The Atomic City Girls

by Janet Beard

  Joe tried to remember that heat, the awful insects humming above his head, and wondered if it was worse than this November cold. But summer seemed like a dream, impossible to recapture. At least now he’d gotten used to things. Those first months he had thought he wouldn’t be able to stand being away from his wife Moriah. On those sleepless, sweltering nights, he’d had half a mind to walk right out of the wretched hutment and hitch a ride down to Alabama where Moriah and the children were waiting. Now he knew he could stand it a little longer, make more money, get Moriah up here just as soon as possible.

  Thirty-eight dollars a week, weather permitting. That was what had brought him here in the first place and that was the reason he stayed. They got fifty-seven and a half cents per hour for forty hours, eighty-six and a quarter cents per hour for overtime, and as long as it didn’t storm, he could work eighteen hours overtime. Joe had always been a hard worker. He was six foot two with strong, long arms, toughened by years of work, and was proud of his ability to provide for his family. That was all a man needed, really, and it kept him out of trouble.

  The labor gangs were working on huge buildings, bigger by far than anything Joe had ever seen. Whatever it was the Army was building here, it sure made an impression. He didn’t have any experience doing construction but was a fast learner. These days, the foreman had him mixing and pouring concrete, endless amounts of the stuff. By the end of the day, every muscle in his body called for a reprieve, his back ached, and his shoulders felt pinched with pain. But he’d never been one to complain about hard work. What bothered him most about the job was the landscape. He missed the country. He felt as though he might as well be on Mars, looking around at the sprawling mass of beams and frames and half-finished factories. Steel, concrete, men in hard hats, and mud as far as he could see in any direction. It oppressed him. It was unnatural and ungodly, and he missed the fields, the trees, birdsong, and animal noises, rather than the relentless hammering, drilling, and rumbling of engines.

  When he wasn’t working, he kept to himself or palled around with Ralph. They got plenty of food in the colored cafeteria, though you had to be sure to get there before they quit serving. There were always two choices, “not spicy” or “spicy” for the folks from Louisiana who liked that sort of thing. He’d tried the spicy food once, but it just burned his mouth. The not-spicy food kept his belly full, but what he wouldn’t give for some of Moriah’s fried okra and collard greens.

  He wrote to her and the children every day as best he could, though his spelling wasn’t good. He’d never got past the fourth grade in school and knew he got things wrong. But he had to stay connected to them, and in return they each sent him little notes and drawings. He kept them all, neatly folded in his footlocker under the cot. He put everything of value he owned, which wasn’t much, in the locker, because there was no lock on the hutment. Be charitable to all men, but don’t trust any of them, his father had always said.

  He went to church regularly, though he made it a point to stay away from the holy rollers in town. Joe had always taken his spirituality seriously and never trusted fanatics, the roadside prophets too easily overcome by the Holy Spirit, and there were plenty of that type here in Oak Ridge. Ralph still came to church with him, but the boy seemed to seek out trouble. Ralph had always been hot-tempered. He’d shown up one day about five years back on the Hopewell farm, couldn’t have been older than fourteen, with the nastiest broken arm Joe had ever seen. Said he was looking for work, but he could hardly stand with the pain in his arm. Joe figured he must have been running from trouble, but something in the boy’s firmly set lips moved him. He brought Ralph home, and Moriah took care of him, setting his arm in a splint. It was never quite right, but he was strong and made up for it with his good arm.

  Ralph went to church with them and became a favorite because of his strong tenor. Reverend Clayton said Ralph had the sort of voice that brought sinners back to God. He still didn’t drink or gamble, at least not that Joe knew about, and that was saying something in this place. Wasn’t much else to do, and the rec halls were filled with illegal hooch and poker games. Joe stayed away from that stuff, but occasionally he went with Ralph to the rec hall. It was little more than a barn. Sometimes a screen was pulled down to show race films. Other times he played checkers with Ralph or the other men. But he always kept an eye out and made sure both of them got out of there if things turned rowdy. Just last week a man had been stabbed in the hutment next door over a five-dollar gambling debt. Folks had too much time on their hands. That and they weren’t allowed to live with their women, which stirred up trouble.

  In any case, it wasn’t drinking or gambling that worried Joe about the boy; Ralph’s real problem was his temper. After a year, he finally told Joe why he wound up on the Hopewell farm. His stepfather had been hitting Ralph’s mother until the boy got in the middle. He’d beaten the man badly and hadn’t waited to see what shape he’d be in when he regained consciousness.

  “Joe?” Ralph whispered. “You awake?”

  “No, sir. I’m dreaming of a furnace.”

  “It ain’t right.”

  “What?”

  “This ain’t no fit place for a man to live. We were better off working in the fields.”

  “We could hardly feed ourselves.”

  “At least we ain’t have to answer to no one but Mr. Hopewell. Here we’ve got the whole Army against us.”

  “It won’t last forever, Ralph. War’ll end someday. Least you ain’t fighting.”

  Ralph had tried to enlist, but the Army wouldn’t take him on account of his arm. Sometimes Joe thought the boy would have been better off serving, with all that fight inside of him. But selfishly, he was glad Ralph was here. Even though he was just a boy, he was a good friend. Hot-headed, yes, but Joe knew if he or Moriah were in any kind of trouble, Ralph would be the first person there to help them.

  Ralph rolled over, away from him. The boy got big ideas from the colored newspapers his friends in the rec hall gave him. Sometimes he’d read them aloud to Joe. He read haltingly, betraying his lack of education, but far better than Joe could read to himself. Last summer the papers had stories about Negroes rioting in cities and often getting killed. Ralph would get too worked up reading about it to keep his voice steady and finally would put the paper down to go outside and walk or smoke. Ralph wore a Double V pin on his jacket, which he’d ordered from the Pittsburgh Courier. The two V’s stood for Double Victory—democracy at home and abroad. Joe told him it would only draw attention to him, but Ralph just laughed in a bitter way and said white folks wouldn’t know what it meant anyway.

  Joe didn’t worry too much about the things Ralph said. He was just a kid, after all, didn’t have the same worries Joe did trying to feed three children. Joe was forty-eight and had worked for Mr. Hopewell as long as he could remember. This was his first time out of Alabama, and sometimes he missed the red dirt of the farm so much that he felt his chest tighten—strange because he’d always cursed that piece of land where he had been born and stuck his whole life. But it was home, and miss it he did, just as he missed the little cabin where he had grown up and where his own children had been born. Shabby as it was, it was a real house, suitable for a family. Moriah would be in the wooden bed at the back now, asleep under one of her quilts with little Ben in her arms. The girls would be sleeping in their bed across the room, the only time they were ever quiet. If he had been there, he would kiss their soft cheeks, tiptoe over to his bed, and slide in behind Moriah and Ben, wrapping her in his arms. If it was cold in the cabin, they would keep each other warm. If he was feeling hopeless, she would put her warm hand on his cheek, talk to him in her rich, soothing voice until he was calm.

  In a moment, Joe was asleep, still shivering but dreaming of Moriah.

  Then before he knew it, the alarm was ringing—a harsh, tinny sound. At home in Alabama, Joe would wake up naturally at dawn with the sun’s rising and the rooster’s crowing. It wasn’t like he’d enjoyed waking up
so much back then, but it was more peaceful than greeting the day in this plywood box with that awful little clock blaring at him.

  It was his and Ralph’s week on the early shift; the other men in the room stayed still or groaned or rolled their heads under their pillows. Joe silenced the alarm and swung his legs over the side of the cot. He went over to a washbasin and braced himself for the touch of icy water. The joints in his fingers ached as he slid his hands into the bowl and splashed his face, as quickly as possible. That woke a man up.

  He and Ralph would get breakfast in the cafeteria, then head to their gang. Joe looked forward to breakfast, mostly because the cafeteria was well heated, and he would be comfortable for the first time in twelve hours. Then it was back out into the cold to work, but labor kept a body warm.

  Ralph was still in bed. Joe gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Ralph!” he said in a loud whisper, trying not to disturb his roommates.

  Ralph didn’t respond, and Joe shook him hard. “Wake up, boy!”

  Ralph let out a little moan and rolled over. Half asleep like this, he looked like a child.

  “Come on,” Joe whispered more gently. “Let’s get some coffee and grits in you, and you’ll feel better.”

  Ralph didn’t say a word on the way to the cafeteria. “You shouldn’t stay out so late,” chided Joe.

  Ralph hunched into his jacket, hands dug deep into the side pockets.

  The sun was just rising up over the ridge in front of them, bright but not warm. Joe watched his breath cloud in front of his mouth as he spoke. “Got to take care of yourself, Ralph.”

  Ralph sighed. “Yes, sir, I hear.”

  Joe doubted his lectures ever did much good, but he suspected the boy appreciated them, despite his surly attitude. Ralph’s daddy had never been around, and his stepfather had obviously been no-account.

  The colored cafeteria was crowded with all the men on the early shift filling up for the morning’s work ahead of them. Sure enough, the room was sweltering with radiator heat and the crowd of bodies. It was loud, too; the walls echoed with conversations, laughter, even a harmonica coming from somewhere—too much noise for that time of the morning.

  They got platefuls of biscuits and gravy and mugs of black “coffee”—not real coffee but an earthy-tasting substitute. It was hot at least, as were the biscuits, even if they were dry and crumbled at the touch. The gravy was thin, with only a couple of puny pieces of sausage bobbing in it, but the food would keep him going till their next meal in five hours.

  Ralph gulped down the fake coffee but only picked at his biscuit. “Aren’t you hungry?” asked Joe.

  He shrugged. Times like this, Joe wanted to shake some sense into him. Why was he always so sullen, making himself so miserable? If a man puts a plate of hot food in front of you, you eat it, simple as that. “You ain’t sick, is you?”

  “Nah, I ain’t sick.” Ralph took a big bite. You just had to nudge him, like a child.

  “Got a letter from Moriah yesterday. Ben learned to say ‘Daddy’ when she showed him my letters.”

  Ralph had a soft spot for the children. He almost smiled.

  “Where were you last night, anyhow?”

  “Rec hall.”

  “Playing checkers?”

  Ralph shook his head. “Talking.” He leaned into Joe and spoke in a low voice. “Some men here got real big ideas.”

  “What sort of ideas?”

  “Ideas about how we can change things.” Ralph leaned back, as though to let that sink in.

  Joe was suspicious of this sort of talk. “You getting into trouble?”

  “No, sir.” Ralph stabbed some biscuit and shoved it into his mouth. “It’s not like that. These are good folks who think we deserve to be treated better for helping our country fight this war.”

  A bell went off, which meant it was six fifty, time for the men to go meet their crews. Everyone began getting up, the room loud with the sounds of trays being slammed down and chairs sliding against the rough floor. Ralph stood, and Joe followed.

  “Just be careful,” said Joe. He couldn’t help but sound disapproving.

  They would be pouring concrete that morning, laying the foundation for yet another new building. He and Ralph met the rest of their gang, and they were all loaded into the back of a bus to drive across the reservation to the site. The buildings being built were giants; for the life of him, Joe couldn’t work out what in the world the Army would do with such monstrosities. He looked out over what had been fields and farmland when he first arrived—familiar and so much more fathomable to him than these warehouses, factories, and endless parking lots. Plenty of folks would no doubt marvel at the sight of a city being built practically overnight. It did give you a sense of man’s capabilities. Maybe that was what got Ralph so riled up about this place. For a young man, Joe reckoned it would be hard to look around without thinking about what was possible, what men could accomplish, and what a man could do for himself.

  The spot where they’d been working all week was at the bottom of a steep valley. It was as though they were filling the valley right up with their construction. He was glad to have a chance to do his part for the war effort, not because of patriotic feelings exactly, but more because he knew so many young men who were off fighting, boys from his church back in Alabama and some of the other field hands from the Hopewell farm. Even young Teddy Hopewell had died in Italy. Moriah had written to Joe after Teddy’s death, distraught. She’d looked after him as a child.

  Once he was working, Joe’s mind wandered less. He became focused on the task at hand, which was a relief because it took his mind off the missing—missing Moriah, missing the children, missing the country. The morning would pass by quickly enough this way, and soon enough another day would be gone. He’d be exhausted, but one day closer to having enough money to send for his family.

  (Courtesy of the Department of Energy)

  Chapter 4

  FOR CICI ROBERTS, THE WAR HAD BEEN AN OPPORTUNITY, AN INTERNATIONAL crisis disruptive enough for her to undergo a personal transformation. In 1942, she had been a sharecropper’s daughter, beautiful but with a bleak future of poverty, hard work, and harder religion in front of her. A year later, she had run off to Nashville with a boy she knew from grade school who had just enlisted. He wanted to marry her, but as soon as she got to town, she found a room to share with another girl and a job as a hostess at a hotel restaurant downtown. She was hired because she was pretty, and the rich ladies who came to dine there liked to be surrounded by pretty things. She listened carefully to them and their debutante daughters. As Cici seated them at perfectly set tables, she absorbed the way they held themselves, the formation of their vowel sounds. At night, she would lock herself in the hallway bathroom at her rooming house and practice talking like those Nashville ladies.

  By the time she heard about Oak Ridge, her transformation was almost complete. No one ever had to know that her daddy was a sharecropper; she spoke and carried herself like a plantation heiress. What Cici lacked, of course, was actual money. But she recognized a prospect to fix that at the Clinton Engineer Works. Cici loved everything about Oak Ridge—she didn’t even mind the mud. She could be whomever she pleased in this strange new town full of people passing through, people from all over who didn’t know anything about her or care where she came from. She loved the boys and the parties and the dancing. She loved roller skating and listening to records and how everything here was different from Perry County.

  She had to be careful with the boys. It was fun to flirt and be admired, but she always kept her ultimate goal in mind: finding a husband with money. So many girls got swept away at the sight of a uniform, but just because a man was a hotshot in the Army now didn’t mean he’d amount to squat when the war was over. Wars can’t last forever, and you had to think long-term. It was lovely to be making seventy-five cents an hour, but it wasn’t enough. Cici had glimpsed what life was like for the truly wealthy, and saw no reason why it shouldn’t be like that fo
r her, too. Her mother had always told her that working hard would get her anything she wanted, but her hardworking mother’s body was worn out at forty, and her mother’s future held nothing but more work. Cici wasn’t going to waste her life working hard; she would use the gifts God had given her, her striking good looks, and see that they secured her a future with as little work in it as possible. She made sure to tell everyone she could that she was here to do her part for the war effort. What she carefully implied was that she had no need for the money she made working in the factory. Her time and energy were being donated as an act of charity. One of the most important lessons she learned in Nashville was that money (or at least the illusion of money) attracted more money.

  Cici asked the right questions of her suitors, subtly did her research. You had to find out his plans, what kind of family he was from. She carefully strung along as many boys as possible at a time, giving each just enough attention to keep him wanting more, but not so much that he would get the wrong idea. You couldn’t let them get too far; it was important to have a sterling reputation so that when you found the right one, he would marry you. Of course there were older men at Oak Ridge, too, men who already had money. But Cici found that pursuing those types was tricky; they didn’t tend to socialize with the young people at the dances and the bowling alley. Besides, most of them were married, and if they weren’t, you had to wonder why not. She’d gone on one date with a bald engineer who spent the whole time telling her about his three beloved pet turtles he’d had to leave back in Pennsylvania with his mother. He hadn’t tried to kiss her or even hold her hand once all night, which was just as well.

  She had meant it when she told June that they’d be best friends. Her new roommate seemed sweet, and to tell the truth, Cici needed a friend. She’d never been good with other girls. Boys she knew how to talk to, but girls always seemed jealous; or maybe it was because she could be a little mean. She was competitive when it came to men, but you had to be, especially in times like these, when there were hardly any of them to go around. But June was perfect; she was mourning a dead fiancé and plain and shy, anyway. Cici was feeling happy and charitable. Things were going so well for her in Oak Ridge that she ought to share her happiness by reaching out to help this new girl.