Duty and Desire

by Anju Gattani

  He put his baseball mitt-sized hand on my shoulder and guided me out to the hallway, which was the opposite of our clean, well-organized kitchenette. It had three light sconces but only one bulb that held out against the darkness, and boasted several competing lengths of wallpaper, with old designs peeking out from under newer ones like the place was some half-finished archeological dig.

  One of our neighbors, Mr. Roswell, was sitting in the hallway on a wooden chair, looking at the Defender under the dim yellow glow from the lone working bulb. He was about sixty-five years old, thin as a stick, but healthy. He never had two nickels in his pocket but always dressed like he was going to the opera. He kept the chair in the hallway because he could be sure to run across one of the many other residents of the kitchenette building, especially since his own tiny apartment was near the shared bathroom. The newspaper was an excuse to sit outside; he was barely literate. He sat on his chair and awaited his prey, like a spider.

  “Abe! I didn’t know you was in town.”

  Our neighbors always liked to see Uncle Abe, and he liked to see them. They tried to borrow money from him, and he tried to borrow money from them, and I think they ended up just passing the same old tattered dollars back and forth.

  “Yes, George, I am. I see you’re looking well, as usual.”

  “And hello, young Johnny.”

  “Hello, Mr. Roswell.”

  “You say hello to your mother and father for me, Johnny. And your sister, too.”

  Katherine was starting to catch the attention of a lot of men in the building, and not only the young ones.

  “I will, sir.”

  “So polite. Abe, I hope you’re not bringing this young man out in the hallway to punish him for something?”

  “No, not at all, George. I’m just trying to get him away from the negative influence of that crazy wife of mine. I’m trying to tell him that he needs to go to France.”

  “France!” Mr. Roswell said. “Why would he want to do that? Do you speak French, Johnny?”

  “No, sir.”

  “See there?” Mr. Roswell said.

  “You’re about as bad as Eveline. The boy can learn French, any fool can learn French if they want to. What he could get over there is freedom.”

  Mr. Roswell seemed to think about that.

  “Well, the white folks there seem a little calmer about these things,” he allowed.

  “That’s right,” Abe said. “A Race man there can own property wherever he likes. He doesn’t have to live just with his own.”

  “They have that Josephine Baker there, too, I heard,” Mr. Roswell said. “She dances in front of white audiences.”

  “Who’s out here talking about Josephine Baker?” another voice said.

  It was Lance Wilson from upstairs. He was a lanky man, not much older than Katherine. He ran policy numbers from a shop down the street, a kind of constant ongoing lottery that didn’t pay out much but didn’t cost much to play, either. My mother said he did other things, as well, and told me to keep away from him. But I always thought he seemed nice. He was also very tall, and that impressed me at the time.

  “We are telling this young man that he ought to go to France,” Mr. Roswell said, delighted to have an additional source of conversation.

  “France? He ain’t going to France before I go,” Wilson said. “I’d get a lot more out of a Josephine Baker show than he would.”

  “He wants to fly aeroplanes,” Uncle Abe said. He always pronounced it that way. The first time I heard him say it I thought he said, “arrow planes.”

  “And he should fly aeroplanes if he wants to,” Uncle Abe continued. “They’ll let him do that in France.”

  “They’ll let you do anything in France,” Wilson said with an air of authority, as if he had not just announced that he had never been there. “A Black man can go over there and have a white wife, if he wanted one. You can do whatever you want.”

  “They let a Race man fly in the Great War,” Uncle Abe said. “You know, he shot down some planes, became an ace.”

  “Yeah, I heard of him, too,” Wilson said. “Can’t remember his name, though.”

  “I read about him,” Mr. Roswell said. “I can’t remember his name, either.”

  “I better be going,” Wilson said. “Got a drawing soon. You all take care. You tell your sister hello, young man. And let me know before you head off to France.”

  “I will.”

  I started reading everything I could about France after that, looking at newspaper articles and books at the library. They spoke French. They had exquisite cooking and ate snails, which I found nasty but interesting. The population of the country was 40 million people. They used francs, whatever they were, for money instead of dollars. And they didn’t seem to hate Black people. A woman named Josephine Baker was indeed getting famous for dancing there and didn’t have to do it just in front of Black audiences. And Uncle Abe was right about the fighter pilot. He was Eugene Jacques Bullard. They let him fly for France in the Great War, and he shot down two German planes. He wasn’t an ace, though. You had to shoot down at least five airplanes to become an ace.

  I decided I wanted to become an ace, if there was ever a war again.

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