Author: Kalie Dudeck

The house next door to my childhood home had a garden. A smallish one, but the man grew grapes and I used to spy the tendrils of vines wind their way around the trellis whenever I trespassed into their yard. He and his wife were retired. Everybody on the street called him “Frenchy” because his last name was LeClair.

            They had a big family, lots of adult children and grandchildren. I’d sit on our back porch and watch them all come over. They’d sit outside and smoke cigarettes, the odor and their laughter rolling in heavy waves into our yard.

Every Friday, they’d make pizza. Now and then, I’d be invited over by a granddaughter and I’d watch the women pound the dough with their flour-covered fists, while others cut the freshly picked vegetables. Thick slices of zucchini and eggplant sprinkled with salt lay on damp paper towels by the sink. Tomatoes passed through the grinder, exiting as sauce.

            My eyes were two moons, reflecting the bright, colorful display through clouds of flour. They’d call me to the sink to see all their garden’s bounty. That was the first time that I ever held fresh basil leaves in my hands. I lifted them to my nose and the scent wrapped itself all around my nostrils, giving my nose a hug.

            There were so many other firsts for me in that small rancher even though I wasn’t invited to pizza night that often. The first time I saw Jaws was in their living room, seated on the floor with all the grandchildren while the suspenseful music played and people screamed. The first time I ever ate mushrooms was at their table. I devoured pizza slices with the topping, and eventually, they sent me home with a bowl of the sautéed leftovers.

Over slurps of garlicky fungi, I asked my parents why they’d never given me mushrooms before. They looked at me bewildered, unsure of the answer. My mother washed the bowl and I returned it later that night, the scent of olive oil smacking me in the face as my neighbors opened their door.

Almost thirty years later, I began my own backyard garden. The first two years, I had an extensive patchwork of pots, overplanting some very large ones with four tomato plants each. I had no idea just how much fruit a single plant could produce. Whenever we went outside, I’d watch my then four-year-old daughter pick the small Sungold tomatoes and pop them in her mouth. I’d remind her to rinse them in the outdoor sink, where she’d run with handfuls of the orangey orbs.

In the same pots as the tomatoes, I placed basil plants. This one with lemon basil, that one with Thai. Before the yellow flowers became ripe fruit, I’d bend to smell the tomato plants and get a whiff of the basil as well. Though I was steps from my patio, I was also back in that flour-filled kitchen, and the packed table, and their living room floor, where even when the shark comes up as Brody’s head is turned, I remain calm, smelling the lingering basil oil on my fingertips.

I taught my daughter to pluck the tender leaves and lift them to her nose, inhaling the herbaceous aroma. We hold out the bottom of our t-shirts to create a pouch where we collect plucked tomatoes and herbs when we forget to bring a bowl or basket outside.

Last summer, a local farmer to plowed a bit of earth in our backyard, and my mother bought forty-four tomato plants for me to painstakingly press into the ground. I bought myself two pairs of overalls, hoping to feel the part as our basil variety increased to six, and I fought all season to nip the flowers from the heads of the stalks so that they wouldn’t go to seed.  

As I pruned, I’d watch my daughter drive around the perimeter of the garden in her pink electric car. She’d lift the large straw sunhat from covering her eyes and resituate her teddy bear in the passenger seat. And I hoped, one day long from now, when she has the chance to touch basil again, she won’t be too shy to hold the leaf to her nose. I pray she’ll remember these summer days in her own yard, picking Sungolds and running to the outdoor sink.

It is my pleasure to introduce the 20th installment of mojo online. This issue marks the return of our online journal after a 4 year haitus since the Covid-19 pandemic.

This issue signifies a kind of rebirth, which I believe is reflected in the works we’ve selected. Our editorial team took their time to carefully curate each of the final submissions, combing through hundreds of entries to arrive at a diverse collection of stories that supports

On April 5^th, 1968, the day following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., three black undergraduates purposely knocked me out of their way as they came through a library door at the University of Chicago. Too astounded to respond, I thought: “Didn’t they know how sickened I had been by the killing? Why knock me out of the way?  Considering this incident later, I recognized that victims of racism tended at times to act irrationally.  I had seen this trait within my own family, in holocaust survivors who found trouble accepting the existence of “Good Germans.”

Twice a year, in spring and in autumn, schools of Coho, or Silver, salmon migrated through Chicago’s harbors. At those times, I would take a study break, grab my tackle, run to my car, and head to Jackson Park near 63^rd Street, where a long stone jetty with a warning light for mariners at its end, curved northwards into Lake Michigan.

            On one beautiful afternoon, a few days after the incident at the library, I walked to the end of that jetty, right next to the signal light marking the harbor entrance, and tossed out my Little Cleo lure. I cast into the lake for the next four hours without getting a strike. Late in the day, my arms and shoulders aching, I decided to cast once more and quit for the day. To my surprise and glee, I hooked a two-pound salmon, but as I struggled to lead it into my net, I heard behind me what sounded like gunfire. I glanced toward shore stunned. Flames and smoke erupted from buildings on 63^rd Street while, along South Shore Drive, a long line of armored personnel carriers belonging to the Illinois National Guard inched

northward.  Sixty-Third Street was the center of the Woodlawn district, a desperately poor and crime-ridden black ghetto separating the University of Chicago in Hyde Park from the relatively affluent and racially mixed South Shore. Mayor Daley had called in the National Guard and, later, regular units of the 101^st Airborne, to suppress the rioting arising from King’s assassination.

            Dozens of people, mostly men but a few women too, stood rooted in place on the jetty and watched their all-black neighborhood burning down while a seemingly all-white Illinois National Guard invaded it with heavy military equipment. I had seen the guardsmen bivouacked in a park near my apartment the day before.

            Looking down the jetty, I suddenly realized I was the only white among all the people there. I stood at the tip of the jetty, faced with a long walk back to shore. This recognition did not immediately, however, translate into fear. I lived in South Shore in the first integrated apartment building in Chicago, felt comfortable among blacks, and had developed friendly relations with many. Still, I didn’t know any of the people on that jetty and, while I can’t say I became frightened, an inkling of concern began to course through my consciousness. At that point, one of the black fishermen, a man I guessed was in his late forties or early fifties spoke to me:

“You know,” he said, “if more people went fishing there’d be a lot less                           trouble in the world!”

I laughed, and agreed with him, certain he was correct.

            He spoke again:

            “That’s a nice salmon you have there!  Are you done fishing for the day?”

            “Yes, I am.”

“Then I’m going to walk out to the parking lot with you.”

We walked down the jetty, passed the dozens of people standing there watching the violence unfold on shore. Everyone was courteous to me. A number of fishermen in a friendly manner admired the salmon I had hanging from a stringer. The momentary feeling of concern I had experienced when I first heard and saw the clash on shore evaporated.  But when we reached the parking lot, a sudden realization hit me that I could be in grave danger.

            Dozens of black teenagers in gang outfits sat on cars watching the destruction of their neighborhood. It seemed to me I was the only white around for a thousand miles. At that time, ferocious teenaged gangs from Woodlawn, the Blackstone Rangers being the most infamous, terrorized both Hyde Park and South Shore. Murders, assaults, robberies, and rapes abounded. The gangs often ordered twelve-year-olds to commit murders for them; twelve-year-olds couldn’t be prosecuted as adults.  I was aware of this fact as I glanced around the parking lot. The teenagers eyed us. What they saw were two fishermen with their gear walking side-by-side, one black and one white, as if they were old friends.

            When we reached my car, I thanked my companion, but he just waved me off as if what he had done was nothing special, just one fisherman helping another, and then he walked off to his own car.

            It was not until I was in my kitchen, a few minutes later, putting that salmon in the oven that the full realization of what that man had done for me hit home. He may well have saved my life.  I hadn’t thought quickly enough even to ask his name, a lapse I’ve regretted ever since.

I don’t mean to mislead by my title: there’s no murder with a nightgown at the center of intrigue, not even a juicy romp between women. The gown’s previous sleeper was unknown, her origin out of state. She was offered to the highest bidder on ebay and I was the fortunate recipient of the soft package that left a perfumed detergent fragrance in my mailbox. Nestled in lavender tissue lay a long gown, true to the describption, ‘condition gently worn’, a bit nubbly textured light pink flannel with darker pink rosebuds. Before dark when I would try her on, I imagined a character in a film, an older woman from an earlier time wandering on a landing, her grey hair loosened from its braid. Not exactly virginal but it didn’t say ‘sex”. I named the gown Jane.

I’ve always loved clothes but was not easy to fit. My mother, short and stocky, encouraged me to forget my figure, also short and stocky, and enjoy what I dressed it up with. She’d been an excellent athlete but despite her protestations that her sturdy legs had served her well and I should be happy with how I was made, she confessed that whenever short skirts came back, she groaned. She admitted to positioning herself behind furniture in photos to hide her legs. Growing up in the fifties, I was influenced by cultural images of beauty and spent decades before elongating mirrors hoping I actually looked longer and thinner in black pants. Then I moved to west Sonoma County, where older hippies, artists, eccentrics dressed in rainbow colors and natural fabrics that fit loosely around tall, short, skinny, ample women..

I haven’t bought retail or anything new except underpants for most of the time I’ve lived in the county. Sartorially, I’ve been liberated by from department stores by t thrift stores, used clothing shops, artisan wear and especially clothing swaps where I’ve found recycled treasures of loved garments that are unique and interesting in the way the mass-produced clothes seldom are. I have a friend who grew up wealthy with a great wardrobe decided her dominating mother. Mother insisted her daughter never wear another’s clothes, and never give hers away where she might meet it on another woman. Perhaps superstition or simply a sense of privilege, my friend’s mother would have turned over in her grave before sleeping in a gown that had warmed another’s body. I’ve felt just the opposite: when I give up clothes I’ve loved but am not wearing, when I put on a friend’s garment from a clothing swap, a gift exchange has occurred. Even ebay celebrates the gifting feeling despite being in the money economy.

I slept in Jane every night for a week, the sweetsy detergent fragrance giving way to by my own body oils, the nubbly texture becoming softer until she was truly mine. When a big October storm with heavy rain and high winds downed trees all over the county and left us without light and heat, I stayed in bed almost all day reading on my kindle. Even more than at night, on this long grey day, I felt that Jane had once wrapped around a reader as she was doing now, and today we were going to finish Howard’s End before the lights came back on to television and bad news.

The world around my cocoon trembled with turbulence and the sky was dark, the storm, the darkness and instability of the barometer extending way beyond our windows to every part of the planet. We trembled before the unknown, human to human, nature to human, and I imagined the woman who slept in Jane before she came to me was well out of the turmoil of this second decade of the second millennium. Being of a vintage ready to fall, I contemplated this flannel comfort as my winding sheet. But before those choices, the first intoxication of love came to an end; two beings as one began to seem confining, Jane feeling clingy to the touch, smells no longer pleasantly familiar, verging on stale. We were ready to separate. I sent Jane to the washing machine while I, aninconstant lover, awaited a pair of panda-printed pajamas from the post box.

My half-eaten apple falls onto the carpet and I yell:

This is me now, perpetually, the sound of a knife dicing

echoing from the dim kitchen down the hall:

A moldy seed I’ve swallowed and coughed up and then

swallowed again, the seed germinating into a black cactus

pressing against my trachea as I speak, as in a robbery

with my own hands circling my neck, blade pressed firm:

Yes this is a threat because with this disease tomorrow

is always harder. When swallowing smoke is no longer

an option. Instead, the necessary medicine is

sitting at the counter with my son at seven in his

stretched Pikachu jams, ankles showing while he paints

a little ceramic bear he got in his Halloween haul.

Husky sitting obediently beside him. Blue and purple

on his fingertips. Makes me think about how if

I draw enough triangles, and connect them,

they’ll make a hexagon. Later, I think about Uno cards

incinerating in my hands. Specs of paint

on my son’s face as we play. He is smiling but also

becoming the bear tonight and I wonder if that bear

will become brimstone when I dream of hornets and

first-degree burns. I want to get the paint off his face

but my hands are always in fists. And the rays on my

drawn suns are irregular, stunted, but there’s one

that goes off the page, long beyond the messy Uno deck,

off the table, down to the carpet where the apple fell earlier

and I spent all afternoon on my knees, picking off

little pieces of dog hair, hungry, crying hard.