Margaret Bourke-White perches with her camera on a Chrysler Building gargoyle sixty-one floors above the streets of New York City.
Text copyright © 2017 by Carolyn Meyer
Cover illustration copyright © 2017 by Jim Carroll
All rights reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, contact [email protected].
Although this work is based on the life of Margaret Bourke-White, it is a work of fiction. Some names, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used to enhance the story.
Calkins Creek
An Imprint of Highlights
815 Church Street
Honesdale, Pennsylvania 18431
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-62979-584-3 (HC)
ISBN: 978-1-62979-800-4 (e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951193
First e-book edition
The text of this book is set in Neutraface.
Design by Anahid Hamparian
Production by Sue Cole
H1.1
For Vered and Giovanny
Prologue
Sometime after midnight, a thump—loud and jarring. A torpedo slams into the side of our ship, flinging me out of my bunk. The ship is transporting thousands of troops and hundreds of nurses. It is December 1942, and our country is at war. I am Margaret Bourke-White, the only woman photographer covering this war.
The U.S. Army Air Forces has handed me a plum assignment: photographing an Allied attack on German troops in North Africa. I wanted to fly in one of our B-17 bombers, but the top brass ordered me to travel instead on the flagship of a huge convoy, headed from England through the Strait of Gibraltar toward the coast of North Africa. It would be safer than flying, the officers argued.
As it turns out, they were dead wrong. Beneath the surface of the Mediterranean, German submarines glide, silent and lethal, stalking their prey. We are asleep when one of their torpedoes finds its mark.
The ship tilts sharply, and the lights flicker and die. I pull on my olive drab work slacks and my officer’s coat, thinking it will be warmer than the waterproof trench coat. Fumbling in the dark, I grab my musette bag with one camera and, leaving everything else behind, race to the bridge to try to photograph what is happening, but there is not enough light and not enough time. The order blares: “Abandon ship! Abandon ship!” I head for Lifeboat No. 12 and board with the others assigned to it, about fifty people, mostly nurses. We’ve drilled for it over and over, but this is not a drill. My mouth is dry with fear. Our boat is overloaded, but the officer in charge says we’re going to chance it. As we are lowered, I can’t help thinking what a dramatic photograph that view of our sinking ship would make, if only the light were better.
We sit up to our waists in water from the torpedo splashback and use our helmets to bail. The rudder is broken. All around us in the water, people are thrashing and grabbing for something to hang on to, struggling to survive. We rescue some, lose others. A voice cries in the darkness, “Help me! I’m all alone!” We try to row toward that desperate voice, but without a rudder we can do nothing. The cries grow fainter. Then, silence.
I take my turn rowing, my arms aching and my hands blistered. Someone in a nearby lifeboat begins to sing “You Are My Sunshine.” We all join in. Even off-key, it makes the rowing easier. We watch silently as flames swallow our wounded ship.
The rest of the convoy has scattered to keep from giving the German U-boats another target. In the bright moonlight I see that a single destroyer stays behind, and we hope they will come to pick us up. But no—they drop depth charges to try to get rid of any remaining German submarines. Someone is shouting into a megaphone, but we can’t make out the words. Maybe he’s wishing us luck. The destroyer sails on. No one in our boat says a word. Now we are entirely alone.
The moon sinks into the dark sea. I think longingly of chocolate bars, the emergency rations I’d tossed out of my camera bag to make room for extra lenses. The hours pass. I’m wet to the skin, and cold. Hungry, too. I could do with a bite of chocolate.
Dawn comes slowly, the pale colors blooming in the eastern sky. I wonder again if I will survive, if any of us will. Irrationally, I mourn the loss of my elegant cosmetics case, covered with beautiful ostrich skin and filled with ivory jars from Hong Kong. I can’t imagine why it matters.
It’s December 22—the winter solstice, someone reminds us, and that’s why the sun is so late making its appearance. We cheer when it finally rises majestically from a flat gray sea.
I get out my camera and begin taking pictures. We look miserable and bedraggled, but we’re alive.
One of the nurses jokes that she’s ready to place her order for breakfast: two eggs, sunny-side up, no broken yolks, please.
“And hot coffee!” adds another. “Buttered toast!”
Wet, cold, exhausted, crowded in with dozens of others, more than the boat is meant to hold—all wondering what will happen to us, if we will live or die—I think of my home, my parents, those early years when I had no idea where life would take me, only that I wanted it to be bold and exciting, anything but what it was then….
1
Bound Brook, New Jersey—1916
I BLAME EVERYTHING ON MY MOTHER. SHE STROVE for perfection, and nothing else satisfied her. There were rules, and we—my sister, my brother, and I—were expected to abide by them.
Mother decreed that we would not read the funny papers. She found nothing funny about them. “The comics will harm your mind and ruin your taste for good art,” she said. One look at “Krazy Kat” or “Maggie and Jiggs” would surely begin the deterioration of our brains.
We were not allowed to visit friends who did read the funny papers. I imagined Sara Jane Cassidy and her brother, Tommy, who lived on the next block, sprawled on the floor with the Sunday papers, laughing at the antics of the Katzenjammer Kids.
Sara Jane was sympathetic. She sometimes smuggled the funny papers to school in her lunch box and let me have a guilty look at them while I ate my liverwurst sandwich.
Mother also dismissed movies as a waste of time. “Movies entertain much too easily,” she said. “Far better to read a good book that stimulates the mind.”
No card-playing. (Chess was different. Father taught all of us to play—even Roger, who was much younger.) No gum-chewing.
My sister, Ruth, two years older than I, complained about our mother’s rules even more than I did. The one that bothered Ruth most: No silk stockings. Mother insisted on cotton stockings. Much more practical.
“They’re so ugly!” Ruth wailed.
“The hard way is always the better way,” Mother lectured, unmoved.
Our family lived in Bound Brook, New Jersey. I was in eighth grade, and Ruth rode the trolley to Plainfield, where she attended high school. Roger was only six and had just been enrolled in first grade. The minute we came home, Mother wanted a report of everything that happened that day. If I told her about a quiz in geography, mentioning that we had to answer just ten questions out of a dozen, she pounced: “I hope you chose the ten hardest,” she said, frowning until I said yes, I had picked the hard ones, and answered the easy ones too.
Then she smiled and said, “Good girl!” She hardly ever said that to Ruth, and almost never told little Roger how good he was. Roger hated school.
I was sick and tired of being a good girl. What thirteen-year-old girl wouldn’t be?
When Ruth and I were both in grammar school, we had walked together to the four-room schoolhouse, balancing along the tops of fences. After Ruth moved on to high school, I missed having her walk home with me, and I did my high-wire act without her.
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Two grades were assigned to each room with one teacher, so that in fifth grade I shared a classroom with the sixth grade. By the time I was actually a sixth grader, I had absorbed most of their lessons, and every afternoon the teacher sent me to the cloakroom with a group of slow readers to tutor them. This made me popular with no one.
Seventh grade improved nothing.
My best friend, Tubby Luf, was tall and blond and thin as a straw. Tubby’s name was Margaret, like mine, but when her younger sister was just learning to talk, it somehow came out as “Tubby,” and it stuck.
“I like it,” she said. “It’s ironic.”
Tubby was the kind of brainy girl who used words like ironic.
Mother would not allow nicknames. Her name was Minnie—her given name, she claimed, not a nickname. My father was Joseph, but she made an exception for him: she called him Joey. If she could call my father Joey, why could I not be Peggy, the name I favored?
“Because I named you Margaret.” End of argument.
At school I was Peggy, but in the presence of my mother I must always be Margaret.
Mother insisted that we speak correctly—proper grammar, no slang or contractions—no I’m or she’s or isn’t or wouldn’t. “It shows sloppiness of mind,” Mother declared, “as well as lack of effort.” Ruth whispered to me that Mother often slipped up and used contractions herself.
The other students looked at me as though I were an oddity. The cotton stockings, the bans on funny papers and chewing gum, on slang and contractions and nicknames—Ruth and I were misfits. How could we not be?
Mother herself spoke very well. Father also spoke well, when he spoke at all—he was a very quiet man. Sometimes I thought he talked so little because he was afraid he’d make a mistake, and Mother would correct him.
Ruth and I wondered what our parents were like when they were young. We had a photograph of Minnie Bourke in a white shirtwaist with leg-of-mutton sleeves, and Mother had confessed that a shirtwaist was considered “not quite nice” at the time. In the picture she is standing by her bicycle. She was about to ride the bicycle to meet Joseph White. The Whites lived in the Bronx, and the Bourkes in lower Manhattan. They rode out into the country and read philosophy to each other. One day Minnie’s bicycle chain broke, and there was no way to fix it.
“We left our bikes and hiked up the nearest mountain,” Mother told us, “and that’s when your father proposed.”
Ruth and I thought their courtship was terribly romantic.
“Do you think he kissed her?” Ruth asked me.
“Well, of course he kissed her!” I said. “She said yes, and then they kissed.”
Ruth was doubtful. “They were very proper. And Mother has told me over and over that I mustn’t let a boy kiss me until we’re married.”
Father, an engineer for a company that manufactured printing presses, invented ways to improve their efficiency. One invention changed the way funny papers were printed in color, a mechanism to align the edges of the various colored parts. This may not sound like much, but it saved the company a lot of money.
He’d designed the unusual house we lived in and built the huge stone fireplace with a mantel he’d sawed out of a tree. He planted gardens that included rare specimens, each labeled with its scientific name. He took me on nature walks in the woods nearby, pointing out things he wanted me to observe. I was comfortable with his silence.
Father knew all about snakes and lizards. When I was nine or ten, a snake slithered across our path, sensed us, and stopped. It flattened its neck and raised its head up like a cobra, hissing and striking. I clutched Father’s hand.
“Harmless,” he said. “Just a hognose. Some people call it a puff adder, but a hognose snake isn’t a puff adder at all. Only the real ones, the African kind, are deadly. Watch him roll over and play dead.”
The snake did just that. His mouth was open, his tongue hanging out. He certainly looked dead. “Turn him right side up,” Father said. I wasn’t too sure about this, but when I did, the snake rolled over “dead” again.
“Can we take him home?” I asked, and Father agreed and showed me how to pick him up. I wasn’t afraid.
The hognose/puff adder was soon completely tame and liked to curl up on Mother’s lap when she sat in her rocking chair to sew or read the newspaper, and Mother didn’t mind. I named him Puffy.
“You could have come up with something more original,” Ruth said. “Puffy seems rather childish.”
I glared at her. She sounded like Mother—No nicknames. I looked up the snake’s scientific name in one of Father’s books: Heterodon platirhinos. He would remain Puffy.
On the day I took him to school, Puffy, frightened out of his wits, performed exactly as I knew he would, rearing up, neck puffed out, and hissing menacingly. The other children screamed and pulled away, even though I promised he wouldn’t bite. They laughed nervously when he played dead, but still they refused to touch him.
“Do not be afraid, it is just a hognose,” I reassured them.
My schoolmates reported “Margaret’s poisonous snake” to the principal, who ordered me to take Puffy home and not to bring him or any other snake to school.
“There are only two venomous kinds of snakes in New Jersey—rattler and copperhead,” I informed the principal, quoting my father. “And more than a dozen harmless ones in our part of the state.” The principal was unmoved.
I began bringing home garter snakes that showed up in the garden and water snakes from the nearby brook. I scooped up eggs from the water and watched them hatch into tadpoles and salamanders. Father built cages for our hamsters and rabbits. Two turtles that Ruth named Attila the Hun and Alaric the Visigoth lived under the piano. We no longer had a dog. Sadly, Rover had been carried off by old age a year earlier.
On my birthday Father surprised me with a baby boa constrictor. She was beautiful, cream-colored with reddish-brown markings, and she twisted herself around my wrist like a bracelet. I called her Cleopatra.
Ruth said, “That name makes no sense.”
“It does to me,” I snapped. “It is the snake the Egyptian queen used to kill herself.”
“That was an asp,” Ruth argued. “Not a boa.”
My interest turned to butterflies. I gathered dozens of them and put them in drinking glasses arranged upside down in rows on the windowsills. For weeks I put leaves in their glass cages, and not just any leaf but only the kind that type of butterfly laid its eggs on. Eventually, some of the caterpillars entered the next stage, the chrysalis.
“This is where the metamorphosis happens,” Father explained. “Now you must wait. And watch.”
Father planned to take photographs with his old-fashioned camera. He set up his tripod, opened the camera with the accordion-shaped bellows perched on it, inserted the glass plates, and focused the lens. One by one the chrysalises began to burst open, and each damp shape emerged and spread its beautiful butterfly wings. Father clicked the shutter.
“Let me look,” I begged. He stepped aside while I ducked my head under the black camera cloth and peered into the viewfinder. The image was upside down. Better not to have the camera in the way, I thought. Better just to look.
Afterward, he closed himself in the bathroom in total darkness, bathed the glass plates in separate trays of awful-smelling chemicals, rinsed them, and set them up to dry. He printed the best of the glass negatives on special paper, another messy process. Father’s photographs hung on the walls in every room of our house—pictures of Mother draped in a shawl, of us children, of the flowers in our garden and the birds that visited there. I helped him choose which chrysalis-to-butterfly pictures to hang.
Mainly, though, Father thought. Once he took our family to a restaurant for dinner, a rare treat, and just as our food arrived, an idea came to him. He began to sketch a diagram on the tablecloth. We ate, and he drew. Ruth and I nudged each other, wondering when he would notice the fried chicken growing cold on his plate. He left without eating a sing
le bite.
“Are you going to take the tablecloth, Father?” Roger asked, startling him out of his thought cloud.
Father shook his head, tapping his forehead. “Unnecessary. I have it here.”
Mother grew impatient with him. “If only he would talk more!” she complained. He was a brilliant inventor, she said, and his ideas made his bosses rich. Mother tried to get him to ask for a raise in pay, but Father didn’t seem to care much about that.
In grammar school Tubby’s mother bought her dresses in gay colors with ruffles and lace that I envied, but Mother would have none of it. She dressed me in dark-colored skirts and white middy blouses with sailor collars. “Very practical for everyday,” she said.
My hair was parted in the middle and pulled back in plaits. Ruth was supposed to braid my hair every morning, and if she and I had argued about something, she punished me by pulling them so tight that I couldn’t blink. Mother said I could do away with braids when I reached high school. But not a word about dresses.
Mother signed Ruth and me up for dancing classes because, she promised, “If you dance well, you will never lack for partners.”
The boys in the class, sent by their anxious mothers, obviously wanted to be anywhere else. The teacher paired us off according to height, and her assistant banged out a peppy tune on the piano. Short, shy partners steered me glumly around the polished floor. Later, at home, I danced by myself, dreaming of the day some boy would actually ask me to dance.
Each year the grammar school held four dances for the seventh and eighth graders. I came down with a cold and missed the autumn affair, but after weeks of dancing classes I was primed for the Christmas party. Teachers would chaperone, and parents volunteered refreshments. I asked Mother if we could contribute cookies.
“If you wish to take cookies, you must bake them yourself. You certainly know how.”
I wanted to take something that would be different. Suddenly inspired, I decided to forget baking cookies and take pickles instead. I loved Grandmother White’s dill pickles. My mother did not care for them. The jar had sat unopened in the cupboard for a very long time.
Girl with a Camera Page 1
