Mama Jo, I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Miss Laura Anne Needleman, of Greenville.
Now Laura Anne was in for the hyperbole bath.
Why, this lovely gal is going to marry our Mr. Levy? Well, ain’t she just a princess fit for a prince, then. What eyes you have, child! They’re like the glitterin’ dawn of a newborn world.
More of the same came out of her mouth until Laura Anne burned to clap her hand over it to get her to stop. What she did do was plaster a grin on her face then push herself past the other two to gain uninvited entry into the trailer. She craned her neck to take it all in, curious as if she had entered a museum of the exotic, studying what she could glimpse of the chopped-up rooms within. Not looking where she was going, she twisted her ankle in a pothole of linoleum warped and ripped through by the elements, artfully concealed beneath a strip of plywood and a scrap of rug. Mercifully, her stumble startled Mama Jo Baylin out of her litany, and an entirely different woman emerged, one who took charge of every situation she found herself in because without her help the world hurtled headlong to ruin.
Lord Almighty, child, I might have told you to watch your step there if you’d given me a minute, she said, her irritation clear. You alright?
I think so.
The girl hobbled over to an easy chair, covered against dust and common use with a bedsheet, and sunk into it. An open Bible was on a reading table next to the chair’s arm. Above that a portrait of Jesus in a pose of sacral suffering hung on the wall, hovering forgiveness over her as if she represented the whole of reckless humanity. Mama Jo hurried to the icebox, wrapped a handful of frosty shards in a towel, then sat on a footstool in front of the chair. She removed Laura Anne’s shoe and placed her foot in her lap, pressing the frigid towel against her ankle.
Please, I’m sorry. You don’t have to do that. I’m alright, I’m just havin’ terrible luck with my feet today, Laura Anne begged, genuinely uncomfortable from the woman’s ministrations, but Mama Jo ignored her. She bent over her foot and examined it from side to side, up and down.
You’ll live, she said, you’ll walk upright out of here. But set with me for a bit like this for safety’s sake.
Mickey Moe was left standing anxiously in the middle of the room. May I? he asked, gesturing toward the couch and, gaining permission, sat himself down.
Mama Jo, I’m sorry to trouble you this way. Our visit is obviously ill-starred. But I was lookin’ for Bald Horace. I had a mind to chat with him about the past.
Mama Jo’s chin tilted upward in a prideful manner.
Well, he ain’t here right now. Every Tuesday afternoon, I take him over to the hospital for his treatment. We’re so regular, they don’t even make him wait much. I pick him up after five. Then once he’s home, he needs his rest.
Disappointment flooded him. The prospect of waiting another day for an interview with the man who could hold the key to his happiness was a torment. Impatience pricked his memory. A long-ago image of that sometimes wife of Bald Horace, Aurora Mae, who claimed to know his daddy better than anyone, came to his mind. The thought of her lit his imagination afire. Yes! he thought. Yes! Aurora Mae would be the key to everything, he just knew it. There could be no doubt. He swallowed his excitement and asked, as politely, as he could manage,
And Bald Horace’s wife, is she still around here?
The woman’s brow creased with puzzlement.
Bald Horace got no wife I ever saw.
Sure he does. Great big tall woman. Wide, too. Aurora Mae’s her name, I believe.
No, no. Don’t know anyone like that.
Mickey Moe’s heart sank; the fire fizzled and smoked. His best lead was lost to time. It never occurred to him that Mama Jo might lie.
They stayed another quarter hour, making pleasantries. When they were ready to leave, Laura Anne got up and put weight on her foot without pain, but Mama Jo insisted on a treatment of herbs plucked fresh from one of her window boxes. She placed them in a ring around the girl’s ankle to assure that swelling didn’t kick in later then secured all with a plaited rag of haint blue to keep evil spirits away. Mickey Moe told her they’d be back the next morning.
When they got home, Mama was waiting in her front room with her mouth in a twist. Where’d you get that? she asked straight off, pointing to the rag on the girl’s ankle.
Sara Kate never hesitated to bedevil Miss Beadie if she could get away from it. She piped up from a doorway. I put that on ’er, Miss Beadie. I thought it best if she was stuffin’ those poor li’l feet back into her shoes so quick.
And it was so very kind of you, I thank you so much, Laura Anne quickly said, with a nod of gratitude to her co-conspirator.
Mama held up a hand to silence them. She had a pronouncement to make. She’d decided that Laura Anne Needleman could stay in the house for two nights and two nights only, so’s they could get to know each other, but only on condition that she phone her parents immediately to let them know where she was.
Laura Anne did so.
Hello, Mama? She said into the phone as cousin Patricia Ellen snickered on the other end of the line but not loud enough for the hovering Beadie Sassaport Levy to hear. Why deception is easy, Laura Anne thought, when in the name of a good cause.
Oh yes, the girl thought she was the most clever woman alive; the strongest, most determined, invincible female ever to walk the streets of Greenville and Guilford. She spent her time under Beadie’s roof with her chin held high, a demeanor of unshakable self-confidence coloring everything she said or did. The phrase
noblesse oblige
, a phrase she’d learned from the educational channel on the TV, resounded through her head whenever she spoke with her future mother-in-law. She related to that woman with a winning humility that barely hit skin-deep but worked wonders nonetheless. For two days, she proved to Mickey Moe that she could be a bulwark of strength for him, a wellspring of support, a partner in arms. For two days, their plans went extraordinarily well.
And then her daddy showed up.
B
ERNARD QUIT SCHOOL WHEN HE
was thirteen. His grandmama made sure he had something resembling a bar mitzvah that year. The part that stuck was not putting his hand on the Torah while the traveling rabbi read for him, nor the sugar cake they all ate afterward, nor was it the astonishing sight of Caroline Levy up, washed, and dressed before the middle of the afternoon sitting in the front row of the Memphis synagogue with an alert expression in her eyes. The part that stuck warmed his heart so much his toes curled inside his shoes. Now you are a man, the rabbi said. A man! Bernard thought, a man! A man gets to go wherever he likes, make money, and keep it. A man doesn’t have to fetch beer for Mama’s friends or clean their boots. A man doesn’t get cuffed on the ear unless he goes lookin’ for it. A man kicks the man who kicks him back. Sweet dang. I am now a man, and now I am free.
The Monday after the ceremony, Bernard went to school to tell Miss Maple good-bye. She did not try to dissuade him. She gave him a good hug and wished him well. When she did, he clung to her longer than was manly and walked away with something hard in his throat. He went directly to his grandparents’ store and told them his plan to go to the levee and get a job on a riverboat, any kind of job, stoker, swabbie, pot scraper. It didn’t matter as long as he saw a wage and some of the world ’til he could figure out what to do with his life. Grandmama moaned and groaned and beat her chest, but there wasn’t much else she could do about his decision. Boys younger than he went out on their own at that time. Granddaddy slipped him ten dollars on the q.t. If he was careful, the old man pointed out, it was a sum that would get him by for a time. He didn’t have to take the first backbreaking, mind-numbing piece of work that came along. He could study things around him, ponder a bit before enslaving himself to a cruel taskmaster. Grandaddy also gave him a parcel of wisdom.
Son, he said. Don’t forget you’re a Jew. Things is easy for us most times here, that is true. Especially when compared to up North or in the old countries. But when there’s trouble, folks always seek to remind you of what you are. You can bet on it. So don’t forget. They won’t.
It wasn’t so long before that Leo Frank had been lynched by a mob in Marietta, Georgia, after Governor Slaton commuted his death sentence for the murder of little Mary Phagan, a charge for which he’d clearly been railroaded. The incident sent a shiver down the spines of every Jew in the South, including young Bernard’s. He shook his head as gravely as any man and promised he would not forget he was a Jew.
Grandmama meanwhile packed him a kerchief full of food for the road. She knotted it, then stuck a sprig of sage underneath the knot for luck.
Big Bette used to do that for me when I was a child, she explained. I had to walk an awful ways through the woods to the only schoolhouse in two counties. She swore on all her ghosts that li’l piece of green gave the innocent a heap of protection. She’d put it in my lunch and after I ate, I’d stick it in my drawers like she told me. That, she’d say, is where a young girl requires fortification. I tell you, it itched some, but nothin’ out there ever hurt me. So I suspect she was right on all counts. You, when you finish up what you got to et in this bundle, you stick it, I would think, in your shirt near the heart.
As he was about to leave, they told him to bow his head. They raised their hands over him and gave him a blessing as old as time. His eyes stung and the hardness at his throat got bigger, so Bernard was a fine mess by the time he went to say good-bye to his mother.
When he got home, most of Mama’s mind was deep in opium dreams. It’s doubtful Caroline Levy understood what was going on as he packed up a sack of clothes and his daddy’s penknife, the pearl-and-ebony-handled artifact that was the whole of his legacy. She had trouble keeping her eyes open when he gave her his prepared speech about being a man and the river calling to him. All she said was, Well, you’re one of ’em, ain’t you, boy. Then her eyes closed again.
He could not rouse her a second time. Wanting some part of her to take with him—she was still his mama after all—he grabbed a hank of hair and sawed it off using his daddy’s penknife. He twisted it, wound the twist tight around his palm to make a compact ring he stuck in his pocket, leaving his hand there, touching it, while he bent over to kiss her forehead and left her forever.
It was late in the year 1918. The war was over. The influenza epidemic was winding down. Both had done their damage. White men’s jobs went begging often enough. Bernard took his granddaddy’s advice and spent a few days wandering the levee, observing things. He noted which riverboats abused their workers, both black and white, which beat the Negroes only, which crews looked half-starved to death, which were manned by thugs with cold, darting eyes. He studied barges that carried freight, noting what kind, and ferries that carried people to and fro. He studied the destinations of all of them. Like his daddy and granddaddy before him, what attracted him were pleasure boats full of dandies calling to serving boys on the dock by waving straw hats in the air. They smoked cigarillos, their free arms draped the waists of blonde and redheaded women, who leaned over the rails and behaved like Mama on her worst days. Minstrels serenaded them from the docks, and they rained silver coin upon them. There must be piles of money on those boats, Bernard thought, and dozens of ways for me to get my hands on some.
Luck was with him. One of the biggest paddleboats on the river,
Delilah’s Dream
, had a ship’s doctor looking for an assistant. The doctor took one look at Bernard Levy wandering the levee and smiled the way most folk did. Then he wondered about that sweet assembly of button eyes, flared nose, and curlicue mouth so fiercely focused in the center of a wide, round face. Although he had the stature of a child, he looked strangely adult in posture and gesture. The doctor had the boy brought to him so he might study such a curious package. He gave Bernard a dollar and examined him from head to toe, measuring his skull, his limbs, the breadth of his chest, and even that of his behind until he was satisfied that this was no genetic abnormality but a normal thirteen-year-old lad. He examined his intellect next to see if impairment accompanied an odd physiology. Finding Bernard with all his senses intact and quick witted, he offered him the medical assistant job on a whim, thinking even a man in extremis would be cheered by the sight of him. He could produce him at his elbow whenever he had bad news to tell.
And so Bernard’s first career, in which he learned a great deal useful in all the others, began. For nearly three years, he followed Dr. Grayson around, carrying instruments, medicines, slop buckets, and towels. After the first three months, he could clean up blood and guts without getting sick to his stomach, steel himself against the stench of pus, and stitch a knife wound as well as the doctor himself. He witnessed the exposure, pulling, and scraping of female parts he’d never known existed. Once, the doctor allowed him to extract a child’s tooth. He learned about people. He learned that rough men felt fear, that women could bear pain, that a body could watch moonbeams dance on the river and go mad from the sight. He watched the gamblers and con men ply their trades to learn where a man was weak, where strong, when pushing him worked wonders, and when pushing him went too far. He fell in love with one bad woman, then another until he swore off any woman he did not buy, as buying them seemed more honest and less trouble. He came to know more cities and towns than he could fairly distinguish other than by their climate or the goods sold from their docks. He learned that nature was more unpredictable than all the bad women he had known put together.
The doctor was good to him. He gave him time off, room, board, and a decent wage. Considering the hardships and barbarities Bernard witnessed every day on the river, these were no small boons. He slept in the antechamber of Dr. Grayson’s suite aboard the
Delilah’s Dream
. It was a cozy spot, one he made his own. He had a straw mattress, fine cotton sheets, and a goose-down pillow set into an alcove originally designed for the storage of muddy boots and such. That left enough floor space for a wardrobe and one of the doctor’s cast-off easy chairs with a brick under its broken foot to keep it level. When everything was quiet, he liked to nestle in the chair and read old magazines he found abandoned on deck or study the pictures in the doctor’s medical books. After two years in service, Bernard experienced a growth spurt, and the alcove became too small for sleep. Accordingly, he converted that space to a shelf for reading materials along with a row of cigar boxes, in which he stored his collection of sentimental treasures, mostly postcards and ladies’ hair ribbons. He slept in the chair.