Flygirl (7 page)

In the bathroom, I wash my face twice. The red rims around my eyes won't go away and neither will the tender bruising where my mother slapped me for the first time in my life. I give up and finish getting dressed. There is a tiny hole in Jolene's nylons, right on the knee. Maybe it won't run. Maybe I can buy her a new pair.

The girl in the mirror looks hollow. Big dark eyes like empty wells. I look unnaturally pale, sickly, almost green.

I turn away from my reflection and hang Jolene's hose up to dry. Adjusting the straps on my overalls, I go downstairs to pay the piper.

Grandy and Abel are sitting at the kitchen table. I wish Abel wasn't here for this. There are things he shouldn't have to worry about until he's older. But Mama's always made us sit through each other's talking-tos so we both learn the lesson with only one of us having made the mistake. Mama jumps up from her chair the minute I come in and goes to the window. She won't look at me. I stand in front of all of them, unsure if I should sit down. Unsure if I'm welcome.

“I knew one day you'd go to see her,” Mama says, her voice strained and quiet.

I blink in confusion. “Mama?”

She turns around and her eyes are as red as mine. “Don't ‘mama' me, girl. You know who I'm talking about. Was this for her?”

I swallow hard, all the pieces falling into place. “No. This wasn't about Grandmère Boudreaux.”

My father's mother, French-speaking, Creole, light-skinned Grandmère Boudreaux, has money and status that goes with her maiden name. She's my daddy's only immediate family and we've never even met. I know where her house is, on one of those streets uptown in the Garden District of New Orleans, one of the old houses built for the free people of color before the Civil War. A fashionable neighborhood for the almost white. The rest of my family would never dare set foot there—Thomas's hair's too kinky, Abel's skin too brown. But I've got the right complexion, the right texture to my hair. I'd fit right in.

She could take me to Paris if she wanted to, to where colored women can learn to fly. Just like Bessie Coleman, the first colored woman pilot. Of course, with my father's mother, I wouldn't need to be colored if I didn't want to be.

I never knew my mother was afraid of that fact until now.

 

My father's people were town people, city folks who followed opportunity the way a compass follows north. Sometime back, one of them found herself with child by a white man. They steered that half-colored girl down a path that made each generation lighter than light, having children by white men and marrying those children to other mixed coloreds, lighter and whiter until my father was born.

Daddy was destined to marry a white woman, to be a
passé blanc
and give his family a better lot in life. But Daddy wasn't an opportunist. He was a romantic, and his heart chose Mama. Grandmère Boudreaux never forgave Daddy for his choice of a brown-skinned bride or his career as a strawberry farmer, which he learned from Grandy and mixed with his college learning. Grandmère drove out to our house only once, when I was nine years old, to have a look at us, as Daddy said. A look was all it was, too.

She drove up in a brand-new Studebaker caked with country dust. Our dust. The back window rolled down slowly as the car came to a stop at the end of our driveway. It never turned to come up to the house.

From the front steps, itching in my Sunday best, between a stiff-jawed Thomas and an unusually quiet Mama, I caught my only glimpse of Grandmère Boudreaux through that open window. She was fair. Not like milk, but cream, the good kind you pour into coffee on special occasions, the same shade as the paper flowers in Mama's old Easter hat. Her hair fell in soft, graying finger waves, like a movie star. Her powdered skin was set in an expression so severe it looked like it hurt. Her mouth was a firm red slash in that pale, pale face.

One of her gloved fingers went up in the air, like she was pointing at a bird. The window rolled back up and the Studebaker drove away.

Mama harrumphed, the way she does when she knows I'm lying, and marched us back inside to put on our regular play clothes. Daddy just sat down on the front steps, his hat in his hands, and hung his head. I'd never seen him like that before. Later that night, when Mama gave me my bath, I asked her how I could be like Grandmère. Her jaw clenched real tight and she said, “Marry a white man.”

 

Mama seems to deflate when she hears I haven't been to see Grandmère Boudreaux, a sigh of relief that loosens her shoulders and makes her seem like my mother again. Grandy sighs and gets up from the table. My eyes follow his back as he starts to make a pot of coffee.

“Young woman, you'd best not be setting after a fella like that,” he says without turning around.

I blush, but it's a feeling of relief. “Only one fella, Grandy. Thomas.” That gets everyone's attention, even Abel. Grandy comes back to the table but doesn't sit down. Mama sits real still, her eyes on me.

“I had an interview. To join the Women Airforce Service Pilots. And it looks like I might have a shot.” I smile in spite of myself and drop it just as fast. No one's saying anything. I swallow hard. “Remember that article Abel gave me?”

Abel ducks his head so Mama can't see his smile.

“Oh, Lord,” Grandy says under his breath.

“What are you talking about, girl?” Mama asks. “You might be able to fake white, but even you can't fake being a pilot.”

I didn't think I could feel more ashamed than I already did, but leave it to Mama to get me there.

“I used Daddy's license,” I say quietly. Now I'm the one ducking my head.

My mother gets up and walks away. I can't let it happen like this.

“Just listen to me. Listen to me!” I all but shout, and Mama stops in her tracks. I've never raised my voice to her and gotten away with it. But I'm not a little girl anymore.

“Somebody has got to do something. So I went. I put my name on Daddy's license and I went and got an interview. And you know what? I wasn't hiding anything when I went into that room and sat face-to-face with an actual woman Army Air Forces pilot. And do you know what she saw? Not a Negro woman, not a white woman, not a high yellow. But a pilot, Mama. A good pilot that they need. Don't you see? This is what Daddy used to fly for. The chance to be everything other than the color of his skin.”

No one says anything and I realize I'm on my feet and my heart is beating fast.

“Maybe Uncle Sam doesn't care about Thomas. Maybe a colored soldier doesn't have a chance in the world. But I do, Mama. So what if they think I'm white? Let them see what they want to see. I'm still me.”

Mama laughs then, a low chuckle. She leans up against the doorjamb and for a minute she doesn't look like my mama anymore. She looks like the woman in my parents' wedding picture—young and full of pride. The picture ran in the paper, the only time Daddy's mother ever saw her new daughter-in-law up close.

“Baby, you don't know what you are getting into. You do not know. But your daddy did. He knew what his mother was asking of him, every day to turn his head away from his people but never really hold his head up with white folks, either. Always looking in the mirror, making sure his hair stayed straight, his skin stayed light. Do you know there's a whole side to his family he wasn't allowed to see? Didn't want to be marked ‘colored' by association. Are you prepared for that? Are you willing to give up your brothers? Grandy? Me?”

I don't say anything. We are “that” side of the family, because Daddy married Mama. My jaw tightens, but I don't back down. I've gotten this far. I'm not going to let anything stop me now. Besides, plenty of folks have passed for a better job, like Stevia Johnson. What I'm doing is no different, except it can help my brother win the war.

Mama must see the determination in my face because she leans in close and jabs a finger into the tabletop. “Listen to me, girl. Because you are young and you don't know, I'm here to tell you: you cross that line, you cannot cross back just as you please. Look at her, at Mrs. Geneviève Boudreaux, too proud to even visit her own grandchildren or go to her son's funeral! And now this . . .”

Mama shakes her head. “I hope to God you don't get in. I hope to God you never have to learn what your daddy already knew.”

She looks at me with such sorrow, I think my heart will break.

“Ida Mae.” Every fear, every hope, a dozen slaps, and a thousand hugs are in those two words, my name. She repeats it: “Ida Mae.”

On the stove, Grandy's coffee comes to a boil.

“Abel, want a sugar lump of coffee?” Grandy has stayed quiet through all of this. I'm Mama's child to raise, not his. If he has something to say, he'll take it up with her later.

Abel happily scrambles off his chair to get a saucer for his little sip of coffee. Grandy puts a half spoon of sugar on the saucer and adds two spoonfuls of coffee. Thomas and I used to do the same thing when we were his age.

The house feels stuffy all of a sudden. “I'm gonna get some air,” I say.

Grandy nods and pours a cup of coffee for himself and for Mama. I hear them out on the porch rocking and murmuring low as I find a place to sit down in the fields. The stars are coming out. I count them, and my blessings, and wonder if Mama is right.

It's an ordinary Wednesday. Jolene and I work our fingers to the quick, rubbing beeswax into the wood floors at the Wilson place.

“If ever there was a reason to fly,” I tell Jolene, “it would be to save me from having to wax floors.”

“Shoot, fly all you want,” she replies. “I'd rather be rich.”

By the time we leave for the day, we are worn down to the bone, but the floors shine like honey in the late-afternoon light. Otis Wilson has shipped off for basic training. He looked like a sad puppy in his best travel suit, ready to face the Nazis head-on. Mrs. Wilson was so proud, but his daddy knew better. Otis Wilson is not cut out for war. Jolene and I baked him some thumbprint cookies with his favorite jam, just to keep him company on the bus.

“Ida Mae, ain't that the mailman?” Jolene asks as we turn the last corner toward home. Jolene lives less than a mile from my place, and we usually walk a ways together. But today, when we step off the bus, the mailman is waving at me. We break into a run.

“Here you go, Miss Ida Mae. I knew you was looking for something in the mail, but I didn't know what. Says United States Armed Forces right on the envelope, so I figured it was something important.”

“Are you gonna open it or what?”

The letter feels like a weight in my hand. “Of course,” I say, but my fingers don't comply.

“Give it here.” Jolene takes the envelope from me and rips it open with one dark brown finger. She reads the letter, and I try reading her face, but her brown eyes and her smooth forehead tell me nothing.

“Jolene,” I finally manage to say.

She raises an eyebrow and looks at me.

“Texas? You're really gonna go to Texas?” She stuffs the letter back in its envelope. “Shoot, girl, you're crazy.” She hands the letter back to me. “Go on, tell your mama. I'll watch the fireworks from my front porch.”

She saunters away, leaving me standing in my cleaning uniform in the dust. I drop my bags and tear into the envelope, devouring the letter as it unfolds in my hands.
Pleased to offer . . . Report to training . . .
My heart starts beating faster and faster, like the train that will carry me off to Sweetwater, Texas.

“Jolene!” I holler at her. “I'm going to be a WASP.”

She's grinning at me from a few yards down the road. I take a picture of her with my mind. That's how I'll see her, I tell myself, whenever I get to missing her. But I'm on my way to flying.

 

Mama's walking the fields with Grandy when I reach the house. My acceptance letter is tucked into my pocket. I think about hiding it, but there is no point. Grandy sees me coming and waves. He and Mama cut across the strawberry plants and meet me in the driveway.

“Hey, baby girl, back from work late, huh.”

“We did a lot of extra work. The Wilsons are having folks over for dinner,” I explain. I hold up the envelope. “This just came. The WASP accepted me.”

Mama doesn't say anything. She just stares at me. Grandy takes off his hat and wipes the sweat from his forehead.

“We've had such a long day,” he says, and shakes his head. “Come on, we'll talk about it over dinner.”

They head into the house. I stand outside just a moment longer, the evening wind rising around my ankles, tossing the hem of my dress.