Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(112)

Harder is still a fire-breather, still naive in Frangie’s eyes, despite his grand allusions to Marx and Lenin and the Soviet this and the Soviet that. Most difficult of all for Frangie is the fact that he sneers at the faith she relies on. The opiate of the masses.

And yet, much of what he says gets through. The tales of lynchings, of beatings, of castrations, of the fear that pervades the South and has now moved north as black people follow the defense industry jobs into Chicago and Los Angeles and Detroit.

She has not forgotten the white sergeant who tried to rape her. She has not forgotten the slurs and the open hatred she’s gotten from white troops. She does not ignore the fact that even now white officers command black troops, and white generals try their best to assign black units to the most demeaning tasks.

And now that she knows the truth of Tulsa in June of 1921, she cannot look at her own brother’s face, at the color of his skin, without being forced to imagine their mother’s suffering.

There are good white people, she tells herself. She’s met good white people. And all people, all people of all colors, are the children of God, all sinners, all in need of redemption through the blood of Christ. But her imagination tortures her, playing again and again what must have happened to her mother, over and over like an eternal newsreel, each image more lurid and horrifying than the one before.

They cut deep, those images.

“Miss Frangie?” It’s a corporal striding purposefully toward them from behind.

“What is it?” she asks.

“Colonel wants to see you.”

This is tantamount to being summoned to meet Moses or Franklin D. Roosevelt. Frangie has had no dealings at all with the base commander. No reason on earth why she should, she’s a lowly detached medic awaiting orders. The distance between Frangie Marr and a colonel is vast and unbridgeable in her mind.

“But . . . why?” she asks.

The corporal shrugs. “Colonel tells captain, captain tells lieutenant, loot tells me, and here I am telling you.”

Frangie glances at Harder for support, but Harder just frowns, no doubt annoyed at having his latest sermon interrupted.

Frangie follows the corporal to a jeep and is then driven to the air base and the HQ building, a grand estate that has been ceded to the military by its owner, an earl or a count or whatever—Frangie has never been clear on what those titles mean.

Her fear grows with each minute of the trip. Has the colonel somehow gotten word that she’s talking revolution with her Communist brother? One thing is certain: it’s trouble. She is in some sort of trouble.

But apparently the trouble can wait as she is told to take a place in the small waiting room outside the colonel’s office. She takes a seat. A white lieutenant, also waiting, sniffs noisily and moves ostentatiously to the seat farthest from her. But the colonel’s secretary brings her a cup of tea with milk and sugar in the British style, which she’s come to like.

She waits and sips and wishes she had something to read. The lieutenant is called in. She waits some more. The lieutenant leaves. She waits as a pair of privates arrive and are shown immediately into the office. She waits as they emerge with relieved smiles on their faces.

Frangie waits as six different individuals are shown in, one after another, and the hours slowly tick away on the wall clock. Finally, at what must be the last hour of the colonel’s day before heading off to dinner, she is summoned. The kind secretary shows her in.

The colonel is Air Corps, tall, distinguished looking with gray temples and extravagant, sandy eyebrows.

She advances to an imaginary line on the floor before the colonel’s desk and salutes.

The colonel looks at her with what feels to Frangie like naked hostility.

“So you’re the little Nigra who crawled under a tank?”

He has not returned her salute, which leaves her standing at attention, right index finger on her right eyebrow, waiting.

“Sir?”

“I don’t suppose we need to ask how it happens that some coon gets himself trapped under a tank.”

“I . . . Sir, they told me he—”

“Goldbricking, if I know my Nigras. Avoiding work. Is that it, Marr? Was he shirking?”

“I don’t believe so, sir. I think he was green and didn’t—”

“Are you contradicting me?” He finally tosses her an indifferent salute.

“I only know what they told me, sir,” she says, lowering her hand at last.

“Well, I’m telling you: he was shirking, like you people do. Isn’t that right, Marr?”

He is directly challenging her to contradict him. Frangie feels herself melting into her boots, withering beneath his hard glare. “If you say so, sir.”

“You’re goddamned right about that: if I say so. And I do say so, and do you know how I know? Because I know the Nigra, that’s how. I grew up on a large farm in Mississippi, and we . . . employed . . . your kind to pick cotton and never once did I see a Nigra really work hard.”

It was not a question. No answer is possible. So she stands at attention feeling small and helpless and bewildered.

“Now this,” the colonel says. He holds up a piece of paper. “Goddamn insult to the white boys out there giving their lives for freedom. They won’t be getting a medal, you can be damn sure of that, because they don’t have the president’s wife nagging and bullying for them.”