Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(89)

“Bertha May, huh?” she prompts. “I suppose she’s some ancient nurse . . .”

“Bertha May? Ancient? Not at all,” he protests. “Quite the contrary, she’s the most lovely . . .” He stops. “Oh, I see your game. Oh, you have grown tricky in my absence, Knee-high. But you’re wrong, there is no romance going on here.” This is said with a degree of conviction tinged with bitterness, a bitterness confirmed when he adds in a low mutter he must think she can’t hear, “More’s the pity.”

Around the campfire are a dozen men and women, more or less equally split. Harder is greeted with waves or shouted greetings. It’s clear he is liked, and Frangie finds this immensely gratifying. She’s had no choice but to guess what Harder’s life has been like these past years of separation, and her imagination had led her to dark assumptions. That he is respected and liked, here at least, relieves her mind.

Willie is a picker, not a strummer, with each note crystal clear, mournful, but with an edge of wry humor, and he accompanies himself in a tenor that seems at odds with his rotund and ancient (by army standards) form.

A good mornin’ little schoolgirl



Can I go home with you?

Harder checks that the blanket is keeping Frangie warm, and despite her protests that she is fine, perfectly fine, he pushes her so close to the fire she expects within a very short time to actually burst into flame.

They share a cup of coffee and politely refuse the bottle of brandy being passed around.

“How is the family?” Harder asks with stiff nonchalance.

“Well, Obal is practically grown up. If by grown up you mean that he has a paper route and is crazy determined to get every one of his customers a nice, dry paper perfectly deposited on their stoop.”

Harder grins. “Obal working?”

“You would not credit the seriousness in his letters.”

“And Mother?”

“She’s fine. Worried like any mother, I suppose. She’s still sewing a little, but she has a second job packing parachutes. And you know Father was hurt, I suppose?”

Harder shrugs. “I’m not much concerned with him.”

“Well, be that as it may, he has a new job dispatching taxis, and now he’s doing something at the defense plant as well, I don’t quite understand what it is. But it seems everyone is quite prosperous.”

She makes no effort to conceal her own wry bitterness. She volunteered for service to help her family with expenses; now her sacrifice is unnecessary, while she is stuck in the war, like it or not.

“I was amazed they let any Negro carry a gun,” Harder says. “There was a lot of pressure from the NAACP and Eleanor Roosevelt and various other do-gooders.”

“You don’t approve?”

He shrugs again. “As a way to demonstrate that Negroes are not cowards or fools, it’s a good thing. But I’m not sure the fellows who get a leg blown off are grateful.”

“I suppose not.”

“And for what?” Harder asks rhetorically. “Everyone knows the Italian campaign is a sideshow. The real fighting is on the Eastern Front. Soviet comrades are dying by the tens of thousands fighting the Fascists in the most inhuman conditions.”

At the word comrades Frangie glances around nervously.

“No need to worry,” Harder says, dripping sarcasm. “The capitalists have decided they quite like Communists . . . so long as they’re dying. But never fear, as soon as the war is won our capitalist overlords will turn against them again. Probably start a whole new war.”

Frangie winces, wishing she had managed to avoid anything political, but Harder barrels ahead.

“This war is not at all what most folks think. The real war is between the Fascists and the Communists, with the capitalists doing the absolute minimum. The capitalists want to see the Fascists destroyed because they threaten British colonies. The Nazis want to replace the colonial order with an even greater evil, so we fight them. But make no mistake, America is being used to defend the evils of colonialism and imperialism. And the only ones truly standing for the rights of working men and women are the Communists and Comrade Stalin.”

Frangie doubts this is quite true, but there has never been much point in arguing politics with her brilliant, verbose, and rather strident brother.

“Our people, Negroes, colored folk, we’re being tricked into believing that we can change things by serving in the capitalist army. But back home, white defense workers are striking to stop colored folk getting paid equal. They’re using the tools of unionism to deny us our rights, which is an unholy perversion of . . .”

It goes on like this for a while, and Frangie tunes out the words, maintaining an attentive expression even as her memory drifts back to the day when a thirteen-year-old Harder had ambushed her with water balloons.

“. . . and has Jim Crow changed? Not a bit. Just last week a fellow in Louisiana was lynched, strung up by night riders in front of his children by the light of a burning cross.”

Frangie wonders if she should break into his peroration on the topics of race and class and the exploitation of workers, but she knows she can’t hold her own in any sort of political discussion. What she feels is that his fervor burns too hot to last. And she worries that his outspokenness will land him in trouble sooner or later.

“. . . since the days of the Greenwood riot. It’s the same as ever—”