There’s a feature article on eight couples where the husband is off at war. In all eight pictures both man and woman grin like idiots, like they’re looking forward to it all. My, won’t war be fun! And all are white.
In the entire magazine, of hundreds of drawings and photos, thousands of faces, three are black: the seminude actress, a reporter for a black newspaper shown taking notes, and an illustration with a slave in the background.
Not until she turns to a women’s magazine—Woman’s Weekly—does she see anything about women at war. But the article is mostly nonsense while the drawn illustrations are absurd: women in tight-fitting uniforms, top buttons open, hair out of a shampoo ad, lips luscious and red, carbines cocked at improbable angles.
“Not sure which is worse,” Frangie mutters.
After a full day of being shuttled this way and that while reading the magazines cover to cover and then back again, Frangie lands at last in a makeshift hospital in the countryside north of Portsmouth. It is a former Home Guard camp, two dozen long, narrow, hastily constructed huts, three of which have been designated with stenciled signs as a “Colored Ward.”
She is still weak and weighed down by feelings of sadness, which she knows from her training are common in injured soldiers. But knowing her depression is common does nothing to lessen it.
“Marr, Francine, Corporal,” a chubby black nurse reads from Frangie’s chart.
Frangie nods, not bothering to explain that she’s usually called Frangie.
“Well, Francine, it seems you’re going to live and walk and eat solid food. You’re slated for a nice long rest and rehabilitation.”
“They’re not sending me home?”
The nurse shrugs and smiles. “Believe it or not, the generals and such never do ask me my opinion on who should go home.”
Frangie nods.
“Got the blues?”
Frangie shrugs. But now the nurse is frowning. “Marr. Marr. That’s an unusual last name. I have the feeling in the back of my head that I heard it somewhere before.”
“Maybe so,” Frangie says flatly. Then, with an effort, “What’s your name, Nurse?”
“Carmela DeVille.” The nurse waits, expecting a smile, then, slightly crestfallen, says, “That’s not really my name. I do like the sound of it, though. I’m Joan Lewis, pleased to meet you. I’ll have dinner brought round, you missed the usual dinner hour, but I will plead medical necessity! You need a good, healthy hot meal.”
Frangie falls asleep minutes later—or at least into a hazy, unsettled, restless dream state—and wakes after an indeterminate amount of time to a voice that pierces right down to her sleeping subconscious.
“Jesus H. Christ. I don’t believe it.”
A male voice, a confident but concerned voice. A voice that sounds . . .
She opens her eyes and looks up at the face of her brother, Harder Marr. He is holding a metal tray piled high with creamed chipped beef, mashed potatoes, corn, and a biscuit.
She stares at him with the suspicion of a person just awakened from a dream and still not sure whether they are seeing reality.
“Harder?”
“You are no more surprised than I,” he says. Then he grins tentatively. “Say, are you allowed to talk to me?”
“I don’t see Daddy here, do you?” She holds out her arms. He sets the tray down on her legs and hugs her.
Then he lifts her medical chart, lets out a low whistle, and says, “You must be tougher than you look, Knee-high.”
“Knee-high? No one’s called me that since . . . you know, since you left.”
“Left? Who left? I was kicked out.” He says it without obvious rancor, more in amusement.
“What are you doing here, Harder?”
He shrugs. “The draft board caught up to me. So here I am, like most Negroes, working as an orderly. Private Harder Marr: cleaner of bedpans and deliverer of trays. I put it in one end, take it from the other. Though I do wash my hands in between.”
Frangie grins. “My goodness it’s swell to see you, Brother.”
“It’s good to see you too, Sis.”
It is said by both with emotion verging on tears. Years have passed since Harder’s politics caused him to be disowned by their father. Harder is older, more serious-looking now, worn perhaps, tired but not defeated. He is the tallest person in the family, nearly six feet, and the lightest-skinned with features that seemed to be an uneasy cross between white and black, but Frangie knows there’s hardly a colored family that doesn’t have some white blood somewhere in their past.
“Well, the head nurse will skin me if I dawdle,” Harder says with a roll of his eyes. “But I’m off shift in a couple of hours. I’ve found a place out of doors that’s not too unpleasant, if you’re up for a ride in a wheelchair.”
“You have no idea what I’d give to see the sky,” Frangie says.
She sleeps after that, is awakened to be jabbed with a needle, sleeps, wakes again to be poked at by a doctor who communicates solely, it seems, in grunts. But the tenor of the grunts is satisfied. It seems her fever has left her weak and exhausted, but her wounds are all healing satisfactorily. The cast on her leg makes the flesh beneath it itch like mad at times, but that will come off in a few weeks, most likely. In the meantime she is to relax.
As evening comes on, Harder comes to fetch her. He has a thermos of coffee, a pair of sandwiches wrapped in a British newspaper, and a piece of venetian blind slat wrapped in gauze and tape.
“What’s that for?” she asks.
“There are one or two things we lowly orderlies know that you medics don’t,” he says. Then he demonstrates the ease with which his segment of wrapped blind can be slid down inside her plaster cast, providing a gentle but outstandingly effective scratching tool.
“My goodness, Harder, they should give you a medal for inventing that!” She unconsciously adjusts her vocabulary, which has begun to slip perilously close to the common soldier’s dialect. A certain four-letter word for sexual procreation is often used as verb, noun, adjective, and adverb (often modifying itself). So she consciously reaches for safe expressions, expressions an untainted Frangie would use. Goodness. My, my. You don’t say. Well, I never.
Harder pushes her wheelchair along the ward, past cot after cot filled with colored soldiers. It’s a cheerful enough ward since most of the soldiers are past the point of danger and only waiting for bones to knit together, skin to close, dysentery and malaria to calm and recede. Virtually everyone here will be back with their units within a few weeks.
The air outside comes as a welcome surprise, a face slap of damp chill. Harder has brought a blanket, which he tucks efficiently around his sister. Evening is coming on, with mist blurring but also magnifying the stars, so they seem to twinkle with unusual brilliance. They push down the central line of mud road along a sort of boardwalk that runs past identical long huts.
It is all much more peaceful than Frangie is used to. An ambulance rumbles by, but there are no tanks or half-tracks, no antiaircraft batteries being hastily shifted, no jeeps loaded with self-important officers.
It is far from a garden spot, being a vast field of mud barely punctuated by the few surviving patches of green turf. But beyond the camp there is the forest, and beneath the line of trees are three fires burning, campfires, each silhouetting men and women standing, hobbling, or rolling. As they get closer, with Harder struggling to push the narrow wheelchair wheels through mud and over ruts, Frangie sees that one of the fires has a distinctly darker-skinned complement and, to her delight, she hears a guitar.
“That’s Willie playing,” Harder says. “He’s an orderly too. If Bertha May is off duty, you’ll likely hear her singing. Beautiful voice. Like an angel.”
There is something in his tone that makes her turn to look back at him. She sees a wistful half smile, eyes gazing into some imaginary vision.
“Bertha May, huh?” she prompts. “I suppose she’s some ancient nurse . . .”
�
��Bertha May? Ancient? Not at all,” he protests. “Quite the contrary, she’s the most lovely . . .” He stops. “Oh, I see your game. Oh, you have grown tricky in my absence, Knee-high. But you’re wrong, there is no romance going on here.” This is said with a degree of conviction tinged with bitterness, a bitterness confirmed when he adds in a low mutter he must think she can’t hear, “More’s the pity.”
Around the campfire are a dozen men and women, more or less equally split. Harder is greeted with waves or shouted greetings. It’s clear he is liked, and Frangie finds this immensely gratifying. She’s had no choice but to guess what Harder’s life has been like these past years of separation, and her imagination had led her to dark assumptions. That he is respected and liked, here at least, relieves her mind.
Willie is a picker, not a strummer, with each note crystal clear, mournful, but with an edge of wry humor, and he accompanies himself in a tenor that seems at odds with his rotund and ancient (by army standards) form.
A good mornin’ little schoolgirl
Can I go home with you?
Harder checks that the blanket is keeping Frangie warm, and despite her protests that she is fine, perfectly fine, he pushes her so close to the fire she expects within a very short time to actually burst into flame.
They share a cup of coffee and politely refuse the bottle of brandy being passed around.
“How is the family?” Harder asks with stiff nonchalance.
“Well, Obal is practically grown up. If by grown up you mean that he has a paper route and is crazy determined to get every one of his customers a nice, dry paper perfectly deposited on their stoop.”
Harder grins. “Obal working?”
“You would not credit the seriousness in his letters.”
“And Mother?”
“She’s fine. Worried like any mother, I suppose. She’s still sewing a little, but she has a second job packing parachutes. And you know Father was hurt, I suppose?”
Harder shrugs. “I’m not much concerned with him.”
“Well, be that as it may, he has a new job dispatching taxis, and now he’s doing something at the defense plant as well, I don’t quite understand what it is. But it seems everyone is quite prosperous.”
She makes no effort to conceal her own wry bitterness. She volunteered for service to help her family with expenses; now her sacrifice is unnecessary, while she is stuck in the war, like it or not.
“I was amazed they let any Negro carry a gun,” Harder says. “There was a lot of pressure from the NAACP and Eleanor Roosevelt and various other do-gooders.”
“You don’t approve?”
He shrugs again. “As a way to demonstrate that Negroes are not cowards or fools, it’s a good thing. But I’m not sure the fellows who get a leg blown off are grateful.”
“I suppose not.”
“And for what?” Harder asks rhetorically. “Everyone knows the Italian campaign is a sideshow. The real fighting is on the Eastern Front. Soviet comrades are dying by the tens of thousands fighting the Fascists in the most inhuman conditions.”
At the word comrades Frangie glances around nervously.
“No need to worry,” Harder says, dripping sarcasm. “The capitalists have decided they quite like Communists . . . so long as they’re dying. But never fear, as soon as the war is won our capitalist overlords will turn against them again. Probably start a whole new war.”
Frangie winces, wishing she had managed to avoid anything political, but Harder barrels ahead.
“This war is not at all what most folks think. The real war is between the Fascists and the Communists, with the capitalists doing the absolute minimum. The capitalists want to see the Fascists destroyed because they threaten British colonies. The Nazis want to replace the colonial order with an even greater evil, so we fight them. But make no mistake, America is being used to defend the evils of colonialism and imperialism. And the only ones truly standing for the rights of working men and women are the Communists and Comrade Stalin.”
Frangie doubts this is quite true, but there has never been much point in arguing politics with her brilliant, verbose, and rather strident brother.
“Our people, Negroes, colored folk, we’re being tricked into believing that we can change things by serving in the capitalist army. But back home, white defense workers are striking to stop colored folk getting paid equal. They’re using the tools of unionism to deny us our rights, which is an unholy perversion of . . .”
It goes on like this for a while, and Frangie tunes out the words, maintaining an attentive expression even as her memory drifts back to the day when a thirteen-year-old Harder had ambushed her with water balloons.
“. . . and has Jim Crow changed? Not a bit. Just last week a fellow in Louisiana was lynched, strung up by night riders in front of his children by the light of a burning cross.”
Frangie wonders if she should break into his peroration on the topics of race and class and the exploitation of workers, but she knows she can’t hold her own in any sort of political discussion. What she feels is that his fervor burns too hot to last. And she worries that his outspokenness will land him in trouble sooner or later.
“. . . since the days of the Greenwood riot. It’s the same as ever—”
“Have you learned anything about those days?” she breaks in, seeing an opportunity to get away from radical politics.
“About Greenwood?” He frowns and seems to be looking in her eyes for the answer to a question. “What do you know of it?”
“Only what everyone knows, I suppose,” Frangie says.
“Mother hasn’t ever . . .” He lets it hang.
Frangie has a squirming feeling of discomfort. “She doesn’t talk to me about it. I know she was there at the time, and Daddy was up in Chicago visiting his sister.”
Harder has stood all through his long, fervent political survey, but now he sits on a moss-coated log so he’s at eye level with her. “Haven’t you ever wondered about it?”
“I’ve wondered, but . . . she’s always seemed like she didn’t want to talk about it.”
“I’m not surprised. She had a very bad time of it. She won’t talk, but others have, down through the years. I fought many a schoolyard skirmish because of it.”
“But . . . but because of what?”
“My God, you really don’t know.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
His face is serious now, grim even. His gaze meets hers and won’t release her, and the back of her neck tingles.
“Have you never wondered why I look like this?” he asks, almost pleading.
“Look like what?”
“My skin. My nose. My hair. My eyes.”
She stares at him, and the tingling spreads from the nape of her neck down over her shoulders and up her cheeks.
“Good lord, little Frangie, my sweet sister. Do I look like Father? Do I look even a little bit like Father?”
Frangie’s head is moving slowly, side to side in negation, in denial, in a preemptive, protective reaction to what she senses coming. She doesn’t want what’s coming. She begins moving to the music, trying to focus on the Robert Johnson song Willie is now playing.
Woke this mornin’ feelin’ round for my shoes,
But you know by that, I got these old walkin’ blues.
But Harder has never been one to read subtle cues. His voice is relentless, cold, determined to tell it all. “They caught hold of Mother. She was newly married, just seventeen at the time, and they caught hold of her as she was fetching groceries.”
“What do you . . .” But she can’t say more, her throat is swelling shut, her heart pounding like a great bass drum keeping a funereal time. Because all at once, she knows.
“She was raped, Frangie. Many times, by many white men.”
“Jesus, no.”
“She was close to death for weeks.”
“No, no, Jesus no, Jesus no,” Frangie pleads, imploring Harde
r through a screen of tears.
Harder takes her hand but his expression is remote. “Did you think Father kicked me out for my politics alone? No, although he has a fool’s unthinking rejection of the party. No, Knee-high, every time he looks at me he knows. My face is a constant reminder that I am not his son.”
29
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—GESTAPO HEADQUARTERS, NAPLES, ITALY
The slap is backhanded. The ring cuts her cheek, a new cut to join the dozens already there, some partly scabbed over, others fresh and oozing blood.
Her ankles are tied to the feet of the chair. Her hands are tied behind the chair back. Her left eye is swollen closed. Blood clogs both nostrils so she can only breathe through her mouth.
Her stolen black dress is in tatters. The collar is so saturated by both fresh and dried blood that it looks as if the fabric is rusting.
“Again, Hans.” The Gestapo officer has a soft voice, an insinuating, regretful, but slightly bored voice.
Hans is a big brute in a sweat-stained uniform, which he has covered with a long, white butcher’s apron. It protects his uniform from the flying sprays of blood that are an occupational hazard for Hans. He wears leather gloves to spare his knuckles, and he wears a fat gold and emerald ring, a ring that looks as if it was looted from a rich dandy’s home. Hans has shoved the ring down over his gloved pinkie. He’s an expert at the backhanded blow that will bring the emerald into contact with flesh. But this is a less artful, more brutal blow, a punch, a clenched fist not to her face but to the side of her neck. It snaps her head sideways and sends waves of pain into her shoulder and rocketing up through her brain.
For a while she is lost, wandering on the dreamlike border between nightmare reality and eerie, unsettling visions. She has tried to focus her thoughts on a single happy moment, her date at the Stork Club with Halev. But that memory has become fragmented, so she can no longer summon long passages of happy conversation and now can only hold on to snatches, moments, and then only for a few seconds at a time.
Silver Stars Page 27
