Free A Good American by Alex George Page A

door. Jette’s quiet yearning for home manifested itself in other ways, too. She cooked only traditional German fare—bland, hefty dishes, fortified by mountains of starch. Possessing no cookbooks, she picked her way back to distant memories. By dogged experiment she extracted the tastes and textures of her childhood from deep within her. Over time she constructed a gastronomic mosaic, each dish a quiet elegy to all she had left behind. Spareribs with sauerkraut, steamed ham, caraway meatballs with
spaetzle
, fried apple slices, barley porridge with buttermilk—these concoctions came freighted with memories. A mouthful of
streuselkuchen
, laced with golden almonds, took her back to long summer afternoons spent in the garden of her childhood home. The heavy rye of
roggenbrot
brought the chill northern evenings closing in. Jette’s kitchen became a shrine, turning out culinary museum pieces. Every day she baked mountains of white bread, laced with milk and sugar. And there were
lebkuchen
, Joseph’s favorite—crumbling fortifications of molasses, spices, raisins, and lard.
    While Frederick was at work, Jette secretly began to write letters home. She filled page after page with detailed reports on their new lives, the lines smudged by her tears. In between these reports she begged her parents for forgiveness.
    She never received a reply.
    O ne Friday morning, a few months after Joseph’s first birthday, Frederick was sweeping the floor of the Nick-Nack when there was a knock on the door. “We are closed!” cried Frederick in his awkward English. “You must wait until lunch!” He carried on with his work. After a brief pause, the knock came again.
    Frederick put down his broom with a sigh. He went to the front door of the tavern, pulled back the bolt, and opened the door. Leaning against the door frame in an elegant slouch was a black man no more than five feet tall. He was dressed in a light gray suit and black patent leather shoes. The brim of his hat was pulled down over his eyes. A gold fob chain hung on his vest, glimmering in the morning sun. Frederick tried to hide his astonishment. Since he had arrived in Beatrice he hadn’t seen a single Negro.
    “I am sorry,” said Frederick, “we are closed.”
    “Don’t want no drink,” said the man.
    “Well then, how is it that I can help you?” asked Frederick politely.
    The man pushed himself away from the door frame. “Heard you got a piano.”
    Frederick nodded. “Yes, that is correct. We have a piano.”
    The man scratched the side of his neck. His fingers were long and thin. “I can play.”
    “No thank you,” said Frederick.
    “Folks like to hear me play.”
    “No thank you,” said Frederick again, stepping back inside. As he closed the door, the gleaming tip of the man’s shoe appeared, blocking its progress.
    “But you ain’t heard me play yet,” he said through the crack. He spoke without rancor.
    When it came to matters of race in America, Frederick was hopelessly out of his depth. Here his innate warmth toward his fellow man was outflanked by history. Only a few decades earlier, Missouri had been ripped apart by the Civil War. Fathomless atrocities had been committed on its soil, a slave state at the frontier of Confederate territory. Thousands of soldiers had perished, innocents were slaughtered, women were raped and beaten to death. Children were taken from their beds, never to be seen again. A cloud of terror had hung over the land. All this in the name of freedom. The tragedy of it all was that the Union’s eventual victory did not erase the shadow of slavery. People’s thinking would not be altered by a peace accord and new laws that they did not want.
    Frederick, unsullied by the blood of local history, was perplexed by the unreflective racism that he had witnessed in many of his customers. He struggled to reconcile the casual bigotry he heard at the bar with what he knew of the men who said such things.
    It was his customers who