Читать книгу Front Lines - Майкл Грант - Страница 12

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FRANGIE MARR—GREENWOOD DISTRICT, TULSA, OKLAHOMA, USA

“I don’t want you to go, baby.”

Dorothy Marr tugs at the fabric, lines it up, glances at the spool of thread, presses the pedal, and ree-ree-ree-ree-ree-ree.

“I know that, Mother,” Frangie Marr says. “But you can’t pay the bills on your own. We’ll end up in the street if I don’t.”

Just about eighteen hundred miles east and a little south of Gedwell Falls, eighteen-year-old Frangie Marr sits with her mother on the screened porch where her mother hauls her battered sewing machine on hot, humid nights like this.

The screens have been torn and patched and torn again, and the mosquitoes have memorized every last one of the holes. Unseasonably warm weather has released the insects from their slumber, and Frangie slaps one that lands on her arm, leaving a spot of her own blood that she flicks away.

She’s a tiny thing, Frangie Marr, that’s what people always say about her and have since she was twelve. Her adolescent growth spurt came late and petered out early. Until age fourteen she’d been just four foot ten. Now she is five foot one—if she cheats a bit and sort of lifts herself up in her shoes.

Her mother presses the pedal on the sewing machine and runs a dozen stitches. The rabbity sound of the machine has always been part of Frangie’s life, though it used to be slower before they had electricity and the machine was foot-powered.

“You should get some sleep, Mother.” Frangie is tired of this conversation; she’s had it before. Each time her mother tells her she doesn’t have to go, and each time Frangie says she does. It feels like her mother is pushing off the responsibility, like she wants to be able to say, I told her not to go. Maybe Frangie’s being unfair thinking that, but she feels what she feels.

“Can’t sleep, sweetie, you know I have to get this dress done for tomorrow morning. You know Miss Ellie.”

“Oh, I know Miss Ellie,” Frangie says. “That is one complaining white woman.” This is safer territory for conversation. Frangie complains about her mother’s customers, and her mother in turn says things like, “Oh, she’s not so bad, ” or “Well, she has her ways. ”

Sure enough: “She’s all right,” Dorothy Marr says with tolerant smile. “At least she pays on time. And she had that ham sent around for Easter.”

Yes, she pays on time, and when Frangie was younger Miss Ellie would rub her head and say, “Need me some pickaninny juju.”

Frangie despised that and despised the woman. If she’d actually had any juju she’d have used it for her family or for herself, not transferred it to a skinny, mouse-haired, flint-eyed white woman. When Miss Ellie wasn’t rubbing Frangie’s head for luck she was making remarks like, “I reckon I could scour my pans bright with that brushy Nigra hair of yours.”

At times like that Frangie’s mother would press her lips tight into something that was not quite a smile, but not a readable expression of disapproval either. One did not talk back to white folk or object to words like pickaninny or Nigra, no, not even when it was your own daughter being referred to with casual condescension and unearned familiarity.

Maybe it’ll be different in the army.

Frangie raises her glass of barely sweet tea and says, “To getting paid.”

Her mother winces. “I always wanted you to finish school, Frangie. I saw you maybe going to college. Maybe being a doctor. That’s what you’ve been saying since you were four years old.”

“Aren’t a lot of colored doctors around.” Frangie has to say it to show she’s not some silly dreamer. She dreams all right, but she can’t set herself up to look foolish when she fails. That particular dream is for her, just for her, not even for her mother.

“Used to be before the trouble. Used be black doctors, black lawyers, even that old professor.”

“And what happened?” Frangie asks rhetorically. “White folks rioted and burned everything down. All those doctors and lawyers and such left Oklahoma for good.”

“More than twenty years ago,” her mother says. “You weren’t even born.”

“You were though.” Frangie isn’t sure whether or not she should just drop it. She’s overheard whispers at times about what her mother, then just fifteen years old, endured at the hands of the mob.

“You don’t know nothing about that,” her mother said, shutting down the conversation.

A moth beats itself against the screen, not as clever as the little mosquitoes. Survival by adaptation, that’s what they said in the science books that her school did not allow. Frangie figures in a few thousand years moths will all have died off in the face of the screened porch challenge, but mosquitoes? They have already adapted.

“Things are changing, maybe,” Dorothy Marr says, uncomfortable with her daughter’s silence. “There are plenty of colored folks being called up to this war, that’s going to mean something.” Then, as if realizing what she is saying, she stops herself and says, “But that doesn’t mean—”

Frangie laughs. She has a musical laugh that always brings smiles to the faces of even her sternest teachers. “I won’t be enlisting for the sake of colored folk, Mother. I’ll be enlisting because Daddy can’t work. Let’s be practical.”

“Please don’t ever say that to him.” Her mother glances meaningfully toward the interior where Frangie’s father sits listening to a radio program, some horror story judging by the wobbling organ music being played between bits of dialogue. Her father loves radio plays, the more gruesome the better.

“I would never,” Frangie says.

“His pride . . .”

“His pride. He gets his hip crushed on the job, and the city gives him a severance that’s half what a white man would get. Doesn’t even cover the cost of whiskey to dull the pain.”

“It ought to be your brother going,” Dorothy says, whispering the last word. Frangie’s brother, Harder, is much older, nearly twenty-one now, but he is no longer welcome in the home, and never to be spoken of within her father’s hearing.

Harder is with the union, and he’s a communist, a revolutionary, at least he talks like one. Communists are levelers who want everyone to have the same—no rich, no poor, no bosses, and no differences between races. All that might be okay, but commies are also atheists, who reject Jesus and most likely other folks’ religions, too, all of them, not just some, and that’s unacceptable, intolerable to Frangie’s father.

“Well, it isn’t him, is it?” Frangie snaps. Then she laughs to take the edge off the sound of bitterness. A little thing with a great laugh, that’s Frangie Marr. Occasionally she would also be called cute, but that’s because no one ever calls her pretty. Cute she is, with hair still wild and natural—getting it straightened costs a half dollar and only lasts a couple weeks—and a lower lip that sticks out just a bit farther than its mate and gives her a pugnacious air. The feature that makes people look at her twice, sometimes with suspicious glances, is her eyes. They are too large, wide-set, slanted a bit. And they judge, those eyes do, they watch and they take note and they judge all that they see, and lots of folks do not like that much.

To the innocent, her eyes are arresting. To a person with something on his conscience, they seem too knowing.

Her mother sews another few dozen stitches, the machine making its crazed sound. “Life is hard.”

“Pay for a private is fifty dollars a month, and they have it set up where you can send almost all of that home. They call it an allotment. Well, I guess forty dollars a month would help a lot around here, especially with one less mouth to feed.”

Her mother can’t answer that and stares down at her work. The sewing machine bulb creates a sphere of light illuminating calloused, nimble fingers, a seamed, worried face, and the gleaming steel of the rapidly stabbing needle.

Of course the money will help. It will be the difference between scraping by and ending up on the street begging relatives to take them in.

“If only your father was well, he could get on at the bomber factory once it gets running,” Dorothy says.

Just then Frangie’s little brother, Obal, comes tearing out onto the porch to report breathlessly on his doings with friends and how his best friend, Calvin, found a broken-down bike in the dump. He thought maybe they could get it fixed up well enough for him to deliver papers, or maybe even telegrams, which pays better.

“I would help him whenever he couldn’t do the work. I could make a quarter maybe, fifty cents sometimes.”

Down the street toward central Greenwood the juke joint is warming up as the night ever so slowly cools. The ramshackle building with its single, blinking red florescent letter, R for Regent’s Club, vibrates with the sound of drums and trumpet.

“Diz is playing,” Frangie says wistfully. “I’d give just about anything to be able to play a horn like that.”

“Jazz,” Dorothy says dismissively. “Devil’s music.” But there isn’t a lot of intensity behind that judgment, and Frangie notices her mother has a tendency to move in her chair in response to the rhythm coming down the street.

“I’m going to do it,” Frangie says, as if waiting for an argument.

Her mother does not argue, and Frangie thinks, My God, I am actually going to do this. There’s something familiar in the sense of abandonment that wells up within her, and then she remembers the day when her mother first dropped her off at school. She turned and walked away while little Francine—as she was called then—bawled her eyes out and got a smack on the butt from her teacher. Well, maybe it will be no worse than school, she tells herself.

“I’m going for a walk,” Frangie says. “Can I bring you back anything?”

“No, sweetheart.”

There is something final about that word coming from her mother. Sweetheart. It’s a word she uses when comforting Frangie. She used it when her grandmother, Meemaw, died. “People die, sweetheart, even the ones we love.”

Frangie passes her father, asleep now in front of the ancient radio that only gets two of the four available stations. The program has shifted to a mystery.

Frangie goes first to her “hospital” in the back yard. It’s not much—a sort of doghouse constructed out of bits of this and that. It has a chicken-wire “yard” in front with a dish of water and one of food scraps. At present there are two patients—a cat recovering from burns and a pigeon with a broken wing.

Neither patient is happy about the presence of the other. But they are separated by some chicken wire on sticks.

“How are you doing, Cleo?” Frangie kneels and reaches in to pet the understandably jittery cat. “I am going to get you both out of here if I’m going away.”

She fishes around in the small toolbox that is her medical kit—lard for salve, rags for bandages, half a bottle of iodine—which the cat really does not enjoy, no, not even a little—Popsicle stick splints and a carefully wrapped needle-and-thread kit for stitches. She takes the lard, picks a bit up on two fingers, and soothes it over the cat’s exposed skin.

“There you go. Now do not lick that off ! And do not eat Mooch. Mooch, you squawk if Cleo bothers you.”

Frangie wipes her hands, checks the chicken wire to make sure her charges are safe, and sets off toward Greenwood Street. There half a dozen two-story brick buildings have replaced a segment of what was destroyed in the riot, but which give way on all sides to vacant lots, fire-scarred derelicts, low bungalows, and intermittent sections of store fronts featuring a malt shop, pawn shops, dress shops, drinking establishments, a pool hall, and a church.

It’s always busy out on Thursday nights when maids who work for the rich white folk get their traditional night off. Busier even than usual with this muggy weather that threatens tornadoes. Frangie wears a faded green floral-print sundress and walks barefoot. The riot and the Depression both linger on in Tulsa, especially in Greenwood. Frangie owns a pair of shoes, but they’re a size too small and reserved for church, school, and bad weather. She figures she will put on her shoes when she goes to enlist, and the army will give her a good pair of boots. They’ll probably take getting used to, the boots, after so long running around barefoot or else wearing her size-too-small hand-me-down pumps.

Frangie lets herself be drawn like a fly to honey by the music throbbing from the Regent’s Club, a ramshackle affair built of wood siding and nailed-on sheets of tin. The street is dark at 9:00 p.m., but lively with maids and washerwomen, gardeners and butlers, all dressed to the limit of their pocketbooks.

“Hey, pretty girl.” This from a man in a zoot suit with its draping, high-belted trousers, and absurdly long, padded-shoulder jacket.

“You’re too old for me, Grandpa,” Frangie says breezily.

The man laughs and mimes a knife going into his heart. “Oh, little sister, why you want to hurt a man like that?”

Frangie walks on by, pleased with herself. She slows her pace as she passes the club. There’s a clarinet playing now; a wild, thrilling sound backed by what some people called “jungle” rhythms.

Frangie sings softly to herself, mimicking the instruments. “Bada da da, dada dada . . . bum bum bumbum bum bumbum bum badum bum.” Cool clarinet now, and drums and stand-up bass, all urgent and relentless.

Frangie would love to go inside, but that costs a dime except on Ladies’ Nights, and Frangie does not have a dime. But there’s no law against lurking on the street outside, swaying to the music, feeling it speak to something inside her.

Devil jazz. It seems to Frangie that devils have good taste in music.

“Frangie? Is that you?”

The voice belongs to an old schoolmate of hers, Doon Acey. He was a year ahead of her, but unlike many upper classmen he’d always been decent enough to her.

He moved away, she thought, up to Memphis, anyway she hasn’t seen him around lately. And she’s certainly never seen him like this: he’s wearing an Army Class A uniform, dark green, with a single yellow chevron on his shoulder and a rakishly tilted cap on his head.

“Doon? Well, look at you.”

Doon grins with far more confidence than he’d ever shown when she knew him as one of the less conceited athletes at school.

“You like the monkey suit?” Doon asks. He points at the stripe. “Private first class. But you can just call me PFC Acey.”

“Looks like I’ll have one for myself soon,” Frangie says. “A uniform, anyway, maybe not such a fine stripe.”

The grin drops from Doon’s face. “You got drafted? But you’re not even eighteen yet, are you?”

Frangie shrugs, feeling a little strange talking about her decision. “I’ll be eighteen soon enough, and I’m not waiting around for some draft board. I’m enlisting.”

“Enlisting?” Doon looks at her as if she might be crazy. “Why would you do a foolish thing like that?” He takes her arm and guides her a few yards away to where the crowd is less thick and the music not so urgent. “Frangie, I don’t know what you think is going on in this war, but it’s not what folks think it is, at least not for us.”

The laugh-a-minute Doon is gone suddenly, replaced by an earnest young man. Frangie is almost alarmed by the change.

“So tell me,” Frangie says.

“First of all, nothing changes between black and white. We have white officers—only white officers, no Negro officers. Most of the NCOs are colored, but it doesn’t help because we’re still doing the same old shit—sorry, I shouldn’t use that word. The same old stuff. I’m in the artillery.” He points to a small badge on his collar, two ancient cannons, crossed. “See those cannons? That’s just about how old our equipment is. The white regiments get the new stuff; we get what’s too old or broken . . . I just mean, don’t start thinking things are different for us just because we’re fighting for the same country.”

“My pop’s too hurt to work.”

“I heard about that.”

“And we need the money.”

Doon nods, accepting that, but he is still concerned. Frangie figures it’s not the first time he’s heard a similar story. “My mama talks about me going to college but can’t pay the grocer.”

“College girl, huh?” Doon brings back that wide smile of his, and she likes him for that. Too many people still didn’t believe females belong in college, let alone colored ones. “What would you study, little Frangie, if you were to go to college?”

“I guess I wouldn’t mind being a doctor,” Frangie says shyly.

“You get to be a doctor and I’ll break my arm just to give you something to fix up.”

She doesn’t know how to answer that, so she just looks down and suddenly realizes how young she must look, a short girl with no shoes. Probably looks thirteen.

“You know, you can put in to be a medic,” Doon says, snapping his fingers. “Yeah, why not if you want to be a doctor?”

“They taking us for that?”

“Medics? Sure. What do you think, some white doctor is going to tend to a Nigra that gets shot?”

Frangie has already thought along the same lines, but she is glad to have the confirmation from Doon. A medic. Has to be better than cleaning toilets or cooking stew, although her stomach rumbles a bit at the thought of stew. Dinner was beans and cornbread and not too much of either.

They stand for a while, listening to the music. The band is blistering but still somehow cool and in control.

“That man can play,” Frangie says after a while.

“Don’t you know who that is? That’s Benny Goodman. I heard a couple of his own boys are down with the grippe and he had to cancel their own gig downtown with his big band, so he came down here to play with Diz.”

“A white man playing at the Regent?”

Doon smiles. “Jazzmen don’t care a damn—sorry—for what color you are, it’s just can you play or not. And that particular white man can play some clarinet.”

“Well, I guess I have to get back or my mother will fret,” Frangie says. “Take care of yourself, Doon.”

“Send my regards to your mom and pop. I don’t forget your dad speaking up for me that time, getting me that work. So if there’s anything I can do. You know?”

“I do.” Frangie starts to walk away, turns, now walking backward, and says, “Just don’t stick your head in the wrong end of any of those old cannons. I still remember you and that car muffler you thought you could spit into.”

Doon laughs. “I’d say I’m smarter now, but look at me.” He waves his hands elegantly to indicate his uniform. “How smart am I?”