The Color of Water Read online

  “Where’d you learn that handshake?” someone asked the kid.

  “My father taught me,” he said proudly. “He’s a Black Panther.”

  The bus roared to life as I panicked. A Black Panther? Next to Mommy? It was my worst nightmare come true. I had no idea who the Panthers truly were. I had swallowed the media image of them completely.

  The bus clanked into gear as I got up to open my window. I wanted to warn Mommy. Suppose the Black Panther wanted to kill her? The window was stuck. I tried to move to another window. A counselor grabbed me and sat me down. I said, “I have to tell my mother something.”

  “Write her a letter,” he said.

  I jumped into the seat of the Black Panther’s son behind me—his window was open. The counselor placed me back in my seat.

  “Mommy, Mommy!” I yelled at the closed window. Mommy was waving. The bus pulled away.

  I shouted, “Watch out for him!” but we were too far away and my window was shut. She couldn’t hear me.

  I saw the Black Panther waving at his son. Mommy waved at me. Neither seemed to notice the other.

  When they were out of sight, I turned to the Black Panther’s son sitting behind me and punched him square in the face with my fist. The kid held his jaw and stared at me in shock as his face melted into a knot of disbelief and tears.

  5.

  The Old Testament

  My father was a traveling preacher. He was just like any traveling preacher except he was a rabbi. He wasn’t any different from the rest of those scoundrels you see on TV today except he preached in synagogues and he wasn’t so smooth-talkin’. He was hard as a rock and it didn’t take long before the Jewish congregations figured him out and sent him on his way, so we traveled a lot when I was a young girl. In those days any Orthodox Jew who said he was a rabbi could preach and go around singing like a cantor and such. That’s all some of those Jews could do in those days, travel around and preach and sing. There weren’t jobs out there like you know them today. Living. That was your job. Surviving. Reading the Old Testament and hoping it brought you something to eat, that’s what you did.

  See, Orthodox Jews work with contracts. Or at least my family did. A contract to marry. A contract to preach. A contract for whatever. Money was part of their lives because they had nothing else, like a real home. At least we didn’t. Tateh would sign a contract with a synagogue and after a year the synagogue wouldn’t renew it, so we’d pack up and move to the next town. We lived in so many places I can’t remember them. Glens Falls, New York; Belleville, New Jersey; Port Jervis, New York; Springfield, Massachusetts; someplace called Dover. I remember Belleville because someone was always giving us hand-me-down clothes there. That’s how the members from the congregations would pay us, with food and a place to stay and their cast-off clothes. I remember Springfield, Massachusetts, because my sister Gladys was born there. We called her Dee-Dee. She was four years younger than me. Dee-Dee came into this world around 1924. Whether she is still in this world today I do not know. She would be the last of my mother’s children still alive other than me.

  We carted everything we had from town to town by bus—clothes, books, hats, and these huge quilts my mother had brought from Europe. They were full of goose feathers. You call them piezyna, in Jewish. They were warm as a house. My sister and I slept under them wherever we lived. We attracted a lot of attention when we traveled because we were poor and Jewish and my mother was handicapped. I was real conscious of that. Being Jewish and having a handicapped mother. I was ashamed of my mother, but see, love didn’t come natural to me until I became a Christian.

  For a while we lived above a Jewish store in Glens Falls, in upstate New York, and the kind Jewish people who ran it baked us pies and gave us apples. We went sledding and did things as a family and my parents seemed to get along. It wasn’t bad up there really, but as usual Tateh’s contract didn’t get renewed and we had to leave. Luckily he got an offer to run a synagogue in Suffolk, Virginia. He told Mameh, “We’re moving south.” Mameh didn’t want to go. She said, “May be we can get something up here,” because her sisters and her mother were in New York City, but talking to him was like talking to that wall over there. He said, “We’re moving,” and we went to Suffolk, Virginia, around 1929. I was eight or nine at the time.

  I still remember the smell of the South. It smelled like azaleas. And leaves. And peanuts. Peanuts everywhere. Planters peanuts had their headquarters in Suffolk. Mr. Obici ran it. He was a big deal in town. The big peanut man. He gave a lot of money out to people. He built a hospital. You could buy peanuts by the pound in Suffolk for nothing. There were farmers growing peanuts, hauling peanuts, making peanut oil, peanut butter, even peanut soap. They called the high school yearbook The Peanut. They even had a contest once to see who could make the best logo for Planters peanut company. Some lady won it. They gave her twenty-five dollars, which was a ton of money in those days.

  Suffolk was a one-horse town back then, one big Main Street, a couple of movie theaters—one for black folks, one for white folks—a few stores, a few farms nearby, and a set of railroad tracks that divided the black and white sections of town. The biggest event Suffolk had seen in years was a traveling sideshow that came through town on the railroad tracks, with a stuffed whale in a boxcar. The folks loved that. They loved anything different, or new, or from out of town, except for Jews. In school the kids called me “Christ killer” and “Jew baby.” That name stuck with me for a long time. “Jew baby.” You know it’s so easy to hurt a child.

  Tateh worked at the local synagogue, but he had his eye on this huge old barn-type building across the tracks on the so-called colored side of town with the aim of starting a grocery store there. Well, that upset some of the synagogue folks. They didn’t want their holy rabbi going into business—and doing business with niggers, no less!—but Tateh said, “We’re not moving anymore. I’m tired of moving.” He knew they’d get rid of him eventually—let’s face it, he was a lousy rabbi. He had a Jewish friend in town named Israel Levy who signed a bank note that allowed Tateh to get his hands on that old place. Tateh threw a counter and some shelves in there, an old cash register, tacked up a sign outside that said “Shilsky’s Grocery Store” or something to that effect, and we were in business. The black folks called it “Old Man Shilsky’s store.” That’s what they called him. Old Man Shilsky. They used to laugh at him and his old ragtag store behind his back, but over the years they made Old Man Shilsky rich and nobody was laughing then.

  Our store was a rickety, odd, huge wooden structure that looked like it was held together with toothpicks and glue. It sat at the very edge of town, near the town jail and overlooking the wharf. On the first floor was the store, a storage area, an ice room, a kitchen with a kerosene stove, and the backyard. We slept upstairs. There was no living room, no dining room upstairs, just rooms. Me and Dee-Dee slept in one room under our big quilt. Mameh often slept in the same room as us, and my brother Sam and Tateh slept in the other. My parents didn’t have the kind of warm relations that most parents had. Mameh was a very good wife and mother. Despite her overall poor health—she could barely see out of one eye, had severe pains in her stomach that grew more and more painful over the years—she could do more with one hand than I can do with two. She cooked matzoh balls, kneydlach, gefilte fish, kugl, chopped liver, and more kosher dishes than I can remember. She would darn socks. I learned how to chop fish, meat, and vegetables on a butcher-block cutting board from her. She kept the religious traditions of a Jewish housewife and was loyal to her husband, but Tateh had absolutely no love for her. He would call her by any name and make fun of her disability. He’d say, “I get sick to look at you,” and, “Why do you bother trying to look pretty?” His marriage was a business deal for him. He only wanted money. That and to be an American. Those were the two things he wanted, and he got them too, but it cost him his family, which he ran into the ground and destroyed.

  We had no family life. That store was our life
. We worked in there from morning till night, except for school, and Tateh had us timed for that. He’d be standing in the road outside the store with his hands on his hips at three P.M. sharp, looking down the road for me and Sam, and later Dee-Dee, as we ran the six blocks home from school. Right to work we went. Homework was done between customers. We were the only store open in town on Sundays, because we celebrated our Sabbath from Friday to Saturday evening, so we did booming business on Sundays because the white folks would shop there as well as our normal customers.

  We sold everything in that store: cigarettes, by the pack or loose—Camels, Lucky Strike, Chesterfields for a penny each, or Wings, two for a penny; we sold coal, lumber, firewood, kerosene, candy, Coca-Cola, BC powder, milk, cream, fruit, butter, canned goods, meat. Ice was a big product. It was put into the big wooden icebox in the back of the store and sold by the chunk or into smaller pieces that sold for fifteen cents each. That icebox was big enough for a person to walk in, which I never did. Anything that could close behind me, or trap me, I never liked. I’m claustrophobic. I can’t stand feeling stuck or trapped in a place. I like to move. Even as a tiny girl I was like that. Hobbies? I had none. Running. That was my hobby. Sometimes when Tateh wasn’t home, I’d tear out the door of the store and run. Just run anyplace. I would run down the back roads where the black folks lived, across the tracks to where the white folks were. I loved to sprint, just to feel the wind blowing on my face and see things and not be at home. I was always a running-type person.

  Of course I had something to run from. My father did things to me when I was a young girl that I couldn’t tell anyone about. Such as getting in bed with me at night and doing things to me sexually that I could not tell anyone about. When we’d go to the beach in Portsmouth, he’d get into the water with me, supposedly to teach me how to swim, and hold me real close to his body near his sexual parts and he’d have an erection. When we’d get back to the beach, Mameh would ask, “Are you getting better at swimming?” and I’d say, “Yes, Mameh,” and he’d be standing there, glaring at me. God, I was scared of him.

  Anytime he had a chance, he’d try to get close to me or crawl into bed with me and molest me. I was afraid of Tateh and had no love for him at all. I dreaded him and was relieved anytime he left the house. But it affected me in a lot of ways, what he did to me. I had very low self-esteem as a child, which I kept with me for many, many years; and even now I don’t want to be around anyone who is domineering or pushing me around because it makes me nervous. I’m only telling you this because you’re my son and I want you to know the truth and nothing less. I did have low self-esteem as a child. I felt low.

  Folks will run with that, won’t they? They’ll say, “Oh, she felt low, so she went on and married a nigger.” Well, I don’t care. Your father changed my life. He taught me about a God who lifted me up and forgave me and made me new. I was lucky to meet him or I would’ve been a prostitute or dead. Who knows what would’ve happened to me. I was reborn in Christ. Had to be, after what I went through. Of course it wasn’t torment twenty-four hours a day being a Jew. We had good times, especially with my mother. Like on Passover, where you had to clean that house spic-and-span. Not a crumb or speck of leavened bread could be found anywhere. We loved getting ready for it. You had to use Passover dishes and we had a big seder, where the family sat down and the table was set with matzoh and parsley, boiled eggs and other traditional Jewish food. We set an empty chair for the coming of Elijah—see, Jews think the real Messiah hasn’t got here yet. The Haggadah had to be read and Tateh would ask us children questions about why we celebrated the feast of Passover. Well, you can believe we knew the answer rather than get smacked across the face by him, but to be honest with you, I used to see that empty chair we left for Elijah at the table and wish I could be gone to wherever Elijah was, eating over somebody else’s house where your father didn’t crawl into bed with you at night, interrupting your dreams so you don’t know if it’s really him or just the same nightmare happening over and over again.

  6.

  The New Testament

  Mommy loved God. She went to church each and every Sunday, the only white person in sight, butchering the lovely hymns with a singing voice that sounded like a cross between a cold engine trying to crank on an October morning and a whining Maytag washer. My siblings and I would muffle our laughter as Mommy dug into hymns with verve and gusto: “Leaning…oh, leannning…safe and secure on the—” Up, up, and away she went, her shrill voice climbing higher and higher, reminding us of Curly of the Three Stooges. It sounded so horrible that I often thought Rev. Owens, our minister, would get up from his seat and stop the song. He’d sit behind his pulpit in a spiritual trance, his eyes closed, clad in a long blue robe with a white scarf and billowed sleeves, as if he were prepared to float away to heaven himself, until one of Mommy’s clunker notes roused him. One eye would pop open with a jolt, as if someone had just poured cold water down his back. He’d coolly run the eye in a circle, gazing around at the congregation of forty-odd parishioners to see where the whirring noise was coming from. When his eye landed on Mommy, he’d nod as if to say, “Oh, it’s just Sister Jordan”; then he’d slip back into his spiritual trance.

  In the real world, Mommy was “Mrs. McBride” or “Mrs. Jordan,” depending on whether she used my father’s or stepfather’s name, but in Rev. Owens’s church, she was Sister Jordan. “Sister Jordan brought quite a few of her children today,” Rev. Owens would marvel as Mommy stumbled in with six of us trailing her. “Quite a few.” We thought he was hilarious. He was our Sunday school teacher and also the local barber who cut our hair once a month when we grew big enough to refuse Mommy’s own efforts in that direction—she literally put a bowl on your head and cut around it. He was a thin man who wore polyester suits and styled his hair in the old slicked-back conk, combed to the back in rippling waves. He could not read very well—I could read better than he could when I was only twelve. He’d stand on the pulpit, handkerchief in hand, wrestling with the Bible verses like a man possessed. He’d begin with, “Our verse for today is…ahh, ummm, ahh …” flipping through the pages of his Bible, finally finding the verse, putting his finger on it, and you could hear the clock going tick, tock, tick, tock, as he struggled with the words, moving his lips silently while the church waited on edge and my sister Helen, the church pianist, stifled her giggles and Mommy glared at her, shaking her fist and silently promising vengeance once church was over.

  Rev. Owens’s sermons started like a tiny choo-choo train and ended up like a roaring locomotive. He’d begin in a slow drawl, then get warmed up and jerk back and forth over the subject matter like a stutterer gone wild: “We…[silence]…know…today…arrhh…um…I said WEEEE…know…THAT [silence] ahhh…JESUS [church: “Amen!”]…ahhh, CAME DOWN…[“Yes! Amen!”] I said CAME DOWWWWNNNN! [“Go on!”] He CAME-ON-DOWN-AND-LED-THE-PEOPLE-OF-JERU-SALEM-AMEN!” Then he’d shift to a babbling “Amen” mode, where he spoke in fast motion and the words popped out of his mouth like artillery rounds. “Amens” fired across the room like bullets. “It’s so good AMEN to know God AMEN and I tell you AMEN that if you AMEN only come AMEN to God yourself AMEN there will be AMEN no turning back AMEN AMEN AMEN! Can I get an AMEN?” (“AMEN!”)

  And there we were in aisle 5, Sister Jordan in her church hat and blue dress, chuckling and smiling and occasionally waving her hands in the air like everyone else. Mommy loved church. Any church. Even Rev. Owens’s Whosoever Baptist Church she loved, though he wasn’t her favorite minister because he left his wife, or vice versa—we never knew. Mommy was a connoisseur of ministers; she knew them the way a French wine connoisseur knows Beaujolais red from Vouvray white. Rev. Owens, despite his preaching talents, wasn’t even in the top five. That elite list included my late father, the late Rev. W. Abner Brown of Metropolitan Baptist in Harlem, our family friend Rev. Edward Belton, and a few others, all of whom were black, and with the exception of Rev. Belton, quite dead. She considered them old-timers, me
n of dignity and dedication who grew up in the South and remembered what life was like in the old days. They knew how to fire up a church the old-fashioned way, without talk of politics and bad mouthing and negativity but with real talk of God and genuine concern for its parishioners. “Your father,” she often mused, “he’d give anybody his last dime.” She did not like large churches with political preachers, nor Pentecostal churches that were too wild. And despite her slight dislike of Rev. Owens and his odd style—he once preached a sermon on the word “the”—T-H-E—she had respect for him because his church and preachings were close in style to that of her “home” church, New Brown Memorial. Unlike New Brown, however, Whosoever wasn’t a storefront church. It was a tiny brick building that stood alone, about fifteen feet back from the sidewalk, with a sign above the door that was done by a painter who began his lettering without taking into account how little space he had. It read: WHOSOEVER BAPTIST CHURCH.”

  I never saw Mommy “get happy” at Whosoever Baptist, meaning “get the spirit” and lose control—thank God. When people got happy it was too much for me. They were mostly women, big mamas whom I knew and loved, but when the good Lord climbed into their bones and lifted them up toward Sweet Liberty, kind, gentle women who mussed my hair and kissed me on my cheek and gave me dimes would burst out of their seats like Pittsburgh Steeler linebackers. “Oh yessss!” they’d cry, arms outstretched, dancing in the aisles, slithering around with the agility of the Pink Panther, shuddering violently, purse flying one way, hat going another, while some poor old sober-looking deacon tried grimly to hang on to them to keep them from hurting themselves, only to be shaken off like a fly. Sometimes two or three people would physically hold the spirited person to keep her from hurting herself while we looked on in awe, the person convulsing and hollering, “Jesus, Jesus! Yes!” with Rev. Owens winging along with his spirited “AMEN’S” and “ah yes’s!” I never understood why God would climb into these people with such fervor, until I became a grown man myself and came to understand the nature and power of God’s many blessings, but even as a boy I knew God was all-powerful because of Mommy’s utter deference to Him, and also because she would occasionally do something in church that I never saw her do at home or anywhere else: at some point in the service, usually when the congregation was singing one of her favorite songs, like “We’ve Come This Far by Faith” or “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” she would bow down her head and weep. It was the only time I ever saw her cry. “Why do you cry in church?” I asked her one afternoon after service.