Jennie and the Diamond Ring

“Genug shoen – enough already. I’m making good money with the taxi. You don’t have to schlep with the cart all the way up to Lexington and 1-2-5 every day,” Izzy would say to his mother-in-law every morning.

“Vy not?” she’d say. “Vat else I can do?”

Along with thousands upon thousands of other Jews, Isidore had fled Russia before the revolution. With his parents and brothers and sisters, he made his way from Minsk across Europe, via Budapest and London, and landed at Ellis Island in 1913. They stayed in Charlotte, North Carolina for a while, where he worked at a junk yard and drove a motorcycle. Then they went to Calgary while waiting for American naturalization. Iz learned to be a projectionist there. As soon as they got their U.S. papers, they set up in New York. That’s where Iz married Fannie in 1922. He drove a cab and was doing pretty well for those days.

Fannie’s family was in the garment business. Her mother Jennie, a tiny woman, had been taking a pile of end-pieces from their sewing shop every night. She’d load up a cart with them the next morning and push it to Harlem. Black women would buy the cast-off fabric and use it to make potholders, scarves or even socks.

But it was driving Iz crazy.

“Why? Why? Genug shoen, Jennie.” Sure, when he was a projectionist, the pocket money she brought home from the end-pieces helped. But as a taxi driver working double-shifts he didn’t need it any more. He had gotten married, had two kids. His father died and he was supporting his family and his mother-in-law in their rented apartment. She didn’t need to push the cart any more and he didn’t want her to.

But it gave her something to do every day and she wasn’t going to give it up without a fight. She wasn’t even going to give it up with a fight, the one they’d have almost every night when he’d come home from his long day behind the wheel, shuttling fares across the Bronx and Brooklyn and Manhattan.

One day Jennie came back from Harlem and was emptying the cart when she saw it: A spectacular diamond wedding ring. A gold band with three prongs held a big flawless stone, must’ve been at least a carat and a half, maybe two. On the inside of the band was the engraved inscription: “To Marcella From C. Love You Always.”

“Hmm,” Jennie said to herself. “It must have slipped off the finger of one of the black ladies.”

She put the ring in a piece of fabric and tucked it into a pocket of her purse. She re-stocked the cart with that day’s new end-pieces and went to bed.

The next morning, as she approached Lexington and 125th, she saw a woman standing on the corner, with body language displaying some signs of anticipation. The woman didn’t wait for her to get all the way down the block – Jennie’s tiny steps and advancing age made for a slow trip. The woman walked forward to meet her.

“I was so afraid you’d never come back,” the black woman said. “I’m so glad to see you.”

“My son-in-law, he doesn’t vant me to come no more. But I like it. Vat else vill I do? But he says I don’t make enough money. It’s not vorth it, he says. He doesn’t vant me out pushing the cart. Oy vay, ve fight about it every night.”

“Do you remember me from yesterday?”

Jennie didn’t really. There were a lot of women coming to look at the fabric every day. And she was getting old. She grimaced and shrugged.

“I was looking through your cart. I lost my ring yesterday. I thought maybe you found it later?”

Jennie smiled. The woman’s eyes widened with something beyond relief in reaction. But it wasn’t over. There would have to be authentication.

“Desc-rrr-ibe it,” the tiny Jewish woman commanded the large black woman. Jennie rolled the ‘r’ with her Yiddish accent.

The black woman remained calm.

“It has a gold band and three prongs and it’s engraved “To Marcella From C. Love You Always.”

Jennie opened her purse and plucked the piece of fabric holding the ring out of the pocket and handed it to the black woman.

“Here it is,” she said.

The black woman opened the fabric and saw the ring. She looked at Jennie for a few seconds with something like bewilderment. Then she walked away.

“Hmmph,” Jenny said to herself. “You’d tink a ‘tank you,’ maybe?”

It was Shabbat. Jennie went home for the Friday night prayer. The men went to synagogue in the morning and the women prepared the lunch. The weekend passed. Iz begged Jennie not to walk the fifteen blocks back to Harlem anymore. For the first time, she thought about it.

“Maybe he’s right,” she said to herself. “I am getting old.” But then she realized how bored she’d be. And a couple of bucks a week allowed her to buy a pin for her granddaughter and a toy car for her grandson every now and then. “Maybe a few more months,” she said. “Maybe I quit ven the vinter comes.”

She pushed the cart slowly down the block toward Lexington and 125th on Monday morning. But something was happening. Things seemed different.

There was a crowd of black women there and it looked like they were waiting for something.

They were waiting for her. About a dozen of them, maybe more.

As soon as she got to the corner, they crowded around her cart and started buying the cast-off fabric pieces faster than she could count the money. Instead of selling six or seven pieces for nickels and dimes, she unloaded the whole cart. Suddenly, about five dollars worth of coins was weighing down her purse.

When the crowd cleared, she saw the woman whose ring she’d returned the week before, standing across the street, observing the scene with her arms crossed.
Marcella nodded to her. Jennie nodded back.

The same thing happened the next day and the day after that.

Marcella had gone to church on Sunday and told the story of the ring. She was the leader of the choir.

“So I want all the women in this church to go down to the corner whenever you can and buy the fabric from the honest Jewish lady who gave me back my ring.”

When my grandfather Iz heard the story he put his hands over his face.

“Oy gevalt! Now she’s never going to stop with the fershlugginah cart!”

And so my great-grandmother Jennie pushed that cart up to Lexington 1-2-5 every day until she couldn’t push it anymore.