The Color of Water (11 page)

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.

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.”

Tateh looked at me like I was crazy. “They're too big,” he said
.

“This is how they're supposed to fit,” I said. I was afraid he would change his mind. And the clerk, he wanted to sell those things and make his money, so he babbled out, “Oh, they're perfect, Reverend Shilsky, they're perfect.”

Tateh grumbled about it, but he paid for them
.

The moccasins were so big my feet squeaked and squished in them, like they'd been plunged in a bucket of water. I went squishing down the hallway in school and the kids laughed at them, so I took them off
.

None of the boys in school would even bother with me. So after a while I had me my own friend, and he didn't care that I wore secondhand clothes or was Jewish. He never judged me. That's the first thing I liked about him, in fact that's what I liked about black folks all my life: They never judged me. My black friends never asked me how much money I
made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, “Come as you are.” Blacks have always been peaceful and trusting. I don't care what they show on TV, these stupid boys with guns and these murderers they show on the news. Those aren't the majority. Most blacks are peaceful and trusting. That's why they're made a fool of so easily
.

My boyfriend's name was Peter, and he lived in one of the houses on the road behind the store. He was a tall, handsome young man, dark-skinned with beautiful teeth and a beautiful smile. He'd come into the store and buy Coca-Colas, crackers, gum, or other small items. I didn't notice him at first because I was always busy when he came in the store. There was plenty of work to do, not just behind the counter but elsewhere; like the wholesalers used to sell margarine without the yellow in it, so I'd have to go in the back and add the yellow dye to it, stir it around in a big barrel, or go into the ice freezer and pull out big blocks of meat and ice to chop up and lay out, just any number of things. But he'd come and find me in the store alone somehow and he'd linger, chatting or teasing me and trying to get me to smile in some way. He had a sense of humor that made me laugh all the time, and I began to look forward to his coming by. He'd always make sure Tateh and Mameh weren't around, which was difficult because Tateh kept a close eye on his daughters, but Peter would find his moments. One day he saw me outside pumping kerosene out of the tank and he came around and asked me to go for a walk and I said yes. He was a bold guy because from that moment on he was risking his life. God knows what I was thinking about. The only thing I told him was, “If my father sees us, we're in trouble.” Tateh
with his loaded pistol would've shot him certainly, and probably me, too, but it didn't matter to me. I was naive and young and before you know it I fell in love with him
.

I loved that boy to death and he loved me. At least, I thought he did. Who cared that he was black? He was the first man other than my grandfather who ever showed me any kindness in my life, and he did it at the risk of his own because they would've strung him up faster than you can blink if they'd have found out. Not just the Ku Klux Klan but the regular white folks in town would've killed him. Half of them were probably the Klan anyway, so it was all the same. You know death was always around Suffolk, always around. It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets. A lot of those secrets ended up floating down the Nansemond River just down the road from us. Folks would go down to the wharf and throw out nets for crabs and turtles and haul in human bodies. I remember one of our customers, Mrs. Mayfield, they found her son out there, he wasn't more than seventeen or so. He'd been killed and tied to a wagon wheel and tossed into the water until he drowned or the crabs ate him. You know a crab will eat anything. You have never seen me eat a crab to this day and you never will
.

Well, Peter and I were having our regular little secret rendezvous, carefully arranged. We'd meet in the yard or the passage behind the store, or he'd write a note and slip it to me secretly. If the store was closed he'd slide the note under the front door. On the Sabbath, Friday nights
,
it was a thrill for me to pretend I was going downstairs to the kitchen and then creep into the store to pick up the torrid love notes he slipped under the door. He would pledge his love for me no matter what and write out the plan for our secret meeting. At the appointed time he'd come by and pick me up in a car and I'd get into the back seat and lie flat so I wouldn't be seen. He had friends that lived out in the country in isolated areas, and that's where we would be together
.