Flygirl

by Sherri L. Smith

  Jolene shakes her head. “You’re a fool, Ida Mae. At least when a girl passes for white down here, it’s to have a better life. Not to end up dead. You are a colored girl, no matter how high yellow you look or how white you act. The army don’t even know who your family is. If something happens to you, you think they’ll write a letter to some colored folk so we can collect the body?”

  “Seems like everybody around here is so busy telling me I can’t that they won’t spare a minute to say I can, and did, do what I said I would,” I snap. “You can’t take it away from me, Jolene. Even if you’re jealous. Even if your skin’s so dark all you’ll ever be is a housemaid. No, don’t worry about me. I’ll be just fine.”

  The ladies up front are watching us now. Apparently they can hear something. Eliza is leaning forward to listen better, and Miss Mary looks worried. My cheeks are burning with anger and embarrassment. I lift up my hair dryer and feel my curls. They’re dry enough. “I’m done here.” I stand up. Jolene watches me with hurt in her deep brown eyes.

  Well, I’m hurt, too.

  Jolene shakes her head again and goes back under the dryer. I pick up my own magazine and walk to the front of the shop, where Miss Mary sets me down to style my hair.

  “Everything all right, baby?” she asks.

  “Everything’s just fine.” The angry lava inside me is already cooling down, turning into a lump of cold pride. And regret. But all I want to do is go home.

  It feels like a lifetime before Miss Mary tells me my hair is done. Jolene is still under her dryer, her face hidden by a magazine. “Please tell Jolene I’ve gone home,” I ask Miss Mary.

  “Of course, darling.” She lets me out of the chair and grabs a handful of my curls. “Such good hair,” she says, smiling. “Such good hair.”

  When I get home, I find Mama in the kitchen, making drop biscuits to go with the chicken she’s roasting. There’s a pile of mustard greens on the table. I wash my hands in the kitchen sink and sit down in front of the greens without a word, glad to stop using my head for a while. Jolene’s got me so turned around, I don’t know which way is up. I wish the army had taught us how to navigate feelings as easily as they did a starless night sky.

  Mama’s new Fiestaware bowl, the one that looks so much like jade in the afternoon light, fills slowly as I sift through the greens, sliding my fingers down the spines, breaking off the tough, soil-heavy stems. Greens should go down smooth, not rough and hard to chew. The sharp, spicy smell of the leaves sprays the air. Mama just keeps mixing her biscuit dough. We fall into the rhythms of the kitchen so easily it’s a wonder I’ve ever been away.

  Mama hasn’t said much to me since my first night back. If things were different, she’d know something was wrong now and ask me about it. She’d give me advice on what to say to Jolene, tell me how friendship is more important than pride. But her silence is stubborn and I don’t know if she’d take her own good advice right now. Not when she’s set her mind otherwise. That’s something I guess I learned from her.

  I remember how she was when Daddy left her, still pregnant with Abel, and went off to Chicago to learn to fly. Mama wore black that whole five months and acted like she’d been widowed. Daddy hated knowing she was dressed that way. Said it was like a flower putting on a hat, covering everything pretty. Daddy was back before Abel was born, but Mama never really forgave him.

  I shake my head at the memory. Funny to realize that when she actually became a widow, Mama only wore black once, at the funeral, and then never again. Maybe she thinks Daddy’s watching his flower from heaven now.

  “Hey, Ida.” Abel comes bounding into the kitchen, his arms full of strawberries. “Found these at the far end of the field,” he says with a grin. “Mama, can I have a bowl?”

  “You know where they are,” she says, shaking her head. Mama’s back is turned to us, but I know she’s smiling just the same.

  Abel pulls out his shirt from the bottom with one finger, making a hammock, and dumps the berries from his arms into the cloth.

  “Abel,” I warn him.

  “Young man, if that stains, you’ll be bleaching it out yourself,” Mama says, turning around from her biscuit dough for the first time. The white batter clings to her fingers in little peaks. Abel giggles and reaches over the counter for a bowl.

  “You said get a bowl,” he insists. Lucky for him, there’s nothing but a little dirt left on his shirt. He shakes it off into the garbage pail and rinses the berries under the faucet.

  “Can we save some biscuits for shortcakes?” he asks.

  “Now, where do you think I’m going to come up with cream just so you can have shortcake?” Mama asks him, moving to the sink herself to wash her hands.

  Abel shrugs. “I thought it’d be nice. Ida’s home.”

  Mama glances over at me for the first time. Her face softens. “That’s a fine idea, Abel,” she says to him. “We’ll see what we can do.”

  “Thanks, Mama.” Abel smiles at both of us and tears out of the kitchen just as fast as he came, in the way that only young boys do.

  “I can’t believe how big he’s gotten,” I say, watching those long, jackrabbit legs carry him out of the room.

  “Three children, and I never get used to how fast you all have grown up,” Mama says. She towels her hands dry on her apron and opens the oven to baste the chicken.

  “Another hour on dinner,” Mama says. She puts her biscuit dough in the icebox. Nice thing about drop biscuits. You don’t have to worry about them rising.

  “Now, let’s see about that cream.” Mama reaches for a coffee can on top of the icebox, where she keeps her rationing coupons, and sits at the table.

  “I’ve got some snap beans in the icebox that could use some cleaning, if you got the time,” she says.

  I’ve got the time, all right. Jolene isn’t going to want to see a movie with me now, or ever. Maybe even if I had the words to apologize. “We having snap beans or greens tonight?”

  “Put the mustard greens on,” Mama says. “There’s salt meat in the icebox to season them with. The beans are for tomorrow.”

  I find the big pot Mama uses for greens and drop a few pieces of the pink-and-white salt meat into the bottom with the greens. Mama’s cooking up a storm, but today I’ve lost my appetite.

  “I’ve missed you, Ida Mae,” Mama says out of the blue.

  I join her at the table with the bag of green beans. “I’ve missed you, too, Mama.”

  We work in silence for a while, me with my green beans and Mama shuffling through her stamps looking for a coupon for a pint of cream.

  “Aren’t you going downtown with Jolene tonight?”

  “No, ma’am.” I swallow around the lump in my throat. “Not tonight.”

  Mama stops her shuffling and looks up at me. “What did you girls get up to?”

  I shrug, but Mama knows how to get an answer out of me. She sets her elbows on the table and gives me a stare that says she’s got all the time in the world.

  “We got into it over nothing,” I say. But it isn’t nothing, really. It’s everything. “She’s mad at me because I’m passing and she can’t.”

  Mama raises an eyebrow. “Is that what she said?”

  I think about it and shake my head, getting angry all over again. “No. What she said was I’m a fool, a fool for thinking I can be a WASP. But I’m not, Mama. I’m doing it, no matter what anyone says. I know you think I should come home, but I can’t. They need me to fly just as much as any of you need me here.”

  Mama laughs sharply. “Baby girl, Uncle Sam doesn’t need you. Uncle Sam doesn’t need anyone in particular. He just takes whoever he can get and tosses them up to the slaughter.”

  “Mama, don’t start.” I drop the snap bean in my hand into the bowl.

  “Somebody needs to. Somebody needs to talk some sense to you.”

  I stand up from the table. “I thought you understood, Mama. When you came to see me at the base, when you risked everything to tell me that Th
omas was missing, you said you were proud of me. I thought you finally understood why I wanted to be a WASP. Are you saying that’s all over now that Thomas is back home? Now we can let the country fend for itself, let all of those other sons and brothers find their own way back home because we’ve got ours?”

  Mama is standing now, too, and for the first time I realize we are both exactly the same height. She stares me down with those brown eyes, nostrils flaring, as if to say, “Girl, don’t you take that tone with me.”

  But she doesn’t say it.

  Instead, she looks at me hard and says, “Ida Mae, people are dying. Women are dying. You think I don’t read the paper? Every time there is an airplane crash reported, I think of you. Do you think I don’t wonder if maybe, on this or that stormy night, you’re up there flying in the lightning and the hail? Just the way I worried about Thomas overseas, trying to save those boys from dying in the swamps and the heat.” She comes toward me, grasping my hand in both of hers.

  “Baby, I don’t care if you come home and clean houses or even if you run off like your daddy’s people and pass for white in some town I’ve never seen. But I want you to be safe. Safer than I can keep you if you go back and fly for the army, your country, or any other reason. I want my little girl to live.”

  I stare at my mother for a long time, and suddenly, I can’t keep the truth from her. “My best friend died last month, Mama. It was awful. Worse than I can say. She knew something was wrong with her plane, but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. I watched her come in for a landing, all wrong, but there wasn’t anything else that could be done. And when her wheels hit the ground, it sparked the fuel tank and . . . I’ve never seen such a ball of fire.”

  Mama pulls me into the hug that I’ve been wanting ever since that awful day. “Her name was Patsy, Mama. Patsy.” I cry on my mother’s shoulder, and she holds me the way she used to. I don’t feel so tall anymore, standing in the kitchen with her arms around me.

  “Mama, I get so scared sometimes. But then I feel so free when I’m up there, like nothing can go wrong. I know it does sometimes. I know it does. It’s dangerous, but life is dangerous, isn’t it? You’ve heard the news, the same as me, Mama. This war is bad. If it reaches our shores, who knows what will happen? I can’t let fear stop me. Not when there’s so much in this world to be afraid of.”

  Mama pulls away from me and holds me at arm’s length. “Baby girl, I’m sorry about your friend. But I don’t know what I’ll do if it happens to you. Thomas being back home is a miracle. I don’t know if God will give me another one.”

  I feel such misery, I can only look at my mother and think again about the high cost of war. Why should she have to pay?

  Just then, Abel comes running back into the room. “Grandy got some cream from Mr. Brandy’s cow. Mr. Brandy said we could have it if we bring him a shortcake.” He’s excited, out of breath, and so carefree he seems to float across the linoleum toward us. Mama wipes her eyes with her apron and turns to him.

  “Well, isn’t that nice?”

  “Can I have a pitcher?” he asks.

  “Of course. Now, thank Mr. Brandy for me.” She moves to the cabinet and pulls down a small jug.

  I sigh and pick my bowl of snap beans off the table.

  Abel passes me on his way out. “Your hair looks pretty, Ida Mae.”

  “Thanks, Abel.”

  He grins and is gone.

  “Supper’s in half an hour, Abel,” Mama calls after him. Just like that, we fall back into the kitchen rhythms and stop all talk of war.

  Coming home isn’t what I thought it would be. I come down to help with lunch on my last day and the tension that had broken between Mama and me is back. She moves slowly through the kitchen, making sandwiches, not quite looking at me. She knows I’m leaving, but she’s more sad than angry about it now. Rather than sit with that sorrow, I tell her I’m not hungry and head outside to be alone. Jolene isn’t talking to me ever since that day at the hairdresser’s. My face grows warm with shame just thinking about the things I said to her. But I don’t know how to take them back. I’m not even sure if I want to. Maybe both of us were wrong.

  No, home isn’t what I thought it would be. I don’t know what I was expecting. A parade, a party, or a reception like those people sitting on the hoods of their trucks out at Baker’s Pond gave us. But not this.

  I walk out into the strawberry fields. When I was young, I would lie on my back at the edge of the field and look at the clouds. Today, I just keep walking. On the other side of the field, past the tree line, is a little stream. More of a ditch, really. We used to fish for crawdads in the mud there, when Daddy was still alive. I go there now and find a good rock to sit on. The clouds skid by overhead on the spring breeze.

  God, I wish Daddy was here. He understood me. At least, I like to think he did. We grow up into people our families don’t always recognize. Like little Abel, whose growth spurts make him look like a basketball player now, and Thomas, who used to be so big and strong, suddenly bedridden and weak. And me, I don’t even know if I’m colored or white anymore. Ida Mae Jones or Jonesy. I want to be them both.

  “Ida, Ida Mae!” Somebody’s hollering after me. I slide off my rock and rest my back up against it. If I’m lucky, they won’t see me from the other side.

  “Girl, don’t be hiding from me. I can see you just the same!”

  Shoot. I peek over the rock. Grandy’s coming toward me, an oily rag in one hand, a tractor engine part in the other. I don’t know if that old thing’s actually ever broken or if he just likes taking it apart.

  “Sorry, Grandy. Just looking to be alone for a little while.”

  Grandy comes up to me, sweat on his brow, his overalls a patchwork of dirt and grass stains. Aside from his hands and his work clothes, Grandy is the cleanest man I’ve ever seen.

  “Plenty of time to be alone on the way back to Sweetwater,” he tells me.

  I smile at him, but it’s a sad smile. “I don’t know if I’m going back.”

  Grandy looks at me like I’m the fine print on a city lawyer’s contract. “Of course you’re going back.”

  He turns and walks back through the trees, toward our strawberry fields. I have to jump up to catch up with him.

  “I want to, but Mama’s against it.”

  Grandy shakes his head. “The two of you are more like sisters than mother and daughter. Twins, at that.”

  He turns around to face me. “Ida, you’ve been hardheaded for far too long to stop now. That’s your daddy in you, and your mama, too. And if there’s one thing I know, you can’t fight blood. That’s why your mama had to let your daddy fly. And that’s why she had to pretend she didn’t love every minute of it when she was up in that damn plane with him.

  “You see, we all have our nature at the core of everything we do. There’s no changing it, no matter how we try. That’s why I’m a farming man. Have been, ever since Lincoln gave my granddaddy an acre and no mule to work it with. And why your mother is the head of the household, man or no man around the house. And why you have to fly, no matter what it takes.”

  I blink, astonished. Sudden tears fill my eyes. “But it’s dangerous, Grandy.” I think of Patsy’s tiny funeral, with only me, Lily, and Emily Harper present. At least we knew about Patsy’s landlady. But I can’t risk telling anyone about my family. Jolene was right. If something happens, who will tell them about me?

  “A tractor killed your daddy, Ida Mae, but we still use tractors. An airplane is no different. It’s just a tool, if you know how to use it right.”

  It’s the same argument I gave Mama, but I shake my head. “Everything I’m doing is based on a lie. I’ve turned my back on where I come from, Grandy, on being who we are.”

  We’ve reached the tractor, resting in the field like an ailing cow. Grandy reaches under the shiny red hood and yanks out a rubber tube. “Baby girl, haven’t you heard a thing I’ve said? You are who you are, Ida Mae. Black or white, red or brown, you
can’t change it.”

  He hands me the hose and the engine part. I stand by dutifully while he dives in with both hands.

  “If . . .” He grunts, pulling at another hose. “If some white folks want to buy what you’re selling, let ’em. In the end, the goods are delivered. Right?”

  “Right.” The tears are coming now, but I’m smiling, too.

  “They get their planes, don’t they? You ain’t selling them to the secret Negro army, are you?”

  “No, Grandy. I’m not.” He’s trying to make me laugh. It’s almost working.

  “Well, then. Give me that hose back.” I hand it to him. “This damn tractor’s useless.”

  “Then why do you keep giving it a new paint job every year?”

  Grandy frowns at me. “Don’t sass me, girl. Besides, a man’s got to have something to do with his hands.”

  For the first time, I look at Grandy’s tractor engine. “You know, at the base, we learned to fix our own airplanes. I bet I could take a look at this for you.”

  Grandy finishes reassembling the last piece. He turns to me with a disapproving glare and slowly wipes the grease from his hands onto his faded red rag.

  “Ida Mae Jones, you truly haven’t heard a thing I’ve said. I told you, a man’s got to have something to do with his hands. This tractor is mine. You go find something else to occupy your time.”

  I stand there in front of my grandfather and think he’s the next-best thing to having Daddy here. Grandy keeps that stern face up, even though he’s got me smiling from ear to ear. I throw my arms around his neck and pull his head down so I can kiss his bald spot.

  “I think I know where I can find a few airplanes,” I tell him.

  Now Grandy smiles, pink gums and white teeth. He laughs, a low chuckle that sounds like he’s heard a dirty joke. “Now, that’s my girl. Finally got her ears open. Tell your mama you’ve got a job to do. She’ll come around. Even if she says she won’t. That’s the way it was with your daddy.”