Jew Store (2 page)

23 M
IRIAM'S
R
OMANCE

24 A
UNT
H
ANNAH'S
W
EDDING

25 C
ONCORDIA'S
S
AVIOR

26 M
IRIAM'S
R
ESCUE

27 P
USH
C
OMES TO
S
HOVE

   I wish to express deepest gratitude to that most expert of guides, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., who helped me find my way back to Concordia.

I
f you leave the main highways and travel on one of the county roads in northwestern Tennessee—which is what I did in August of 1995—you will see endless cotton fields. I had last seen the cotton fields of Tennessee in 1933, the year my family left the South. Then the fields were small, family-owned, bounded by fences or hedgerows; nowadays they stretch out with no lines of demarcation and have the look of big business. It is, however, still a quiet place, a rural land. I was born there, in the small town I am calling Concordia.

I left the highway out of Nashville and got onto County Road 431 because of a sentimental wish to travel the same road that my parents, my brother, Joey, then seven, and my sister, Miriam, five, had traveled by horse-drawn wagon in 1920—two years before I was born. Although County Road 431 was then a clay road meandering along, it made its way, as now, west through Weakley County and into the county I have named Banion, of which Concordia is the county seat.

Until this trip I had not been back. A Buddhist text tells us that the elephant is “the wisest of all the animals, the only one who remembers his former lives, and he remains motionless for
long periods of time, meditating thereon.” This may be fine for the elephant, but Concordia is one of those towns that has been steadily losing population, and I am a woman of more than a certain age. By 1995 I was feeling an urgency to forgo meditating and take a look at the site of my childhood before it or I disappeared. A grandchild told me I was having a “roots emergency,” and I guess I was.

I decided on a one-day visit—enough, I thought, to cover a town only six blocks one way and five the other. And I planned not to visit people, only places.

County Road 431 was never very lively. You see the cotton fields, but you need patience to get to the signs—the
BANION COUNTY
one and then the one that says
CONCORDIA TOWN LIMITS
. After a church and a graveyard turn up, you are almost immediately on First Street.

First Street seemed little changed from what I remembered. Though no longer cobblestoned, it is still only three blocks in length, stores on both sides. I went quickly to our old store, which had been in the center block—the Number One location in that day's merchantspeak.

You used to be able to spot our store by the gold letters on the plate-glass windows:
BRONSON'S LOW-PRICED STORE
. My father had splurged on those letters. For customer morale, he said, so customers would not feel that “low-priced” meant cheap.

Our store is now Swain's Electronics, one of the few stores on the street that still sells things. Most of the properties that are occupied offer services. Some persevere from my day. The First National Bank, for example, seems as in charge as ever, its brass plaque gleaming perhaps for the ages. At the end of the street the train depot is still operating, if minimally. And across the railroad tracks the church steeple rises into the air, though the church may no longer be New Bethel Baptist.

Bronson's Low-Priced Store was Concordia's “Jew store.” There had been none until my family got there, and in those
days it was the custom for every small Southern town to have one. A Jew store—and that is what people called it—was a modest establishment selling soft goods—clothing and domestics (bedding, towels, yard goods)—to the poorer people of the town—the farmers, the sharecroppers, the blacks, the factory workers. We were the only Jews among Concordia's inhabitants, of which, when my family arrived in 1920, there were 5,318, counting whites and Negroes.

For us Concordia actually began at the house of Miss Brookie Simmons. As I pulled my rental car up to it and sat looking, it seemed much as it had when I had last seen it and, I have no doubt, much as it had been when Aaron and Reba Bronson and family had pulled up to it themselves on their arrival in Concordia.

T
hough I was not there on that first day, it doesn't really matter. The story of it, and the events leading up to and following it, have been so often recalled and relived in my family, they have long seemed as much my experiences as the things I remember as having happened to me. My mother and father are with us no longer for the nostalgia sessions that so engrossed us, but Miriam and Joey are still around. Miriam and Joey live up North; I, in the South, though among a mixed population of Southerners and Northerners. Although Miriam has been living up North for many years, her Southern accent is as strong as ever, if not stronger. Joey (“Joe” now to most people but “Joey” as ever to Miriam and me) lost his a long time ago. Mine is still there, more there at certain times than at others: When Southerners are present, my speech is dense with
y'all
s and
mercy
s and much less so when they're not.

Joey and Miriam and I get together as often as possible, and when we do, out come the stories, along with the snapshots and the newspaper clippings and the old store newspaper ads.

L
ike Banion County and Concordia, most names are not real ones; but what happened and why are pretty much the truth, or, as my father would say, “close enough so nobody argues about it.”

M
y mother always said she'd felt something of a let-down when she first saw the sign reading
CONCORDIA TOWN LIMITS
. They had been riding for three days along rutted dirt roads north and west of Nashville. Somehow she had come to believe that when they got to the town that my father had chosen for their new home—their
destination
, he said—there would be something remarkable about it, something that would set it apart from the other small Tennessee communities through which they had been traveling. But here they were, at the “outskwirts,” as my father called it all his life, and what she saw were only more cotton fields, yet another wooden church with a cross on top, one more cemetery. So what should she have expected? she asked herself. An elevated train? Fancy gates?

My mother wasn't exactly overjoyed at being there. Truly, ever since they had left New York City, her mood had been like a thing on her chest, as she used to say. Two years and three months before, the family had ridden the train south to Nashville, where at least there lived other Jewish families, where there was a shul, or synagogue, and the prospect of a glass of tea in the afternoons with the rabbi's wife. Now they were about to
enter a small town in Banion County, west Tennessee, fifty miles southwest of Paducah, Kentucky, wherever that was. They were going to try to open a store in a place where they would be the only Jews in town.

These feelings of my mother's were very unlike those of my father. Indeed, in disposition the two of them were very different. She was the one who looked back, fretted, viewed with alarm, often brooded. He lived for the future, crossed bridges when he came to them and not before, hoped always for the best.

In looks, except that they were both small in stature, they were opposites as well. My father's appearance was bright and light, his straight hair “blondish,” his eyes famously blue, his smile quickly there. My mother was dark haired and dark eyed, and her smile came less readily.

As they rode toward town, true to form, my father was ebullient, my mother apprehensive.
Oy
, what were they doing here, she was asking herself, herself and her husband and her two children, here among these, as my father called them, “country Tennesseans”? From what she had seen of them along the road, she had already declared them a curious people. Were they not strange, these women who charged out of their houses (in bonnets stiff like iron) to
sweep with brooms
their dirt yards? Whoever heard?

And
oy
, the church spires. As she looked now toward the town, she counted six. Or maybe seven. In such a small town, so many churches? From what she had heard, in the South prayers went to God and to—um—
Jesus
, so why not just one big praying place, come one, come all? The deep gloom all at once upon her, she did what she always did when this happened—put her head in her hands and moved it back and forth, as if tolling it. “Like a bell my head was in those days” was the way she used to describe it.

As the oft-repeated tale went, when, on July 16, 1920, the Bronsons reached the edge of town, there was in the sky a heavy
black cloud outlined in cold blue. Within a few minutes the rain began falling. My father pulled the wagon into the graveyard, and my mother joined Joey and Miriam under the tarpaulin, which already sheltered the family's few possessions. My father stayed out in the now-hammering rain and stared at the tomb-stones. On one a poem started, “So sinks the sun after a gentle day,” and he thought it was nice that somebody's day had been gentle, his own not having been gentle by anybody's call.

My father had wanted to go by train; Concordia was a county seat, and therefore the train stopped there. But trains meant fares and freight charges, and with the debt to my grandfather for their trip to Nashville still outstanding, my mother—for whom a debt was, as she put it, “like a growth”—argued otherwise. No, she said, they should think of “a penny saved, a penny to pay back with” and should therefore go by wagon. As if it were a matter of choosing the El over the streetcar to get to 125th Street, my father said.

As the thunder retreated, my father heard its rumble as threats to return if he didn't do right. Understood, he said to himself, but right about what? Out of his choices, of which he had many, he picked the most imminent—a place to stay. The wagon one more night was not an option. But where to look? And where was his
mazel
—his good luck—which should be turning up right about now to point the way?

Suddenly, not from the heavens but from the elm tree, plummeted two boys. As they stood staring at my father, they seemed to him the color and texture of the rain itself.

Atop pale hair sat ancient Panama hats, the saturated brims undulating with each raindrop. Pants, perhaps once blue, were streaky white; white shirts, confined by suspenders, were soppy, the long sleeves, buttoned at the wrists, plastered to arms. Feet were bare.

These were the Medlin brothers—T and Erv. As he announced their names, T, the older one and the one who spoke
(Erv, six, only gazed), told my father he had been “christened” T.J. but was called T “for short”—as if, my father always said, two letters were too much of a mouthful. T was “near to nine,” although my father described him as one of those country boys who might be “near to nine” but were more like “near to” thirty. They were the sons of a cotton farmer and lived “over yonder,” T said, pointing to a peeling farmhouse.

T was puzzled by my father's presence. “You be the new Jew peddler?” he asked him.

“Jew yes, peddler no,” my father answered him.

It was clear the boy had never before seen a Jew who wasn't a peddler. “Where you bound then?” As we got to know T through the years, we all were aware of his habit of flicking his eyes up when he was doubtful, and he did that now. “And what you got in mind?”

When told that my father was bound for Concordia and had in mind opening a store there, the boy seemed even more confounded. Though we all liked to “do” people, I always thought my father had a true gift for mimicry, and what T said now, according to how my father told it, was, “Danged if I ever heard tell of a Jew storekeeper afore. And, law, in
Concordia?
”

As the rest of the Bronson family emerged from the tarpaulin, T looked them over, commented in an aside to my father, “I see you ain't just the one Jew,” and asked if they needed a place to stay. He had something in mind—the home of his “cudden,” Brookie Simmons, the one in Concordia who took strangers in, the one who, according to T, “loved company like a darky on Sunday afternoon.”

My father had one question—the itchy “How much?” All the money he had in the world was in his inside coat pocket, and it was a slight amount indeed. “She charge much?” he asked T, not comfortable with the question but having to ask it anyway.

It was plainly T's view that everybody in the world except
my father knew that Brookie Simmons was the daughter and heir of “Coca-Cola” Simmons, the bottling plant magnate and the town's wealthiest man, and as such she would be little interested in such matters. “You don't know nothing if you think she's in it for the money,” he said to my father.