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PARTISAN REVIEW
the Negro families moved into their apartments. I wanted to move
where my friend Mikey, son of my mother's employer, had lived.
Mikey's mother, Mrs. Cohen, told my mother she would put in a good
word for us to the landlord. We were nice Negroes, she would tell
him,
and her Mikey and I had played together through the years. She didn't
have to tell him we were clean; he could see how immaculate
my
mother had always kept Mrs. Cohen's house.
I had always wanted to go through Mikey's apartment, but I was
allowed only to peer into the kitchen from the corridor, a corridor al–
ways graced with the ethnic smells that Sam Levinson wrote about.
Now these corridors would be acquiring a new ethnic -fragrance. The
smells of kosher cooking would be replaced by those of pork chops,
chitterlings and other soulful odors, many of them redolent of pork in
one form or another. (Had "The Three Little Pigs" ever been read in
that building?)
We moved in. You know, I think Mrs. Cohen wanted Mom to
take her old apartment so that she could drop in to reminisce. Mter all,
it was her first home and the place where her children were born. Just
the same, I didn't know why she would want to cling to memories of
that old place; where she was going was luxury in comparison to what
she was leaving. But to us blacks, what she was leaving was luxury.
Mrs. Cohen's husband also seemed to have a fondness for the apart–
ment, for he would stop by whenever he was in the building to collect
insurance premiums from the tenants. We soon found out that his visits
weren't just nostalgia. He knew that the walls were paper-thin, and he
could talk with Mom and at the same time listen for clients who made
it a practice not to be home when he was around. Mter a few visits, we
caught on; after that we would signal his clients by tapping on the pipes
when he appeared.
We had not only taken over Mrs. Cohen's apartment, we had taken
over her furniture as well. I'm sure that Mrs. Cohen felt she was showing
her love and appreciation for Mom by leaving the furniture, and
I'm
sure that Mom appreciated it. Deep down, however, I know she would
have preferred to buy her own - but that was out of the question.
So Mom thanked Mrs. Cohen and promised to keep the rooms just
as they were. And whenever the word was out that Mrs. Cohen was in
the neighborhood, we would break all records to get upstairs to reset
the stage of memory. However, one day Mrs. Cohen was visiting us
when new linoleum was delivered. Would you believe that she was upset
because we were replacing the old, worn-out linoleum she had left?
"Vera," she admonished Mom, "why are you changing the color of the
linoleum in the kitchen? You could have asked me and I would have
told you where I bought it. Then you could have gotten more just like
