Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (3 page)

In the First Church of Christ, Scientist, the congregation wordlessly praised the Almighty. No stamping of feet or clapping of hands accompanied the worship. For the whole service, time seemed suspended and reality was just beyond the simple and expensive heavy doors.

•  •  •

“Did you like it?”

We sat in Louise's kitchen, eating her mother's homemade-from-scratch biscuits.

“I don't know. I didn't understand it.”

After a year of relentless observation, I trusted her to think me unexposed, rather than ignorant.

Her mother gave me a copy of Mary Baker Eddy's
Science. and Health
. I began to wrestle with new concepts.

The tough texture of poverty in my life had been more real than sand wedged between my teeth, yet Mary Baker Eddy encouraged me to think myself prosperous. Every evening I went home to a fourteen-room house where my son and seventy-five-year-old Poppa Ford awaited my arrival. Mother usually was out dining with friends, drinking with acquaintances or gambling with strangers. Had she been there, her presence would not have greatly diminished my loneliness. My brother, who had been my ally, my first friend, had left home and closed himself to me. We had found safety in numbers when we were young, but adulthood had severed the bonds and we drifted apart over deep and dangerous seas, unanchored.

In Mother's house, after dinner, I would read my son to sleep and return to the kitchen. Most often, the old man dreamt over an outsized cup of heavily sugared coffee. I would watch his aged ivory face, wrinkled under ghostly memories, then go to my room where solitude gaped whale-jawed wide to swallow me entire.

Science and Health
told me I was never alone. “There is no place God is not.” But I couldn't make the affirmation real for me.

•  •  •

The sailor wandered around the store. He was reading the bulletins and scanning the posters. His dark hair and oval, sensual face reminded me of Italian Renaissance paintings. It was strange to see a white military man in the Black area in broad daylight. I decided that he had gotten lost. He walked to the counter.

“Good morning.”

“Have you got ‘Cheers’?”

Maybe he wasn't lost, just found himself in our neighborhood and decided to buy some records. “Cheers”? I thought of all the white singers—Jo Stafford, Helen O'Connell, Margaret Whiting, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Bob Crosby, Bing Crosby and Bob Eberle. Tex Beneke. None had recorded a song entitled “Cheers.” I ran my mind over Anita O'Day Mel Tormé, June Christy. No “Cheers” there. He had looked like a vocal man, but then maybe he was looking for a white Big Band instrumental. Stan Kenton, Neal Hefti, Billy May. No “Cheers” in their catalogs.

“I don't know if we have it. Who cut it?” I smiled. “Cut it” showed that I was so much a part of the record business that I wouldn't say “Who recorded it?”

The man looked at me and said dryly “Charlie Parker.”

Although I lived in a large city, in truth I lived in a small town within that city's preserves. The few whites I knew who were aware of Charlie Parker were my brother's friends and were wrapped away from me in a worldly remoteness. I stumbled to get the record. When I shucked the jacket off he said, “You don't have to play it.” He went on, “I'll take ‘Well You Needn't’ by Thelonius Monk and ‘Night in Tunisia’ by Dizzy Gillespie.”

My brain didn't want to accept the burden of my ears.
Was that a white man talking? I looked to see if maybe he was a Creole. Many Negroes from the bayou country could and did pass for white. They too, had hank-straight black hair, dark eyes and shell-cream skin.

There was nothing like a straight question: “Are you from Louisiana?”

“No, I'm from Portland.”

There is a textured grain that colors the Black voice which was missing when he spoke. I wrapped his selections and he paid for them and left. I wondered that he had been neither amiable nor rude and that he didn't remind me of anyone I'd ever met.

My two employers and Louise's handsome friend, Fred E. Pierson, cabdriver and painter, were the only whites I knew, liked and partially understood. When I met Fred, his friendliness had caused my old survival apparatus to begin meshing its gears. I suspected him (perhaps hopefully) of being personally (which meant romantically) interested in me. He helped me to paint the seven downstairs rooms at Mother's house and told me of his great and sad and lost love affair and that he liked having me for a friend.

The next weekend the sailor returned. He browsed for a while, then came to the counter and interrupted my preoccupation with papers.

“Hi.”

I looked up as if startled. “Hello.”

“Have you any Dexter Gordon?”

“Yes, ‘Dexter's Blues’.” Another Negro musician.

“I'll take that.”

I asked, “How about a Dave Brubeck?”

“No. Thanks, anyway.” Brubeck was white. “But anything by Prez? Do you have ‘Lester Leaps In’?”

“Yes.”

He waited. “Do you know of any jam sessions around here?”

“Oh, you're a musician.” That would explain it. Members from the large white jazz orchestras visited Black after-hours joints. They would ask to sit in on the jam sessions. Black musicians often refused, saying, “The white boys come, smoke up all the pot, steal the chord changes, then go back to their good paying jobs and keep us Black musicians out of the union.”

He said, “No, I just like jazz. My name is Tosh. What's yours?”

“Marguerite. What kind of name is Tosh?”

“It's Greek for Thomas—Enistasious. The short of it is Tosh. Are there any good jazz clubs here. Any place to meet some groovy people?”

There was Jimbo's, a blue-lighted basement where people moved in the slow-motion air like denizens of a large aquarium, floating effortlessly in their own element.

Ivonne and I went to the night spot as often as possible. She would take money from her catering business and I from my savings; we would put on our finest clothes, and hiding behind dignified façades, enter the always crowded room. Unfortunately, our attitudes were counterproductive. We projected ourselves as coolly indifferent and distant, but the blatant truth was we were out to find any handsome, single, intelligent, interested men.

I told Tosh I didn't know of any places like that in my neighborhood. When he left the store, I was certain he'd find his way to the downtown area, where he would be more welcome.

Louise continued encouraging me toward Christian Science.
I gingerly poked into its precepts, unwilling to immerse myself in the depths because, after all, Christian Science was an intellectual religion and the God its members worshiped seemed to me all broth and no bones. The God of my childhood was an old, white, Vandyke-bearded Father Time, who roared up thunder, then puffed out His cheeks and blew down hurricanes on His errant children. He could be placated only if one fell prostrate, groveled and begged for mercy. I didn't like that God, but He did seem more real than a Maker who was just thought and spirit. I wished for a Someone in between.

Louise's partner was Jewish, so I spoke to him of my need and asked him about Judaism. He smiled until he sensed my seriousness, then said he attended Beth Emanu-El. He told me that there was a new rabbi who was very young and extremely modern. A Black singer had recorded “Eli Eli” and I listened to the song carefully The beautiful high melodies and the low moaning sounded very close to the hymns of my youth. It was just possible that Judaism was going to answer my need. The Torah couldn't be as foreign as
Science and Health
.

For hundreds of years, the Black American slaves had seen the parallels between their oppression and that of the Jews in Biblical times.

The Prophets of Israel inhabited our songs:

The Hebrew children in the fiery furnace elicited constant sympathy from the Black community because our American experience mirrored their ancient tribulation. With that familiarity I figured Judaism was going to be a snap!

Beth Emanu-El looked like a Tyrone Power movie set. Great arches of salmon-pink rose over a Moorish courtyard. Well-dressed children scuttled from shul and down the wide stairs.

I explained to a receptionist that I wanted to speak to Rabbi Fine.

“Why?” Her question really was, What are you doing within my hallowed halls? She repeated, “Why?”

“I want to talk to him about Judaism.”

She picked up the phone and spoke urgently.

“This way.” Stiff-legged and stiff-backed, she guided me to the end of a hall. Her gaze rested on me for a still second before she opened the door.

Rabbi Alvin I. Fine looked like a young physical education teacher dressed up for an open house at school. I had thought all rabbis had to be old and bearded, just as all priests were Irish, collared and composites of Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald. He invited me in and offered a seat.

“You want to discuss Judaism?” There wasn't a hint of a
snicker in his voice. He could have been asking a question of a fellow rabbi. I liked him.

“I don't know anything about it, so I can't discuss it.”

“Do you want to become a Jew?”

“I don't know. I'd just like to read up on your faith, but I don't know the titles of any books.”

“What is the faith of your fathers?”

“Methodist.”

“And what is it not giving you that you think Judaism would provide?”

“I don't know what Judaism's got.”

“Can you say you have applied yourself to a careful study of the Methodist tenets?”

“No.”

“Would you say you have totally applied the dictates of the Methodist church?”

“No.”

“But you want to study Judaism, an ancient faith of a foreign people?”

He was systematically driving me to defense. If he wanted debate, I'd give him debate.

I said, “I want to read about it, I didn't say I wanted to join your church. I like the music in the C.M.E. Church and I like the praying, but I don't like the idea of a God so frightening that I'd be afraid to meet Him.”

“Why does your God frighten you?”

It would sound too childish to say that when my minister threatened fire and brimstone, I could smell my flesh frying and see my skin as crisp as pork cracklings. I told him a less personal truth. “Because I'm afraid to die.”

I expected the bromide: If a person lived a good life free of sin, he or she can die easy.

Rabbi Fine said, “Judaism will not save you from death. Visit a Jewish cemetery.”

I looked at him and felt the full force of my silliness in being there.

He said, “I'll give you a list of books. Read them. Think about them. Argue with the writers and the ideas, then come back to see me.” He bent over his desk to write. I knew I would enjoy talking with him about Life, Love, Hate and mostly Death. He gave me the paper and smiled for the first time and looked even more boyish. I thanked him and left, certain that we would continue our discussion soon. I took a year to buy or borrow and read the books, but twenty years were to pass before I would see Rabbi Fine again.

Tosh became such a regular in the store that his arrivals raised no eyebrows and Black customers even began saying hello to him, although he only nodded a response. He had been discharged from the Navy and found a job in an electrical appliance shop. He had taken a room in the Negro neighborhood and came to the record store every day. We talked long over the spinning records. He said he liked to talk to me because I didn't lie.

I asked how he had come to like Black people so much.

“I don't like Black people,” he said, dead serious. “And I don't like Italians or Jews or Irish or Orientals. I'm Greek and I don't like them either.”

I thought he was crazy. It was one thing to be introverted, but another to admit to me that he disliked Black people.

“Why do you dislike people?”

“I didn't say I disliked people. Not to like people isn't the same as to dislike them.”

He sounded profound and I needed time to mull over that idea.

I asked if he liked children. He said he liked some children.

I told him about my son, how bright he was and pretty and funny and sweet.

“Does he play baseball?”

I hadn't thought about the physical games Clyde could share with a father. A new world appeared with the question. In my next castle-building session, I would dream about a husband who would take our sons to the park to play baseball, football, basketball and tennis, while our daughter and I made cookies and other refreshments ready for their return.

“No, he doesn't play ball yet.”

“Let's go to the park on your day off. I'll teach him what I know.”

I had not really examined Tosh before. He had thick black hair and the slow, sloe eyes of Mediterranean people. His face was gentle and had an air of privacy. He was handsome, but he fell some distance from the mark I had set for a husband. He was two inches shorter than I and white. My own husband was going to come handsome, six feet three inches and Black. I snatched myself away from the vague reflection and set a date for the three of us to go to Golden Gate Park.

My son and Tosh liked each other. They played handball, and after a picnic lunch, Tosh took a portable set from a package and began to teach my son chess. The day ended at my house, where I introduced Tosh to my mother. She was hospitable, just.

“How did you come to meet Maya? Where are you from?” and “When are you going back?” Tosh held his own before that whirlwind of a woman. He looked directly at her, ignored the implied queries, answering only what he was asked outright. When he left, Mother asked me my intentions.

“He's just a friend.”

She said, “Well, remember that white folks have taken advantage of Black people for centuries.”

I reminded her: “You know a lot of white people. There's Aunt Linda and Aunt Josie and Uncle Blackie. Those are your friends. And Bailey has those friends Harry and Paul, the table tennis expert.”