What sammy knew, p.1
What Sammy Knew, page 1
ALSO BY DAVID LASKIN
The Children’s Blizzard
The Long Way Home
The Family
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Laskin, David, 1953– author.
Title: What Sammy knew : a novel / David Laskin.
Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020004185 (print) | LCCN 2020004186 (ebook) |ISBN 9780143135500 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525507178 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: New York (State)—History—20th century—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3612.A8536 W53 2020 (print) |LCC PS3612.A8536 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004185
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004186
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
to the memory of
Ethel Beane Foreman
and
Ivan Doig
Contents
Cover
Also by David Laskin
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Author’s Note
Ethel Beane Foreman and Ivan Doig, to whose memory this novel is dedicated, could not have been more different from me—or from each other—in background, temperament, upbringing or outlook. Ethel, the granddaughter of tidewater Virginia slaves, spent her life cleaning the homes and raising the children of privileged white families, including, in the last decade of her life and the first of mine, my own. Ivan, the descendent of hardscrabble Scots, grew up herding sheep and cutting hay in the uplands of central Montana before going off to university and becoming a writer. Ivan was a friend and mentor. Ethel was our domestic worker. And yet together, in their very different ways, they gave me the strength and love and inspiration to write this book.
Ethel, on whom my fictional character Tutu is based, never had much in the way of worldly goods, but she did have a powerful voice and she knew how to use it. I grew up to the sound of that voice, hectoring, commanding, protecting, instructing. I will never forget the sound of that voice crying out when the news came over her radio that four little girls had been blown up in a church basement in Birmingham. I was nine at the time, old enough to understand that those girls were killed because they were black. It never occurred to me that the Birmingham church bombing had anything to do with the racial dynamics being enacted under our own roof. Ethel told me little about her past—I never asked—but late in life, fifty years after she was gone, I set out to learn everything I could. What I discovered—the places she lived and worked, the churches where she worshipped and sang, the death of her only child, her descent from the slaves of our Founding Fathers and from the Founders themselves—I’ve given to Tutu. Tutu is imagined—but the stories, both the ones Ethel told me and the ones I managed to uncover, are real, and I’ve tried to recount them in the voice I knew and loved. Remembering and telling these stories is my way of honoring Ethel’s memory, keeping her alive in our world, and, I hope, bringing our world closer to justice. Her life matters.
Ivan’s stories of growing up poor and motherless in Montana—shared in the course of many a long dinner—were as strange to me as anything Ethel revealed about her own past, and yet these have touched me as well. Ivan took me under his wing, believed in me, supported me in every way a seasoned writer can support a rookie. Ivan himself jumped the fence from nonfiction to fiction in mid-career, and he (gently) nudged me to consider doing the same.
Ethel and Ivan both had my back in the ways that matter most. Without the two of them, I would not be the writer I am, perhaps I would not be a writer at all, and I would certainly never have been the writer of this novel. That is why I have dedicated the book to their memory. But I’d also like to add here my gratitude for their many gifts, often given unknowingly but always unconditionally.
Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.
PSALM 69
Chapter One
This is how Sam Stein remembered drowning.
He was three years old, maybe four. The afternoon was stifling. Cicadas revved in the tops of the backyard trees like rusty chain saws. Or maybe they were chain saws? The air reeked of grass and gas. “Quit whining,” Tutu commanded in that voice like a slap—but he couldn’t. He wanted his mother! He was so sticky that his shirt was glued to his back and his undies wedged in his crack like a damp rope. “Kiddy pool!” his big brother Tom screamed and then the even bigger brother Ron screamed it too. “Kiddy pool.” But why, Sam wondered, would a kitty need a pool? They didn’t even have a cat. Tutu peeled his clothes off and told him to step into his trunks. She kept him steady with one hand on his back—her touch soft from the pearly lotion she was forever wringing into her palms. The pool was a circle of blue. A Wiffle ball, a plastic bat, and a couple of rubber duckies circled one another on the shining blue surface. Sam jumped through the confetti of light that shook down from the trees. His two brothers were already kicking up stars and Sam joined in, hammering his legs through the cool slosh, stomping, marching, spinning, squealing. All three of them were as slick as eels from the baby oil Tutu slathered over their pale knobby backs and shoulders. “Wanna duck, Sammy?” his oldest brother shouted in his face. “C’mere, Sammy. Get the ducky.” But whenever Sam reached for the prize, Ron whisked it off, hid it behind his back, threw it up, and swiped it back inches away from Sam’s greasy little fist. On the last throw, he lunged and fell flat on his face in the tepid bug-flecked blue. He cried into the water and inhaled and choked. His throat screwed shut like a faucet. Still on his stomach with his mouth and nose submerged, he began to thrash and squirm. And then he quit and lay still.
Sam Stein at seventeen could not possibly remember any of this—but he did. He remembered it like it was yesterday. While stars winked on in the blackness behind his eyes, a shrieking whoop—“MY BABY!”—pierced his brain and Tutu—tall, brown, bowlegged Tutu, who hated to be hurried—came charging across the lawn, elbowed aside the paralyzed brothers, scooped Sam out of the pool, and pressed him gasping and then screaming to the gray cotton cloth of the maid’s uniform she wore.
Sam remembered drowning—almost drowning—but the rest of them—his mother and brothers—only remembered “MY BABY!” From that day on,
But not Tutu. Tutu was strict and scary. She rarely smiled and never kissed. She punished Sam relentlessly and cruelly—not with her fists but with her scorn—but she never laughed at him, even when he deserved it. Tutu was the live-in maid—“I’m not your damn maid,” she snapped whenever she heard one of them use that word—but Sam knew, had known from the day they brought him home hollering for all his newborn lungs were worth, that he was her boy. Born on her birthday, delivered into her arms by his desperate mother, Sam belonged to Tutu. He and his skinny white ass wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for her. It didn’t matter what he said or did, how he treated her, or whether he loved her back. He was hers. She was his. For good.
Chapter Two
Should he shave? Sam, locked in the bathroom he shared with his brothers, ran two fingers along his jawline and over his upper lip, but instead of sandpaper it felt more like blades of newly sprouted grass. “I celebrate myself and sing myself—and what I assume you shall assume . . .” No, that was leaves, not blades, of grass and to judge by his photo Walt Whitman had never shaved in his life. What did it matter? Supposedly, girls loved poetry, and Sam, halfway through his senior year of high school, was finally tall enough to stand next to one and recite Whitman or whatever to her face instead of into her boobs. For the first time in his life, Sam was starting to get some second female looks, as in “Is that really Sam? Scrawny little Sammy Stein?” Scrawny no more, Sam had shot up half a foot since the start of the school year, rocketing in three months from puny to lean to—dare one say—lanky?
“Yes, one would definitely dare,” Sam told his reflection.
But he still hadn’t kissed a girl. At seventeen!
Well, it was a new year—new decade—or almost. Seven hours to go and 1969 would morph into 1970, senior spring would officially begin, and Samuel Orin Stein would be free to do whatever the hell he liked with whoever the hell he wanted to do it. His college applications were in, his second round with the SATs was coming up in six weeks, AP English and history were ticking along nicely. As long as he didn’t flunk anything or get arrested, he was golden.
All he needed was a girlfriend.
Sam turned on the water, washed his face, brushed his teeth, combed his wavy chin-length reddish brown hair, scanned the dense drifts of nose and forehead freckles for the telltale bomb crater of a zit. He got so close to the mirror that their noses almost touched. Cute as you turned out? Girls will eat you alive. Tutu told him that just last week—and when it came to appearances, Tutu never lied. What would a girl see? Sly hazel eyes flecked with gold and green. Mouth too big for the concave cheeks. Pale, barely visible eyebrows. Tufts of orange fuzz. And freckles—millions of amber dots that swirled and merged and overlapped in coded patterns.
I love freckles, she—whoever she was—would say.
“Would you like to try one?” he asked the mirror coyly.
Sam braced for the reprimand. Tutu was always on his case for talking to himself in the bathroom, though he never understood how she could pick up his solo mumbling clear across the house. But when he shut off the faucet what he heard was not her raucous imperative but a high thin whine like a dentist’s drill. Crying? He opened the bathroom door, flipped on the overhead light in the hall—he’d been in there communing with his cuteness so long that night had fallen—and followed the keening to the kitchen.
“Tutu?”
The room blazed with light. Tonight was his parents’ big New Year’s Eve dinner party and every surface was mounded with food, bowls, boxes, bottles, jars, utensils. A cast-iron skillet of Crisco sputtered on the stove, but instead of frying, Tutu was collapsed on the patched vinyl bench with the apron pressed to her face. Her knobby shoulders shuddered as she rocked back and forth.
Crying—her? Sam had only seen tears in Tutu’s eyes three times in his life: the Sunday in September 1963 when four little black girls got blown up in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. The day JFK was assassinated. And when the news came over her radio that Dr. King had been shot. Otherwise she was as impervious as a cop.
“What happened? Are you hurt? Did someone die?”
“Oh, Sammy.” She rocked and howled and the words strangled in her throat. “They’ve gone and fired me, Sammy.”
“Who did?”
The wailing screeched to a stop like a needle skidding across a record. “Who do you think—Mickey Mouse?” Tutu hated a dumb question. “Your parents, that’s who. They told me I’m too old and sick to work anymore. One month and I’m out.”
Sam slumped down on the bench across from her and listened with head bowed while she gasped out the story. The week before Christmas, Tutu had nearly passed out after climbing the steep flight of stairs to her attic room. Sam’s mother, Penny, a radiologist at the local hospital, insisted she be checked out by a heart specialist. Tutu backed out of the first three appointments, but when she finally submitted, the exam revealed that the valves of her heart were seriously damaged, probably from a childhood bout of rheumatic fever. Climbing steps, hauling laundry, dragging around the vacuum—really anything that elevated the pulse could kill her. The cardiologist had advised Penny to let Tutu go—for her own good—and the Steins chose New Year’s Eve to break the news. “Out to pasture, Sammy.” The tears were running down her face again. “Don’t they see I got bills to pay—money I owe—people who depend on me? How am I supposed to get another job? Who’d hire me at my age? Next thing I’ll be pushing up the daisies in potter’s field.”
“Wait a minute! They can’t just get rid of you like that. You’re part of the family!”
They locked eyes, Tutu’s brown pools rimmed in red and Sam’s hazel cat’s eyes snapping with outrage. “Family, huh?” She took a pinch of bare ginger-colored skin from under the white cuff of her uniform and twisted it at him. “Does it look like we’re related?” She heaved herself to her feet. “Now get out my kitchen, boy.” That’s what she always called it—my kitchen—though not one thing in that linoleum, chrome, Formica, plastic, and knotty pine room belonged to her. “I got work to do.”
“But—”
“No buts. I’m not your auntie. I’m nothing but the maid. Ex-maid soon enough.”
* * *
• • •
“what do you mean her own good? That’s so”—Sam mentally riffled through his newly acquired SAT words—“paternalistic. Don’t you think Tutu can take care of herself? Make her own decisions?”
Sam had been tracking his mother through the house ever since she got back from her final round of party errands, and now the two of them faced off in the dank cinder-block basement outside the liquor closet. The naked 45-watt bulb trapped them in a cone of dirty light. Penny Stein, her back to the locked plywood door, had the key to the kingdom of booze hidden in her fist. “So what’s your solution, Sam?” Thanks to the recent growth spurt, he was now tall enough to look down on the straight sharp part in the black helmet of his mother’s hair. “You wanna do the housework she can’t handle anymore? Or watch her keel over of a heart attack while she’s schlepping your dirty undies?”
“How about letting her decide? Give her the autonomy.” Those SAT words were great in arguments.
“How about you mind your own business.”
“How is this not my business? Tutu practically raised me.”
“Oh for god’s sake.”
“And if she’s so sick, how come she’s working on New Year’s Eve? Fried chicken and corn bread! What’s your theme this year—down on the plantation?” His mother bristled. “Don’t you think it’s just a tad hypocritical having the black maid serve soul food to your rich white friends? I mean, this is 1969. Have you ever heard of Black Power?”
“Tutu doesn’t need Black Power,” Penny shot back. “She’s got us. She’s one of the family.”
“Right. That’s why you’re firing her. I’ll keep that in mind when you get old and—”
