The Last Thing You Surrender, page 10
Fifteen minutes later, the bus reached her stop. The door whisked open, and Thelma climbed off as gratefully as she had climbed on. She repositioned the grocery bag onto her hip for the walk home. Her thoughts turned to what she would fix for dinner. It was the first thing that always came to mind when she got off the bus.
And all at once, Thelma was struck by the mechanical sameness of her own days. It was a thought so jolting she actually stopped there on the dirt road to think it. Her life was the same thing every day. She got up, she made breakfast, she rode the bus to work. She cleaned the same furniture, mopped the same floor. On Saturdays, she rode the same bus to the same store, bought the same things, got back on the same bus, walked half an hour on exhausted legs, thinking of what she would make for dinner for her brother and grandfather. She got home, she made the same meals, she listened to her brother rant the same rants, she cleaned up the same kitchen, she fell asleep next to the same radio, half-listening to the same programs.
It was as if her life were so automatic, so defined by all these things she always did, that it hardly needed her to live it. Hire some other woman—any other woman, really—to do the cooking and the cleaning and the going to market, and what need was there for Thelma Mae Gordy?
Maybe she should take the advice she had given that poor little white woman. Maybe she was the one who should go over to Pinto Island and apply for a job.
The thought made Thelma laugh. She shook her head and made herself move forward, still chuckling.
Lord, where did that come from?
Probably, it was just that she was tired. Probably, that was it.
When she got to the house she stopped at the mailbox, but it was empty. Apparently, Luther had already retrieved the mail.
Thelma hoped there wasn’t another letter in it like the one from the white marine that had arrived like June snow a few weeks ago. With his odd Christmastime visits already a month past by then, Thelma had been shocked to find an envelope bearing George Simon’s name in her mailbox. And she had given silent thanks Luther had not been the one to bring the postman’s offerings in that day. Heaven only knew what he might have done if he had seen it.
But the fact of the letter hadn’t been the only surprising thing. She had been equally surprised—maybe even more surprised—by the chatty earnestness of it. No, it was more than that. It was the strange, undue … familiarity of it.
He had written from Cleveland where, he said, he was still on tour for the War Department talking about what Gordy did for him at Pearl. He said he wanted to apologize—Lord, this boy did more apologizing!—for making her discuss a painful subject. He didn’t realize it was something she had made a conscious decision to do.
(Though she still didn’t know why.)
He had even prayed for her and sent her a Bible verse—“‘For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.’—Jeremiah 29:11”—and told her to trust in the Lord.
The tenderness of it made no sense from some white man she hardly knew.
Perhaps most amazing, he had told her he felt indebted to her because of what Eric had done. “I can’t imagine there would ever be anything I could do for you,” he had insisted, “but if there is, I want you to please ask. I’ll do whatever I can. Thelma, I can’t stress it enough: I’m serious about that. I owe him that much.”
She had written back, promising she would trust in the Lord, thanking him for being so kind but assuring him that he owed her nothing. But the whole thing made no sense. What were they doing, exchanging letters? George Simon was a white man who lived somewhere over on the west side out by the country club, and she was a black woman who lived … here.
The thought made her pause again, and this time, she looked around.
Water from a recent rain moved sluggishly in the open ditch. From someone’s backyard, she heard the alarmed cackle of a chicken, perhaps about to have its neck wrung. And the dirt road, still squishy from that selfsame rain, had deposited mud that climbed halfway up her work shoes, which meant she would spend half an hour after dinner cleaning them with a brush and some Rinso to ensure the blinding whiteness her white lady demanded. She would have to wrap them in bread sacks Monday morning to keep them clean on the way to work if it rained again tomorrow.
The realization reinforced the reality: she was a black woman who lived here. So why would he write her a letter like that? And why would she have spoken to him—and written back to him—as she had?
It made no sense. She hoped he wouldn’t write her again. And she also hoped he would.
It was as she was trying to sort out this contradiction that she noticed Luther. Apparently, he had been sitting on the porch all along, but she had not seen him. Seeing him now, she knew at once that something was wrong. A cigarette drooped from his lips. His expression was that of a man who has been hit in the face with a rock he never saw coming.
Her first thought was Gramp. Had the old man taken sick? Or worse?
“Luther?” she asked, stepping quickly across the piece of plywood that served as a bridge over the ditch, “what’s wrong?”
He looked up. It was a moment before his eyes actually found her. When they did, Luther reached into his shirt pocket without a word, produced an envelope, and handed it to her.
The envelope was cream-colored. It said “Selective Service” in the left-hand corner, and in a box below that, it had been stamped with a local return address. Her brother’s name and their address were written haphazardly across the front.
Foreboding squeezed Thelma’s heart in a frozen vise. She opened the envelope and pulled from it a piece of paper, cream-colored like the envelope. At the top it said, “ORDER TO REPORT FOR INDUCTION.” It was addressed from the president of the United States to Luther.
“Greetings,” it began.
Luther had not wanted to register with the Selective Service when the peacetime draft went into effect. It had taken all of Thelma’s and Gramp’s doing to cajole him into going down and putting his name on the roll, mainly by promising that it was just to keep him from getting in trouble with the law. Somehow, it had never occurred to either one of them that the military might actually want him.
She looked at her brother, touched his shoulder with the caution you might reserve for an unfamiliar dog, and called his name. He didn’t answer. She tried again, “Luther, honey …?”
He looked up at her. She braced herself for an epic rant that would blow hard and fierce as the storms that sometimes came in off the Gulf, tearing down trees, turning the ground sodden and useless. But her brother did not raise his voice. Rather, he spoke in a deadly calm that was somehow all the more frightening.
“They killed my mama and my papa,” he said.
“I know, honey.”
Tears shone, unshed, in his eyes. “I saw all of it,” he said. “I remember all of it. And now they want me to go and fight, maybe die for them, in their war?”
He shook his head, laughed a joyless laugh. “White folks must be out they goddamn minds,” he said softly. “I ain’t goin’. I can promise you that.”
Thelma was alarmed. “Honey, you got to go. If they call you, you got to go.”
He lowered his eyes, appeared to study his shoes. “I ain’t goin’,” he repeated in a dull, soft monotone. “I will not go to war for this country, Thel,” he said. “I will not.”
Thelma felt panic surging in her like water. “Luther, if you don’t go, they’ll come after you. Maybe arrest you. Maybe throw you in jail.”
Now he brought his head up, and something fierce had entered his gaze. Still, he did not raise his voice. “They not gon’ get me, Thel. Promise you that.”
five
THE FERRY CHUGGED ACROSS THE MOBILE RIVER, JUST ABOVE where it opened into the bay. Colored kept to one side, white to the other, working men and women carrying their lunch pails, chatting softly together as Pinto Island grew closer. Thelma stood a little apart from them all, nervously dragging on a cigarette.
It was a sparkling Saturday morning in April, and she was dressed all wrong. In her flower-print dress with white flats and gloves and a hat pinned just so on the crown of her head, she looked ready for church. But these other women, in their mannish slacks and headscarves, looked ready for work. She should have thought about it, she told herself reproachfully, should have dressed like she was ready to pitch right in. But then, she had been so anxious the last few days, she hadn’t really thought of very much at all.
And now, here she was, overdressed and fretful, on her way over to apply for a job.
Thelma had laughed the idea off the moment she had it, walking home that day with her arms full of groceries. But the idea had refused to be so easily dismissed. On the contrary, it had only grown as the days became weeks. It had shaken her awake at odd hours, stolen over her as she stood waiting for the bus, slipped up behind her as she was fixing after-school snacks for her white lady’s children. “They can’t get enough bodies over there,” she had told Flora Lee Hodges, and the little white woman’s dull eyes had sparkled, lit by the sudden, alien idea that she might take a job.
So why not Thelma? If she thought Flora Lee Hodges was good enough to get work over there, how could she think less of herself? Flora Lee had probably never even graduated high school. Hadn’t she confessed that she was “no great shakes” at reading?
But despite her pregnancy, Thelma had managed to graduate Mobile County Training School on time and with honors. Luther had dropped out in 10th grade, saying he didn’t need to know nothing about no Shakespeare or algebra in order to cut hair. But Thelma had enjoyed Shakespeare—also Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and James Weldon Johnson—and had excelled in algebra. She had gone all the way through and after graduation had even briefly entertained the notion of going to a Negro college and studying to be … a teacher, maybe. Or a nurse. She was a smart girl—everybody said so. But then reality had asserted itself—where was she supposed to get money for tuition?—and she had quietly put her daydreams aside and found herself a white lady to work for.
How many times had reality intruded upon something she wanted? How many times had she had that thing snatched away from her? She told herself she’d made peace with her homely, childish dreams being pushed aside in the face of adult concerns. This was what being a grown-up meant, after all. She told herself it was okay.
But it wasn’t, really. It never was.
Thelma Mae Gordy was 21 years old, but she felt twice that. She felt as if her life was a script someone else had already written out, and all she had left to do was go through the motions. This was the realization that had stopped her, walking home from the bus that day. In the end, she faced a very simple question, really: Didn’t she have a right to her own life?
And the answer had to be yes, didn’t it? Otherwise, what was the point?
So without telling her brother, without telling their grandfather, she had gotten up this morning and caught the bus to the pier. They would assume she was going to the market up on Davis as she always did on Saturday, and later on, she would. But right now, Thelma had something very different in mind.
She was the last one to step off the ferry. She found herself trickling along at the tail end of a stream that melded into a tributary that melded into a river of people surging through a gate beneath a metal archway that read “Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company.” For a few moments, Thelma allowed herself to be carried along in the tide of people walking purposefully across the vast plant. Her head turned as if on a swivel. There was so much to take in: the women chattering together as they came out of a building; the men with clipboards, making marks and looking over shoulders as other men turned wrenches; the air loud with the clanging of hammers; the crack and sizzle and flying sparks of metal being joined to metal. Cranes as tall as skyscrapers lifted walls of metal like a toddler lifts building blocks. On the side of a one-story wooden building, mounted and framed, were posters bearing war slogans:
Loose Lips Might Sink Ships!
I Want You for the US Army
Buy War Bonds
And, sure enough: We’re All Together Now.
Thelma shook her head, amused at the image that was supposed to represent Eric and the white marine. What it depicted was not what had happened, not remotely, but after she got used to the idea, she had decided that that was all right with her, so long as it encouraged people to pull together to win this war. Luther, she knew, wouldn’t have shed a tear if the Japanese and the Nazis took over the whole damn country. She tried to tell him the Nazis would be happy to put him and her and all Negroes into one of their camps, maybe even return them to slavery, but Luther just shrugged.
They could march right through Bienville Square for all he cared. Luther was indifferent, not just to the outcome of the war but to the fact of it. He never talked about it, did not read the accounts in the newspaper, had not followed along on a world map as the president spoke on the radio and explained where the troops were fighting and how they were progressing.
For her part, Thelma could not understand how anyone could be apathetic about this war. The Nazis hated everyone who was not like them. And the Japs had attacked her country—yes, her country, hateful and mean as it so often was—and she took that personally. She wanted revenge. She wanted to see the enemy crushed. And if a silly poster helped bring that about, it was fine with her.
Thelma turned from the posters—and stopped.
She found herself staring across at a shipway where a battleship was under construction, and the sight stunned her. She realized in that moment that she’d had no idea what a warship really was. She had thought she knew, but nothing she could have pictured would have prepared her for this.
The thing taking shape above her was a behemoth so far out of human proportion as to render human proportion itself insignificant and absurd. Indeed, the people working to put the vessel together, the ones climbing the scaffolding and walking across the footbridges, the ones operating the cranes that delivered building materials to half-formed decks, the ones welding and hammering and pushing levers on heavy machines whose purposes Thelma could not begin to guess, seemed like nothing so much as ants.
Thelma wondered what in the world she could have been thinking to board that ferry and come over here seeking a job building something like that. There was no way in the world she could have a part of anything so … astounding.
“It’s your first time?”
Thelma was startled by the voice at her elbow. When she turned, she found herself facing the easy smile of a colored man in denim overalls. He appeared to be in his forties, a wiry man with a long, thin face and lively eyes that, just now, watched her with frank interest. “I beg your pardon?” she said.
“I asked if it was your first time over here,” said the man. He positioned himself shoulder to shoulder with her so that they were both gazing up at the behemoth. “I asked because first time I come over, I done the same thing you doin’. Stood and looked up at the ships on the shipways. Couldn’t make myself understand how big they really was. When I seen you frozen there, lookin’ up with that look on your face, it reminded me of my own self, not too long ago.”
Thelma nodded. “It is big,” she said.
“It is that, indeed,” he said. “But you get used to it.” After a moment, the man faced her and held out a hand. “Oliver Grimes,” he said. “Most folks just call me Ollie.”
Thelma spoke her own name as she allowed her hand to be swallowed in his. “Well, Miss Thelma,” said Grimes, “I am pleased to make your acquaintance. Hope to see you around here if you get the job. Pretty gal like you would class up the place, I’ll say that much. More’n some of these other booger bears we got runnin’ round here now, an’ that’s the truth.”
Thelma didn’t know how to take that. She lowered her eyes, blushing. It made the man smile. “Oh, I’m just foolin’ with you, honey,” he said in a gently amused voice. “Don’t pay me no never mind.”
He touched her elbow and she lifted her eyes. “Look,” he said, pointing toward the wood-frame building, “you want a job, that’s where you go. Talk to the man in there. Good luck now, you hear?”
Thelma nodded. Grimes flashed her that easy grin and sauntered away, turning back once to lift a farewell salute. Thelma watched until he disappeared into a crowd of men going to work. She took one last eyeful of the skeleton of the mighty, towering ship. Then she steeled herself and walked to the employment office.
She climbed two steps to the door and walked in. A white secretary sat at a desk at the door. She had her head down, scribbling furiously on some piece of paper. Thelma stood there a full five minutes, her purse held before her in two hands, before the woman finally looked up at her without interest. “Yes?” she said.
Thelma cleared her throat. “I’m here to get a job,” she said.
Where in the hell was Thelma?
On Saturdays, Luther cut hair for a half a day. Then he went home to spend the afternoon drinking beer, maybe listening to a ball game on the radio. Usually, Thelma was home from the market by now and she had a box of those cheese crackers he liked.
But lately, she had been getting home later and later. She said the buses were crowded, that sometimes, they passed you right by without even stopping. He knew this was true. He had seen it for himself. But even so, it wasn’t like her to be this late. The man on the radio said it was after four. She had never gotten home after two on a Saturday. And besides, now that he thought about it, she had left earlier than usual. So what could be taking her so long?
He missed his crackers.
A commercial came on the radio and Luther took the opportunity to get up from the chair in the front room and get another beer from the icebox. The floor seemed to move beneath him, which was no surprise, he supposed, given that he had been sitting here drinking for the better part of three hours. Luther placed his steps carefully, planting one foot, pausing to see what the floor would do, then planting the other.
