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