgotten he’d had it. If you knew Richie, you’d nod and say, “Uh-huh,” because it was perfectly in character for him to forget he was carrying around ninety precious dollars, which was a huge sum in those days. We used to call him “the Mad Scientist” when he was little. His science experiments would nearly blow up the house because whatever he created, he’d leave it bubbling and boiling while he went to search for food, forgetting it completely. He could remember the toughest calculus formulas and had nearly perfect pitch as a musician, but he literally could not remember to put his pants on. He would play John Coltrane–type solos on his sax for hours and be dressed in a winter jacket and gym shorts the whole time. He was that kind of kid, absentminded, and very smart, and later in life he became a chemist. But to the cops, he was just another black perpetrator with a story, and he was arrested and jailed.
Mommy paced the house all night when she got the news. She showed up early at Richie’s arraignment the next day and took a seat right behind the defense table. When they brought him out in handcuffs and she saw him cuffed and dirty after being in the holding pen all night, she could not contain her grief and began muttering like a crazy woman, wringing her hands. Through her reverie of mumbo jumbo she heard the court-appointed lawyer lean over to Richie and offer two words of legal advice: “Plead guilty.” She jumped up and screamed, “Wait!” She charged past the court officers, shouting to the judge that it was a mistake, that none of her kids had ever been in trouble with the law before, that her son was a college student, and so forth. The white judge, who had noticed Mommy sitting in the largely black courtroom, released Richie to her custody and the charges were later dropped.
But that experience made Mommy bear down on the younger ones like me even more. She was, in retrospect, quite brilliant when it came to manipulating us. She depended heavily on the “king/queen system” which she established in our house long before I was born: the eldest sibling was the king or queen and you could not defy him or her, because you were a slave. When the eldest left for college, the next ascended to the throne. The king/queen system gave us a sense of order, rank, and self. It gave the older ones the sense that they were in charge, when in actuality it was Mommy who ruled the world. It also harked back to her own traditional Orthodox upbringing where the home was run by one dominating figure with strict rules and regulations. Despite the orchestrated chaos of our home, we always ate meals at a certain time, always did homework at a certain time, and always went to bed at a certain time. Mommy also aligned herself with any relative or friend who had any interest in any of her children and would send us off to stay with whatever relative promised to straighten us out, and many did. The extended black family was Mommy’s hole card, and she played it as often as the times demanded because her family was not available to her. As I grew older, it occurred to me at some point that we had some relatives we had never seen. “How come we don’t have any aunts and uncles on your side?” I asked her one day.
“I had a brother who died and my sister…I don’t know where she is,” she said.
“Why not?”
“We got separated.”
“How’s that?”
“I’m removed from my family.”
“Removed?”
“Removed. Dead.”
“Who’s dead?’
“I’m dead. They’re dead too by now probably. What’s the difference? They didn’t want me to marry on the black side.”
“But if you’re black already, how can they be mad at you?”
Boom. I had her. But she ignored it. “Don’t ask me any more questions.”
My stepfather, a potential source of information about her background, was not helpful. “Oh, your mama, you mind her,” he grunted when I asked him. He loved her. He seemed to have no problem with her being white, which I found odd, since she was clearly so different from him. Whereas he was largely easygoing and open-minded about most worldly matters, she was suspicious, strict, and inaccessible. Whenever she stepped out of the house with us, she went into a sort of mental zone where her attention span went no farther than the five kids trailing her and the tightly balled fist in which she held her small bit of money, which she always counted to the last penny. She had
absolutely no interest in a world that seemed incredibly agitated by our presence. The stares and remarks, the glances and cackles that we heard as we walked about the world went right over her head, but not over mine. By age ten, I was coming into my own feelings about myself and my own impending manhood, and going out with Mommy, which had been a privilege and an honor at age five, had become a dreaded event. I had reached a point where I was ashamed of her and didn’t want the world to see my white mother. When I went out with my friends, I’d avoid telling her where we were playing because I didn’t want her coming to the park to fetch me. I grew secretive, cautious, passive, angry, and fearful, always afraid that the baddest cat on the block would call her a “honky,” in which case I’d have to respond and get my ass kicked. “Come and let’s walk to the store,” she said one afternoon.
“I can go by myself,” I said. The intent was to hide my white mom and go it alone.
“Okay,” she said. She didn’t seem bothered by my newfound independence. Relieved, I set off to a neighborhood grocery store. The store owner was a gruff white man who, like many of the whites in St. Albans, was on his way out as we blacks began to move in. He did not seem to like black children and he certainly took no particular liking to or interest in me. When I got home, Mommy placed the quart of milk he sold me on the table, opened it up, and the smell of sour milk filled the room. She closed the carton and handed it to me. “Take it back and get my money back.”
“Do I have to?”
“Take it back.” It was an order. I was a Little Kid in my house, not a Big Kid who could voice opinions and sway the master. I had to take orders.
I dragged myself back to the store, dreading the showdown I knew was coming. The owner glared at me when I walked in. “I have to return this,” I said.
“Not here,” he said. “The milk is opened. I’m not taking it back.”
I returned home. Ten minutes later Mommy marched into the store, doing her “madwalk,” the bowlegged strut that meant thunder and lightning was coming—body pitched forward, jaw jutted out, hands balled into tight fists, nose red, stomping like Cab Calloway with the Billy Eckstein band blowing full blast behind him. I followed her sheepishly, my plan to go it alone and hide my white mother now completely awash, backfired in the worst way.
She angrily placed the milk on the counter. The merchant looked at her, then at me. Then back at her. Then at me again. The surprise written on his face changed to anger and disgust, and it took me completely by surprise. I thought the man would see Ma, think they had something in common, then give her the dough and we’d be off. “That milk is sold,” he said.
“Smell it,” Ma said. “It’s spoiled.”
“I don’t smell milk. I sell milk.”
Right away they were at each other, I mean really going at it. A crowd of black kids gathered, watching my white mother arguing with this white man. I wanted to sink into the floor and disappear. “It’s okay, Ma …” I said. She ignored me. In matters of money, of which she had so little, I knew it was useless. She was going full blast—“…fool…think you are…idiot!”—her words flying together like gibberish, while the neighborhood kids howled, woofing like dogs and enjoying the show.
After a while it was clear the man was not going to return her money, so she grabbed my hand and was heading toward the door, when he made another remark, something that I missed, something he murmured beneath his breath so softly that I couldn’t hear, but it made the crowd murmur “Ooohhhh.” Ma stiffened. Still holding the milk in her right hand, she turned around and flung it at him like a football. He ducked and the milk missed him, smashing into the cigarette cabinet behind him and sending milk and cigarettes splattering everywhere.
I could not understand such anger. I could not understand why she didn’t just give up the milk. Why cause a fuss? I thought. My own embarrassment overrode all other feelings. As I walked home, holding Mommy’s hand while she fumed, I thought it would be easier if we were just one color, black or white. I didn’t want to be white. My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul. I don’t consider myself Jewish, but when I look at Holocaust photographs of Jewish women whose children have been wrenched from them by Nazi soldiers, the women look like my own mother and I think to myself, There but for the grace of God goes my own mother—and by extension, myself. When I see two little Jewish old ladies giggling over coffee at a Manhattan diner, it makes me smile, because I hear my own mother’s laughter beneath theirs. Conversely, when I hear black “leaders” talking about “Jewish slave owners” I feel angry and disgusted, knowing that they’re inflaming people with lies and twisted history, as if all seven of the Jewish slave owners in the antebellum South, or however few there were, are responsible for the problems of African-Americans now. Those leaders are no better than their Jewish counterparts who spin statistics in marvelous ways to make African-Americans look like savages, criminals, drags on society, and “animals” (a word quite popular when used to describe blacks these days). I don’t belong to any of those groups. I belong to the world of one God, one people. But as a kid, I preferred the black side, and often wished that Mommy had sent me to black schools like my friends. Instead I was stuck at that white school, P.S. 138, with white classmates who were convinced I could dance like James Brown. They constantly badgered me to do the “James Brown” for them, a squiggling of the feet made famous by the “Godfather of Soul” himself, who back in the sixties was bigger than life. I tried to explain to them that I couldn’t dance. I have always been one of the worst dancers that God has ever put upon this earth. My sisters would spend hours at home trying out new dances to Archie Bell and the Drells, Martha Reeves, King Curtis, Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin, and the Spinners. “Come on and dance!” they’d shout, boogying across the room. Even Ma would join in, sashaying across the floor, but when I joined in I looked so odd and stupid they fell to the floor laughing. “Give it up,” they said. “You can’t dance.”
The white kids in school did not believe me, and after weeks of encouragement I found myself standing in front of the classroom on talent day, wearing my brother’s good shoes and hitching up my pants, soul singer-style like one of the Temptations, as someone dropped the needle on a James Brown record. I slid around the way I’d seen him do, shouting “Owww—shabba-na!” They were delighted. Even the teacher was amused. They really believed I could dance! I had them fooled. They screamed for more and I obliged, squiggling my feet and slip-sliding across the wooden floor, jumping into the air and landing in a near split by the blackboard, shouting “Eeeee-yowwww!” They went wild, but even as I sat down with their applause ringing in my ears, with laughter on my face, happy to feel accepted, to be part of them, knowing I had pleased them, I saw the derision on their faces, the clever smiles, laughing at the oddity of it, and I felt the same ache I felt when I gazed at the boy in the mirror. I remembered him, and how free he was, and I hated him even more.
11.
Boys
If there was one thing Tateh didn’t like more than gentiles, it was black folks. And if there was one thing he didn’t like more than black folks in general, it was black men in particular. So it stands to reason that the first thing I fell in love with in life was a black man. I didn’t do it on purpose. I was a rebellious little girl in my own quiet way, but I wasn’t so rebellious that I wanted to risk my own life or anybody else’s life. They would kill a black man for looking at a white woman in the South in those days. They’d hang him. And the girl, they’d run her out of town. Who wants trouble like that? But as I became a teenager, I wanted the same things any teenage girl wants. I wanted love, nice clothes, a date. I never had that. My life was the store. My life hadn’t changed since elementary school. The only break I got was when Mameh would send me to her relatives in
New York during summers, but in fact, my responsibility for the store grew after my brother Sam ran off. My daily routine never changed: Open the store at seven, school till three, come straight home and work till ten, then flop to sleep. Work all through the weekend except the Sabbath, then back to school on Monday. My only freedom was to swipe pennies from the store drawer and walk downtown with Dee-Dee to buy romance magazines like True Love and True Romance. They used to tear the front cover off the back issues of the romance magazines and sell them by the bundle for ten cents. We’d read them on the Sabbath by candlelight. You couldn’t light a stove, or play, or tear paper, or ride in a car on the Sabbath, but you could read.
It wasn’t like I had a great family life to turn to. We went to synagogue together on Saturday morning and Jewish holidays, but Tateh didn’t love Mameh. His idea of a family outing was to take me and my sister to a chicken farm in Portsmouth, Virginia, where he’d slaughter chickens according to kosher law so he could sell them to Jewish customers. He would sit on a low box or stool, pick up the chicken, hold it by its neck faceup, and slit it across the neck. Then he’d toss it away and grab another one while the headless chicken would fluff and flap around, give a few heavy shakes, and die.
I was never asked out for a date by anyone in school. I loved to dance and had long legs, and I once auditioned for a dance musical at school and made it, but some of the girls made such a fuss over having to dance next to a Jew that I dropped out of it. During gym class when we’d pick tennis partners, the girls would pick and pick until I’d be standing alone. If Frances wasn’t around, I wouldn’t get picked. I’d like to say I didn’t care about my classmates, and what they thought of me. But when I was a teenager I wanted to be like them—American and WASP and going around in style, going dancing, but my parents wouldn’t have that. Dancing? Forget it. New clothes? No way. Tateh was the one who decided what clothes we wore, and he’d buy the cheapest things he could find. He was used to us getting hand-me-downs from the congregations and that was fine with him. He’d buy a brand new V-8 car every year but he couldn’t see the logic in buying new clothes when you got cheap hand-me-downs for free. I once wanted these white moccasin-type shoes that were the fashion in those days, and I bothered Tateh to buy them for me so much he got sick of me and relented. We went downtown and the clerk showed us a pair two sizes too big. I put them on and said, “They’re perfect.”
The Color of Water Page 8
