The Color of Water (20 page)

In order for my parents to get a divorce properly in the Jewish faith they would've had to go to a rov, a kind of high Jewish rabbi, but Tateh didn't care for no
rov.
He was done with being religious. He went out to a lawyer one day and came back with some papers and laid them on the table and told me, “Tell your mother to sign these.” They were divorce papers. Mameh refused. Then he went to Reno, Nevada, and got himself a quickie divorce. He came back to Virginia and said, “Tell your mother
we're divorced,” and that was it. But nothing changed in my house. We all still lived together, and we were all miserable, and by this time I was home a few weeks, a lot longer than I had planned, and I wanted to leave. It was a miserable time, especially for my poor sister Dee-Dee. Dee-Dee was four years younger than me, only about fifteen then. What a life she'd had. Of all of us children, Dee-Dee had the worst of it, because she was the youngest
.

Dee-Dee didn't seem to have problems. I always thought she was prettier than me. She wasn't rebellious like I was. We were like night and day. She was short and had curly brown hair while I was tall and dark and thin and had a mustache. When she was little she refused to wear hand-me-downs and wore nice skirts and socks and always looked neat, whereas I would wear hand-me-downs and looked like a sack of potatoes no matter what I wore. Dee-Dee was very smart. She got good grades in school while me and my brother Sam barely passed. She was Tateh's favorite and I was always a little jealous of her because Tateh paid for her piano lessons while he wouldn't allow me to take them and that sort of thing. See, she was the first American in my family, while Sam and I were immigrants, and we kind of had that immigrant thing on us. The kids would make fun of us for being Jewish in school, but they wouldn't make fun of Dee-Dee. You just didn't do that to Dee-Dee. She had confidence. She was a nice Jewish girl who did what she was told. I mean, she was in high school going through the things high school girls go through, playing tennis and learning piano, and when Tateh was divorcing Mameh she got lost in all that. No one ever talked to her or shared feelings with her, including me. We were close—not close enough
for me to tell her the mess I had made of my life, but close enough—and one evening she came up to our bedroom and said, “I know you're going to leave, Rachel. Don't leave. Don't go back to New York.” Dee-Dee was so proud, and for her to ask me to stay…well, she meant it. We didn't talk to each other that way, and for her to come out and say what she was feeling was hard for her. It hurt me so much to hear it because I couldn't stay. “I'll think about it,” I said
.

“I don't believe you,” she said. “I know you're going back. Please don't go back. Promise me you'll stay.” She sat on the bed and buried her face in her hands and cried, my little sister. “Promise me,” she sobbed. “Promise me you'll stay.”

“Okay, I promise,” I said. “I'll stay.” But I broke my promise to Dee-Dee and she never forgot it. And she would remind me of it many years later
.

It was November 1982, and I was tooling down Virginia State Route 460 in my green 1972 Volkswagen at four a.m. A few hours before, I had dropped off my ex-girlfriend, Karen, a black model who renamed herself Karone (“My agent told me to do it”) at her grandmother's house in Petersburg. Also in tow with her was her two-year-old son, Paul, a gentle, kind boy who seemed slightly confused as to who I was. Mommy hated Karone. “You got a ready-made family now,” she quipped. “Your whole life was in front of you. Now look at you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Bye-bye dreams!” she sniffed.

I ignored her. Karone and I had no plans to get married.
We were not close. We were both living in Boston and decided it was time to leave town as well as each other. She was leaving her ex-husband behind. I wanted to leave myself behind. I had been working as a feature writer at the
Boston Globe
, a great job for a twenty-four-year-old reporter. My best friend was a white guy about sixty years old named Ernie Santosuosso who was the
Globe
jazz critic then. We would walk around the features department singing “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” and “It's You or No One” by saxophonist Dexter Gordon. I could've stayed there with Ernie forever, dogging it and cracking jokes in the features department, but I couldn't decide whether I wanted to be a writer or a musician, not knowing that it was possible to do both. In some ways I was caught between the worlds of black and white as well, because I'd discovered after college and graduate school that the earnest change-the-world rap sessions me and my schoolmates had that lasted till four
A.M.
didn't change the world one iota. I can clearly remember saying to my black college roommate in my freshman year, “Racism is a problem that should end just about the time we graduate.” Instead it smashed me across the face like a bottle when I walked into the real world. Boston was not an easy place to have a racial identity crisis either. Its racial problems are complicated, spilling over into matters of class, history, politics, even education. It was more than I wanted to face, and I had to run.

On the seat next to me was a small map of Virginia with the town of Suffolk circled on it, and a hand-drawn map Mommy had given me. It had taken years to solicit this information about where she grew up. Every time I'd ask about it, she'd say, “Oh yeah, well, there's nobody there that remembers me,” and off she went, looking for a house, or chasing down some errand that lasted hours, days, or weeks. It had gotten to the point where I didn't see why she made such a secret of it, and the part of me that wanted to understand who I was began to irk and itch at me, like a pesky mosquito bite that cries out to be scratched. When I finally nailed her down on it, she sat at the kitchen table, pulled out an old envelope, ripped it open, and unfolded it to give her more space. She then drew me a map of where she had lived in Suffolk. She talked as she drew: “The highway goes here. Here's the bridge. The courthouse is down the road, and the Jaffe slaughterhouse is over here. …” That map was the only clue I had to lead me to Mommy's family. She knew no names of people in Suffolk, despite having lived there for nearly thirteen years. “You can't remember anybody?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Nobody?”

“Well, I knew a girl named Frances.”

“Who was she?”

“She was my best friend.”

“Where is she now?”

“God knows.”

“What about her family.”

“Don't remember them. But her mother could cook like the dickens.”

So I went to Suffolk looking for Frances and her mother who could cook like the dickens. Mommy didn't remember their last name.

It was seven
A.M.
when I arrived in town, exhausted and hungry after the drive from Petersburg. The town looked like its sugar days were over. Quiet, empty, a mix of grand old buildings and new, more of an industrial site than a town really, with development sprawling into its surrounding areas rather than inside the town itself. I saw a McDonald's at a corner intersection. I parked there, went inside, and ordered some food. I sat down at a table and opened Mommy's little hand map. I checked the map, looked out the window, checked it again, looked out the window again. I knew I was on Main Street. There was an old courthouse building catty-corner to where I sat. Behind the courthouse was a graveyard. To my left was a bridge and a slaughterhouse. I was sitting right where her family's store used to be, 601 North Main Street. I left the food untouched and went outside and looked around. There was an old house behind the McDonald's. I knocked on the door and an elderly, bespectacled black man answered. I told him my business: Mother used
to live here. Name was Shilsky. Jews. A little store. He fingered his glasses and stared at me a long time. Then he said, “C'mon in here.”

He sat me down and brought me a soda. Then he asked me to tell my story one more time. So I did.

He nodded and listened closely. Then his face broke into a smile. “That means you ol' Rabbi Shilsky's grandson?”

“Yep.”

First he chuckled. Then he laughed. Then he laughed some more. He tried to control his laughing but he couldn't, so he stopped, took off his glasses, and wiped his eyes. I started to get angry, and he apologized. His name was Eddie Thompson. He was sixty-six. He had lived in that house all his life. It took him a minute to get himself together.

“I knew your mother,” he said. “We used to call her Rachel.”

I had never heard that name before. Even in recounting what little she had told me of her life, Mommy had never referred to herself as Rachel. She had always called herself Ruth. I discovered later that her true name was Ruchel, a Yiddish name which her family Americanized to Rachel, which she in turn further changed to the even more American-sounding Ruth.

“I knew that whole family,” Thompson said. “Rachel, Gladys, Sam, and the parents. Rachel was the kindhearted one. Gladys, the young one, we called her Dee-Dee. She was
a li'l bitty thing. She looked more like the father. Sam, the brother, we used to call him Sparky. They say he got killed in World War Two in a plane crash. Rachel, why she used to walk right up and down the road here, her and the mother. The mother was crippled. She used to limp. Her whole left side was messed up, Mrs. Shilsky. What a nice lady. She'd slip you a piece of fruit or candy inside the store when the old man wasn't looking. Old Man Shilsky though …” He shrugged. “Personally, I never had no problem with him.”

“What was he like?” I asked, my heart pounding.
Why is my heart pounding?
I asked myself. I wasn't sure.

“Like?” he asked.

“Old Man Shil—My grandfa—” I didn't know what to call him. Neither one sounded right. “What was Shilsky like?” I asked.

“Well…you being his grandson and all …” He shrugged again. “He…The old man was all right. I got along with him okay.”

I could see in his face that he didn't believe it, so I said, “You don't have to spare me. I never knew him. I'd just like to know what he was like.”

He cut a quick glance at the window, then said evenly, “You won't find anyone around here who liked him enough to even talk about him.”

“Why so?”

“His dislike for the colored man was very great.”

“How so?”

“Well…he just disliked black folks. And he cheated them. Sold ‘em anything and everything and charged ‘em as much as he could. If you owed him five dollars he'd make you pay back ten. He shot ol' Lijah Ricks in the stomach. Lijah brought that on himself though, went in the Shilskys' store fussin' over some sardines and crackers and wouldn't pay. Shilsky shot him in the left or right side, I can't remember which. He didn't kill him, but he was a hateful one, Old Man Shilsky. His own wife was scared of him.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Know? Why I could practically see into the man's house from my bedroom. We were right next door. I worked for Shilsky at one time. Made ten cents a day firing up his stove on Saturday mornings ‘cause Jews can't do much on Saturday. That's their Sunday, you see. He had a kerosene stove that left black marks everywhere. I wonder what happened to it. …” He pondered it a minute before I brought him back to the subject at hand. “He had a good thing there,” Eddie Thompson said, “making money hand over fist off the Negro. But see, he was mean as a dog. Mrs. Shilsky was terrified of the old man. If she was talking to you and he came into the room, she'd shush up and tremble.”

I listened in silence, his words landing on me like bricks. “What happened to him?” I asked.

“He run off with one of the sorriest, trashiest, poor-as-Job's-turkey white women you ever did see. I don't know how he got mixed up with her. She was a Claxton, Richard Claxton's wife. The old man, he fell in love with her because of Mrs. Shilsky being like she was, I reckon. That woman was big as a house. He looked like a boy when he walked down the road next to her. He was a little bitty guy.” He laughed, bittersweet. “Ol' Man Shilsky. Boy, he was something else.”

“You have any idea where he went?”

“Nope. Maybe Richmond. Don't know for sure.”

“I'd sure like to find him,” I said.

“Oh, I know where you can find him,” the old black man said. He pointed down to the ground and winked. “They'd let him in down there even if the bridge was out. They'd parachute him over.”

He talked for a long time, chuckling, disbelieving. “Rachel just left one day. I'm telling you she left, and we thought she was dead. That whole family is long gone. We didn't think we'd ever see none of them again till we got to the Other Side. And now you pop up. Lord knows it's a great day.”

He asked if he could call Mommy. I picked up the phone and dialed Mommy's house long-distance, got her on the phone, and told her I had somebody who wanted to talk to her. I handed the phone to him.

“Rachel? Yeah. Rachel. This is Eddie Thompson. From down in Suffolk. Remember me? We used to live right be—Yeaaaaaah, that's right.” Pause. “Naw. Everybody's dead now but Molly, Helen, Margaret, and Edward. That's right…Well, I'll be! The Lord touched me today!”

He paused a moment, listening.

“Rachel? That ain't you crying now, is it? This is old Eddie Thompson. You remember me? Don't cry now. …”

In the summer of 1941, before I came back to New York to stay with Dennis in Harlem, we received a letter in Suffolk from Mameh's family in New York. It said, “We have three rooms' worth of furniture. Do you want it?” Bubeh lived in a three-room apartment. That's how they told us Bubeh was dead. They didn't even bother to write to Mameh, but rather wrote to Tateh in English, which Mameh didn't read nor understand. Tateh read the letter and tossed it to me. “Read this to your mother,” he said, and walked away
.