Jump into the Sky

by Shelley Pearsall

  ALSO BY SHELLEY PEARSALL

  Trouble Don’t Last

  Crooked River

  All Shook Up

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Shelley Pearsall

  Jacket photograph of a boy’s face copyright © 2012 by Factoria Singular/Getty Images

  Jacket photograph of parachutists copyright © 2012 by Lambert/Getty Images archive photos

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of

  Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pearsall, Shelley.

  Jump into the sky / Shelley Pearsall. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Borzoi Book.”

  Summary: In 1945, thirteen-year-old Levi is sent to find the father he has not seen in three years, going from Chicago, to segregated North Carolina, and finally to Pendleton, Oregon, where he learns that his father’s unit, the all-black 555th paratrooper battalion, will never see combat but finally has a mission. Includes historical notes.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89548-7

  [1. Segregation—Fiction. 2. Prejudices—Fiction. 3. African Americans—Fiction. 4. United States Army. Parachute Infantry Battalion, 555th—Fiction. 5. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 6. United States—History—World War, 1939–1945—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7. P3166Jum 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011024935

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  for the 555th

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. Fifth of May

  2. Queen Bee Walker

  3. Scorpion of Death

  4. Peace on Earth

  5. Like Joe Louis in a Dress

  6. Barbed Wire Pie

  7. One White Angel

  8. So Long

  9. Southbound

  10. Jim Crow

  11. Signs

  12. Captain Midnight and His Secret Squadron

  13. Missing

  14. Room of Webs

  15. Keeper of Secrets

  16. Cool Ribbling Crick

  17. Like White on Rice

  18. Victory

  19. Love Conquers All

  20. Telegram

  21. Blackout Jump

  22. Ain’t Easy Being the Basket

  23. The World as a Colored Person

  24. Six Days

  25. Jump Outta the Bird

  26. The Shock

  27. Secrets

  28. A House of Cards

  29. Firecrackers

  30. Seeing Underwater

  31. Revelations

  32. When Sugar Went Flying

  33. Headlines

  34. Leaving

  35. Sitting Still

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  1. Fifth of May

  Whenever something bad happened, my aunt Odella was always quick to say how the end of one thing was the beginning of something else. During the war, she cooked for a lot of church funerals, where any comforting morsels of wisdom you could hand out to grieving folks with a plate of fried chicken and green beans sure came in real handy. Maybe that’s where it all started, who knows.

  To be honest, the spring of 1945 was so full of endings, sometimes it was hard to make a guess as to what the beginnings might be. It was the end of Hitler, of course, although nobody would fry a chicken’s eyeball over him being dead. A lot of people were saying it would be the end of the Nazis and the whole war itself pretty soon, if we were lucky. But the crazy Japs kept insisting no matter what happened, they’d keep on fighting forever.

  Seeing how often Aunt Odella handed out her funeral advice to other folks, I shoulda realized the day would come when she’d turn around and use the same words on me. But it was like the Japs sneaking up on Pearl Harbor while the entire country was sleeping. I was taken by complete surprise when she did.

  I remember it was early on a Saturday, the first week of May, when Aunt Odella came barging into my room like the blitz. I was loafing in bed, half asleep, half awake, my big feet drifting over the edge. They’d been doing that a lot. Or maybe the bed was drifting out from under them—I’m telling you, I was thirteen with feet the size of U-boats.

  My mind was drifting too. I shoulda been thinking about my father, who was serving in the army, and who was still staring at me from the same picture frame he’d been stuck in since he left. Or my best friend Archie’s older brother who was missing in action, they said, and who could be dead somewhere over there in Germany.

  But I gotta admit I was thinking about girls.

  I was wondering if the stocking on my scalp was gonna make any difference at all. Every Friday night Aunt Odella smeared my head with a thick coat of Vaseline and pulled one of her old stockings over my hair, pressing it down smooth. Then I had to wear the fool thing all night, praying like the dickens that there wouldn’t be an air raid drill or half of Chicago would see me with ladies’ hosiery stretched around my skull.

  “You gotta start early if you want good smooth hair when you grow up, so all those colored girls will like you,” Aunt Odella insisted. Good hair lays flat. Bad hair springs up in clumps. Clumpy hair. That’s what my aunt called it. Lately she’d been worrying a lot about my looks and my future.

  I tried telling Aunt Odella how there wasn’t a girl who would get within a hundred and fifty miles of me if she knew I wore stockings and Vaseline on my head every Friday night. Heck, no girl got within a hundred and fifty miles of me now anyhow, which was fine with me. “Good to hear it. You be sure and keep it that way,” my aunt would say, slapping on some more grease.

  So I was lying there with a stocking stuck to my scalp and my big feet dangling over the bed when Aunt Odella came in that Saturday morning and made a beeline for the window next to me. She pounded her fist on the frame that hadn’t moved since last November. “Open up.” After pushing that stubborn window toward the sky, she took a deep gulp of the Chicago morning stink, turned around, and announced to me and the world, “It’s a new day, Levi. And I’ve decided it’s time to start thinking about your future.”

  Like I said, this was a favorite theme of hers. The future. I gotta admit there were times during the war when none of us were real sure we’d get one, what with Hitler and all. But since Germany seemed to be on the verge of surrendering, maybe there was hope for us yet.

  Through my half-shut eyelids, I watched warily as Aunt Odella planted herself on one corner of my bed like she owned it. Which she did, of course. When I’d come to stay in her tiny apartment after my daddy left for the war, she’d given up her only bed and moved out to a cot in the front room, so she could have her space
and I could have mine. Who knew she’d be sleeping out there for three years?

  Aunt Odella wasn’t a small person either. Man oh man, just about every night I’d hear that rickety cot creaking as she sat down on it and Aunt Odella hollering how the whole thing was gonna fold up and squash her flat as a bug one of these times. “I hope you’re paying attention to all these sacrifices I’ve been making for you and your daddy and the war, Levi,” she’d shout as she wrestled with the fold-up metal legs, “especially if I die here tonight in this cot.”

  She called me a sacrifice about ten times a day. I was used to it.

  From where she was sitting at the end of the bed, Aunt Odella pretended to be studying a spot on the wall above me. The wallpaper in the room was pink roses, good God. I couldn’t tell which rose she was staring at. I tried not to look at them to begin with.

  “So, I’ve gone and made up my mind about a few things,” Aunt Odella said in this determined-sounding voice, and I thought, Oh no—because my aunt making up her mind was like the Germans deciding to invade Poland. There was no defense.

  I figured she was probably planning to sign me up for the church choir. Because of the war, Shiloh First Baptist’s choir was often short of men, and Aunt Odella was always threatening to volunteer me to sing. I sent up a quick prayer: Please, dear God almighty, not the choir. I could carry a tune, but I’d rather lug hot coals across the Sahara than sing with a bunch of old ladies who wore choir robes resembling first-aid tents.

  What Aunt Odella said next was nothing I ever saw coming.

  “In life, you know how the end of one thing is often the beginning of something else?” She glanced over at me.

  “Yes ma’am.” I nodded my stocking-covered head as if this was the very first time I’d heard those familiar words. Part of me wondered if a funeral plate of fried chicken and green beans was gonna appear next.

  “Well, this is one of those beginning and ending times, Levi. Because I believe I’ve done more than my share in raising you. More than most folks my age woulda done.” Aunt Odella continued, “And with the war ending soon, I think it’s time for a change in both our lives.”

  That’s when I suddenly got a real bad feeling about what was coming next.

  I watched as my aunt gathered a big steadying breath, squared her shoulders, and with no more emotion than if she was an officer ordering his men to storm the beaches of Normandy, she said how she knew it wouldn’t be easy, but she’d decided the time had come for me to move on. To go somewhere else. To leave.

  And, you know, part of my brain just couldn’t believe I was hearing her right. While there were days when I’d wished on every darned star and planet in the sky to be living somewhere else, I never thought my aunt—who knew my whole life like an open book—would ever think of sending me away.

  2. Queen Bee Walker

  Dorothea May Walker was the one who started it all, of course. The leaving.

  That’s the first thing that went through my mind as Aunt Odella sat there talking. Dorothea May Walker was my mother, but everybody else in town knew her as the jazz singer “Queen Bee” Walker for the honey-sweet sound of her voice. I’ve been told she sang in clubs all over Chicago and even performed with the great Louis Armstrong and his band once. Who knows what’s true and what’s not. I got my doubts.

  All I can say for sure is my daddy met her one night when she was singing at a nothing-special place in Chicago called the Wonder Lounge. The story goes that he strolled into the club for a quick drink and a song, and came out later with a famous wife. But it wasn’t quite so speedy. Aunt Odella would always correct that part of the family story and tell me that my daddy went steady with Miz Walker—putting a mean edge to the z—for a few months before they ran off and got married. She was a good-looking girl, my aunt said. “Like the movie star Lena Horne, only a coupla shades darker. Like a hot-chocolate Lena Horne. And if the war had been on back then, I’m telling you, her voice woulda been rationed along with the sugar.”

  “But don’t be fooled,” Aunt Odella would always add. “That sweet voice of hers didn’t mean she was a sweet person. I don’t think that girl had a sweet bone in her whole entire body. After your daddy married her, he couldn’t do nothing right in her eyes. Couldn’t buy her the right clothes, couldn’t take her to the right places, couldn’t tell her she was pretty enough times.”

  According to my aunt, Queen Bee Walker was the kind of wife who was always unhappy about something. “And then one night, just a few months after you was born squalling and crying into this sorry world, she up and left.”

  I knew the rest of the story. How she drove my daddy’s old Ford jalopy to the club one night to sing, left me lying on the passenger seat like a loaf of bread, and disappeared.

  But I figure the lady must’ve had some speck of human kindness in her stone-cold heart because even though it wasn’t a real chilly night when she left, she’d been careful to wrap me up in a fur coat my daddy had given to her as a present once. Heck, if she’d wanted to be mean, she coulda run off with that expensive fur coat and the old Ford too, right? Next to me, she left a note written on a paper napkin from the club. It said I AM LEVIN in crooked black letters.

  She didn’t have much education. “Couldn’t read much, I don’t think, and hardly knew how to write more than her own name,” Aunt Odella would tell me. “When your daddy found you lying there with that note in the middle of the night, it confused him for a minute. He thought she was giving you a new name: Levin. And then he realized, ‘No, by gosh, the woman is trying to tell me she’s leavin’, movin’ on, gone—’ ” My aunt would wave her hand in the air each time she told this part of the story, as if Queen Bee Walker had vanished into thin air. Maybe she did. “Never saw a hair of her pretty little head around this part of Chicago again.”

  But the name stuck.

  “Where’s that baby Levin?” folks in the family would ask, just joking a little because sometimes in life it’s better to laugh than to cry. And my daddy had enough of a mess in his life, with a wife who had run off and a new baby to take care of and all. He needed a good laugh, I guess.

  As time passed, Levin turned into Levi.

  Finally, according to Aunt Odella, everybody in the family just gave up using my real name of Chester, which had come from Great-Granddaddy Chester with the Paralysis. Aunt Odella herself had to admit I didn’t look much like a shriveled-up raisin of a man who’d been born during slavery times. “Guess your name is the one thing your momma got right,” my aunt would say to end the story, “even if she didn’t mean to.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  Because once those words were scrawled on a napkin, I believe that’s when leaving became a permanent part of my life. A curse I had to carry around like a pocketful of rocks. I Am Levin. How many times had I heard those words? First from my momma. Then from my daddy, who used them so often, he wore them out. Then there was Granny, who’d died and left me—not that she could be blamed for that fault entirely, being the age of ninety-two when she passed on. Now it was Aunt Odella bringing them up again.

  Honestly, where did Aunt Odella think I could go to next? She was my daddy’s oldest sister—although no words had ever been whispered about how much older she was. His two younger sisters lived in Detroit, but they had their own families to worry about and couldn’t be bothered with me. Everybody else was busy with the war.

  Still sitting on the end of my bed, my aunt nodded toward my father’s photograph on the shelf nearby. There he was: Charles A. Battle wearing his brand-new army uniform with a proud smile. Tell you the truth, he hardly looked real. He had one of those thin Hollywood mustaches, a neck the size of a football lineman’s, and shoulders that didn’t even fit inside the frame. His army cap was so crisp and perfectly creased, you’d swear it was made outta paper.

  Aunt Odella gave a loud sigh and picked at some invisible lint on her dress sleeve. “He’s been gone for a long time, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes ma’am.” I n
odded, wondering where this talk was heading.

  “Probably wouldn’t even recognize you now, you’ve grown so much.”

  “No ma’am.” Tried not to give an eye roll, but I never liked people talking about how tall I was. These days, me and Archie looked like David and Goliath walking around together—me being the big Goliath and him being the puny, tough David who would pop anybody in the knees for nothing. There were a couple of taller boys in our school, but the little grammar school kids still liked calling me “Big Man” whenever they saw me. “Hey, Big Man, come be our tree,” they’d say at recess, flapping their little hands in my direction. Their part of the schoolyard didn’t have any trees for tag, so if I was feeling generous, sometimes I’d stand there with my arms out, being their tree. Wasn’t much of a star at sports, anyhow.

  Aunt Odella’s gaze returned to the picture of my father. “The war’s gonna be over soon and you’ll want to be with your daddy when that happens, don’t you think?”

  I shrugged. “When he gets back, I guess.”

  He was stationed at an army post in North Carolina, but I hadn’t been dwelling on him much lately, I gotta admit. The army moved him around so often, you couldn’t really blame me for not worrying about where he was every minute or when he was coming home. Only place he hadn’t been sent to was the war itself. Which was one of life’s eternal mysteries. All these big battles were happening over in Europe and the Pacific, and he hadn’t seen a single one of them as far as we could tell.

  My aunt continued, “Well, I been doing a lot of thinking and praying about your daddy, and I decided the time’s come for you to see him again.”

  What? Flat-out shocked, I stared at Aunt Odella.

  “With the war ending any day now, I think it’s time for you to go and stay with him for a while.” Her voice was stubborn. “I done way more than my share of raising you. It’s his turn to take over. That’s what I decided. There’s a train leaving for North Carolina today.”

  Good grief almighty, was she out of her mind? Did she remember my daddy was still serving in the U.S. Army? And our country was still in a big war? And nobody had surrendered yet?