When Women Were Dragons(31)
“Let this be a lesson to parents everywhere,” the newscasters said. And then they let the matter drop.
A little over a year later, in the winter of 1958, a new union formed by the Black female employees of a large fishery in southern Alabama had been striking for several months—demanding fair wages, safer conditions, and an end to the racist abuse at the hands of their supervisors. The company owners, growing tired of the bad press and the union’s vexing persistence, contracted with a number of former law enforcement officers and other aggrieved men in the area to make an example of the strikers. They hoped to break the union’s will just enough to encourage an amenable contract.
“Who do they think they are?” the company bosses said as they handed out envelopes filled with cash and promises of immunity. “I trust you gentlemen to nip this little problem in the bud.”
The envelopes had a pleasant heft in their hands. The men said they would have done it for free as they pocketed the money with a grin.
The strikers had blocked the one road leading into and out of the plant with both barricades and tents, which they used to hold strategy meetings and prayer circles, as well as a distribution center for food and supplies. A separate tent provided shelter for the makeshift childcare center. There were tables heaped with homemade bread and pots of baked beans, as well as a constantly replenishing vat of bubbling stew ready to be dished into crocks for people to take home and feed to their families. The women kept the tents staffed day and night, armed with bats and sticks and righteousness, and the full conviction that justice would eventually prevail. They were prepared to strike forever, if need be.
The men contracted as thugs for the company decided to attack on the night before Christmas. Fewer people there, they figured. And nothing distracts a bunch of women like an impending holiday. This was common knowledge.
“Piece of cake,” they laughed as they planned out their course of action. “Like taking candy from a bunch of big babies,” they said as they downed bottles of whiskey and headed out loudly, into the night.
The men were never seen again.
There were rumors of shots fired. There were rumors that an unusual tremor sent buildings shaking, knocked dishes out of cupboards and children out of bed, and caused the roads to buckle. People said it could be felt from Heron Bay all the way to Montgomery.
The next morning, the tents had burned and the tables had all flipped and the vat of stew, for the first time in months, was cold. The ground was littered with the remains of broken liquor bottles, and shotguns that had been snapped like twigs, and a scattering of men’s shoes. Other than that, the strike line held, and grew. Women from surrounding parishes arrived, helping to clean up, mend what was broken, and lock arms in an unbreakable barrier across the road.
The company, for its part, denied ever meeting with the missing men, denied any knowledge of their plans, denied the envelopes and the cash and the promises, and most important, denied ever disagreeing with the strikers in the first place. “A simple case of miscommunication,” they said. They called in the press and signed new contracts with great fanfare, and insisted on photographs showing smiling white men in fine suits magnanimously shaking the hands of Black women in coveralls as they agreed to every single item that the strikers had been demanding for months.
The women in the photographs did not smile. They stood with their faces tilted slightly upward, their eyes obscured by a sudden flash of light.
And then in May of 1959, patrons at a particular bar in Los Angeles reported an astonishing event that occurred during a semi-regular drag ball and performance. Three dancers, each exquisitely coiffed, rouged, and costumed, right in the middle of what was described as the performance of their lives, each bedecked and adorned with color and glitter and light, stepped out of their already beautiful skins in front of a thunderstruck audience. Brand-new dragon bodies unfurled, one by one, onstage, their multicolored scales glittering under the floodlights. They were, all three, so very lovely that the audience had to collectively catch their breath. Some people fell to their knees. Many wept. Given that crossdressing performers at this time in history were particularly adept at making art under difficult, violent, and sometimes outlandish circumstances, it didn’t occur to anyone to stop the performance. The music simply played on, the dancing continued, and the drag-dragons didn’t miss a beat. They continued their song and continued to dance, finishing to thunderous applause and no fewer than ten curtain calls, before crashing through the leaky ceiling and disappearing into the night. The patrons looked up and watched as the dragons flew in formation, their tremendous bodies growing smaller and smaller, a hard, insistent brightness cutting at the night, until, at last, they glinted among the stars. Onlookers reported that it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen.
And lastly, on New Year’s Eve, 1959, revelers at more than six hundred separate holiday parties across the country reported a transformation or two, all when the countdown to the new year had just begun. There was no damage, no mayhem. Just a sigh, a shudder, and a sudden cry of joy as what was small became suddenly large.
Each one took to the sky.
Each one didn’t look back.
And none of this was covered on the news. It was, again, unmentionable. And the world kept its eyes on the ground.
16.
Sonja and her grandparents lived in a magical house. Or, at least it seemed so to me. Before they moved in, the house had white clapboard with grey trim and a black roof—virtually invisible on the block. The landlord was a fairly careless bachelor who lived on the other side of town, and didn’t much care what colors they painted or how they altered the property, just as long as they paid their rent in a timely manner. Within a month of their moving in, the house had transformed: yellow walls, trim a different color on each window, flowers painted on the door. Inside there were rooms painted with fairy woodlands, and rooms painted in Norwegian meadow landscapes, and rooms painted with mountains crawling with hiding trolls, and rooms painted to look like the shores of Lake Superior—still beloved and longed for. Sonja’s grandparents each had separate studios—her grandmother had claimed the main-floor den, while her grandfather transformed the garage into a space with a woodstove and a brightly painted floor and newly installed wide windows and an easy chair for thinking. We were welcome in their studios and welcome to watch them work. (This, in contrast to my own father, whose office I had never once seen. I had no idea what it might be like to watch him work.)