Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [74]
Fezzes, chadors, and next this: a mosque. Inside, the former McPherson Hall had been redecorated according to a Moorish theme. The attendants led Desdemona over geometric tilework. They took her past thick, fringed draperies that shut out the light. There was no sound but the swishing of the women’s robes and, from far off, what sounded like a voice speaking or praying. Finally, they showed her into an office where a woman was hanging a picture.
“I’m Sister Wanda,” the woman said, without turning around. “Supreme Captain, Temple No. 1.” She wore another sort of chador entirely, with piping and epaulettes. The picture she was hanging showed a flying saucer hovering over the skyline of New York. It was shooting out rays.
“You come about the job?”
“Yes. I am silk worker. Have lot experience. Farming the silk, making the cocoonery, weaving the …”
Sister Wanda swiveled around. She scanned Desdemona’s face. “We got a problem. What you is?”
“I’m Greek.”
“Greek, huh. That’s a kind of white, isn’t it? You born in Greece?”
“No. From Turkey. We come from Turkey. My husband and me, too.”
“Turkey! Why didn’t you say so? Turkey’s a Muslim country. You a Muslim?”
“No, Greek. Greek Church.”
“But you born in Turkey.”
“Ne.”
“What?”
“Yes.”
“And your people come from Turkey?”
“Yes.”
“So you probably mixed up a little bit, right? You not all white.”
Desdemona hesitated.
“See, I’m trying to see how we can work it,” Sister Wanda went on. “Minister Fard, who come to us from the Holy City of Mecca, he always be impressing on us the importance of self-reliance. Can’t rely on no white man no more. Got to do for ourself, understand?” She lowered her voice. “Problem is, nobody worth a toot come for the ad. People come in here, they say they know silk, but they don’t know nothing. Just hoping to get hired and fired. Get a day’s pay.” She narrowed her eyes. “That what you planning?”
“No. I want only hire. No fire.”
“But what you is? Greek, Turkish, or what?”
Again Desdemona hesitated. She thought about her children. She imagined coming home to them without any food. And then she swallowed hard. “Everybody mixed. Turks, Greeks, same same.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear.” Sister Wanda smiled broadly. “Minister Fard, he mixed, too. Let me show you what we need.”
She led Desdemona down a long, wainscoted corridor, through a telephone operator’s office, and into another darker hallway. At the far end heavy drapes blocked off the main lobby. Two young guards stood at attention. “You come to work for us, few things you should know. Never, ever, go through them curtains. Main temple in there, where Minister Fard deliver his sermons. You stay back here in the women’s quarters. Best cover your hair, too. That hat shows your ears, which be an enticement.”
Desdemona instinctively touched her ears, looking back at the guards. Their expressions remained impassive. She turned back, following the Supreme Captain.
“Let me show you the operation we got going,” Sister Wanda said. “We got everything. All we need is a little, you know, know-how.” She started up the stairs and Desdemona followed.
(It’s a long stairway, three flights up, and Sister Wanda has bad knees, so it will take some time for them to reach the top. Leave them there, climbing, while I explain what my grandmother had gotten herself into.)
“Sometime in the summer of 1930, an amiable but faintly mysterious peddler suddenly appeared in the black ghetto of Detroit.” (I’m quoting from C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Muslims of America.) “He was thought to be an Arab, although his racial and national identity remain undocumented.