The Color of Water by James McBride Page B

watching Billy, her face reddening. “Try it again,” he said.
    â€œOkay,” Billy said, swallowing. “When Jesus first came to…No, wait.…Um. Jerusalem was…Wait a minute. …” He stood there, stalled, gazing at the ceiling, biting his lip, desperately trying to remember the Bible story he had memorized just a half hour before, while the church murmured, “Oh it’s all right now…just keep trying,” and Mommy glared at him, furious.
    A few more embarrassing seconds passed. Finally Deacon McNair said, “Well, you don’t have to tell us a Bible story, Billy. Just recite a verse from the Bible.”
    â€œAny verse?” Billy asked.
    â€œAny verse you want,” the deacon said.
    â€œOkay.” Billy faced the church again. Every face was silent, watching him.
    â€œJesus wept,” he said. He took his seat.
    Dead silence.
    â€œAmen,” said Deacon McNair.
    After church, we followed Mommy as she stalked out, and my godfather met her at the door. “It’s all right, Ruth,” he said, chuckling.
    â€œNo it’s not,” Ma said.
    When we got home, Mommy beat Billy’s butt.

7.
Sam
    Our store was at an intersection at the edge of town on a long, sloping hill. If you stood in front of the store and looked right, you saw the town—the railroad tracks, the department stores like Leggets and Woolworth. If you looked straight ahead, you saw the courthouse, the jailhouse, the county clerk’s office, and the road to Norfolk. To the left was the Jaffe slaughterhouse and the wharf where the Nansemond River met the Main Street Bridge. The wharf was huge and dark. Boats from all over the world would stop there to lay over or make repairs, and often the sailors would come into the store and invite me and my sister Dee-Dee to see their boats. “No, no thank you,” my mother would say. She couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but as soon as they’d say, “Come with us,” she’d hop out of her chair by the door and stand in front of
those big sailors shaking her head. “No, no, go away. Tell them to go away,” she’d say in Yiddish. She’d never take her eyes off them
.
    We were right at the intersection where the road from Norfolk and Portsmouth came into Suffolk. That intersection always had a lot of traffic on it. I don’t mean traffic like you see today. In those days, two or three cars was traffic. Or people on foot. Or farmers leading mules hauling peanut crops on a wagon. Or soldiers on trucks from the bases in Norfolk. Or men in chain gangs. People got about any way they could in those days
.
    I was sitting behind the counter of the store one afternoon and a car full of men wearing white sheets drove past. They had white hats covering their faces, with two little eyeholes cut out so they could see. They were driving those old black tin lizzietype cars, the Model A types, with two men in the open section up front and two in the cab section behind. Car after car of them drove by, so many it was like a parade. We came from behind the counter and stood outside the store to look at them. “What the heck is that?” Dee-Dee asked. “I don’t know,” I said
.
    That was the Ku Klux Klan riding through
.
    I didn’t know the Ku Klux Klan from Cracker Jacks, but our black customers slipped out and dashed into their homes as soon as they caught sight of them. They kept out of sight and low key, very low key when the Klan showed up. The Klan would ride right up Main Street in broad daylight and no one did a thing about it. It seemed to me death was always around Suffolk. I was always hearing about somebody found hanged or floating in the wharf. And we were uneasy too, my family, because in the South there was always a lot of liquor and drinking, and
Jews weren’t popular. Tateh kept a loaded pistol underneath the counter next to the cashier. He cleaned that gun