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says, exasperation in his voice . He has been put on the defensive. He
knows it, she knows it.
"Yes, it does!" she says triumphantly. "I know."
"It's not race, lady," the assistant manager pleads, wholly on the de–
fensive now.
"Yeah!" she says, gleefully slapping the shopping cart rim. "And I'm
fucking Snow White. If I was some fucking little old Jewish lady, you'd
take it back. It's 'cause I'm black. Black. I'm no little old Jewish lady.
I'm black."
Mirror image absorbed, reality strikes. This exchange in a neighbor–
hood supermarket between Puerto Rican man and black woman takes
on the intimacy of an old threat. The invisible yet omnipresent Jew, this
time in the shape of a "fucking little old Jewish lady," dropped like a
lead weight into a confrontation between black woman and Hispanic
man. No longer is this a mere squabble. Until now, the argument did
not threaten. All has changed -
the Jew
thrust forward, the Jew card
played. A shower of anger needles into rage. Rising within me, Melville's
old grudge.
Memory demands witnesses. The assistant manager is my subaltern
Jew in New York, symbolically singled out, like the narrator of a story
by John Berryman. Only unlike "The Imaginary Jew," the person imply–
ing the manager is partial to Jews is not a bullying white man in Union
Square at the end of the Depression but a large black woman standing
like an Old Testament Deborah in a Chelsea supennarket in 1993.
A minor incident? Admittedly. Were I to relate it to my black col–
leagues at City College, it would merely embarrass them. (Embarrass
most of them, anyway. Among the faculty is that racist harlequin,
Leonard Jeffries, holding forth with Stephen Fetchit asininity about the
Sun People and Ice People and the humanizing effects of melanin be–
neath the skin.) Yet it gnaws at my mind. For days, I can focus on little
else. It forces me to think about what I do not want to think about -
blacks and Jews in New York.
Not
a
New York subject but
the
New York subject - and yet, the
more written about, the more shrouded in nuance and accusation, the
less real it is. As if blacks and Jews were simply rival claimants for the
prerogatives of suffering. As if the lives of New Yorkers were lent mean–
ing by an equal emotional physics, each group demanding exclusive pos–
session of the mirror in which its victim.ization is reflected.
How difficult to look in that mirror today. Is that why this super–
market encounter embodies my sense of caution in writing about blacks?
