Flygirl Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  December 1941

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  August 1943

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  February 1944

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Specal Preview of ORLEANS

  PREVIOUS NOVELS BY

  Sherri L. Smith:

  Lucy the Giant

  Sparrow

  Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to Professor Abe Ravitz for overseeing the seedling version of this novel and to my manager, Garrett Hicks, for recognizing what the story could become. Special thanks to my husband for his input and support. There’s no crying in writing!

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group. Published by The Penguin Group.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd).

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  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa.

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Copyright © 2008 by Sherri L. Smith. All rights reserved.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-69928-3

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Version_2

  For my mother, Joan Marie.

  You taught me to soar.

  December 1941

  Chapter 1

  It’s Sunday afternoon, and the phonograph player is jumping like a clown in a parade the way Jolene and I are dancing. We’re cleaning the Wilson house and Nat King Cole’s singing on the record. It sounds fine. This is one of the best places to clean because they have a big yard and no neighbors close enough to hear our ruckus. Otherwise, working on a Sunday would be a real drag. But the Wilsons are gone for the weekend and Mr. Wilson said he’d pay extra for a clean house when he gets back. With Christmas just a few weeks away, the money will come in handy.

  I am knee-deep in Murphy Oil Soap, washing Otis Wilson’s sticky fingerprints off his mama’s fine oak banister, when Jolene comes waltzing down the stairs with the laundry.

  “I swear, these people must change their clothes every hour on the hour, every day. I’ve never seen such a mess of laundry in my life. Ida Mae Jones, hurry up with that polishing and come help me.”

  “I am hurrying. If they’d stop giving Otis jam for breakfast, I wouldn’t be cleaning this railing every week.”

  “If they stopped giving Otis jam for breakfast, he’d cry for a week,” she says.

  Otis Wilson is the most spoiled white boy in New Orleans. Just a year younger than Jolene and me, but at seventeen, he’s still a slobbering mess. Jolene says it’s because he’s soft in the head. I think it has more to do with being spoiled.

  “You think he’d enlist if we ever join this war?”

  Jolene laughs her big horse laugh. “Girl, can you see that little jam jar in a uniform? I mean he’s big enough, for a white boy, and not bad looking, either, if you like the pasty type, but taking orders and holding a gun—we’d be better off surrendering than sending him to fight.”

  “Too true, too true.” I laugh, thinking about Otis’s broad-bellied self in a uniform. “Think they’ve got maids in the army to wipe the jam off his rifle?”

  It’s Jolene’s turn to chuckle. “Now stop making me laugh and get to work. We’re going to have to clean this house a hundred more times if you’re going to get the money to go to Chicago.”

  “Don’t I know it.” I sigh. At home, we get by running our little berry farm, but getting by is far from getting rich. Even with cleaning houses full-time since Jolene and I graduated high school in June, the saving is coming slow. Sometimes it seems like my purse is nothing but a sieve with money running through it like water. “The way I see it, another month of solid work and I’ll be set. Then all I have to do is find a way to get my mother to let me go to Chicago by myself.”

  “Or work another six months and take her with you.”

  “Oh, I can see that now,” I say, rolling my eyes. “‘Mama, you wait right here, I’m gonna go take my pilot’s test.’ She only lets me fly now because Grandy’s with me. She hates to fly.”

  “Girl, I know better than to tell you to give it up. You’ve got the flying bug just as sure as your daddy did, but some days I think it’s more trouble than it’s worth. More money than it’s worth, too.”

  “Bessie Coleman had to go all the way to France to learn how to fly just because she was colored.” She was one of my idols—the Negro Amelia Earhart. “She was nothing more than a hairdresser, but she did it. So why can’t I? I already know how to fly, Jolene. If I can’t get my license in Tuskegee, at least Chicago’s closer than Paris.”

  Jolene shrugs over her armful of dirty shirts. “If you say so.”

  “I do.”

  Just remembering my first time in a plane, in my daddy’s old Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny,” I get goose bumps. Nothing else on God’s green earth does that to me. Of course it’s worth it.

  Last year, just before I turned seventeen, Mama’s daddy, Grandy, convinced her to let me go to Tuskegee to take my pilot’s test. I’d taken over Daddy’s side business of dusting crops, but I needed my license. Daddy would have taken me, had he lived. I’d already flown over forty hours with him, and I had passed the written exam by mail just before he died. All I needed to do was go up in a real plane with a certified instructor. Mama kept Daddy’s promise by letting me go.

  Grandy and I showed up real early at the airfield. I was so excited I thought I’d have to run to the restroom and pee every five minutes. Grandy was as calm as could be, though, and that helped me a lot. The instructor, a Mr. Anderson, showed up, and he was a white man, with blue eyes and a firm jawline. I’d heard he had passed other colored pilots at the base, and I thought he looked tough, but fair.

  Well, I said a little prayer asking Daddy for help, and I took that instructor up in the test plane. It was a Jenny, like Daddy had taught me on, easy as slipping into an old sweater. We did rolls, and loops, and landings, and I could hardly stop smiling because I knew I’d done good.

  But when we climbed out of that plane, Mr. Anderson looked at me and said, “You can fly, no doubt about it. But no woman’s gonna get a license out of me. Go home, Miss Jones. You’ve failed.”

  I stood there, staring at his strong jaw
line and his blue eyes, and if looks could set a fire, he’d have been a three-alarm blaze by the time I was done. Grandy, who’s seen more than his share of wrongness, just took my arm and said, “S’all right, honey. We’ve got better places to go.”

  That better place is Chicago, the Coffey School of Aeronautics. Owned and run by colored people, like me. Teaching men and women alike. No matter how long it takes me, that’s what I’m working toward.

  “Stop daydreaming, Ida,” Jolene says, disappearing into the washing room. “Hurry down here so we can talk.” Her voice carries from the back of the house. I finish scrubbing the banister, still trying to figure out how to get to Chicago without letting Mama catch on. She doesn’t like the idea of me flying. She only lets me dust crops because it pays a little and Grandy comes with me. Daddy is the only person who could convince her that I’d be okay by myself. But since he’s gone, I’m on my own. As far as Mama is concerned, going to the big city by myself is crazy enough. She’d call me a damn fool if she knew it was because I wanted to fly.

  “Finally,” Jolene says as I round the corner to the washing room. “Grab a tub—this is old-fashioned dirt in these socks. It’ll take a washboard to clean them.”

  She pours boiling water from a kettle into the washer and runs those socks through about a hundred times each. Mr. Wilson fancies himself a golfer, but you’d think he was a gopher with all the dirt he brings home with him from the course. The socks are a hopeless cause. Still, I put them in a galvanized tub with bleach to get them white and bluing to get them even whiter. Laundry is my least favorite part of housekeeping. The smell of the soap and chemicals stays in your skin for a week. Sometimes, on a hot day, I feel like I sweat bleach.

  “Now, about Chicago,” Jolene says, sounding just like her mother. Miss Tara is a math teacher, and whenever she puts herself to any sort of problem, math or otherwise, you just know she’ll solve it. Jolene isn’t as reliable as her mama, but it is comforting to have her on my side, just the same.

  “Here’s what to do. Tell your ma that you’re visiting my mama’s sister in Natchez, with me. I’ll even go see my old aunt to keep your story straight.”

  “You make it sound like a sacrifice,” I say, “when everybody knows your aunt lives across the river from the city. And that she falls asleep early every single night, Miss I’ll Be Back Before She Knows I’m Gone.”

  “Why should I suffer for you?” Jolene raises an eyebrow and laughs. “Besides, we can’t all fly airplanes. Some of us have got to keep both feet on the ground. New Orleans is a good place to do just that.”

  “On the ground, Jolene? On the dance floor of a jazz club is more like it.”

  Jolene grins, the gap showing in her smile. She pats her Marcel curls beneath the gray scarf that is part of our cleaning uniform. “Don’t I know it, don’t I know it.” Jolene has a fantasy of leaving Slidell to sing in a New Orleans nightclub. Trouble is, she has no voice for it. So she spends her days in the city with me, washing clothes and cleaning houses.

  “Jolene, you are nothing but trouble.” I reach over her head and turn on the radio we have stashed on the laundry room shelf. There’s a ball game on, so I fiddle with the knobs.

  “Put some music on. Sammy Kaye’s Sunday Serenade should be on.”

  “You’ve already got the record going, and every radio station’s starting up with Christmas carols. Besides, I just want to hear the news.”

  I twist the dial until the news comes in good and strong. The news is much the same as it was last night. The Germans and Russians are fighting in subzero temperatures, and Japan’s moving troops in the Far East despite our peace talks. Jolene sighs and goes back to scrubbing the laundry. I turn the volume down so we can talk over the news and the phonograph playing upstairs.

  “Did you know the Russians let their women fly military planes?” I say. “In England, too. Ferrying planes for the air force. Isn’t that a kick?”

  “Loony’s more like it. What girl in her right mind wants to be flying around in a war zone?” Jolene rolls her eyes at me and my face goes hot. “Baby, you’re not only fly crazy, you’re war crazy, too. That’s a bad combination.”

  I cut off the radio to keep the peace, and Jolene starts singing along with the record. It’s nearly four o’clock by the time we’re finished with the Wilsons’. We yank off our head scarves and shake out our hair on the back steps of the house. We button up our sweaters against the slight December chill. Jolene pulls her copy of the house key from her pocket and locks the place up tight.

  “I sure hope Mr. Wilson is grateful for the Sunday cleaning,” Jolene says, dropping the key into her bag. “I need a new pair of stockings.”

  “Why do you waste your money, Jolene? Silk is for show-girls and debutantes.”

  “And young ladies who hope to catch a man someday. You’d do well to get yourself a pair, or you’ll end up an old maid.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  “Speak for yourself,” she says. I turn to see her smiling her prettiest little smile at some city road worker across the street. The boy can’t be much older than we are, and he sure looks all right in his overalls and cap. It takes me a minute to recognize him as Danny Taylor from our elementary school.

  “Danny Taylor, is that you?” I call out.

  Jolene frowns and drops the able-Grable sexy act. “Aw, heck, Dan. What you doing, looking all grown up like that?”

  We wait for a break in the traffic and jog across the cobblestones. Poydras Street is a leafy place, sheltered by live oaks with crepe myrtle trees growing in between. Danny Taylor smiles at us when we get closer. He’s got a nice smile, broad with teeth as white as milk in a strong brown face.

  “Ida Mae Jones, I thought you was a white woman walking over there with that fine light skin and pretty brown hair.”

  My hand goes instantly to my curls, loose and smooth, like my daddy’s. The kind of curls Jolene calls “good hair.” Not tight and hard to handle, like hers.

  “What about my hair?” Jolene asks, eyebrows arched. “And my fine brown skin?”

  Danny grins, unaware he’s offended her or me, for that matter. I’m shy of my fair looks, and Jolene’s more than a little jealous. “Well, that’s how I knew she wasn’t white. You’re dressed the same, and Jolene, you’re as black as a good cup of coffee.”

  “Best coffee you’ll never have,” she says, and turns her nose up in the air.

  “Well, it was good to see you, Danny,” I say, anxious to leave.

  “What’s your rush? I haven’t seen either of you two since the eighth grade.”

  “Well, some of us stuck around and graduated,” Jolene snaps. She’s decided not to like Danny Taylor.

  “Well, some of us had to work,” Danny says right back. At school, I had known Danny mostly through my brother. I remember when Thomas came home one day and told us his friend had to quit school to help his family pay the bills. Jolene knows it, too.

  “How’s your mama?” I ask.

  “Fine, fine. Doctor says she has a sugar problem, but she’s doing all right.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I say.

  Jolene’s folded up her arms now. She looks at me and frowns.

  “Well, Danny, like I said, it was nice seeing you, but we’ve got to get the trolley and all before the buses shut down. Sundays are always awful tight.”

  “Say hi to your brother for me.”

  “I will.” Jolene is dragging me away now. I stumble on the pavement, catch myself, and wave goodbye.

  “You just keep waving goodbye to Joe Corn over there,” she says in a clipped voice. “Girl, you can do better than smiling up in his face like that.”

  “Jolene, I was being polite. You could take a lesson or two. What’s wrong with you?”

  Jolene stops in her tracks and screws up her face so tight, I think she’s going to cry. “I don’t know,” she says unhappily. “It’s just . . . am I pretty at all? He didn’t even look at me. Just Little Miss Pretty Hair
and Her Creamy White Skin. I love you, Ida, but he just made me so mad.”

  “Me, too.” I put an arm around her. We stand there, half hugging, with nothing left to say. Daddy once told me color didn’t matter as much to folks up north. Light-skinned like me and him or dark like Mama and Jolene, up there he said they’d treat all colored folks the same, like we were all white. I’d sure like to see that, ’cause down here, color seems to be the only place it’s at.

  The trolley down St. Charles Avenue is empty of colored folks. Jolene and I sit to the back and watch the big houses roll by. St. Charles Avenue is the prettiest place on earth, a green tunnel of live oak trees arching across two paved roads, the trolley running down the middle on its cables. Only the richest, whitest folks live up here. We trundle past Audubon Park and the university, same as always, but inside this trolley car something is different. Jolene nudges me with her foot.

  “It’s like a funeral in here,” she says. It’s true. Usually, the trolley is buzzing with laughter, chatter, and just plain noise. But now, it’s like a storm is coming. The few people on board are deadly quiet.

  “Sooner we get home, the better,” I tell her. The trip up Carrollton Avenue is just as slow. At the last stop, we hop off and run across the wide street to catch the bus back to Slidell.

  There’s more folks sitting in the back of the bus. One of them, a dignified-looking, coffee-colored gentleman in a neatly pressed suit, has a newspaper.

  “Excuse me, sir. What’s the news?” I ask him.

  He looks up at me, startled, and starts to stand. There are plenty of seats, though. Jolene has saved me one.

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry,” he says, rising.

  “Oh, no, no. I just noticed you had the paper. Does it say what’s going on? Everyone seems so . . .”

  He looks at me a moment longer and settles back into his seat, seeing that I’m colored, too.

  “Ah, sorry, baby girl. You haven’t heard? We’ve been attacked by the Japanese.”