Flygirl Read online

  Chapter 2

  My mother is standing on the front porch, waiting for me.

  “Ida Mae, Ida Mae, get in here, quickly!” As if the war had already reached our front door. I run, my shoulder bag swinging against my ribs, and climb the stairs, into her arms.

  “What happened, Mama? What’s happened?”

  “Come inside, it’s on the radio. They’ll play it again.”

  The radio sits on the sideboard in the kitchen, where Mama listens to music while she cooks the family meals, humming and singing the whole day through. Mama’s daddy, Grandy, is at the table now, and his big head with its close-cropped white hair is bowed over his clasped farmer’s hands, like he’s praying. My little brother, Abel, is sitting at the table like it was Sunday school, his seven-year-old face solemn and unsure. He watches me with round eyes as I sit next to him. Mama pulls up a fourth chair. Music is playing, just like any other day. We sit there, hands clasped like Grandy’s, until a news bulletin breaks in.

  “This is an NBC news bulletin. The Japanese have bombed our naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, this morning. In an unexpected attack, a squadron of Japanese planes came out of the sky, dropping bombs on the naval base and the island of Oahu. The president is expected to speak tomorrow morning. This can only be taken as an act of war. We now return to our regularly scheduled program.”

  Grandy sighs, long and low, and raises his head. “They’ll be wanting Thomas,” he says.

  I stare at him. “What do you mean?”

  Mama shakes her head. “But there are so many others who will want to go. He’s not meant to be a soldier. He’s going to be a surgeon. Will they really . . .” She trails off, tears settling in the worry lines around her eyes.

  “Don’t worry, Mama,” I say quickly. “Thomas knows we need him here. Besides, Hawaii is a long way off from Louisiana. Europe is, too. They can’t touch us here.” I stand up and put my arms around her. She holds on to me tight, the way I used to hold on to her when I was little. It scares me, but it’s all right. We’ll be okay.

  Grandy cuts off the radio. “President don’t speak until tomorrow.”

  “Supper’s almost ready,” Mama says, pulling away from me. She straightens her apron, wipes her eyes on a corner, and smiles at me.

  “Ida Mae Jones, what have you done to your hair?”

  I feel the thick wave of it and realize I forgot to comb it out after taking my head scarf off. “Oh, we were cleaning. I’ll brush it. Does it look bad?”

  “Girl, you’d leave your head in the dishwater, if you weren’t paying attention,” Mama says. She’s okay now. “Good thing you got your daddy’s hair, else you’d be looking like a feather bed. Now go wash up and help me finish the potatoes. You’ve got to have an appetite after all the running you must’ve done to get home today.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say. And we move about the house like we have a thousand times before, Grandy in the living room shuffling cards to play Old Maid with Abel, Mama and I side by side at the kitchen sink. Sailors are dying in Hawaii, women are flying overseas. But everything is the same for the Joneses of Slidell, Louisiana.

  That night, after dinner, I go into the barn and pull the cover off of my father’s airplane. Even in the dark, she’s beautiful, with her stacked yellow wings, blue-and-white-striped tail, and red propeller. She shines like new. You take care of a plane, Daddy used to say, and it will take care of you. It’s dark in the barn, but I know the Jenny like the back of my hand. I climb into her open cockpit and settle myself inside. The leather seat cups my back and I rest my head, looking at the rafters up above. The war is here, flown in by Japanese fighter planes. I close my eyes and wonder if it will ever be safe for me to fly again.

  Monday morning dawns clear and blue. It was probably just as blue over Hawaii when the Japanese bombs started to fall. Mama keeps us busy while we wait for my big brother to come home. Thomas is a medical student at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. But he’s taking a leave of absence after what happened yesterday. At a time like this, everyone should be home. I clear away the breakfast dishes, wash them, dry them, put them in the cupboard, and try not to think.

  Grandy disappears into the barn and comes back with a piece from his tractor. He turns on the radio, then sits at the kitchen table and begins to dismantle the greasy bits of metal over a piece of newspaper. Abel sits on the living room floor with one of the barn cats and some of Mama’s yarn. Mama never lets the cats inside. But today, she doesn’t seem to mind. She’s knitting a scarf for Thomas. “Christmas is almost here,” she says, and I can hear the choke in her voice. All of us fiddle with our hands and listen to the president speak.

  I think of those warplanes, flying over American houses, American families. I listen to the sky over our kitchen and pray. On the radio, Mr. Roosevelt’s speech ends. A thousand miles away in Washington, the Congress erupts in applause. For me, there is nothing to clap for.

  Thomas reaches the house, dusty and tired. He runs up the stairs and throws the door open as the radio ovation fades. Yesterday, we were a nation at peace. And now we are at war.

  Thomas sweeps Mama into a hug.

  “Oh, baby, I’m so glad you’re home,” Mama says, holding him tight. She wrings her hands as my big brother takes off his jacket and hangs up his hat on one of the hooks by the door. “How could all of this have happened on a Sunday?”

  “It doesn’t seem right,” Thomas agrees. We have no answers. None at all.

  “Right or wrong, we’ll make it through,” Grandy says. “Good to see you, son.” He and Thomas grip hands. Seeing the two of them together makes me wish my daddy was here.

  Thomas clears his throat. “I made a decision on my way over here. I’m enlisting.”

  The room gets so quiet I can hear the clock ticking on the mantel. I look from Mama to Grandy to Thomas. Mama is the first to speak.

  “You’ll eat lunch first.” Her face is gray, but she keeps her dignity. She pats Thomas on the shoulder, tells Abel to get rid of that cat, and goes into the kitchen, humming.

  “How you doing, Clayfoot?” Thomas grins at me. His smile is contagious. I hug my big brother.

  “Don’t be stupid, Tommy,” I tell him. “You can’t enlist. We need you here.” But he doesn’t listen.

  “It won’t be just the Japs,” he says into my hair. “The Nazis’ll be next. And the Negro doesn’t stand a chance in a world run by them.”

  I nod as though I understand, but I don’t. Like those women flying over Europe, it seems like a picture show, far away and unreal. “It’s almost Christmas, Tommy. There’s a whole ocean between here and the Nazis. Let the ocean do its job.”

  Thomas pulls back, and he’s frowning now. My brother’s gotten taller and more handsome since he’s been at school. He looks more like Daddy every time I see him. The same strong hands, the same warm eyes. Only the curlier hair and pale coffee skin are different.

  “The ocean didn’t stop the Japanese,” he says.

  My heart sinks into my stomach. “Tommy, please.”

  “Clayfoot.” He uses the pet name again. “You sure are just a kid after all. Which makes it harder for me to ask what I need to, but I’ll ask it, anyway. I’m going to join up in this war, a lot of young men are, and I’ll be leaving you all. Not like for school in Nashville, but far, far away. And Abel is too young to do this for me, and Grandy is too old. So it falls to you, Ida Mae.”

  My heart pounds; he is serious, serious if he’s calling me by my given name.

  “Take care of Mama, Ida. Take care of Grandy, of Abel, of yourself, too. There are important things in this world that a man’s got to do. But we do it for our families. I’ll fight for our country, to keep you all safe. You just make sure everyone’s still here when I get back.”

  I want to close my eyes. I don’t want to see Thomas standing there, looking so serious, as serious as he did kneeling by that tractor the day Daddy died. I never wanted to see that look on his face again, but it’s
there. I grab his hand and try to smile.

  “You’re too serious sometimes,” I want to say. But I can’t. Instead, I end up giving him another hug.

  “I promise. We’ll be all right. As long as you are, too.”

  He laughs then and shakes my hand very formally. “It’s a deal.”

  Neither one of us knows we’ve made promises we can’t keep.

  It was a hot day in August when Daddy died. I was sixteen years old. Thomas was nineteen. He and Daddy were working the east field, turning the old husks into the soil, when something went wrong. The tractor flipped over on top of Daddy, and Thomas ran three whole miles to get help. Mama and I came racing out of the house as Thomas flew past us, pointing and hollering, running to get more men to lift the tractor.

  He was too late, but not too late to hear Daddy, with his last breath, talking to Mama and me. She was holding his hand like she could keep his soul from leaving his body, but he just squeezed it back and smiled. “Stella, look at that boy run,” he said, seeing Thomas come up all sweaty and scared, ten men and the doctor behind him, ready to pull that tractor off of Daddy. “Did you see that?” Daddy said. “Look at old Thomas. He sure can fly.”

  Thomas flew, all right; he flew right out of Slidell. He was never going to be a dirt farmer, he said, set to die in the tracks of his plow. He got as far as Meharry, where he is learning to be a doctor so he will never have to run three miles for one again.

  And now my big brother’s running all the way to the war.

  After dinner, Grandy is the first one to speak.

  “Now, be sure you get posted as an officer,” he tells Thomas, jabbing the table with a blunt finger. Grandy fought in the trenches in the Great War. “That’ll keep you out of the worst of it, even in a Negro unit.”

  “Yes, sir.” Thomas nods. Grandy’s got everyone’s attention.

  “Shouldn’t be too hard,” Grandy says. “A half-schooled doctor is better than no doctor at all. That should get you a commission. You’ll be all right, as long as you’re not in the trenches. A colored man in the trenches is worse than dead.”

  Mama goes real quiet. She was two years younger than me when Grandy went off to France. She remembers it well enough, I know, but she never talks about it. Thomas puts his hand over hers on the table. I don’t know what to say to anybody, so I go get Abel and bring him upstairs for bed.

  “Ida, what’s gonna happen to Thomas?” Abel asks me when I tuck him in.

  “Nothing, Abel. Nothing.”

  Abel fixes me with those sharp brown eyes of his and frowns. “Don’t tell stories, Ida. I been to the picture shows. I seen the war reels. I know what it means when he says he’s signing up.”

  I sit still and look at my little brother. Abel is just a kid. He shouldn’t know this stuff. “Yeah, well, Tommy is pretty smart, don’t you think? Training to be a doctor and all. I think he’ll be helping other soldiers stay strong and not in any real danger himself.”

  “I guess.” Abel lies back beneath the quilted coverlet Mama made for him from Daddy’s old sweaters. “You’re not going anywhere, are you?”

  “Now, where am I supposed to go?” I ask him, laughing. But in the pit of my stomach, I realize I did have someplace to go. Chicago. Chicago, to prove I can fly.

  My heart sinks when I didn’t think it could get any lower. The dreams of one little colored girl don’t matter to a world at war. But they matter to me. I swallow my sorrow and kiss Abel on the forehead.

  “Go to bed, silly. And stop asking fool questions.”

  “Good night, Ida Mae.”

  “Good night, Abel James.” I wrinkle my nose and he giggles.

  I cut off the light as I’m leaving, and I hear Abel singing in his seven-year-old voice, real soft, so he thinks I can’t hear him. “Shoo, fly, don’t bother me. Shoo, fly, don’t bother me. Shoo, fly, don’t bother me. For I belong to somebody . . .”

  I smile in the dark at the top of the stairway. Thomas taught me that song. Used to sing it to me in that same reedy little boy voice whenever something was bothering me or making me sad.

  “Troubles are like flies, Ida,” he told me. “You just have to brush them away.”

  “Shoo, fly, don‘t bother me,” I repeat softly in the dark at the top of the stairs, struggling to keep the loss I feel at bay. Chicago will happen someday, maybe after this war. “Shoo, fly, don’t bother me. Shoo, fly, don’t bother me. For I belong to somebody. I feel, I feel, I feel like a morning star; I feel, I feel, I feel like a morning star. Shoo, fly, don’t bother me. Shoo, fly, don’t bother me. Shoo, fly, don’t bother me. For I belong to somebody.”

  August 1943

  Chapter 3

  The war is not going well. Thomas has been gone for more than a year and a half, and his letters are few and far between. It’s for the best, I know. Mama couldn’t read more of the kind of news he’d been sending. We’d barely started fighting Japan when Germany and Italy jumped on top of us, too. The whole world’s gone to war.

  Thomas is a field medic for the colored infantry in the South Pacific, where we’re fighting the Japanese. I don’t know how he gets along. He survived the Battle of Midway just months after enlisting, and we thanked our lucky stars. But our Thomas is still on the other side of the world, where boys are dying like flies in the August heat. This war looks like it’s here to stay.

  There’s more work now that the war effort is on. In addition to the Wilsons, Jolene and I are cleaning for the LaRoches and the Thibodeaux family on Camp Street. The money’s good, but I’m not any closer to Chicago. Daddy’s Jenny is up on blocks in the barn for the time being. Airplanes and fuel are reserved for the war effort, not for colored girls who dust crops without their licenses. There’s not much else for me to do these days except for clean houses and keep my promise to Thomas.

  For two whole days, Jolene and I do nothing but collect silk stockings from all the women we work for and turn them in to the army parachute program. Jolene looked like to die when she had to give up her sackful, but it’s for a good cause, so she’s being stoic about it.

  Seems there’s a different way to help every day. Mama’s been saving up all her bacon grease because the military says they can use it to make ammunition and medicine. I don’t know how bacon fat can kill a Nazi unless you feed it to him by the bucketful, but they’ve got some use for it, anyway. Mama likes to think Thomas has helped some wounded soldiers with the grease she donates at the butcher shop. Even Grandy has gotten into the effort, turning in the spare tires from our tractor. Rubber was one of the first things to be rationed, and any little bit that’s nonessential goes into the war machine.

  With everything so rare these days, the government has issued ration books through the elementary school. Mama and I got ours from Abel’s teacher, Mrs. Marvin. She checked our names off her list and gave us four little books of twenty-eight stamps each, one book for everybody in our family. Every time we buy a rationed item, the cashier rips out a stamp to show we’ve used up our share. Just before Christmas, they added coffee to the ration list.

  Today, Mrs. Wilson gives me and Jolene her ration book to get her some sugar. “I thought about what you said, Ida. I’d better get it now before the well’s run dry.”

  I was actually only repeating what Mama had said to me the week before. Rationing’s got her remembering what she learned in the Depression: “Stock up, Ida Mae, or you’ll be like that grasshopper come wintertime.” I nod at Mrs. Wilson and smile. “That’s right, Mrs. Wilson. It’ll keep in the cupboard real nice, anyway.”

  “You girls run along and let me know if you see anything else that might be getting low.”

  The day is so humid, our dresses stick to our skin the minute we step outside. Jolene and I walk the three blocks to the corner grocery store, swinging our shopping bags over our shoulders.

  “Why the long face, Miss Jones?” Jolene asks me in a joking voice.

  “Nothing, I guess. We got another letter from Thomas today.”
/>   Jolene shakes her head. “I wish I had some fine young Negro writing letters home to me,” she says with a cluck of her tongue. I roll my eyes.

  “Jolene, we’re talking about my brother here,” I remind her.

  She gives me a look, raising her eyebrow. “I know. He’s fine.”

  “Oh, no! You are something else!” I exclaim.

  “I know that, too,” Jolene replies, shaking her hips. “You can put that in your next letter to him for me.”

  I laugh in spite of myself. “You’re terrible.”

  Jolene smiles. “Don’t tell him that part. Besides, you’re smiling again, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.” I sigh. Just pointing it out makes my smile fade. “In his letter, Thomas said things are bad out there. Not in so many words, but I can tell.”

  “That’s war,” Jolene says, as if she’s lived through more than one. But I know she’s right.

  “Still, it seems silly. Thomas has men dying on his stretchers every day, and we sit here hoarding sugar and saving rubber, like that’s gonna make a difference.”

  Jolene shrugs. “What else can we do? We don’t fight the wars. And I wouldn’t want to, anyway.”

  “Nobody wants to, Jolene. But don’t you think we could be doing something more? There are nurses overseas. And there’s the Women’s Army Corps. Those women must be doing something to help out if the army’s using them.”

  Jolene swings her bag onto her hip and fixes me with a look. “Now, I know you’re not thinking of joining the WACs. You want to be a secretary, you can do that right here at home.”

  “They do more than that,” I protest. “Like radio operators and such.”

  Jolene shakes her head. “Ida, those women are either man hungry or funny in the head. No, ma’am, we are exactly where we belong.”

  “On the corner of St. Charles and Camp Street, loading up on sugar? Jolene Dupree, you sure do aim low.”