In the Shadow of Alabama

by Judy Reene Singer

  The chaplain stood up to deliver the eulogy.

  “Our sons are to be interred here,” he intoned. “We did not intend to bring them here to lose them like this. . . .”

  * * *

  His words were blown by the November wind, and Willie could barely hear him at all, because the colored Americans, the colored American soldiers, had to stand in the very rear, even behind the foreign cadets. Even here, at Oakwood Cemetery, on this consecrated ground, this old historical place, as consecrated as church ground, they had to stand in the rear. Willie wondered where they would have buried him, had he died. But then, he wouldn’t have died, because he wouldn’t have been flying.

  The Lord is my shepherd . . .

  The rows of men were praying together now, a deep chorus of male voices, but Willie didn’t join them. He hummed to himself to keep it together, because his friend was in one of those boxes. He knew Fleischer was standing up front, and though he couldn’t see him, he knew Fleischer would be paying respects for both of them. Still, he wanted to pay his own respects.

  “Take the ‘A’ train,” he sang softly. It would be his own personal tribute, because Jink Davies liked the song. Willie preferred “Solitude,” but this was for Jink.

  Melodically, it was a difficult song to sing, the words slow at first, then coming fast, to fit into the beats. The Delta Rhythm Boys sang it best, he thought, every word sweet and clear. He forced himself to concentrate on what they sounded like.

  But the Twenty-third Psalm was scattering Willie’s music.

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me . . .

  Willie didn’t recite the prayer along with the rest of the men. He didn’t trust his voice. Besides, he couldn’t hear the chaplain very well, could barely see him over the lines of hats. No one would know whether he was praying or not.

  “Why you hummin’?” August whispered to him. August was standing next to him, his hat over his heart and praying, like the prayer meant something. Like he was important enough to pray with the rest of them.

  “I’m just praying my own way,” Willie replied.

  “No, you ain’t,” said August. “You hummin’ ‘“A” Train.’ That ain’t no prayer.”

  “It is to me,” said Willie, then turned away, so that August wouldn’t see his face.

  “You better stop your singin’,” August cautioned. “The Lord is back here, too, you know. He knows whether you prayin’ or singin’.”

  * * *

  The bugler played “Last Post,” which was what they played for Brits instead of “Taps,” and then they were all dismissed. Willie waited by the gates, staring down at his shoes, because to look any of them passing by in the eye was to invite trouble. General Chase, General Markham, Colonel Fairchild, Major Dugger, down to the sergeants, Sergeant Hogarth, all filing past him. They liked their coloreds in their place, these men, so he stared at his shoes and waited. Fleischer came up to him. The veins were standing out across his forehead.

  “It wasn’t right—” Fleischer started. “It wasn’t—” He shook his head and walked away. No, Willie thought, it wasn’t right. He lost a friend, but he would never be able to say a proper good-bye.

  * * *

  The next morning was brand new and blameless, with the sun shining bright yellow, the air cold and clear as though it had never been anything else. The clouds hung in a blue sky, in thick white clusters, like soft pillows, like Jink could rest his head on them. It was all innocent. Planes took off, announcements were made by the “Big Voice,” planes landed, like nothing at all had ever happened. The men from Willie’s squadron marched across the field to the wash rack, marching to Hangar Five, ready for duty. Except the doors to the wash rack were closed. Strange, Willie thought, because they were never closed, the work never stopped. Day and night, the planes were rolled in and taken apart and cleaned and put back together and rolled out. This morning the doors were closed, even though there was a Vultee waiting right outside. He could hear some kind of racket coming from inside. A thumping, slamming sound. Shouting.

  The squadron came to a halt and then stood at ease in front of the doors, waiting for orders.

  “Give a hand,” Willie yelled to August, who stepped forward and pulled against the hangar doors to roll them apart. Several men got in position to grab the plane, ready to push it in. They stopped and stared. The reason for the noise was obvious now.

  Fleischer was inside, kicking the shit out of the plane in front of him. “Goddamned piece of crap,” he was screaming. “Goddamned piece of crap . . .” He was oblivious to the men. He was oblivious to the night crew, who had gathered around, or the night sergeant, who was pulling at his shoulder and telling him to cool off. He just kicked and screamed, like he was possessed. The night sergeant finally ordered his crew to leave, and left with them. Fleischer was even oblivious to the fact that his own men had arrived.

  “They had no right to approve it!” Fleischer screamed at the shell of the Vultee. “No right at all!”

  He gave the plane a final kick. It slid backward, then spun into the metal walls, knocking into the hoses and gauges, scattering tools with a splintering clang. Willie stood frozen for a moment, then stepped to Fleischer’s side. He lifted his hand to touch Fleischer on the shoulder, then thought better of it and dropped it.

  “Whoa, Sergeant,” he said carefully. “The men are here. The men are here. Your men are here.” He turned around to order the men to wait outside. Fleischer, panting from the exertion, squatted down and hunched there for a few minutes until his breath returned. Then he stood up. “Have them clean this up,” he croaked, gesturing to the array of tools and plane parts scattered across the bay. He strode toward the radio office and snapped the door shut behind him. Willie turned to the men.

  “You heard the orders,” he said. “Let’s get this place cleaned up. Get this plane out of here. August, set it up.”

  “Yessir.” August grabbed a wing with his huge, meaty hands and righted the plane. “That man sure got hisself a bad temper,” he said, shaking his head. “One mighty bad temper.”

  * * *

  They never mentioned Jink’s name after that, though Fleischer and Willie still met a night or two a week. First, they drank near beer, which was all Fleischer could find in the PX, and later, Cokes, because they realized that neither of them were really drinkers. The beers had always been Jink’s idea.

  They had little to talk about, but they persisted meeting, supposedly to work on the Vultee problem, though neither one of them had the heart to even talk about that. There was nothing they had in common; Jink had always been the lubrication that got the conversations going. Fleischer and Willie sat in the office, in chairs now, lights on, with the Vultee specs laid out in front of them, all blue-penciled by Fleischer, like it meant something. They didn’t talk about it; they didn’t talk about anything. It was a ritual neither one of them could give up, even though it meant nothing anymore.

  * * *

  One day Willie saw a newspaper, The Montgomery Independent, lying on the worktable, opened to an article about the recent World Series. Later, in the office, Fleischer was reading it and sipping a Coke. There was another Coke on the table waiting for Willie. He picked it up and, using the edge of the table, snapped the cap off, glad to see Fleischer was interested in baseball. Willie loved baseball; they could talk baseball, he thought. Something to talk about instead of sitting and thinking about Jink and not talking at all.

  “You like baseball?” he asked Fleischer. “’Cause, you know, I play for the Colored Flyers.” The Maxwell Field Colored Flyers and the Gunter Black Tigers were the two teams made up of all colored soldiers, since they weren’t allowed to play on the white teams.

  Fleischer looked up from the paper with interest. “Are you any good?”

  “Just last week I made a great play on a fly ball for the final out,” Willie said proudly. “I had to run back twenty feet and nearly broke my back to reach it, but it fell right into my glove.” He demons
trated his move. “Smooth.”

  “Well, they sure could have used you last month when Owens dropped the third strike,” Fleischer said, flipping the paper back onto the table. “Wish I had been there to see it. Dodgers fan?”

  “Yankees,” Willie replied, wondering, Dodgers? Was there nothing they had in common?

  “But we got PeeWee Reese! Pete Reiser!” Fleischer retorted. “Great players.”

  “You don’t have DiMaggio,” Willie said, then hoped that he hadn’t sounded too uppity. He liked Fleischer, but he still felt like he had to watch everything he said. He had felt that way ever since he had come to Alabama. The worry, the wariness, was something he wore, like it was part of his uniform. The worst thing was to come off uppity. It meant trouble. But Fleischer merely grinned and clicked their Coke bottles.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got to give you DiMaggio.” It was the first time he had smiled in weeks.

  * * *

  If anything turned out to be the key to solving the Vultee problem, Willie guessed, it was the jeweler’s loupe.

  Fleischer’s girlfriend, Ruth, had sent it from New York because Fleischer wanted to make her some kind of special engagement ring out of tiny pieces of pyrite he had harvested from around the airfield. He was even planning to take a weekend furlough up to Hog Mountain in Tallapoosa County and maybe mine some gold flakes to melt down. He did things like that, cobbling together rags and dust and plane parts to make gifts to send to his girl. Proud of it, too. What she did with the stuff, Willie couldn’t imagine, especially when they sold perfectly nice little diamond rings you could pay off, right in the PX. Even the colored PX had them. But Fleischer wanted something unique; he called it “unique,” though Willie thought it was just cheap crap.

  Ruth had dutifully sent Fleischer the requested jeweler’s loupe, and Fleischer being Fleischer, he used it to examine every part of the radio room, peering at dead spiders, crumbs from the coffee cake, his own fingernails, a piece of hair from his head.

  And the wire connections of the plane.

  “Jackson!” Willie heard him suddenly exclaim from inside the radio room. “Get in here! Look at this! Jackson!”

  Willie handed off his hose to Corporal Hobbs and stepped into the radio room. Fleischer was holding up a piece of wire from a plane radio, the jeweler’s loupe clipped over one side of his glasses.

  “Know what I got here?” Fleischer asked, his voice rising with excitement. Willie shrugged. “Take a look.” He removed the loupe and held it out to Willie, who nervously took it and the wire. Not sure what he was doing, he held the loupe to his eye to peer through. It took him a minute to find the focus, but when he did, he was astonished. The metal end of the wire looked like someone had chewed it.

  “What’s wrong with it?” He glanced back at Fleischer, who was practically leaning over his shoulder.

  “Corroded,” said Fleischer, his voice breathless with shock. “The solution we’re using to clean the planes is dissolving the connections. That’s why the fucking planes are crashing. The connections melted; that’s why they can’t hold! It’s been our own damn fault, the whole time.”

  Chapter 27

  My father had that jeweler’s loupe until the day he died. He was always peering through it, captured by some microscopic invisible world on the other side. Sandra and I found it again, alongside his gold high school ring from Brooklyn Tech, class of 1939, a thick gold watch with its Flex-O-Band, an onyx tie tack, and a blue and gold aviation pin, all of them stored inside a little handmade wooden jewelry box tucked in the front of his sock drawer. It had been a day or two after the funeral, and our mother, after setting aside what she wanted to keep, gave us permission to divide my father’s possessions.

  Sandra packed up most of his good sweaters for her husband, while I folded the rest of my father’s things into a carton for Goodwill, old slacks and shirts I remembered my father wearing, a few leather belts, some pajamas still in cellophane. Sandra managed to fill a large carton to be shipped home to Atlanta: a new robe, shirts that had hardly been worn, the cellophane-wrapped pajamas she liberated from the Goodwill box along with two pairs of special orthopedic shoes.

  “What on earth are you going to do with the shoes?” I asked, as she carefully enfolded each one in plastic bags. “They’re custom-made for Dad’s feet.”

  “They cost over two hundred dollars,” she said indignantly. “Harrison can wear them.”

  “Good thing you’re not taking Dad’s glasses,” I said, “or poor Harrison could wind up going blind from eye strain.” I paused what I was doing. “You’re not, are you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Did you see the frames?”

  When we got to the sock drawer, we both stared at the jewelry box for a moment. “You can keep the socks,” she said in an uncharacteristic gesture of generosity, grabbing fistfuls of old socks and handing them off to me.

  “What am I supposed to do with old socks?” I asked, dumping them into the Goodwill carton.

  But Sandra was already lost in the contents of the jewelry box, jeweler’s loupe firmly planted against her eye, while she turned over each item to see if it was real gold, the watch and tie tack having been already examined, and immediately stored in her pants pocket.

  “You’d think that they would have made this out of fourteen carat,” she complained, holding up the gold aviation pin. She put that in her pocket, as well, then thought twice about it and held it out to me.

  “Would you like this? A memento from him?”

  I barely glanced at it. “No.” I didn’t want anything from my father.

  “Let me know if you ever change your mind,” she said, and put it back in her pocket. “Just the pin, I mean. Not the other stuff.”

  * * *

  I knew my father made his own peculiar jewelry, working meticulously on the most unlikely of materials, and so the presence of the loupe in his jewelry box didn’t surprise me. He’d crafted a necklace for my fifteenth birthday, of tiny, tiny polished silver nuts and bolts hanging from a braided copper wire, taken from an old transmitter. The copper made a green circle around my neck and I threw the necklace out.

  “You’ll have a school ring,” he promised me in my senior year, after I pleaded for one. And one day he appeared at my bedroom door with an odd little box fashioned from the slats of an orange crate. I lifted the rough-hewn lid with great anticipation. “No one else will have a ring like this,” he said. And he was right.

  Lying against a bed of cotton batting was a ring. In lieu of the traditional gold high school ring with its carved emblem and blue stone, he had fashioned one out of the brass shim stock used to patch planes, cut and rolled down to fit my finger, and engraved with my initials.

  Biting back savage disappointment, I put it somewhere in the back of my underwear drawer, never to look at it again until it finally just disappeared.

  We weren’t poor. It was just his way. He held a good job with the airline; my mother owned a little gift shop. When she admired a crystal chandelier, and remarked that she would very much like to have one in her dining room, he made one out of old pale green Coke bottles, turned upside down, the bottoms cut off to allow for wiring, with tiny, flame-tipped light bulbs inside. Her coffee table was made of orange Teflon landing gear from a small plane, set on four legs. She hated it, I knew she hated it, but she never said anything that was less than complimentary to him, and I never understood that. And, of course, she also kept that box of ugly junk jewelry he had given her over the years.

  * * *

  “I remember his jeweler’s loupe,” I tell Willie Jackson as his nurse helps him back into bed.

  “He was never without it,” he replied. “He always said it gave him a different view of life. How things really are.”

  * * *

  I remember that speech, the reality speech. The speech when he cleared his throat and told me that whatever I saw, there was a different and equivalent counterpart. Another dimension to things that inh
abit their own reality. That an atom was as big in its own molecular world as I was in mine, and no less important. He meant for me to be humble. I think he meant for me not to brag, not when I was skipped two grades, or finished all the badges in Girl Scouts, or was elected to the Honor Society and accepted to three good colleges when I was fifteen; he felt compelled to downplay it.

  He shrugged. “You and fifty thousand other people,” was his standard reply. I think he meant to put it into some kind of perspective, so I would remember that though we may feel very big in our own universe, we may be very small in another. He wanted me to remember that we are all equal, that in the great scheme of things, no matter what I accomplished, the world was indifferent to it, that I was no more important than anyone else. It was a noble philosophy.

  But I took it to mean that I wasn’t important at all.

  * * *

  Willie is napping now, his breath purring softly through his lips, and I take the opportunity to make a quick trip to the bathroom, grab a cup of coffee and a late lunch in the cafeteria. Then I check in with David and Malachi.

  David is sitting in on a big business deal and can’t speak for long, but he does manage to tell me that we need to talk. Soon.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he says. “And I don’t want to be hurt, either.”

  “How does a piece of paper make a difference?” I ask. “How does it prevent anyone from getting hurt?” It is my eternal answer and has always worked for me before.

  “It makes all the difference,” he replies. “It makes it official. It lets the whole world know that we are important to one another. It is the one unique gift we can give to each other. A commitment in front of the world. It’s something that I need from you or . . .” His voice trailed off.