Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(9)
Just about eighteen hundred miles east and a little south of Gedwell Falls, seventeen-year-old Frangie Marr sits with her mother on the screened porch where her mother hauls her battered sewing machine on hot, humid nights like this.
The screens have been torn and patched and torn again, and the mosquitoes have memorized every last one of the holes. Unseasonably warm weather has released the insects from their slumber, and Frangie slaps one that lands on her arm, leaving a spot of her own blood that she flicks away.
She’s a tiny thing, Frangie Marr, that’s what people always say about her and have since she was twelve. Her adolescent growth spurt came late and petered out early. Until age fourteen she’d been just four foot ten. Now she is five foot one—if she cheats a bit and sort of lifts herself up in her shoes.
Her mother presses the pedal on the sewing machine and runs a dozen stitches. The rabbity sound of the machine has always been part of Frangie’s life, though it used to be slower before they had electricity and the machine was foot powered.
“You should get some sleep, Mother.” Frangie is tired of this conversation; she’s had it before. Each time her mother tells her she doesn’t have to go, and each time Frangie says she does. It feels like her mother is pushing off the responsibility, like she wants to be able to say, “I told her not to go.” Maybe Frangie’s being unfair thinking that, but she feels what she feels.
“Can’t sleep, sweetie, you know I have to get this dress done for tomorrow morning. You know Miss Ellie.”
“Oh, I know Miss Ellie,” Frangie says. “That is one complaining white woman.” This is safer territory for conversation. Frangie complains about her mother’s customers, and her mother in turn says things like, “Oh, she’s not so bad,” or “Well, she has her ways.”
Sure enough: “She’s all right,” Dorothy Marr says with a tolerant smile. “At least she pays on time. And she had that ham sent around for Easter.”
Yes, she pays on time, and when Frangie was younger Miss Ellie would rub her head and say, “Need me some pickaninny juju.”
Frangie despised that and despised the woman. If she’d actually had any juju she’d have used it for her family or for herself, not transferred it to a skinny, mouse-haired, flint-eyed white woman. When Miss Ellie wasn’t rubbing Frangie’s head for luck she was making remarks like, “I reckon I could scour my pans bright with that brushy 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 to 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.”