He got on the phone. “Jaffe,” he said, “I have incredible news. Fishel Shilksy’s grandson is here. Sitting in my office. No kidding.…Uh-huh. And you won’t believe it. He’s black. No. I’m not lying. He’s a reporter writing a book about his family.…Yep.” When he hung up the phone, he said, “When we’re done, go around to the slaughterhouse on Main and see Gerry Jaffe and his family. They’d like to see you in person.” I knew the name Jaffe. Mommy had spoken of them several times. The Jaffes had a slaughterhouse down the road. Tateh would take us there to slaughter the cows in the kosher faith.…I made it a point to go see them. Like most of the Jews in Suffolk they treated me very kindly, truly warm and welcoming, as if I were one of them which in an odd way I suppose I was. I found it odd and amazing when white people treated me that way, as if there were no barriers between us. It said a lot about this religion—Judaism—that some of its followers, old southern crackers who talked with southern twangs and wore straw hats, seemed to believe that its covenants went beyond the color of one’s skin. The Sheffers, Helen Weintraub, the Jaffes, they talked to me in person and by letter in a manner and tone that, in essence, said “Don’t forget us. We have survived here. Your mother was part of this. …”
Sitting in his office, Aubrey Rubenstein talked easily, as a black colleague sat nearby eavesdropping with awe at the macabre conversation that unfolded between this elderly white man and myself. “There are not that many of us left,” Aubrey said. “We had maybe twenty-five or thirty Jewish families here at one time, back when your grandfather was around. The older ones died, the younger ones left. Some went to California, some to Virginia Beach, or just moved. The only ones who stayed had businesses with their fathers that dropped down to them.”
“Why did they all leave?” I asked.
“Why stay?” he said. “It was not that easy a place for a Jew to live. It was a tiny population of Jews. Most were merchants of one type or another. I suppose some found it easier to make a living elsewhere.” Wandering Jews, I thought.
We spoke easily for quite a while. “It’s an interesting thing that you’ve come down to check on your granddaddy,” he said. “It’s quite a story, I must say.”
I asked him about my family. “Well, it was kind of a tragedy, really. Shilsky wasn’t the man he could have been. He was a good rabbi—by that I mean he knew what he was teaching. In fact, he taught me a little as a boy. But he went into business full-time, which didn’t please a lot of Jews here, and he was seeing another woman for years. I’m not sure whether he was divorced when he left here or not, but I ran into him in New York after the war, maybe ‘46. Me and another fella went to see him about buying the piece of property next door to his store. He was up in Brooklyn.”
“What was he doing there?”
“I don’t know. But I believe Mrs. Shilsky had died by then. The whole thing was very tragic.” Seeing the expression on my face, he added, “Your grandmother was a fine lady. I still remember her coming to temple, lighting the candles, and standing up to say her prayers. I remember her clearly. She was crippled in the leg. She was a very fine lady.”
I asked him if anyone knew how Rabbi Shilsky treated his family, and Rubenstein shrugged.
“There are things that you hear, but no one asked. He was tight with his money and they could have been doing better than they looked. The Shilskys kept to themselves. Your Uncle Sam, he joined the air force and got killed in a plane crash in Alaska. They didn’t find his body or that of the other pilot for a long time, if they ever did find them. I heard this and don’t know it to be true or not. Your Aunt Gladys, you don’t know her, do you? She was a very bright girl. Your mother…well, she was a fine girl. Of course we had heard rumors, and I’m being frank, that she had run off and married a black man, but I never knew it to be true or not. My daddy at one time said it, but my parents never gave it any further comment. My father and mother were like liberals in their days. I never heard them knock anybody for being white or black or green or Christian or Jew or Catholic.”
I said nothing, listening in silence. I imagined that the news of Mommy’s marriage crashed through the Jewish community like an earthquake.
“How is your mother?” he asked.
“Fine.”
“You know,” he said, fingering the papers on his desk, “you look a little bit like your mother. The smile. Do you attend temple, being part Jewish?”
“No. She didn’t raise us Jewish.”
“Well, maybe that was for the best,” he said.
I was surprised by his candidness and said so.
We talked for a while longer before I rose to go. “Next time you come back I’ll see if I can dig up a picture of that old store,” he said. “Make sure to tell your mother Aubrey Rubenstein said hello.”
I pointed to my tape player on his desk. “The tape is running,” I said. “You can say it yourself.”
He leaned over to the tape and spoke into it softly. When he was done, he leaned back in his chair, and looked at the ceiling thoughtfully. “She picked that life for herself and she lived it, that’s all. What her reasons for it were I don’t know. But she did a good job. She raised twelve children. She led a good life.”
I told him I’d be back in a few months. “I’ll have a picture of that store for you,” he promised. But I waited ten years to come back, and when I called on him again he had died. I kept the tape with his greeting to Mommy on it for years, and while I never played it for her, thinking it might be too emotional for her to hear it, I played it for myself many times, thinking, wishing, hoping that the world would be this open-minded, knowing that God is: Ruth, this is Aubrey Rubenstein. I don’t know if you remember me or not, but if you do, I’m glad to meet your son and I see you’ve accomplished a great deal in your life. If you’re ever down this way stop on by and say hello to us. We all remember you. We wish you the best.
As I sat on the steps of the synagogue in the hot August sun, his words sliced through my memory like raindrops. I watched as two little black girls strode by, waved, and walked on. One was eating a bag of potato chips. I said to myself, “Whatever I’m looking for, I’ve found it.” I got in my car and drove back to the McDonald’s where the store had been. I walked around the grounds once again, as if the earth would speak to me. But it did not. It was just a cement parking lot. They ought to take the whole kit and caboodle of these cement parking lots and heave them into the sea, I thought. The Shilskys were gone. Long gone.
That night I slept in a motel just down the road from the McDonald’s, and at about four in the morning I sat straight up. Something just drew me awake. I tossed and turned for an hour, then got dressed and went outside, walking down the road toward the nearby wharf. As I walked along the wharf and looked over the Nansemond River, which was colored an odd purple by the light of the moon, I said to myself, “What am I doing here? This place is so lonely. I gotta get out of here.” It suddenly occurred to me that my grandmother had walked around here and gazed upon this water many times, and the loneliness and agony that Hudis Shilsky felt as a Jew in this lonely southern town—far from her mother and sisters in New York, unable to speak English, a disabled Polish immigrant whose husband had no love for her and whose dreams of seeing her children grow up in America vanished as her life drained out of her at the age of forty-six—suddenly rose up in my blood and washed over me in waves. A penetrating loneliness covered me, lay on me so heavily I had to sit down and cover my face. I had no tears to shed. They were done long ago, but a new pain and a new awareness were born inside me. The uncertainty that lived inside me began to dissipate; the ache that the little boy who stared in the mirror felt was gone. My own humanity was awakened, rising up to greet me with a handshake as I watched the first glimmers of sunlight peek over the horizon. There’s such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, and the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the
rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won’t be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children’s. I left for New York happy in the knowledge that my grandmother had not suffered and died for nothing.
23.
Dennis
In 1942 Dennis and I were living in a room in the Port Royal on 129th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and one night after work I walked into the hallway of our building and this black woman punched me right in the face. She hit me so hard I fell to the floor. “Don’t disrespect me!” she said. She was a raving lunatic. I never even knew who she was. I somehow got off the floor and she chased me up to our room and I slammed the door on her and waited for my husband to get home. Dennis went to speak to her when he got home from work. “That white woman don’t belong here,” she said. That’s what she told him. Dennis didn’t attack her. He just said, “Leave my wife alone,” and she did. Even though we were not married, we considered ourselves husband and wife.
Some black folks never did accept me. Most did, but there were always a few running around saying “Nubian this” and “Nubian that” and always talking about Africa and all this. Well, I’m a mother of black children, and nobody will ever deny me my children, and they can put that in their Nubian pipe and smoke it. All this Nubian. If you want to go back to Africa, James, well, you can go. I don’t see the point in your going when you have your family here. But if you feel you want to go to Africa to find your roots I won’t stop you. I’ll still be your mother when you come back. And you’ll still be my son.
There was no turning back after my mother died. I stayed on the black side because that was the only place I could stay. The few problems I had with black folks were nothing compared to the grief white folks dished out. With whites it was no question. You weren’t accepted to be with a black man and that was that. They’d say forget it. Are you crazy? A nigger and you? No way. They called you white trash. That’s what they called me. Nowadays these mixed couples get on TV every other day complaining, “Oh, it’s hard for us.” They have cars and televisions and homes and they’re complaining. Jungle fever they call it, flapping their jaws and making the whole thing sound stupid. They didn’t have to run for their lives like we did. Me and Dennis caused a riot on 105th Street once. A bunch of white men chased us up the street and surrounded Dennis and tried to kill him, throwing bottles and hitting and kicking him until one of them made the rest of them stop. He said, “Get out of here while you can!” and we ran for it. See, most interracial marriages did not last. That’s what Dennis would say when we argued. I’d say, “I’m leaving,” and he’d say, “Go ahead. Go ahead. That’s what people want us to do. That’s what they expect.” And he was right.
See, a marriage needs love. And God. And a little money. That’s all. The rest you can deal with. It’s not about black or white. It’s about God and don’t let anyone tell you different. All this Jungle fever! Shoot! That Jungle fever goes away, honey, and then what are you gonna do? I say that now in hindsight, because Dennis was afraid to marry me at first. We were acting as husband and wife and having so much fun I didn’t care that we weren’t married. Our little room on 129th off Seventh was smack dab in the middle of all the action in Harlem. There were parades and dignitaries marching all up and down Seventh Avenue back in those days. Adam Clayton Powell used to stand on a podium right on 125th Street and make political speeches. Malcolm X, too. On Saturdays we’d go to the Apollo Theater, and if you got there by eleven A.M. you could sit there all day through three shows. They’d start with newsreels on the war, comedy shorts, cartoons, or sometimes a movie western with Hoots Tebicon, or a musical with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Then at one P.M. they played the Apollo theme song, “I Think You’re Wonderful,” and the bands would bust loose, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Louis Jordan, Billie Holiday, Billy Eckstine. Those musicians worked like slaves, three shows a day. Then on Sunday we’d go to the Metropolitan Baptist Church on 128th and Lenox Avenue to hear Rev. Abner Brown preach.
That man was the finest preacher I’ve ever heard to this day. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus. You never heard anything like him. He was not fire and brimstone. He brought God into your everyday life in a way that made you think heaven was right next door. Harlem loved him. Metropolitan was the church in Harlem back then. Abyssinian was a big church too, but they’d line up along 128th Street to get into Metropolitan like it was a rock concert. If you didn’t get out on that sidewalk by nine A.M. on Sunday morning for the eleven A.M. service, you had to stand in the aisles, and the place seated maybe, I don’t know, at least two thousand people. They’d hold two services at the same time, one in the big church upstairs and one downstairs, that’s how crowded it was. Dennis was a deacon and he sang in the church choir. And it was a mighty, mighty choir too. What a time it was. Those were my glory years.
My world expanded because of Dennis. He taught me about things I’d never heard of. He meditated every day for fifteen minutes. He did that for years, so that even the children learned to accept that ritual. He believed in equal rights, in knowledge, in books; he taught me about people like Paul Robeson, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Joe Louis. He loved the Brooklyn Dodgers—Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella, and Jackie Robinson, especially Jackie Robinson. He couldn’t stop talking about him. “Jackie Robinson proved the Negro can play,” he said. I learned how to eat my main meal in the evening instead of in the afternoon. Instead of eating kosher, using different table settings for every meal and eating all meat or all dairy dishes, I just ate what I wanted. I tasted pork chops and loved them. Grits, eggs, biscuits, and butter, bacon, collard greens, ham hocks, all the food I couldn’t eat before, I ate. But see, I couldn’t iron or clean house or cook. I had never learned to cook as a girl. I worked in the store all day while Mameh cooked kosher, or Tateh would hire a black lady to come in twice a week to help Mameh cook. My husband cooked better than I did, and when I stayed home after our first baby I had to learn to cook from my black friends Susie Belton and Irene Johnson. Susie Belton and her husband, Edward, had a room right next to ours in Harlem and Susie’s room was always spotless, with curtains and lace across the window and bed, whereas my place always looked like thunder hit it.
In 1942, a few months after my mother died, I told Dennis, “I want to accept Jesus Christ into my life and join the church.” Dennis said, “Are you sure you want to do this, Ruth? You know what this means?” I told him, “I’m sure.” I was totally sure.
A few Sundays later we were at Metropolitan and they were singing “I Must Tell Jesus,” and the spirit filled me and when Rev. Abner Brown asked if anyone wanted to join Metropolitan in Christian fellowship I stepped into the aisle and walked to the front of the church. Rev. Brown shook my hand and all the deacons shook my hand and I have never turned back since. I accepted Jesus that day and He has never let me down from that day to this. I later got on as the church secretary, typing out letters for Rev. Brown, and sometimes witnessing weddings which he held in his office, because I’d be the only one around and you needed two witnesses for a wedding. Watching all these weddings made me long for my own. Here I was a church secretary and Dennis was a stout deacon and we weren’t even married. That was a scandal I couldn’t live with. I told Dennis one night, “We have to get married,” but he was hesitant. He said, “I grew up in the South and I can be killed down there for marrying a woman of the other race.” I said, “This isn’t the South. This is New York, and I’m a new Christian before God and I’m not living in sin anymore.” I told him I was leaving if we didn’t get married. That tied him up. He hemmed and hawed so long I actually went out and put a deposit on a room, and when I did that he said, “You don’t have to do that, Ruth. I love you and I’d like you to marry me if you would.” What a man he was. I loved him. He was the kindest man I’ve ever known. All his friends from North Carolina who lived in Harlem would come see
him. They’d holler up to our window. “Dennis…Dennis!” and he’d invite them in and give them our last food or the shirt off his back if they asked. He came from a home where kindness was a way of life. I wanted to be in this kind of family. I was proud to join it, and they were happy to have me.
We had to meet at city hall to get our marriage license on a Saturday because we both worked during the week. Dennis had to work that Saturday morning also. He had quit my Aunt Mary’s by then and was working for the McCoy Publishing Company, a mail order business that supplied emblems, aprons, and books to the Masonic Order. We arranged to meet in front of city hall at two o’clock. I was there at two on the dot and I waited about an hour. Just as I started to walk away thinking, “I thought so,” he appeared. “You won’t get rid of me that easy,” he said.
There were a lot of stares and whispering and pointing and silly questions when we went to the marriage bureau to get our license. The clerks were very nasty and no one wanted to write up our paperwork, but we didn’t let those fools ruin our marriage. We got the license and Rev. Brown married us in his private office at the church. I had told him the truth about me and Dennis not really being married and he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll marry you and be quiet about it.” It wasn’t till later I discovered several church members had lived together for years as husband and wife and had never gotten married. Some even had grown kids. And Rev. Brown had married them all after the fact, so this was nothing new to him. The church janitor and another helper of the church were our witnesses. Afterwards we had our reception over on 103rd and Third at our friends’ apartment, Sam and Trafinna “Ruth” Wilson. They decorated the apartment with pink and white tissue streamers and laid out beautiful trays of delicate sandwiches, entres, cake, and coffee, and Rev. Brown stopped over to join us. It was a lovely reception, just the five of us. I didn’t need a million roses and a marching band. My husband loved me and I loved him, that’s all I needed. We were sitting in Ruth’s house having coffee at our reception and my husband (oh, I was proud to say it too—“my husband”) said to me, “We have to be strong. You know what people will say about us, Ruth. They’ll try to break us up.” I said, “I know. I’ll be strong,” and over the years we were tested, but we never split up or even spent a night apart except when he took the kids to North Carolina to see his parents. I never could go south with him because of the danger. The first time I went south with him was the last time, when I took his body down there to bury him.