Tin lizzies, driven by cotton and hardwood factors in fur-collared ulsters, joggled and backfired over the cobbles on tours of inspection, spooking the horses pulling baggage drays. Across the narrow channel the lanterns were being lit in the squatters’ shanties tethered to the bank of Mud Island on pontoons—“So they can ride out the floods,” Jenny had Muni to know, still dispensing information by the stingy morsel. As if she sensed that her companion had a delicate constitution that could only tolerate spoon-feeding. Despite the paucity of her conversation, however, Muni, who’d scarcely uttered a word, had the impression that the girl was mistress of all she surveyed.
Beyond the island a burnt-orange sun was beginning to set, as the pilot lights came on along the Arkansas shore. Such were the sights that lay at the doorstep of the Pinch, and while Muni had viewed them before on solitary walks, he thought he’d never seen them till he glimpsed them today through Jenny’s wide-awake eyes; though she wasn’t necessarily thrilled by what she saw.
“Did you know there’s a curse on this city?” she said, tying tight the strings of her cap under her chin.
“In curses I don’t believe,” said Muni, adding a “kaynehoreh” against the evil eye.
Jenny sniffed. “Asbestos told me,” she said, as if that settled all arguments, and Muni could have sworn he heard strains of the Negro’s strident fiddle in the air.
The girl began speaking more freely, either from a release of nervous energy or an increasing comfort in the greenhorn’s company. She recounted something of the city’s history, breezily compressing centuries into the space of a paragraph: a Spanish conquistador had once passed through on a quest for gold, butchering Red Indians along the way, and later settlers had bilked the selfsame Indians out of their land. In departing their hallowed bluffs the Indians had flung a curse on the heads of the white men who’d displaced them. There was debate over the nature of that curse, and some said the yellow fever epidemics of the last century were retribution enough—“but I think,” pronounced Jenny with blithe confidence (she was again the mischievous maidl who’d engineered their encounter), “the worst is yet to come.”
Then pensively pointing north with her index finger: “It’s six hours by train to St. Louis,” and south—beyond the railroad bridge recently broadened to accommodate motorcars—with her thumb: “Eight hours to New Orleans. In between is nowhere at all. I would like,” stated Jenny, with that vestige of Yiddish syntax that still sometimes invaded her speech, “to kick from my heels the dust of this town.” Then she voiced her intention to join the circus.
The threat of her leaving gave Muni a touch of vertigo, made him realize how, for all his restlessness, he clung to the Pinch as to a raft in rough waters. “Uncle Pinchas says,” he injected, “that in Palestine the Arabs are butchering Jews …” Jenny eyed him as if wondering if he could only speak in non sequiturs, but Muni felt compelled to remind her that things could be barbarous out there where history was happening. He continued enumerating events he’d mostly ignored when his uncle rehearsed them over the breakfast table. “… and they got on trial in the state of Georgia the Jew Leo Frank for a murder nobody believes he did it.”
Jenny frowned as if to show herself proof against such distractions. “The other girls,” she said, “they don’t think about nothing but who will dance with them at the next Menorah Institute mixer. Me, I need,” she rummaged her brain for the word, “experience.”
Muni tried to remember if he’d ever felt a similar call to adventure. “I had in my life enough experience,” he told her, but he had to admit that the longing became Jenny Bashrig.
On subsequent walks, often at dusk since each had their duties during the day, the girl was forthcoming about her
Beyond the island a burnt-orange sun was beginning to set, as the pilot lights came on along the Arkansas shore. Such were the sights that lay at the doorstep of the Pinch, and while Muni had viewed them before on solitary walks, he thought he’d never seen them till he glimpsed them today through Jenny’s wide-awake eyes; though she wasn’t necessarily thrilled by what she saw.
“Did you know there’s a curse on this city?” she said, tying tight the strings of her cap under her chin.
“In curses I don’t believe,” said Muni, adding a “kaynehoreh” against the evil eye.
Jenny sniffed. “Asbestos told me,” she said, as if that settled all arguments, and Muni could have sworn he heard strains of the Negro’s strident fiddle in the air.
The girl began speaking more freely, either from a release of nervous energy or an increasing comfort in the greenhorn’s company. She recounted something of the city’s history, breezily compressing centuries into the space of a paragraph: a Spanish conquistador had once passed through on a quest for gold, butchering Red Indians along the way, and later settlers had bilked the selfsame Indians out of their land. In departing their hallowed bluffs the Indians had flung a curse on the heads of the white men who’d displaced them. There was debate over the nature of that curse, and some said the yellow fever epidemics of the last century were retribution enough—“but I think,” pronounced Jenny with blithe confidence (she was again the mischievous maidl who’d engineered their encounter), “the worst is yet to come.”
Then pensively pointing north with her index finger: “It’s six hours by train to St. Louis,” and south—beyond the railroad bridge recently broadened to accommodate motorcars—with her thumb: “Eight hours to New Orleans. In between is nowhere at all. I would like,” stated Jenny, with that vestige of Yiddish syntax that still sometimes invaded her speech, “to kick from my heels the dust of this town.” Then she voiced her intention to join the circus.
The threat of her leaving gave Muni a touch of vertigo, made him realize how, for all his restlessness, he clung to the Pinch as to a raft in rough waters. “Uncle Pinchas says,” he injected, “that in Palestine the Arabs are butchering Jews …” Jenny eyed him as if wondering if he could only speak in non sequiturs, but Muni felt compelled to remind her that things could be barbarous out there where history was happening. He continued enumerating events he’d mostly ignored when his uncle rehearsed them over the breakfast table. “… and they got on trial in the state of Georgia the Jew Leo Frank for a murder nobody believes he did it.”
Jenny frowned as if to show herself proof against such distractions. “The other girls,” she said, “they don’t think about nothing but who will dance with them at the next Menorah Institute mixer. Me, I need,” she rummaged her brain for the word, “experience.”
Muni tried to remember if he’d ever felt a similar call to adventure. “I had in my life enough experience,” he told her, but he had to admit that the longing became Jenny Bashrig.
On subsequent walks, often at dusk since each had their duties during the day, the girl was forthcoming about her
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