Skating with the Statue of Liberty

by Susan Lynn Meyer

  Gustave waited in line with the others. When he got to the front, he pulled a dime out of his pocket, and the man behind the counter handed him a pair of scuffed roller skates. The laces were in a snarl. By the time he had untangled them, the other Boy Scouts were up on their feet and skating. Gustave buttoned his coat and tied his roller skates with cold fingers. He saw that Xavier had fallen, and André was laughing at him and pulling him up. Maurice was skating next to a tall, willowy girl with a shy smile. Martha and Leo glided by, holding hands. Toward the center Gustave caught a glimpse of September Rose’s blue hat with the pom-pom. He jumped up from the bench and hurried to the rink, impatiently waiting in line to step up onto the platform. He wobbled once, then got his balance. Gracelessly but quickly, he pushed his way across the skating surface to the spot where she was. Seppie seemed especially tall today in her roller skates—a good three inches or so taller than he was.

  “Hi!” he gasped, catching up with her. “You sang in front of your first big audience! Congratulations!”

  Her eyes were bright in the evening air as she looked over at him. “Thanks!”

  “I have news,” he said. “My friend Marcel. He’s alive.”

  She stared at him, gliding forward, and nearly fell when her skate hit a bump in the rough plywood. “You got a letter?”

  “Yes. From my friend Nicole. Her father knows people. Marcel is alive, but hiding.”

  September Rose shrieked and jumped, and then she did fall. Gustave swirled to a messy stop just beyond her and then circled back and helped her to her feet. “I’m so, so glad,” she said.

  —

  “Clear the rink!” boomed a voice over the sound system after they had circled a few times.

  “But we just started!” Gustave protested.

  “They’re doing specials,” said September Rose as they skated to the exit, filed down, and stepped off onto the damp grass. “Wait and see—it’ll be fun.”

  “Salut, Gustave!” Jean-Paul, Guy, and Xavier materialized, holding cups of hot chocolate.

  “This is Guy and Xavier from my Boy Scout troop,” he said to Seppie. “You know my cousin Jean-Paul. Fellows, this is my friend September Rose.”

  “Hello, September Rose!” Xavier emphasized her name, grinning, but the others just said hello and smiled in a knowing way.

  “Now in the rink,” the announcer called, “let’s have girls only!”

  “So long, boys!” September Rose said tauntingly, and she went back up the stairs and skated off. The rink filled quickly.

  “Look at all those girls!” Bernard marveled as bright coats and hats and hair flashed by.

  The musicians struck up a familiar tune. “ ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me!’ ” several of the girls shrieked at once.

  “Let’s do the movements we do to this song in physical education,” Martha called.

  Girls’ voices started singing the song, September Rose among them. Many girls were doing hand movements in unison while they were skating. September Rose whizzed by. “No, no, no!” she sang, one hand on her hip, the other arm straight out, shaking a finger toward the other laughing girls who were doing the same thing.

  “Clear the rink!” the announcer called again as the song came to an end. The girls moaned good-naturedly and rolled toward the stairs. The boys lined up, ready to go on, sure it was their turn. Leo, who was at the front of the line, had already started skating when the announcer laughed at him and said, “Now let’s have couples only!”

  Amid lots of shrieking and giggling and people pushing and pulling each other, three or four couples got onto the rink and skated around the open space as slow, dreamy music played. Then a few pairs of girls joined hands and jumped in. “A couple just means two people!” one of the girls shouted as she skated by.

  “That’s a very poor showing, boys!” the announcer chided. “Come on, couples only.”

  By now, many more couples had formed. Maurice and Jacqueline went by, and then Gustave saw Martha and Leo. A Negro boy and girl who looked like high school students skated by, moving very expertly, swirling around, one skating backward while the other skated forward. Gustave’s heart pounded. Should he ask September Rose? He caught her eye across the rink, and she very distinctly shook her head. He felt disappointed and relieved at the same time. Then he noticed an older Negro boy making his way over to her and saying something. September Rose nodded hesitantly, took his hand, and stepped onto the rink. Hand in hand they glided along the rink, curving around the end and skating past the other Boy Scouts. Gustave felt a burning in his chest as he watched them go by.

  “That’s more like it!” the announcer boomed. “Clear the rink. And now, everybody’s favorite special: crack the whip!”

  Long, screaming chains of kids crowded onto the rink, and as they came to a curve, the ones inside slowed almost to a standstill and pulled until the ones on the outer end whizzed around the bend. Gustave joined a chain with Xavier, Jean-Paul, and Bernard and skated around dizzily.

  On the far end of the platform, several people crashed into each other and fell. A whistle blew. A rowdy group of boys zipped by. They seemed to be slamming into people on purpose. Suddenly their chain smashed into the Boy Scouts. An older boy in a gray cap crashed heavily into Jean-Paul. “Ooh, sor-ry!” he said mockingly as Jean-Paul went down hard.

  Jean-Paul got up slowly. His lip was bleeding where his teeth had cut it. “I’m going to go get a soda,” he said to Gustave and got off the platform.

  “I’m getting off too.” Gustave skated behind him, catching up. “But I don’t want anything to drink. You go.”

  The whistle blew again. “Clear the rink!” the announcer boomed. “And now let’s have a few quieter numbers. Couples only!”

  The rowdy boys got off the platform in a pack and gathered near the spot at the end of the rink where Gustave and the other French Boy Scouts were standing, near the hot-chocolate line. Maurice went off to join Jacqueline again. In the crowd around the edges of the rink, Gustave caught sight of Seppie’s hat with the pom-pom. She was standing with her friend Lisa and a tall Negro boy, somebody Gustave didn’t recognize.

  He found his feet moving before he knew what he was planning to do. He stumbled over the damp grass in his heavy skates, heading around the rink toward Seppie. She looked up and saw him coming. When he was still at a distance from her, he held up his hand, flashing a double “V,” and then he held out his other hand toward her. She hesitated. But then she smiled and flashed the sign back. A moment later they were stepping onto the rink together, their hands clasped, and then they had joined the coupled skaters.

  Gustave and September Rose soon got into sync with each other, pushing and gliding, pushing and gliding. The wind rushed against his face, cool now after the brief, deceptive warmth of the April day. The sky was starting to darken, and he could smell the ocean and the smoke from the bonfire. Seppie looked over at him and laughed. Marcel is alive! Gustave thought, with a rush of joy.

  The rink was wide open ahead of them, much less crowded than it had been when he’d been skating before. As they turned at the curved end of the rink and headed back, he saw the dusky harbor and in it the Statue of Liberty, tall, majestic, holding up her glowing lamp. The light of her lamp was dimmed now, because of the war, but it was still faintly shining.

  As Gustave and September Rose passed the spot at the edge of the rink where the other scouts were standing, Guy waved. Up ahead a boy was skating with a much taller girl, and Gustave heard the group of rowdy older boys taunting the pair as they went by. “Hey, Shorty! You’re skating with a skyscraper. What’s it like skating with the Empire State Building?” The couple turned, heading around the bend, and as they came back Gustave saw that the girl’s face had gone a painful red and that there were tears in her eyes.

  Noticing again how tall September Rose looked in her skates, Gustave veered toward the center of the rink, pulling her along with him. “Hey, where are we going?” she
shouted, laughing.

  Several other couples glided by on the outer edge. He heard another couple made up of a short boy and a taller girl getting jeered at. “Skyscraper alert! Hey, Shorty! What’s it like skating with the Woolworth Building?”

  But that couple was quick and fearless. They were both really good skaters. The boy swirled the tall girl around showily, ignoring the taunt. Her black curls floated through the air.

  Gustave and September Rose glided along the length of the platform, away from the rowdy group. Gustave could feel the bumps in the plywood as he skated methodically, push, glide, push, glide. Some of the pleasure had gone out of it. They rounded the far end and headed back down the rink. Gustave saw the Statue of Liberty again dimly in the distance. They were approaching the end where the rowdy boys were, and both of them were skating stiffly now, bracing themselves. September Rose’s hand inside his was taut, clenched. What’s another skyscraper? Gustave thought frantically. The Empire State Building, the Woolworth Building…

  “Skyscraper alert!” one of the rowdies jeered, his voice low and insinuating.

  Another voice shouted, “Hey! That Boy Scout kid’s skating with a Negro!”

  “Hey, Boy Scout!” several voices jeered. “What’s it like skating with a n—”

  But before they could finish the insult, Gustave was yelling in English, as loudly as he could, drowning them out, “Yeah, yeah! I know I’m short! I’m skating with the Statue of Liberty!”

  September Rose looked at him, startled, then smiled, and as they turned at the rink’s end, she lifted her hand in a regal gesture just like the statue’s, holding up a beacon of light.

  The music was ending. “Everybody skate!” the announcer boomed. Soon the rink was mobbed with people. September Rose kept her hand in Gustave’s, but they had to slow down, maneuvering their way through the crowd.

  Several kids from Joan of Arc Junior High went by. Leo and Martha skated up, arm in arm. “Hey, good one, Gus, September Rose,” Leo said, looking over at them. “We saw that.”

  “Yeah, you showed them!” Martha giggled. She was a tiny bit taller than Leo, Gustave noticed. “I was afraid of what they were going to say when we went by, but you shut them up!”

  Suddenly someone crashed into Gustave hard from behind. He let go of September Rose’s hand and fell, slamming against the rough plywood.

  “Are you okay?” Seppie reached down and pulled him up.

  As he got unsteadily to his feet, the boy with the gray cap zoomed at him from the right, and he went down heavily again, landing on his elbow. He heard jeers. “Why are you skating with a n—”

  “Get lost, you creeps!” André shouted. He and Jean-Paul were suddenly on the rink to Gustave’s right, and Maurice and Xavier circled around to the left of September Rose. September Rose pulled Gustave up again, her face determined, and the two of them stood still before starting off again slowly, not holding hands this time. The French Boy Scouts stayed on either side of them.

  “I’ve got your back!” Leo called, and, glancing over his shoulder, Gustave saw him and Martha, hand in hand, gliding behind them. Lisa and the tall Negro boy she’d been skating with came up and joined Maurice and Xavier on the left.

  Gustave and September Rose looked at each other and clasped hands again.

  Surrounded by the others, they skated through the dusk. This is what America is supposed to be like, Gustave thought, everyone equal, everyone free. But it isn’t! Off to his left, Xavier laughed. Gustave looked over at him.

  “We’re still right behind you, Gus!” Leo shouted.

  September Rose’s hand was warm in his. “This is great!” she said, her eyes shining.

  And suddenly happiness flooded over Gustave. Maybe America wasn’t always like this. Not always the way it was supposed to be. But at this very moment, it was. He would write back to Nicole tonight and tell her about how this moment felt. America wasn’t perfect. No place was perfect. But America had saved his life and the lives of his family. Gustave’s new life was going to be here, in this country. He knew that now, and his future stretched out ahead of him, unknowable, unimaginable, but full of promise and hope.

  Gustave would always be partly French in his heart. But he was on his way to becoming an American. He had friends in this strange new country. Despite everything that made it difficult, he and September Rose were really friends. And Gustave was right here, right now, alive on this particular April evening in New York, as dusk fell over the Statue of Liberty, with his friends around him, skating with September Rose.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Skating with the Statue of Liberty is a work of fiction. But like Black Radishes, my earlier novel about Gustave in France, it was inspired by my father’s experiences during the war. Like Gustave, my father, Jean-Pierre Meyer, came to the United States as a French Jewish refugee in 1942. Along with his mother and sister, he sailed from Lisbon into Baltimore Harbor on the Carvalho Araujo. From there they took a train to New York and settled in Manhattan. My father attended Joan of Arc Junior High, as Gustave does, and my grandmother learned English in night classes at the same school. Many of the events in this novel were inspired by my father’s experiences, including the incident on the train involving the jeweler’s suitcase, Gustave’s first encounter with the German music teacher, and the winter camping trip with the Boy Scouts. The Franco-American Scout troops were very important to my father and my aunt Eliane Norman (the original Méhari Pondéré and Éponge Tenace!) as they adjusted to life in the United States.

  In one way, my father’s arrival was even more dramatic than Gustave’s. For reasons having to do with the plot of Black Radishes, I had Gustave and his family arrive in the United States in January of 1942. But when the Carvalho Araujo actually sailed from Lisbon carrying my father, my aunt, and my grandmother, it docked in Baltimore on November 2, 1942. Nine days later, on November 11, 1942, Nazi forces occupied what had been the Unoccupied Zone of France, the safer part of the country, where my father’s family had been living. So they and the other passengers on this ship were among the last French Jews to escape. In fact, a Portuguese ship, which may have been the Carvalho Araujo, left Baltimore on November 7, on its way back to Europe, on a mission to bring five hundred more French Jewish children to safety. But it was too late. Those children were refused exit permits and were not able to escape from France.

  As Gustave does, my father worried about the fate of his family and friends left behind in France as he adjusted to life in America, and like Gustave, he found that his English improved from listening intently to the war news on the radio on WQXR. Little was known in the early war years about the fate of the Jews in Europe, but it was clear that they were in grave danger. The American news media devoted much more attention at the time to what was going on in the Pacific than to the war news from Europe, although a few newsreels did mention German internment camps.

  The Double V Campaign is no longer widely remembered, but it was an early campaign against racial segregation. In February of 1942, the Pittsburgh Courier, a prominent black newspaper, published the letter by James G. Thompson that started the campaign, in which he urged blacks to fight for victory abroad but also for victory at home, to fight their second-class status in America. The Courier used a double V insignia on its front page for the duration of the war. Other newspapers picked it up, and the double V became a popular antisegregation rallying cry. The racial terms used in the novel—“Colored” and “Negro”—are of course the terms that were used in the 1940s, which the characters would have been familiar with, not those used in the present day.

  To get a feeling for life in New York in the 1940s, and in particular for race and interethnic relations as they were experienced on a daily basis, I talked to a number of people who could either recall that period or who could recall family stories told about life in New York in that period. I’m grateful to Rita Howard, Anthony Pazzanita, Charlotte Winkler, Margery Sabin, Jim Sabin, and Eric Velasquez for sharing stories about all
aspects of life in New York and life in the 1940s. Memoirs of the period also proved useful in allowing me to envision various aspects of my characters’ lives in the 1940s, particularly Faith Ringgold’s We Flew Over the Bridge, Althea Gibson’s I Always Wanted to Be Somebody, Charles B. Rangel’s And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since, James McBride’s The Color of Water, Madeleine L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention, Gerd Korman’s Nightmare’s Fairy Tale: A Young Refugee’s Home Fronts 1938–1948, Sophie Freud’s Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, Edith Kurzweil’s Full Circle: A Memoir, and Livia Bitton-Jackson’s Hello, America.

  I read widely while researching the novel, and the following works of history and primary sources were particularly helpful. For information on race relations: Harlem at War: The Black Experience in World War II (1996) by Nat Brandt; This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950 (1981) by Jervis Anderson; The Double V Campaign (1998) by Michael L. Cooper; To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (2003) by Martha Biondi; and Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (2012), edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck. For information about daily life: the New York Times historical archive online and Don’t You Know There’s a War On? The American Home Front, 1941–1945 (1970) by Richard R. Lingeman. For information about the demographics of New York: The WPA Guide to New York City (1939), published by the Federal Writers’ Project, and “1943 New York City Market Analysis,” scanned by the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for Urban Research and online at 1940​snewyork.​com. For information about Jewish refugees: Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews 1933–1946 (2009) by Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt and Visas to Freedom: The History of HIAS (1956) by Mark Wischnitzer. For information about the postal system, letters from France, and censors: “United States Mail to France in World War II, Part II” by Lawrence Sherman in American Philatelist 127 (February 2013) and Je vous écris de France: Lettres inédites à la BBC 1940–1944 (2014) by Aurélie Luneau. I’m also grateful to my aunt for giving me letters that had been opened by censors during the war.