Mitla Pass (48 page)

Norfolk had a few new homes requiring quality work. Sugerman subcontracted for the worst type of slumlords who slapped on a coat of paint and new paper to conceal the rot. Sometimes, after forty or fifty years and a dozen coats of wallpaper, the wall could hold no more and everything had to be scraped off by hand. The job always fell to Nathan.

If a place was furnished, everything had to be moved and covered. Then came the shlep, the stevedore’s work. He lugged ladders, saw-horses, planks, and pasting tables up two or three stories. In the beginning, he was unable to match rolls on the walls and ruined a half-dozen jobs. Sometimes the walls were too crooked. At other times the paste wouldn’t hold and the whole roll fell down on top of his head.

“It’s up the ladder, down the ladder, three hundred times a day, then shlep everything down three flights and move all the furniture back. I’m getting varicose veins.”

There was little work in the winter, so Nathan taught Yiddish for fifty cents a student a week and Leah picked up a few dollars as the director of the Freiheit Choral Society.

In springtime, Nathan left to go to one of the “gold rush” cities such as Pittsburgh, where the out-of-town paperhangers worked seven days a week for two or three months straight to fill the larder for the coming winter.

Our second year in Norfolk, when Nathan left on his route of the gold rush cities, Momma suddenly lost interest in lugging Gideon from clinic to clinic. In addition to school, I kept the flat clean, did most of the cooking, and took care of Gideon.

Both of us started to feel the eyes of the comrades on our backs when we would enter a home or meeting hall. It seemed that Momma was being very friendly to a lot of the men comrades. I know that the Freiheit Choral Society was suddenly overloaded with male singers for the first time.

When Nathan slipped home for an occasional weekend, he and Momma always argued.

“I tell you, one more year of this paperhanging business and I’m going crazy.”

Momma always had a new and mysterious malady. “My gallbladder is wrecked from too many hours and days in the Ginzburg Brothers slave shop.”

Then Nathan would always turn on Gideon. “My son is a disgrace to me. Look at this report card. What’s this business of engaging in reactionary pleasure-seeking activities? Baseball, football. It is a shame for a proletariat child. And who let him bring Mark Twain into the house!”

Sometimes the only way to have a truce was for me to get a headache, or Gideon to have an attack of asthma.

But Momma knew how to laugh a lot and even joked about herself. She did keep our clothing neat and patched and shopped for the best day-old food that could be found, and we never missed any concert, or opera, or play that came to Norfolk.

She learned to read beautifully and lifted us into the world of Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill. If nothing else, Gideon owes her his love of literature and I owe her my love of acting and music.

NORFOLK-BALTIMORE

1935

M
ISS
A
BIGAIL
W
INTERS
was no ordinary sixth-grade teacher. The children at J. E. B. Stuart Grammar School held their breath at the beginning of the term, praying they would be assigned to her class. Miss Abigail was not much of a looker. She was a gangly type, almost awkward in her movements, and she didn’t go to too much trouble to pretty herself up. Most men were intimidated by her, because she was a very rare person, a woman flier, an aviatrix, and this commanded fear and respect.

Her father, Clarence, had been a war ace and she and her brother, Jeremy, were, as it were, raised in an open cockpit. Miss Abigail did a lot of other extra-special things like playing the guitar and composing songs. She knew dozens of songs in many languages. She was the drama coach of the school, as well.

She took her students on field trips to the sand dunes at Spencer’s Point—the air shows, the walks through the swamps and marshes near the creeks, and the creeks themselves—so they could explore the animal and plant life that would evade the untrained eye.

It was no secret that the Norfolk school board had their eye on her to make her an assistant principal as soon as there was an opening.

There was something further that was unique to Miss Abigail. One or two of her students ran off with most of the honors every year. During the first days of a school term, she scrutinized her pupils quietly until she found the children she was looking for, and she’d work with them hard for honors, but only if they wanted to.

Gideon had been sick with a severe asthma attack when the school opened. He came into the class several days late and slipped into a seat in the last row—a dubious distinction—because his last name began with the letter Z.

“I think I see a new boy,” she said. “Would you please stand up and give your name to the class.”

Gideon arose. “Gideon Zadok.”

“So you’re the missing culprit. In my classroom we reverse the alphabetical order so that the Z’s are in front. We don’t get many Z’s, so I saved your seat, right up in the first row, please.”

“Wow!”

There was an immediate eye contact established between Gideon and his teacher, which told them both that this was not going to be an ordinary relationship. It broke into words two weeks after he entered her class. Miss Abigail ended a lovely songfest with a medley of Stephen Foster tunes which had been requested by a number of the students.

I hear those gentle voices calling,

“Old Black Joe.”

As she took the sash from about her neck and set the guitar on her desk, she and Gideon exchanged another of their instantaneous glances. She detected sudden rage in his eyes. It lasted but a fraction of a second and was gone. Miss Abigail bided her time and, in the course of the day, asked Gideon to remain after school to help her clean the blackboards and erasers. Gideon sensed that it was going to be no casual encounter, and he closed up.

After the blackboards were erased, he got a pan of water to wash them as she corrected papers. “I was curious about something, Gideon,” she said. She saw the boy’s body stiffen and his lips tighten. “I’m not going to bite you, relax.” She smiled in a certain way that made the recipient also smile. “What do you have against Stephen Foster?” she asked.

“I ... I ... nothing.”

“They are very lovely songs, aren’t they? I’ve never been around a campfire when he wasn’t sung. Well?”

“I guess they’re beautiful, if you say so.”

“Then why weren’t you singing?”

Gideon broke into a fit of sneezing. “Excuse me. It’s the chalk dust.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you to do the blackboards.”

“It’ll go away in a minute ... ka—chooo.”

“Does Stephen Foster make you sneeze?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then why don’t you like him?”

“I don’t sing Christmas carols either, Miss Abigail. I’m Jewish and I don’t believe in Jesus. I pretend to mouth the words, but I really don’t sing. I ... I just don’t like what Stephen Foster is saying.”

“How is that?”

“Well, because he makes it sound like the negroes enjoyed being slaves and he treats them like they were ignorant little children, or dogs licking the feet of their white masters. You know, ‘Massah’s in the cold, cold ground and all the darkies am aweeping.’ You know.”

“What?”

“They didn’t want to be slaves. Nobody wants to be a slave.”

“Do you know any colored people?”

He did. His dad had meetings with them sometimes, and many times he had gone to hear a Communist speaker in black churches. “No, ma’am,” Gideon fibbed, “I don’t know any negroes.”

Miss Abigail chewed on it all for a moment. “I agree with you, Gideon,” she said at last, “but I’m in a difficult position. Every school in America, or certainly every school in the South, sings Stephen Foster. Here it’s required. The school is named after a Confederate general. Can you understand that I agree with you, but I still want to be your sixth-grade teacher and have to do some things I don’t always like.”

Gideon blinked at her and frowned. No adult had ever said anything so grown-up and honest to him before. Molly was always honest with him, but she wasn’t a totally grown-up adult yet.

“Can you understand it, Gideon?”

“I think I can, Miss Abigail.”

“It’s a secret we have to share, because I could get into a lot of trouble,” she said.

“You can trust me,” he said.

“I know I can,” she said. “That’s why I told you the truth.”

G
IDEON DID NOT
know how deep their secret was until a strange incident revealed everything.

A comrade picked him and his father up one evening and they drove south for a meeting at the Zion-Afro Baptist Church just over the North Carolina state line. James Ford, the leading black Communist in the country, was to speak. It was a special event and had to be held in a negro church because it was the only place where they allowed unsegregated audiences. James Ford always ran on the Communist ticket for Vice President. He didn’t get many votes, because negroes couldn’t vote in the South, but he ran anyway.

They arrived at the church, which was packed with black farmers and whites from as far away as Raleigh and Newport News. It was a hot, stifling night as Gideon and his father crammed into the rear of the church. The word was passed that James Ford would be a little late, and the pastor led everyone in a hymn-singing session. Gideon had a fit of sneezing and went outside to catch a breath of air and take a pill.

The church was set back in a stand of oaks near a crossroad of the state and county highways, with sharecroppers’ farms all around. As Gideon stepped out into the night air, the singing followed him. It became uproarious as a number of people began seeing Jesus and screamed and several fainted.

There was a light on in the pastor’s house in the rear of the church, and he made for it to find the water pump, so he could swallow his pill.

He stopped dead in his tracks as a car coming down the highway pulled off and drove toward a shed alongside the pastor’s cottage. Gideon watched as a soldier and another huge man emerged from the car. He felt something was not right and ducked behind a tree to observe. The driver, the huge man, was a comrade whom he had seen at several meetings and who had been to his own home on occasion. He was another of those mysterious Party functionaries no one spoke about.

The soldier took off his clothing, down to his underwear, and the comrade handed him a package which he opened, containing civilian clothes. As the soldier dressed, Gideon saw some headlights blink on and off from inside the shed, and a second car drove out.

The soldier, now in changed clothing, jumped in the back and lay on the floor and was covered by some kind of canvas tarp.

There was a moment’s conversation between the huge comrade and the driver of the second car. It was then that Gideon was able to make out Miss Abigail behind the wheel. Not believing his eyes, he slipped in closer for a look. It was indeed Abigail Winters, and she whisked away and sped down the highway with the soldier.

G
IDEON HELD HIS
tongue for two weeks. Not a word of it, not even to Molly, but he felt he would burst. How to go about telling Miss Abigail he knew about her? Or should he?

Sometimes kids left their desks messy or misplaced something and she would have them stay after school.

Gideon decided to leave a story he had written on the floor near his desk. Sure enough, the cleaning lady put it on the teacher’s desk and Miss Abigail asked Gideon to remain after class.

“I believe this is your composition book,” she said to him after the room had been cleared.

“Yes, ma’am, thank you. I thought I’d lost it.” She gave him a sly look and he cracked a smile. “I guess I did leave it so you’d find it,” he confessed. “I’m really sorry.”

“Well, you did want me to read it, didn’t you?”

“I guess so. I mean, yes I did.”

“Well now, next time you just come up and hand me a story and say, I’d like you to read this.”

“Can I?”

“Of course you can. Your stories are very, very popular with the class. I think the kids look forward to rainy days. Your storytelling has replaced my singing act.”

Gideon straightened up, threw his shoulders back. She made him feel proud. “When I tell a story to the class,” he said, “I make up kids’ stuff, you know, prince and princess stuff for the girls and baseball stories for the boys.”

“They are very entertaining.”

“They’re okay, Miss Abigail. Not my real good stories. Kind of the reason I left that story for you to read was that I didn’t want you to think I was a trivial writer.”

“My goodness, son, you’re not even twelve years old.”

“Sure, but I’m behind schedule. I’ve just started my serious writing.”

“Why do you want to be a writer so badly?”

Gideon’s face reddened. “It’s a secret,” he said.

“We already share one secret.”

“I don’t even share this secret with my sister.”

“All right, have it your way.”

Gideon looked at the floor and shoved his hands in his pockets, then remembered Miss Abigail didn’t like the boys putting their hands there and pulled them out quickly. “Miss Abigail, I want to be a writer because writers know when a person is lonely. I mean, when Molly read me some books, those writers reached out and said, Look, Gideon, we know about your loneliness and we know that you feel downtrodden. And they said ... I’ll stand up for you. You’re not alone anymore.”

“You know that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t you think a writer should develop a balanced view of life? Writers have to know how to laugh, to drink, to be ridiculous and just a little crazy. That takes time.”

“I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that, they have to get mad and stay mad. If things don’t make a writer mad, he’ll end up writing ‘Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail.’”

“What makes you angry, Gideon?”

“You know.” ‘

“You mean the situation with the negroes?”

“I cry about it some nights. It’s much worse than Jewish people are treated and we get treated pretty badly, sometimes. I can’t understand what keeps them from rebelling.”