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Excerpt from THE PEDDLER'S GRANDSON
by Edward Cohen
I never went hunting, in fact had never fired a gun, which put me at a vast distance from most of my male classmates at Murrah, for whom hunting was intrinsic to their upbringing. In the fall they often faced a difficult choice, when the year's first college football game clashed with another southern sacrament, the opening day of dove season. Two months later, around Thanksgiving, deer season was a time of ritual bonding between father and son.
I was only vaguely aware of these central events in my classmates’ lives. I’d heard of the bar mitzvah-like rite of passage of a boy’s first kill, listened to stories of bathless days in deer camp unrestrained by civilization.
In our house, we treasured civilization. It was what we relied upon in the Christians around us for their forbearance. Hunting seemed not merely physical but primitive. My father had a pistol from his World War II days in China and India, kept to repel burglars, but its exact location was not known to anyone.
We did know of Jews who hunted. Ralph did, and by unspoken agreement we never spoke about it. Some Jewish doctors were ardent hunters, prompting my mother’s irritated wonderment. “They work all day to save lives,” she observed, “so they can spend their time off killing.”
She identified with the prey, and so did I, as I had learned many years earlier when I was nine and my father took me fishing at a small muddy lake near Jackson. He was no sportsman, but I’m sure his intent was that we should have a normal southern experience like the other children with their fathers at the lake. He undertook the baiting, an act of courage on his part because of his fear of being impaled by the hook and having to get a tetanus shot.
We settled into fishing, an average southern father and son by all appearances, relaxing on the clay mud shore. Conceivably, we could’ve been talking of our best hunting dog and how he had treed a panther or raccoon (though I knew that raccoons, and also squirrels, were carriers of rabies). Or we could’ve been looking forward to the mess of fish my mother was going to skin, clean, and deep-fry once she got through with her canasta game. All around the lake were fathers and sons having some kind of uncomplicated experience, but as for me, I was thinking, what in God’s name am I doing here, holding this pole with a roach pinned to the end of a hook? And, worse: what if I catch a fish?
One of the nearby fisherman remarked that they weren’t biting today, and I began to relax.
Yet the tranquility of fishing, of sitting wordless for a long time in the same place holding a pole with a roach at the end, genetically eluded me. My mind, even at nine, was whirling around, wondering why I wasn’t enjoying it.
After a couple of hours, as the sun began to set, my father concluded that we’d had a good healthy experience, and we prepared to leave.
That was when I felt a tug on the end of my pole.
“Pull him in, pull him in!” my father encouraged, excited, his southern self taking over. I dragged a tiny fish from the life-giving muddy broth of the lake. While the fish gasped, my father determined that it was too small to keep. I was joyous. The fish would live. At this point my memory becomes jumbled. There was some impediment, some indecision. Perhaps my father didn’t know how to get the hook out.
A man with a stubble of beard approached. “I’ll take it,” he said. Despite my father’s southern side, he was far out of his world here, and I didn’t have time or courage to protest before I heard him accede. Without ceremony the man threw my fish in the bucket, where it thrashed loudly and hopelessly for a long time.
Years later I understood my father’s capitulation when a similar experience allowed me to redress the crime against my poor fish. To do so, I had to stand up to over two hundred years of southern precedent—and a century of Jewish assimilation—and reveal myself as an utter misfit.
It was early morning. I’d returned from the kitchen to the bedroom to dress for work when something gigantic flapped past my face, shrieking. I retreated, closing the door behind me, and listened as it careered through the room, knocking over lamps, beating against the windows, banging into every wall. I risked a look. A very large mallard had somehow plunged down the chimney into my bedroom.
As a nonhunter, my only previous experience with ducks had been with the very tame, disciplined ones that paraded from the elevator to the fountain in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. This duck, however, was twice the size of the Peabody variety, with a wingspread that seemed pterodactylene in the small room. It had crapped all over my bed and was now tearing at the window, beating its green-and-black wings like Leda’s swan about to consummate itself with my Levolar blinds.
A true southerner would’ve known what to do, how to subdue it physically, with a net or coat or bare hands. As for me, I reclosed the door and went to the phone book, hoping there was some governmental agency that might assist me with this natural disaster. Remarkably, there was just such a listing—Small Animal Control.
Within twenty minutes S.A.C. arrived, consisting of a shriveled, berry-tan white woman supervising a rotund black man. The man, without fear, entered my bedroom. He returned momentarily.
“Fat one.”
He reentered with a net, there was increased fluttering, another lamp fell, and he emerged with the duck struggling in the net.
“What are you going to do with it?” I ventured.
“He’d make good eating,” the assistant said, more to his supervisor than to me.
“I don’t know,” the berry-tan woman responded, the first words she’d uttered.
They argued the matter. Although the official policy, as I gathered from their colloquy, was to free captured wildlife, the unspoken cultural norm was the opposite. The supervisor seemed to be swayed by the man’s reasoning while I watched, late for work, a helpless bystander to this life-and-death situation. I didn’t want to appear un-macho, un-southern. Remembering that now-mythical day on the lake with my father and the small fish, I made myself speak.
“I thought you were supposed to let them go.”
They looked at me, irritated at my intervention. I was wearing a tie. Who knew how big a pain in the ass I might be? Finally the woman ungraciously said they’d follow procedure.
They put the duck into their official Small Animal Control truck and drove off. I had to be sure, so I stayed right behind them, all the way to Mayes Lake, until the moment they set my duck free. My childhood fish was not forgotten, but at least in my Jewish ledgerbook he had been balanced.
Excerpt from The Peddler’s Grandson: Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi, copyright 1999 by Edward Cohen, reprinted by permission of University Press of Mississippi.
Now a Bantam Dell paperback (Jan. 2002, $12.95).
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Cohen's bio may be accessed by clicking here.
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From: Jane Miller
I loved your book. I bought a copy for my mother as soon as I read it. She too liked it. It reminded her so of her own Jewish family growing up in Mississippi. My mother is half-Jewish; her mother was Rosa Kamien of Cleveland, MS. My mother's grandparents started the department store, Kamien's, in Cleveland in 1904. It is still in existence today and run by the last of the Kamiens in that area.
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