She imagined that the landscape that was passing by her was beautiful in daylight. But at night, it looked so peaceful and innocent in comparison to the tall buildings and crowds she had grown up around. But then she remembered how looks could be deceiving.
While she couldn’t see the city itself, she could see the gray skies surrounding the front of the train begin to lighten in a faint artificial orange glow. She could feel the train begin to decelerate. Eliza was snoring softly against her pillow, and Grace tapped her foot. “Wake up. We’re here.”
Eliza groaned as she sat up. She turned her neck to and fro, then stretched her arms. “I really hope the beds are soft when we get there. I never want to have to sleep on one of these trains again.”
“Keep hoping, kid. The military isn’t known for its luxurious accommodations.” Grace shrugged into her suit jacket and then began to gather her things. The more the train slowed down, the more her hands shook. She had never been outside the New York City metropolitan area in her adult life. And now here she was in the middle of America’s breadbasket. What the hell had she been thinking?
She repeated to herself silently, For better or for worse, you’re in the Army now.
The brakes whined loudly as the train jerked to a stop. Grace reached into the storage compartment under the bed for her suitcase. Then she ran through her mental checklist:
Suitcase. Check.
Pocketbook. Check.
Portfolio with her sheet music. Check.
Sweater. Check.
Grace draped her sweater over the lower part of her arms to hide how much her hands were shaking. She couldn’t believe it. She was really here. Out in the sleeper car lounge, they waited. She looked over her shoulder at Eliza and, behind her, their new friend Charity, who was already grinning with excitement. “Are you ladies as ready as I am?”
A still-half-asleep Eliza blew out a breath. “As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”
“Good.” Charity grabbed Eliza by the arm. “Then let’s get out of here and show these guys how to win this war.”
There was a line of Army officers waiting for them when they stepped into the brick Rock Island train depot. All of them were white and male. And none of them looked happy to see this new group of arrivals.
“Go through these doors and to your left,” barked the first one they encountered.
“Could you direct me to the ladies’ room, please?” Eliza inquired.
The man propped his clipboard on his hip and glared at her. “You can pee when you get on base, girl,” he drawled. “Until then, hold it while you go through these doors and go to your left.”
Eliza’s jaw fell in shock. “Excuse me?”
But Grace pulled her away by the arm before Eliza could say anything more. He had been wrong to call Eliza “girl,” but it was also too early in their Army careers to get into trouble.
“C’mon, Eliza.”
“Did you hear how he spoke to me?” Eliza continued to pull against her hold. That only prompted Grace to squeeze tighter.
“You’ll have plenty of time to get yourself into trouble with these guys. Let’s wait until it’s for something that’s actually worth it.”
Behind them, Charity suppressed a laugh. “Are you two always like this?”
Grace looked over her shoulder and arched an eyebrow at Charity. “God, I hope not.”
Once they passed through the doors and turned to the left as they had been instructed, they found themselves in an alley. Even though it was the middle of summer, Grace shivered from the cold. It had been raining, so the gusts of wind that whipped into the alley made it feel like early spring. They continued to step forward, following the line of women who preceded them. From what she could tell, the officers were checking off their names and then directing them toward a long line of drab green Army trucks. Their trio eventually made it to the front of the line and gave their names.
“Find a truck with space and hop on.”
“Where are the porters to help us with our bags?” Eliza gritted the words out from between clenched teeth.
Grace turned around to see a breathless Eliza struggling to keep up with them. She rolled her eyes. The girl must have packed like she was going on a vacation, Grace assumed. As a habit, Grace always packed her bags no heavier than she could carry by herself if needed. But Eliza, still struggling with her own suitcase, obviously did not follow the same philosophy. And Grace was the daughter of a Pullman porter. She knew the expected service protocol, especially when there were as many women as there were here.
“Girl, you’re in the Army now. It looks like we’re going to have to make our own way.” Charity shuffled her pocketbook and suitcase to the same hand. With her free hand, she lifted the other side of Eliza’s suitcase.
There was a mad frenzy of women who had alighted from the now departing train. Grace, never the one to go out of her way to socialize, had pretty much limited herself to their train car during the journey. She was shocked by the number of women who stood ready to climb aboard the trucks with all of their worldly possessions in hand.
“Wow, and all of us here for officer training,” she muttered to herself. She noticed one young woman off to the side who was struggling to keep hold of all her luggage. Tears were beginning to form in the corners of her hazel eyes, threatening to fall at any moment. Grace reached out to catch a bundle that was sliding out of the woman’s grip. “You almost dropped this. Do you need some help?”
“Yes, I’d love . . .” But when the woman looked up, the smile on her face fell as she sized up Grace from head to toe. Then, to Grace’s surprise, the woman frowned at her. She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin so she now appeared to look down upon Grace. She cleared her throat. “No, I do not.”
The woman then snatched the bundle from Grace’s hand, which caused her to drop everything else she was struggling to hold in the process. It all looked like a scene from one of the screwball comedy silent motion pictures Grace had seen as a child. Had she not been so shocked by the woman’s rudeness, she might have laughed.
“Here, let me help you,” Grace insisted. She put down her own belongings so she could kneel and pick up some of the woman’s mess.
“You’ve helped quite enough . . . girl.” Grace stilled at the way the woman’s voice drawled around the word “girl” like it was venom.
“That’s fine.” Grace stood. There was no point in attempting to aid a person who obviously didn’t want any help. She took a deep breath. That was the second time in a matter of minutes that she had heard someone who looked like her referred to as “girl.” She really hoped that these were exceptions and not the rule in her new life here.
It did not surprise her in the least that most of the women here were white. Heck, she had been surprised when her father had told her there was a civilian Negro community here in Des Moines at all.
Eliza nudged her. “What was her problem?”
Grace sighed. “I have no idea.”
“I suspect that we’re too far above the Mason-Dixon Line for her liking,” Charity quipped. She marched up to the steps that had been placed at the back of the nearest truck. “But that’s something for her to get over. We have more important things to concern ourselves with. Like getting on this truck. C’mon.”
This Charity Adams sure is a firecracker, Grace thought. She is the type of person I would follow anywhere, even if she was leading me into battle.
Grace smiled to herself as she followed Charity and Eliza up the steps and onto the truck.
Despite the gloominess of the morning, there was a soft golden glow that peeked from the gaps in between the canvas that covered the back of the truck. Curious, Grace took a look to see what it was.
“Oh!” The glow surrounded what could only be the state capitol. It was on a hill just past the immediate vicinity of the train depot. She imagined that the lighting was a muted version of its intended glory because of the early-morning hour, but it entranced her just the same.
One day, she’d have to come back with a camera to take a picture of it.
Grace’s wonder at witnessing the sunrise was short-lived. When they arrived in front of Fort Des Moines, the luggage-laden new recruits were greeted by a never-ending burst of camera flashes as they descended from their trucks. Local and national press had come out in full force to catch a glimpse of the first class of WAAC officer candidates. They couldn’t move an inch without some reporter shoving a camera or a notepad in their faces.
To make it worse, there were Army personnel left and right barking orders at the women to keep the lines coming off the trucks moving, to fill out luggage cards and attach them to their suitcases, and to make a beeline across a large open field.
It seemed that the first act of business on the Army’s agenda was to usher them into a bright yellow building with a sign affixed to it that read CONSOLIDATED MESS HALL.
Eliza whispered to Grace, “What is a ‘mess’ hall?”
Grace shrugged in response. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
They soon discovered the answer to that question when they found themselves in a line where cooks shoved plates of toast, bacon, and scrambled eggs at them.
They sat down at the nearest free seats. Eliza leaned in to sniff her plate. She giggled. “If this is the ‘mess,’ should I be scared to eat it?”
Grace shrugged again. “That’s up to you. All I know is that I’m starving, and I haven’t had bacon in over six months.”
“Six months? I would die if I had to go without bacon for that long. I don’t know how my daddy managed it, but we’ve had bacon every Sunday morning despite rationing.”
Grace held a strip of bacon up to her nose and inhaled deeply. Despite Eliza’s assumption, the reason it had been more than six months since she’d last eaten bacon had more to do with her family’s limited earnings than war rationing.
“Mm. Maybe Army life won’t be so bad after all.” She took a bite and moaned some more.
Meanwhile, Eliza put down the fork she had been using to push around her scrambled eggs. She gave those eggs one last side-eye before setting her sights on her toast. She picked it up, sniffed it, then took a bite. Almost immediately, her free hand clapped itself over her mouth. “Oh my God!”
“What’s wrong? Did you bite your tongue?”
“No. There’s real butter on this toast!”
“No way!” Grace took a bite of her own toast. “You weren’t kidding. Oh, it’s been so long.”
“That’s nothing,” another woman chimed in from a few seats down at their table. “They have real sugar for the coffee.”
Eliza held the back of her hand up to her forehead in a dramatic fashion. “I think we’ve just arrived in heaven, ladies.”
However, the meal quickly turned from heavenly into chaotic. The press spent most of the allotted time getting them to pose for “candid” shots rather than actually eating. When that was over, then came another shock for Grace and Eliza.
They exited the mess hall to a sergeant hollering, “Coloreds over there! Everyone else over here!”
Eliza leaned in and whispered to Grace, “What did he just say?”
“There has got to be some mistake,” Grace murmured more to herself than in response to Eliza. The way she looked off into space in the direction of the officer barking orders at them, it was like she hadn’t heard Eliza at all.
“Of course this is a mistake. I grilled my recruiter with every question under the sun. He assured me there would be no segregation. I told him I wouldn’t sign up if there was.” An image of her father smirking and saying “I told you so” floated in Eliza’s head. No, this definitely had to be a mistake.
Harriet West, who had introduced herself to the trio on the truck ride from the train station, had a frown on her face. “Dr. Bethune told me Mrs. Roosevelt herself would make sure there’d be no separations. Not by race anyway. We should protest.”
“Don’t bother.” Charity frowned as she grabbed her suitcase. “Good ol’ Uncle Sam just pulled another fast one on us. C’mon. We’ll address this another way.”
It was Charity’s command that broke Grace out of her daze. But Eliza looked like she wasn’t ready to follow anyone yet. “The Negro papers said that there wouldn’t be any segregation in the women’s army,” she grumbled.
Charity barked out a short, bitter laugh. “And you believed them?”
Eliza took offense to that and started to protest. “Hey, wait a minute! My family owns a Negro newspaper.”
“She’s right.” Harriet put a hand on Eliza’s shoulder. “Honey, the government would’ve sold you the Statue of Liberty to get you to sign those enlistment papers. I was Dr. Bethune’s assistant before coming here. They had a hard time filling those slots they set aside for us. It would have made everybody look bad—Negro and white—if the recruiters had come up short. I know at least one of the girls they selected wasn’t one hundred percent sure of her decision. I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t show up at all.”
Harriet’s admission triggered Grace’s old doubts about if she belonged here at officers’ training, or the OCS, as they called it. It was beginning to sound like that invitation letter that had distracted her out of a Juilliard fellowship had been sent to her more out of desperation than any belief in her potential. Maybe she should ask whoever was in charge here about sending her home.
No. You’re here now. You’re not going anywhere.
“I thought I told you recruits to move.” The sergeant was now in their faces. He wasn’t quite close enough, though, for his spittle to reach them.
Eliza and Grace held their bags closer to them and scrambled out of his way, following after Charity and Harriet.
“What do you mean?” Grace demanded.
Eliza cleared her throat. “What she’s saying is that both the Army and the Negro leaders were under pressure to make sure that all of the Negro slots were filled for this officer training class. Not enough women were signing up for this very reason.”
“Basically.” Charity shook her head calmly as she carried the rest of her belongings over to where the sergeant had instructed. But Grace wasn’t fooled. She could tell by the way Charity yanked her bag in quick, deliberate tugs that the woman was irate.
“It’s true,” Eliza chimed in. “One of our reporters heard it from Dr. Bethune herself. She let it slip when he was covering the announcement that the corps was being formed.”
Grace turned her head. “That doesn’t mean she was telling the truth. What if she needed us sacrificial lambs to believe that for ‘the cause’?”
“I refuse to believe that,” Eliza whispered. She sounded like her resolve had begun to waver. “I had to throw a temper tantrum and walk out of my parents’ dinner so I could report for duty on time. I’m pretty sure my father has already changed the locks, if not written me out of his will entirely.”
She looked at Grace.
“That’s why I almost missed the train that night we left New York.”
“Oh.” Grace began to second-guess her initial assumptions about Eliza Jones. Maybe she wasn’t a total spoiled airhead after all. Walking out like that in defiance of her father’s wishes was something she’d never have the nerve to do, no matter what her age. “Eliza Jones, that took guts.”
Charity stopped in her tracks and turned around. “Girl, you did what? My daddy would’ve had them stop the train.”
Eliza quirked an eyebrow. “What makes you think mine didn’t try?”
“Attention!” a red-faced officer screamed at both groups of women, shocking everyone into silence. “Since you all are new, I’m only going to explain this to you once. When I or any other officer calls you to ‘attention,’ you are to immediately stop whatever you are doing and stand upright with your chin up, chest out, shoulders back, and stomach in. Like this.”
He took his hands off his hips and demonstrated the correct posture. “Now, let’s try this again. Attention!”
Some of the women
were slower to act than others. But it was easy to tell who there had grown up with a father in the military. It took a few moments for all of them to, more or less, assume the correct stance.
“That’s better. Maybe there’s hope for this little girl army after all.” The officer went back to his clipboard. “Ladies, line up beside me as I call your names.”
The grumpy officer eyeballed the white recruits as they scrambled to follow his instructions. As for Grace, Eliza, and all the other darker-skinned women whom he had ordered off to the side, he barely spared them a glance.
“Come on, ladies,” he huffed. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that I meant straight lines.”
Grace could see him rolling his eyes. Why on earth had the Army picked this obviously unhappy individual to be in charge of a bunch of green lady recruits? She shifted her bundle from one arm to the other. They all just stood there awkwardly, watching the confused mass of women try to organize themselves.
Grace pressed her lips together. She nudged Eliza with her elbow. “C’mon.”
“What?” Eliza was still eyeing the officer.
“Let’s line ourselves up. We’ll have to at some point.”
“Why should we? They’re ignoring us.”
“Yeah, but there’s no way that I’m gonna let us look like that mass of confusion over there.” Grace nodded in the direction of the women still trying to line up to the officer’s satisfaction. “That’s the whole point of treating us any ol’ kind of way. They don’t expect anything better from us. I intend to prove them wrong.”
“Well, when you put it that way . . .” Eliza huffed, but she stood up from the makeshift stairs she had been sitting upon. Grace was already working her way around the other women in their group, encouraging everyone to not only get themselves organized but also asking their names. Slowly, Grace went down the line. She pulled a few of the women out and directed them to different spots either toward the front of the makeshift line or toward the end. She had made it about halfway when she gestured toward Eliza.
Sisters in Arms Page 8
