Chicken Dreaming Corn

Georgia Sun

Georgia Sun A t Erik Overbey's studio on Dauphin Street, as the photographer instructs the Kleinmanswhereto stand for the graduation portrait, Herman waits for the moment to tell his family what is heavyas a volume of Alabamahistory on his heart. Before him, flush with pride, Mama takes up her position sitting erectly on a chair. Next to her on one side is Hannah, her hair a majesty of brown curls, on the other the empty place where Lillian should be. Behind them, standing, Daddy is already staring at the camera, eyes bright with satisfaction: a college graduate, his son. Abe sidles up, saying nothing. Herman knows the story—Hannah has whispered it to him on the store balcony that morning—about Abe's visits to a New Orleans woman of the night, how he'd lost his head and professed love for her, how he'd soon headed with Daddy and AsaSpicer to City Hospital to return with a look, hard to mistake, ofrelief. Herman, diploma in hand, takeshisposition next to Daddy. Eri Overbey studies the composition, walks over to his camera. Herman knowswhat he must say, evenasthey are radiating with joy—kvelling is the word in Yiddish, he has explained to David Pastor—for being the first Kleinman in all the generations of Kleinmans to graduate from college.Just two daysago,with Daddy having taken the Greyhound to Tuscaloosa to be with him, he had stood with the two hundred and sixty-three other young men of 165 166 CHICKEN DREAMING CORN the Tuscaloosa university who would surely assume their places among the leaders of the state,helping guide it out of the depths of the grinding Panic and into the glories that Alabamawas destined to achieve. After the ceremony there had been a party where Aaron Goff, RandyHyman, and BuddySlutskyhad announced their intentions to return home and help their Papas,applyingwhattheyhad learned in history and mathematics and economics to carrying shipments of bowties and boaters and galluses and poplin dresses on into the next generation. Through countlesslate nights his friends had debated overbackhills shinny the shaky future awaiting them among aisles of pants and shirts and rockers and highboys, especially when dollars in a customer's pocket werescarcer than starlings on a stormy morning. But faced with fatherswho braved cossacks, border guards, turbulent seas, Ellis Island physical exams, and broiling Dixie roads to make this day possible, each had vowed,"I want to make my life, too, the store." Herman had said he would wait, though, to be with Mama and Abe and Hannah to make his decision known. When back in Mobile,he told Daddy,he would makethe claim on what his future would be. As Overbeyducks under the black cloth and one bulb explodes, then a second, and the Norwegian emerges to say he is done, Herman, trembling inside, turns to the others and robs the joyous light right from his father's eyes:"I want to try making aliving elsewhere , Daddy,to start over.Like you." He took off to Atlanta, Georgia on a train the following week,a basket packed with Mama's fried chicken on his lap, the addresses tucked into his shirt pocket of two students with whom he'd gone to Alabama.At the shut, he'd gotten the names of some mishpocah of Mobile families,people who might be looking for an ambitious young man eager to make his fortune in the burgeoning Georgia Georgia Sun 167 city. But when he arrived, finding himself a room at a boardinghouse on his own,he stamped through the streets,looking forwork as a stranger. Daddy had done as much, he figured, without much schooling or English. He got a job selling shoes until lack of customers forced the owner to layhim off; he took a job cutting deli meats, but the deli owner wasstruck down by a heart attack and his widow closed the deli's doors for good. He found work in a bookstore, recommending to customers the books of R Scott Fitzgerald, but he watched the Fitzgerald volumes gather dust as the rube Georgians spent their laxhours with nosespressedto the scandalsreported in the Atlanta Constitution. Indeed, it was only President Roosevelt who seemed to be able to keep anyone employed, his job programs sucking out, from the snaking unemployment lines, the able-bodied, down-at-the-heel men, book sense or no sense,and putting a pickaxe...