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. …”
21.
A Bird Who Flies
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.
I waited till evening to read it to her, which meant she was walking around the store all day not knowing her mother was dead, and Tateh knew it, and I knew it, and it was just a mess. I read it to her in her bedroom, the one she shared with me and Dee-Dee. She had a little rocking chair that she sat in, and she was sitting there, looking out the window, when I came into the room. I said, “Mameh, I have something to read to you,” and I read it to her. She never said a word. She just sat there and stared into the night, tears rolling down her face. Not a sound came from her lips. Not a word.
Later on, I went to bed and I heard a little noise coming from her bed. She slept in a little bed, by herself. I heard this little noise coming from her bed, and I knew she was crying and I said, “It’s all right, Mameh, it’s all right,” but she just cried and cried. Just weeping. I can still hear her weeping now sometimes. I know the exact sound of it, like a note you hear or a song that keeps spinning around in your head and you can’t forget it. Every once in a while when I’m walking down the street I think I hear it, just a quick sniffle noise, like an “oh!” and I turn around and no one’s there.
I stuck around Suffolk awhile longer, and then I left for good sometime in 1941. I can’t remember the exact time of all this because it was a bad time. It was bad. I left over Mameh’s objections too. She said, “You can have a good life here,” but I said, “I can’t live here, Mameh,” and she didn’t bring it up ever again or ask me to stay any longer. There was no life in Suffolk for me. I packed what few things I wanted and tried to talk to Dee-Dee before I left, but she wouldn’t talk to me. “You promised you wouldn’t go,” she said, and she walked away from me. As I left the store to walk downtown to the bus station, Mameh handed me a bag lunch and kissed me and I was out the door and gone. I never saw her or Dee-Dee ever again. Tateh didn’t say a word to me as I walked out.
The Greyhound bus station was across from the Suffolk Hotel in those days. I was standing there waiting for the bus to come, when Tateh pulled up in his car. He kept a big V-8 Ford. He got out and took his hands out of his pockets and started pacing. He said, “You should stay.”
I said, “I can’t.” I was nervous. He always made me nervous.
“I’ll get you a route,” he said. “You can have your own route, selling supplies to farmers in the country. You’ll make a bundle. Or you can get a job in Norfolk. You can move there.”
I said no.
“You want to go to college? I’ll send you to college in Norfolk. Or business school, whatever you want, but you have to stay.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I’m telling you to stay,” he said. “Hear me? I need you to run the store. And your mother needs you.”
I began to yell at him and we argued. Here he was having divorced Mameh and he was still using her against me. Then he said, “I know you’re gonna marry a shvartse. You’re making a mistake.” That stopped me cold, because I didn’t know how he learned it. To this day I don’t know. He said, “If you marry a nigger, don’t ever come home again. Don’t come back.”
“I’ll always come to see Mameh.”
“Not if you marry a nigger you won’t,” he said. “Don’t come back.”
He got in his car and left. When the bus came I got on it and cried a little and then fell asleep. When I woke later on, I opened the lunch bag Mameh had packed for me and inside, tucked between the knishes and matzoh balls and chopped liver, was her Polish passport, with her picture inside. It’s the only picture I have of her, she’s sitting down holding me and my brother Sam in her lap.
A few weeks after I got back to New York and was living with Dennis in Harlem, Dennis overheard my Aunt Mary say that Tateh had put out a detective to look for me. It just made me lay low in Harlem. I was never going back home. Instead I got a job at a glass factory down in the Chelsea area of Manhattan. My job was to hold these glass tubes over fire and stretch them into test tubes. I would come home from work every night with big burns on my hands. Not long after, in early ‘42, Dennis came home from Aunt Mary’s factory and told me he heard Aunt Mary say that my mother was sick and had been brought up to a hospital in the Bronx. I right away w
ent out and called Aunt Mary and asked if she knew where Mameh was. She said, “You’re out of the family. Stay out. We sat shiva for you. You can’t see her.” Well, that just hurt me to the bone. That night I told Dennis, “I’ve got to see her.” He said, “Ruth, your Aunt Mary made it clear that you’re not welcome up there.” That gave me pause. I didn’t want to make Mameh sicker. After all, I was out of the family. I worried sick about it, trying to think what to do and I could not decide.
A few days later I was at work at the glass factory and the foreman, a German man, came over to me and told me I had a phone call. It was Dennis. He was calling from Aunt Mary’s factory. He told me Mameh had just passed away.
They had a locker room in the glass factory where we changed and put on our work aprons, and I hung up the phone and went in there and howled out my grief. The foreman and other workers came in there and tried to help me stand because I had fallen to the floor, but I couldn’t get up. I tried to, but I couldn’t, and one of the ladies was saying, “Oh, she don’t have to act like that, hollering and carrying on.”
I was depressed for months. I lost weight and couldn’t eat and was near suicide. I kept saying, “Why couldn’t it have been me that died?” I would go on long walks and would forget where I was. I’d be someplace and couldn’t remember how I got there. Dennis was the one who shook me out of it. He kept saying. “You’ve got to forgive yourself, Ruth. God forgives you. He’ll forgive the most dreaded sin, the most dreaded sin.” But I couldn’t listen, not for a long while, I couldn’t listen. I was so so sorry, deep in my heart I was sorry, but all your “sorrys” are gone when a person dies. She was gone. Gone. That’s why you have to say all your “sorrys” and “I love yous” while a person is living, because tomorrow isn’t promised. Lord, I was burning with hurt. I hung on to Mameh’s passport and carried it everywhere. I didn’t think she was dying when I left home, but she knew it. That’s why she gave me that passport. I’ve always held that to this day, that guilt, that I left Mameh, because all her life I was the one who translated for her and helped her around. I was her eyes and ears in America, and when I left…well, Sam had gone, and Bubeh had died, and her husband treated her so bad and divorced her, and her reasons for living just slipped away. It was a bad time.
It took a long time to get over it, but Dennis stuck it out with me, and after a while I began to listen to what he said about God forgiving you, and I began to hold on to that, that God will forgive you, will forgive the most dreaded sin, because I felt Mameh deserved better from me, and that’s when I started going to Metropolitan Church in Harlem with Dennis to hear Rev. Brown preach. It helped me to hear the Christian way, because I needed help, I needed to let Mameh go, and that’s when I started to become a Christian and the Jew in me began to die. The Jew in me was dying anyway, but it truly died when my mother died.
I remember how she used to laugh when she waved chickens over our heads on Yom Kippur. I bet they don’t even do that now. She’d wave a live chicken over her head and say to the chicken, “You to death, me to life!” while we’d scream and run away because my father would take the chicken from her and kill it as a blood sacrifice. I didn’t like that. It seemed so old-fashioned and odd. “I don’t want to do that in America,” I’d say. But she’d say, “That chicken is just showing God we’re thankful for living. It’s just a chicken. It’s not a bird who flies. A bird who flies is special. You would never trap a bird who flies.” She used to sit in a little rocking chair in her room upstairs and watch the birds. She’d lay crumbs on the ledge of her window and the birds would gather there and eat while she sang to them, but she’d always shoo them away and make them fly off so they’d be free again. She had a little Yiddish song she used to sing to them. “Feygele, feygele, gay a veck.” “Birdie, birdie, fly away.”
22.
A Jew Discovered
It was afternoon, August 1992, and I was standing in front of the only synagogue in downtown Suffolk, a collection of old storefronts, dimly lit buildings, and old railroad tracks that tell of better, more populous times. It’s a small, old, white building with four tall columns and a row of stairs leading to a tall doorway. This is the synagogue that young Rachel Shilsky walked to with her family and where Rabbi Shilsky led the congregation during the Jewish holidays Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement and fasting. When I was a boy, Jewish holidays meant a day off from school for me and that was it. I certainly had no idea they had anything to do with me.
I felt like an oddball standing in front of the quiet, empty building, and looked up and down the street every couple of minutes lest the cops come by and wonder why a black man was loitering in front of a white man’s building in the middle of the day in Suffolk, Virginia. This is, after all, the nineties, and any black man who loiters in front of a building for a long time looking it over is bound to draw suspicion from cops and others who probably think he’s looking for an open entrance so he can climb in and steal something. Black males are closely associated with crime in America, not with white Jewish mothers, and I could not imagine a police officer buying my story as I stood in front of the Jewish temple saying, “Uh, yeah, my grandfather was the rabbi here, you know …” The sun was baking the sidewalk and it was so hot I sat down on the steps, placing my tape recorder and notebook next to me.
My long search for the Shilsky family ended here. I had spent considerable time looking through school records, court records, and other documents with mixed results. My grandmother Hudis was buried far from here, in a Long Island graveyard amongst hundreds and hundreds of Jews, more than she ever had the pleasure of living around down here. The U.S. Army forked over the death record of Sergeant Sam Shilsky, who died in February 1944, but the details of his service record were gone forever, lost in a fire of army personnel records. I felt like I was stalking ghosts. No sign of Rabbi Shilsky, whom I traced to a Brooklyn address in the 1960s, where he apparently landed after wandering through Norfolk, Virginia; Belleville, New Jersey; and Manhattan. Dee-Dee vanished from Suffolk shortly before her mother died, and never returned. She withdrew from Suffolk High on January 23, 1942, one semester short of graduation. Her mother died five days later, on January 28, 1942, in New York City. I could only imagine how painful that must have been, having to leave the only real home she ever had at age seventeen, her mother gone, her father with a gentile woman, her brother in the war, her sister disappeared; being completely helpless as the pillars of her life fell away like toothpicks. Everything she had known was gone. Whom did she live with? Maybe the father kept her. Who knows? I had a feeling she was still alive. She would have been about sixty-seven then. I could have tracked her down—I was, after all, a reporter—but after a couple of feeble attempts I gave up. I didn’t have the heart. I didn’t want to introduce any more pain into her life. She’d seen enough. The closest I could come to her was to sit on these synagogue steps, baking in the August heat, and wonder.
I wanted to see the inside of the synagogue. I wanted to see it, then later tell my black wife and my two children about it—because some of my blood runs through there, because my family has a history there, because there’s a part of me in there whether I, or those that run the synagogue, like it or not. In truth, I had never been inside an actual synagogue before, the closest being the time I was working as a reporter and did a story about a Jewish school in Queens that had a synagogue attached to it. In the course of interviewing the headmaster, a woman, I mentioned that my mother was Jewish and she exclaimed, “Well, according to Jewish law that means you’re Jewish too! We have a black Jew who works in our school!” She hit the intercom button on her desk phone and said, “Sam, can you come up here a minute?” Minutes later the black janitor walked in, holding a mop, smiling. I’d pay good money for a picture of my face at that moment. Ol’ Sam smiled and said hello and I gurgled out a polite response, though I wanted to choke myself for opening up my big mouth.
When I called the rabbi of my mother’s old syna
gogue he spoke to me with neither nostalgia nor surprise, only grudging recognition. He had heard I was in town from other Jews whom I had met. He knew I was black and he knew who my mother was. “I remember your mother,” he said. I explained to him that I was writing a book about my family and asked if I might see some of the synagogue records. “There’s nothing in them that would help you,” he said curtly. I asked if I could see the inside of the synagogue itself. He said, “I’ll have to check with some other board members to see who would have time to open it up to let you see it,” and hung up. I knew the deal. Given the photo of the board members on the synagogue’s anniversary pamphlet I’d obtained, I doubted if half the old geezers on the board were still drawing air. I hung up, muttering to myself, “I didn’t want to see your silly old synagogue anyway.”
By then I had seen enough anyway. The smell of azaleas and the creeping loneliness that climbed over me as I poked around Suffolk had begun to suffocate me. The isolation my family had felt, the heartbreak they had suffered, seemed to ooze out of the trees, curling through the stately old brick buildings and rising like steam off the Civil War statue that seemed to point its cannon directly at me as I wandered through the town graveyard. I wanted to leave right at that moment, but instead sat on the synagogue steps as if glued, as my mind reeled back to a previous trip in 1982, when fate and luck led me deep into the bowels of a state office building where Aubrey Rubenstein was working for the highway department right-of-way office. Rubenstein was in his early sixties then, a heavyset man with dark hair, a deep southern accent, and a very clear and concise manner. His father had taken over my grandfather’s store around 1942 after the old man left town. When I walked into his office and explained who I was, he looked at me a long, long time. He didn’t smile. He didn’t frown. Finally he spoke: “What a surprise,” he said softly. He offered me a seat and a cup of coffee. I accepted. “Don’t move from there,” he said.