A“misdriven nail” Miss Brookie had called Tom Dillon, and for good reason, my father was finding out. Here was a man to whom he could say nothing right.
It was immediately clear that Tom Dillon hated Yankees and hated Jews, so a YankeeJew, which he pronounced as one word, was no doubt as abominable a creature as he could imagine— not, I suppose, that he knew all that many. “I’m not sure our folks will want a store run by a YankeeJew,” he informed my father.
Tom Dillon was a large overweight man about fifteen years younger than his cousin Brookie. Extra poundage, a grandmother, and college degrees—hers from the University of Chicago, his from the University of Tennessee—were about all the cousins shared, except for one personality trait: Both were bent on prevailing. Still, what they hoped to prevail in were vastly different. If Miss Simmons struggled to bring enlightenment, Tom Dillon gave his all to maintaining the status quo. Miss Brookie, who was perhaps the only one in town who knew the word, called him a “xenophobe,” which in Tom Dillon’s case meant that he was suspicious of anybody who wasn’t Southern, white, and Protestant. As Concordia’s leading property owner and a longtime pillar of the church, he was one of the town’s biggest big shots, and though Miss Brookie prevailed occasionally, his score for prevailing was probably somewhere around a hundred percent.
Dillon had an especially heavy and moist face, and as he came out with his objections one-two-three, a handkerchief gripped in his hand swiped at it. If there was indeed a Southern tradition of civility, as my father had observed there was in Savannah, Tom Dillon did not subscribe to it. He again expressed the thought, without any discernible attempt to gussy it up, that there hadn’t been any Jews to speak of around Concordia and he wasn’t sure the town was going to want any.
My father held up his hands as if to physically block Dillon’s objections. Hoping to banter with the man, he said, “Why don’t I take that worry off your hands? Why not say it’s my worry?”
What did my father mean—his worry? Dillon wanted to know. He, Tom Dillon, was the one who stood to lose if the store failed. About the extras my father wanted, hellfire, they cost dollars, his dollars. Adding the upstairs my father had talked about, for instance, meant calling in “Poindexter and his bunch of idiots” to put a door in, and then after Poindexter put it in backward, he, Tom Dillon, that’s who, would have to fight with him over who was to pay to turn it around. And, anyway, an upstairs in a Jew store was just “by damn, showing off,” wasn’t it?
Dillon’s store was narrow and dark, with a single display window for natural light and a ceiling too high for electric lights to help out much. It had all the appeal of a cave. My father said to Dillon, as diplomatically as he could, that the store “ain’t too big, as I’m sure you know,” and outlined how he planned to put the men’s suits and men’s dressing rooms upstairs, away from the women’s department downstairs. He also had the hope, unexpressed, to have dressing rooms that were better than the ones at Edelstein’s, which were two humble cubbyholes separated from the store and each other by curtains, with pinned-on hand printed paper signs reading WHITE MEN on one and WHITE LADIES on the other.
My father’s hopes did not extend to dressing rooms for Negroes, as he had learned that in the South Negroes did not try on in stores; they tried on at home. Still, unlike in better stores, where returns from Negroes were not tolerated for any reason, in Jew stores the owner would at least meet a Negro customer at the back door and arrange there for a return or exchange.
My father said that at the words “ain’t too big,” Dillon took an annoyed swipe at his big, sweaty face, at the overloading beads of perspiration, and, as if sincerely seeking information, said to him, “Tell me something—why in hell did you Yankee-Jews come here anyway?”
A momzer, my father thought, a real, no-doubt-about-it bastard. And was he supposed to take the bastard’s question seriously? Ponder it and give an answer?
No, Dillon seemed neither to invite nor require a rejoinder. It was Brookie Simmons’s business, he was saying, if she wanted YankeeJews in her house, but the town had done fine without them and he expected it would continue doing fine. My father kept trying to interrupt, but Dillon just raised his voice and continued on. He was now letting my father in on the fact that YankeeJews spoil a town. “You know that, Bronson?” he said, as if he had been doing research on the subject.
My father wondered if the bastard expected him to agree, even give a few huzzahs, to shout “You said it!” and then do him a favor and leave town. Out loud he said, “You think so?”
Dillon answered soberly that he did and gave reasons why this was so. “A YankeeJew merchant comes and turns First Street into a cutthroat place and pretty soon everybody in town is miserable,” he explained. He fell silent and shook his head, as if his vision had left him completely depressed.
So where did that leave my father and the store? “About the store,” my father said.
“Oh, yeah,” Dillon said, coming out of his gloomy trance. “I’ll think it over and let you know.”
As I have understood it, my mother had come out on the porch at the very moment Miss Brookie had used the phrase “Jew store” on the telephone with Tom Dillon, before my father’s meeting with Dillon. Miss Brookie had used it as shorthand for the kind of business my father had in mind, had used it with Dillon because, as an owner of business properties, he would know the expression and it would tell him that this was not to be another Dalrymple-Eaton’s, which was a store for the well-to-do, of which one was enough, there not being all that many well-to-do in Concordia. But all my mother knew at that moment was that Miss Brookie had said the unsayable—had said “Jew store.” “How did I know?” my mother asked in later years. “How could I know she wasn’t always big with the ‘Jew’ this and ‘Jew’ that?”
In my mother’s mind the word Jew used all by itself, nakedly, as it were, was not a word but a curse. She believed it was used only by people who hated Jews. If it had its three letters—its “-ish”—on the end, ah, that made the difference. If I said that someone was a Jew, my mother would ask me, “So what is he? A no-goodnik? A gangster?” On that day, however, when she had heard “Jew store,” she had not protested. She could believe she was back with the girls at the table in the factory.
Before Miss Brookie had come back from the telephone, my mother had plunked down on the step next to my father, and he had said, hoping it was true, “Like a baby you slept, Reba.”
My mother could only think it would be terrible if a baby slept as she had. Oy, such dreams she had had—dreams of her long-dead grandmother running around with hair “wild like an animal’s” and screaming that everybody and everything had gone crazy.
On the porch with my father, she had wondered if Joey and Miriam had eaten. “Don’t tell me what,” she had said, and my father had replied that his lips were pasted shut. And who had made their breakfast? And when my father had answered “Lizzie Maud,” my mother had remembered that the lady had mentioned somebody with this name the day before.
“Miss Brookie”—my mother had heard my father call the lady this and knew that she must too—had come back from the phone and now sat down below them on the steps. After telling my father that Tom Dillon would meet with him, she had begun addressing my mother in a blue streak, her words, my mother said when she told this story, like “flies that wouldn’t light.” Miss Brookie had wanted my mother to go with this Lizzie Maud to some place called the U-Tote-’Em—where she could buy her own “wherewithals” and then use the kitchen.
My father had thought my mother should go, but my mother had thought no, she didn’t want to go to the U-Tote-’Em. The only place she had wanted to go was back to bed.
In the end, while my father had gone to meet Tom Dillon, my mother had gone grocery shopping with Lizzie Maud.
My mother had had an unnerving morning at the U-Tote-’Em. First of all, Lizzie Maud had turned out to be a Negro. Oy. She had to shop with a Negro and she would have to cook next to her, too. Then, when she had looked at the meats in the grocery store icebox, just like one in a house except bigger, although she had known not to expect kosher, where was the lamb, the veal, the calves’ liver? Didn’t they know there was other meat in the world besides pork? This was not exactly a fair question, as there were certainly beef and chickens in the box, not to mention kid. But when my mother had asked the butcher—not really a butcher, just the man who ran the grocery store—for a brisket, he had looked at her as if she had brought into his store the word for the flesh from a newly evolved animal.The man had said, “Don’t have no call for that, Mizriz . . . Mizriz . . . Bronson, ain’t it?” “Mizriz,” as my mother would find out, was for many Concordians the pronunciation of choice for “Mrs.” but now sounded to her only like misery.
If my mother was unnerved by it all, Lizzie Maud was unnerved by none of it. Shopping at the U-Tote-’Em was something she did most every day, and, ever since Miss Brookie had begun to welcome guests in her house, she had shopped with them and indeed had taken over their entire orientation. She fussed with her mistress about the extra trouble guests imposed on her, but by now it was only a habit, and in truth she had long since lost the capacity to be surprised, disturbed, or vexed by her mistress.
Her attitude toward guests was a reflection of Miss Brookie’s. If Miss Brookie found the invited ones in some way disappointing—too uncommunicative, too unhygienic, too pious—and showed them the door, Lizzie Maud packed them a lunch and waved a cool good-bye.
Now thirty-one, Lizzie Maud had been with the Simmons family from the age of fourteen as “cook”—in the South a catchall title understood to mean the Negro woman who did everything. Since Miss Brookie was a total incompetent when it came to running the house—couldn’t boil water without a recipe, as we might put it in Concordia—after the elder Simmonses had died, Lizzie Maud had also assumed the role of parent, though she had a family of her own, a husband, Seth, who worked for the railroad, and five children.
For Lizzie Maud there was much to be gained from working in so intimate a way with such a powerful town presence as Miss Brookie, and her personality—bossy, opinionated, unconquerable—was clearly an adaptation of her mistress’s. For a black person of those times, with power so hard to come by, parenting a white woman like Miss Brookie and telling white visitors how and what to do was about as good as you could get.
So it was on the same day that my father came back from his unsatisfactory meeting with Tom Dillon that my mother came back from her unnerving shopping. When my father arrived home, my mother was already sitting on the back porch in an old rocker with a broken rush seat and staring absently into the backyard.
In the backyard was an abandoned outhouse (the “privy,” T called it), the gray of raw wood showing through the old white paint, the sagging door ajar, the windows broken. Farther back was a small stable, which now sheltered both Willy and Miss Brookie’s horse, Harold (for Harold Lloyd), plus the buggy from which Harold had been unhitched. There was no room in the stable for our wagon, which stood outside, open to the elements.
When my father came out on the porch with the story of his meeting with Tom Dillon, my mother immediately thought of Dillon not only as a momzer, as my father had, but also as a kulak, the Russian farmer-peasant, the man Jewish villagers most loved to hate. “A momzer Dillon was, naturally,” my mother always said, “but, I ask you, wasn’t he also the same like a kulak?”
It was a sentiment no one could argue with, though it was true that in certain ways kulaks had the edge. They were not just anti-Jewish, they were actively so: They worked Jews from sunup to sundown, rented them hovels to live in, and, during pogroms, when the Cossacks came swooping into town on horseback to plague Jews and maybe to kill them, they made a great show of hiding the Jews and then betraying them. Still, in basic attitudes toward Jews, kulaks and Tom Dillon were blood brothers.
Out there on the back porch, as my mother sat and rocked, these were the things she turned over and over.