by Anju Gattani
Father moved to Chicago to get away from farming and because he hoped he might be able to put his artistic skills to some use. Mother moved to Chicago because Father was moving there and because she wanted some social justice. That was her phrase. She was tired of living in an area where everyone said the name of Jesus but then allowed white people to lynch black people and act like they were having a party. She was tired of living in a place where black people had to take it. She wanted social justice, she said, so much that I thought it was some kind of product she could not get in the South. I still don’t really know what she thought she wanted. I think she just wanted the atmosphere, just wanted to breathe some free air.
She didn’t find as much freedom as she expected, at least, not at first. She had no particular skills except the ability to cook dishes that convinced people to part with their money for church bake sales. In Chicago, she used that talent to get a job cooking for a wealthy white family who lived a few blocks east of Washington Park. Father got a job with a sign-painting company that was doing work all over town, for Negros and whites alike. It was a CIO union shop and, for the first time in his life, he worked alongside white men who would sometimes call him “Mr. Nicholas,” which never happened down South. They both worked hard but made good money, maybe $80 a week. We lived in a pretty nice apartment and they thought they might be able to buy it someday. I don’t remember all the physical parts of it, but Katherine never forgot them; she never lived anyplace better. She talked about it for years after, used to describe it like a palace, its smooth wood floors and the front door that was rounded on the top. We lived there for one year, and then the bottom fell out of the world.
“Mrs. Carson took me aside today,” Mother said one day while she was folding laundry.
Father grunted. He was pawing through the Chicago Defender and the Bee looking for jobs, while Katherine and I gnawed on cold chicken still wet from the icebox.
“What did she say this time?” he asked after a moment, not taking his eyes from the words on the page. He was not a strong reader and did not like to lose his place.
Mrs. Carson taking Mother aside was not an uncommon thing. She took her aside to ask her to wash the sheets early because her son had a problem with his bladder, and again to ask her never to be alone with Mr. Carson because Mr. Carson sometimes drank and let his hands wander where they should not, and again to warn her never to store anything in the icebox without first asking permission, as it would need to be kept in a separate section.
“She said they want to cut my wages in half, and if I don’t agree to it, they’ll have to let me go.”
Father looked up. “You’re kidding.”
She did not even answer that. She was obviously not kidding. Mother would never joke about money.
“She said the problems are hitting them, too. They’re selling one of their cars and they’re letting go of the cook altogether.”
“That’s just wonderful. Nobody wants signs painted anymore, they’re happy with just cardboard and black paint, so I’m out of work, and now we’re losing half your salary. Kids, maybe you should learn to pick cotton and we’ll move back to Alabama.”
“No!” Katherine and I said in ragged unison.
“I’m sure it’s not any better there, Carl.”
“I’m sure it’s not. Not any worse, either.”
“It’s never any better or any worse, that’s why we left.”
He just sighed and looked back at the paper, but there was little there for him. He was physically large enough to work in the stockyards but did not want to. He wanted to make money doing something that interested him and challenged his talents, which meant he was born in the wrong place and time.
“She wants an answer by tomorrow. What should I tell her?”
“You know what to tell her,” he said without looking up.
About two months later, we moved into a kitchenette apartment closer to the railroad tracks. The trains were not all that close, but you could feel them rumbling in your bones, all the time, so you could never forget they were there. The apartment was one of about thirty that had been carved out in a grand old house that once held just one family. The building had gotten old and feeble, but you could still catch glimpses of its former glory. Some of the doors had very elaborate archways, with glass transoms that had been painted shut; some of the ceilings were pressed tin, with tiny elaborate designs raised in them like veins under the skin; marble peeked out here and there from windowsills. Our kitchenette had none of these things. It had been slapped up in a corner of what used to be a much larger room. A false ceiling hid the tin, the door had been carved out of a thin dividing wall, and none too straight, and the windowsill was made up more of cracks than wood, leaking furiously when it rained.
The kitchen consisted of a stove and an icebox pushed up against the side wall like awkward guests at a party. The rest of the room was just a room and had to hold all four of us, as well as any guests who might come through. The bathroom was down the hall and was shared with half the building. That did not bother me all that much, but Mother despised it, and for Katherine, it probably proved to be her downfall.
It did not take us long to move. Everything we owned we had carried on a train—and we had added very little to it since—so the deed was done in the space of an afternoon, including travel time. The first thing Mother did was put up the small picture of Jesus that she carried everywhere. He was looking out at the viewer with a hint of a smile, and, with one hand, revealed a red, glowing heart.
“He looks over us, wherever we are,” Mother said. “Even in the most degraded of circumstances.”
“It’s not that bad,” Father said, irritated. It had taken him some work even to find this place.
3: The Promised Land
“Got one!” I said, but not too loud.
My friend Nelson Ray and I were playing World War I bomber pilots. Our bombs were acorns. Our targets, standing in for the Germans, were whoever walked under the largest oak on the western side of Washington Park.
In my memory, I spent nearly all my time in the park. I felt like I had the whole world open to me when I was there. It had everything: trees, horses, enough grass to make up two or three football fields, a lagoon as big as the ocean. That’s how it seemed at the time, anyway.
In those days, our folks let us out to run all day in the park. I’ve seen how your mother keeps an eye on you from her kitchen window. You get out of her sight for three seconds and she’s out the door after you. That’s not bad, I know she means the best. But that’s not the way things used to be. Kids were kids then, and they were supposed to be outside, and that was fine with me. If I dared stay inside too long, my mother would find me something to do.
Nelson was a tiny little boy, even smaller than me, but he was fast and could climb like a monkey. He lived to the east of the park somewhere—I never went to his house, and he never came to my kitchenette—but his father ran a dry-cleaning store in the neighborhood and was generally considered to be fair to Negroes. His father knew he played with me, because I sometimes met him at the store, but he obviously did not mind. That didn’t mean anything to me at the time. It does now.
“I don’t think you got her,” Nelson said from above.
He was higher up the tree than I was, sprawled over a limb like a panther.
“I did, too.”
“She didn’t look up.”
“I hit her, though. I saw it bounce off her foot.”
It actually was a little hard to scope out our victories because as soon as the bombs were away, we pulled in our arms and legs as best we could to hide. But I did think I saw it bounce off her foot.
“Here comes somebody,” Nelson hissed. “He’s mine.”
A large man passed underneath, wearing a natty suit and a fedora perched at a jaunty angle, complete with a small red feather. I waited to see the acorn go by, and to hear the simulated scream of a falling bomb, but nothing
happened.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Did you see that guy?” Nelson responded. “He was huge!”
“So? He’s not going to climb up here after you, not dressed like that.”
“I don’t care. He’s big. I just wanted him to go on by.”
Just about then we heard a ragged, tearing sound. I looked up to see an old airplane towing a banner high in the sky above the city. The banner was touting a restaurant or something, but it was at an angle and I couldn’t quite read it. The aircraft was a biplane, a two-winged contraption left over from the First World War. It either sustained serious damage in the war, or had gone without repair, or both. It sounded like a motorcycle as it sputtered across the blue. We watched it until it disappeared behind the apartment buildings on the other side of the park, and half expected to hear a resounding crash.
When it was gone, I flattened my stomach on the branch and held my arms out straight.
“When I grow up, I am going to be a pilot,” I said.
“A pilot?” Nelson said. “What kind of pilot?”
“For the Army. A bomber pilot. Dropping real bombs, not acorns. I will bomb the Germans.”
“But we’re not fighting the Germans anymore. And anyway, you can’t be no bomber pilot.”
“Why not?”
“Johnny, take a look at your arms.”
I did. They were black, same as they are now.
“That’s why. You’re a Negro. The government won’t let you.”
“So what? I can still grab a stick and bomb Germany.”
“We’re not fighting the Germans anymore.”
“I know that. I can still bomb anyone who needs to be bombed.”
“I know you could. I don’t know if you’d be a good bomber, though, the way you drop them acorns. But anyway, it doesn’t matter, they won’t let you.”
“Who? The Army? Or white people?”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Why not, though? It doesn’t make sense.” I knew he was right; I couldn’t be born in Alabama and not know he was right. I couldn’t grow up in America and not know he was right.
“They don’t think you can handle it, I guess. You don’t ever hear white people talking. Some of them don’t even want you to drive, and so they sure don’t want you up over their heads in a plane.”
When Nelson was telling me things I already knew, it did not occur to me to hate him because he was one of the people wanting to hold me back. I knew he wasn’t like that. I could separate him out from the people we were talking about. If a child can do that, I don’t know why adults can’t. Well, I do know now, but I didn’t then.
That night, as I lay in my small bed in a corner of the kitchenette, I burned with the desire to be a pilot for the Army just because Nelson said I couldn’t. The desire had stayed with me that entire afternoon. Nelson and I had wreaked holy hell on the Germans below us with our explosive acorns until some of the older boys who played in the park threatened to come up to where we were and make us eat those acorns, or something worse. We had suspended our bombing campaign then, but I still thought about it.
The desire to fly was born in me that day. Unlike so many childhood interests, it did not die for many years. Nelson is dead now, though. I saw less and less of him as life pulled us apart, to the point that I probably wouldn’t have known him as an adult if I saw him on the street. I heard he took over his father’s store, had a couple of kids and then got drafted. He made a mistake; he didn’t fly. He was infantry. I heard he died in the Battle of the Bulge. So now he knows more about life and death than I do.
#
My uncle Abe visited the next week. I was still stewing about my lack of flying potential, so I took it up with him.
“Why so down, little man?”
“Leave him alone, Abe, let him be,” Aunt Eveline said.
She was reading a stack of newspapers borrowed from the Jacksons down the hall. Eveline was perfectly content to be quiet for hours on end, but Abe was not a reader and was not himself if he was not talking.
“I’m just asking the young man a question,” he said. “Read your papers, woman. Something’s got him upset. Look at that serious face.”
Abernathy, or Abe, was a big man with big appetites. He took up nearly an entire corner of the kitchenette whenever he visited, while Aunt Eveline would barely occupy a single chair. I do not know of any food he would not eat and eat a lot of. His chest was huge, almost as big around as one of the oaks in the park, and he draped it in the finest suits he could afford. He roamed all over the country in a gigantic yellow Cadillac with Aunt Eveline, moving fearlessly through the Deep South, even through the places where Negroes were not allowed to stop and go to the restroom, which was almost everywhere. Uncle Abe said he had the biggest bladder in the South and didn’t need to stop.
“I was just thinking about something, that’s all.”
“Tell me. Tell your Uncle Abe. You and Uncle Abe and God can sort it out.”
A few words about God and Uncle Abe: Mother’s “little” brother was a preacher of sorts. He had held a variety of jobs—some of which made my parents argue—but the most recent was jack-leg preacher. He felt the calling of Jesus, he said, and he wanted a flock to lead.
“He feels the calling of George Washington,” said Father when he heard the news. “And he wants some sheep to give him as many Washingtons as he can get his hands on.”
The problem for Abe was that he roamed so much that he was not a known quantity in Chicago. He could not just show up and get a church going.
“You got to get in there with the people and get to know the church,” he said. “You got to know what the people need. You got to find out why their current pastor is not giving it to them, then you got to provide.”
Uncle Abe became an assistant pastor at the South Side Baptist Fellowship, which met in a building that used to house a Jewish deli. It was where Mother and I went to church regularly, sometimes accompanied by a reluctant Father, occasionally by an even more reluctant Katherine. There was another assistant pastor, too, another shark in the tank. The jobs were unpaid and were mostly filled in case Brother Johnston was sick. It also gave the assistant pastors the opportunity to undermine Brother Johnston whenever they could so they could get their own churches started. Brother Johnston was in good health, at the moment, so Uncle Abe did not have much to do but lounge around the kitchenette and talk to me.
“I’m not upset. It’s just my friend said something the other day and I’ve been thinking about it.”
“What friend?”
When Uncle Abe was paying attention to you, he paid attention to you. His face settled into what looked almost like a parody of concern, but he was serious. It was a good trait for an aspiring preacher.
“Nelson. Nelson Ray.”
“That little redheaded white boy I’ve seen you with? His father has that dry cleaning place on 45th?”
“That’s right.”
“I hear good things about his father. I would rather see a Race man have that business, but if a white man must have it, I guess Nelson’s father is good enough. So, what did this young man tell you?”
“He told me that I couldn’t fly for the Army because I’m a Negro.”
Aunt Eveline, who was supposed to be reading, snorted a little laugh at that.
“What are you making noise at, woman?” Abe asked. “The young man has a serious concern.”
“Ain’t nobody, white or Black, ought to be flying,” Eveline said. “Birds and bats, because they have wings, and that’s it.”
She was quiet but consistent in her way and I don’t think she ever did fly in her whole life.
“Shush,” Abe said, turning back to me. “Well, Johnny, I have to tell you that your friend is right. You can’t fly for the Army. But that don’t mean you can’t fly at all.”
“But how?” I asked.
“You don’t have to
be a military flier. You can fly the mail, or just do barnstorming, if you want.”
“Abe, why don’t you just kill him now and be done with it?” Eveline said.
“I will not snuff out the dreams of the young,” Abe replied. “Now, Johnny, there is one problem. You’ll find it hard to get trained in this country. The white man will keep us down however he can, and that includes keeping us down on the ground. But there are places you can go where they are willing to look beyond the color of your skin. You need to get to France.”
“France?” I said, in unison with Aunt Eveline.
“That’s right, France. France has trained Race flyers. I read about it in the Defender. There was a Race man who went over to France in the Great War. The U.S. Army wouldn’t let him fly but he flew for France and could shoot down German planes as well as anybody. He became an ace. And there was Bessie Coleman. You heard of Bessie Coleman?”
She sounded a little familiar, but I wasn’t sure.
“She was from right here in Chicago. A woman, to boot. Used to do up hair right here in the neighborhood, but decided she wanted to fly aeroplanes. She went over to France and learned how, and then came back and showed everybody how a Race woman could fly.”
“And she crashed her plane and died,” Eveline said.
“Woman! I am trying to encourage this boy!”
“Encourage him to be safe, then.”
Uncle Abe rolled his eyes.
“Come on, let’s go out in the hallway.”