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  Everything was so quiet, you could hear the people in the next apartment listening to the radio and the sound of their teakettle wailing away. I think Aunt Odella was waiting for me to say something, to break the frozenness of the air around us, but there were no words. Just the sound of that fool teakettle. Leaving was one thing, but sending me to my father was something entirely different. I kept thinking to myself, How in the world could she just up and decide to send me to North Carolina? Was she expecting me to stroll down there and show up on my daddy’s doorstep at an army post with no warning?

  My aunt’s determination melted a little around the edges the longer the silence went on. “I’m only looking out for what’s best for you and him,” she said in a softer voice. “Don’t you want to see your father too?”

  I didn’t answer because I couldn’t even conjure up a picture of what seeing him would be like—to know how I’d feel. Heck, it’d been more than three years since he left. Always told my best friend Archie that missing people in the war was like picking a scab—once you started, you’d wish you had left it alone.

  “Boys need their fathers and fathers need their sons in this world.” Aunt Odella stood up as if that was her final word on the subject. Tugging on the sides of her sturdy dress, she straightened out the wrinkles that had bunched around her middle and wiped her hand across the little beads of sweat that had gathered along the top of her upper lip. “Well, it’s getting late. We better get your things packed up.”

  When I was little, I used to wonder if my life woulda been any different if I’d stuck with the plain old name of Chester instead. Maybe I woulda had an ordinary family like Archie’s, with a momma who cooked beef roast on Sundays and a daddy who cranked homemade ice cream when it was hot and told jokes. Instead, I had a family that had taken off more times than a B-17 bomber.

  I think that’s what Aunt Odella was afraid of too.

  Afraid of being stuck with me if my daddy didn’t come back after the war ended. Before I’d come to live with her, she’d taken care of Granny during her illness, and before that, Great-Granddaddy with the Paralysis. So maybe that’s why she wasn’t wasting any time getting rid of me, you know what I mean?

  Not even two hours later, I was walking outta her apartment carrying one suitcase and a paper bag of fried chicken speckled with grease. The suitcase held just about everything I owned in the world—which wasn’t a whole lot by the looks of it. From what I could tell, my daddy had no idea I was coming.

  3. Scorpion of Death

  It’s strange how many dumb things you notice about a place when you’re leaving it. For instance, as me and Aunt Odella headed out of her apartment building that morning, I noticed for the first time how much spit there was on the steps. There was years, maybe decades, of people’s spit on the worn gray stones. Those steps were a spit mosaic. A lot of it was mine and Archie’s, no doubt. We enjoyed letting a nice wet bomb hit the pavement now and then. Strange to think how I had to leave but my spit got to stay, you know?

  I remember how it was a pretty morning for Chicago too. Sunny. Warm. Big yellow dandelions had sprouted up through the cracks in the sidewalk, and I swear I never noticed dandelions growing there before. You could smell the coffee beans roasting at Hixson’s Grocery across the street and hear the faint sound of a saxophone playing, even at that early hour. Probably from the all-night clubs a few blocks over.

  I took one last backward glance at Aunt Odella’s building before we turned the corner. Never thought I’d feel sorry about saying goodbye to that old place, but I did. It was nothing special—just a plain old brick walk-up, three stories tall, with the usual rickety fire escapes zigzagging up the sides. Aunt Odella’s apartment was on the top floor. My window had faced the back and looked out over the tar roof of another run-down apartment building behind us. In the spring, you could see the reflections of clouds going by in the roof puddles, which was the only good part of having a rooftop as your scenery. Sometimes you could feel above the clouds.

  Aunt Odella walked faster down the street, like she didn’t want to give me time to start dwelling too much. The handle of the suitcase kept sliding in my sweaty hands, and I switched sides every time we stopped. In Aunt Odella’s opinion, I’d brought along way more than anybody’d need. “It’s probably that winter cap and all those extra things you packed, making everything so hard to carry,” she said at one stop. “I tried telling you not to take so much.”

  Maybe North Carolina wasn’t the Arctic, but the cap had been a gift from my great-uncle Otis and it was one of those nice leather aviator ones you see in the war movies. People always said it made me look like a mad African bomber pilot, so I couldn’t go and leave it behind.

  Aunt Odella hadn’t backed down on my Speed Jaxon comics, though. “You gonna be too busy where you’re going to read junk.” Even before I’d finished packing, the whole stack of them got yanked outta the suitcase and smacked onto the floor. My aunt said she’d give them to the scrap drive. Paper was in short supply in 1945, but seeing my newspaper comics get sent for scrap just about tore my heart out because they didn’t have a mark on them.

  Still, I managed to slip in the scorpion when Aunt Odella turned around to fold up some of my shirts for packing. The scorpion wasn’t alive, of course—this was a dried-up one my father had sent two years earlier, thinking I’d get a kick out of it for my eleventh birthday.

  Back then, he’d been training in Arizona for a big war assignment the army changed its mind about and never sent him to. Which was a story that seemed to repeat itself over and over when it came to my daddy and his service. Archie was convinced my father was a spy for the U.S. Army. Or a secret commando. “No other explanation for how much moving around and training your daddy does. Man oh man, I bet he’s a big-time top spy for the Allies,” he’d try and tell me. Archie’s father was too old to serve, so maybe that’s why he admired mine.

  In some of his letters from North Carolina, my father had written about jumping out of airplanes with parachutes, and getting his “wings” and “jump boots,” but Aunt Odella had her own doubts about those details. There was no way my father—or any other sane Negro she knew—would jump outta an airplane, she insisted. “I grew up with your daddy and he couldn’t even look over the railing of a porch two feet off the ground without feeling sick,” she said. She thought it was more likely he drove an army truck, or worked as a guard, or something dull and ordinary like that. “He just throws in a few big stories now and then to keep us entertained at home.”

  Most of the time, I couldn’t decide what to believe.

  Fortunately, I’d opened the mail the day he sent the scorpion—if it’d been Aunt Odella, she woulda had a holy flying fit. The scorpion had been pasted inside a folded piece of paper with the words Don’t show to Odella. Happy Birthday! written on the front.

  For a couple of days, I was like Moses parting the Red Sea as I strolled down the hallways at school with that thing in my pocket. Everybody moved aside to let me and Archie pass by. All I had to do was wave the scorpion of death in the air and we could get anything we wanted to eat for lunch. Deviled eggs. A cheese sandwich. Some homemade ginger cookies. Wave it around again and the line for the school washroom would shrink down to nothing. Me and Archie were kings. It was one of those birthday presents you never grow up and forget.

  Besides the old scorpion, there were a couple of other things I slipped past my aunt’s X-ray eyes while I was packing up my suitcase. Took all my father’s letters and his army picture—although I don’t think she woulda complained about me bringing them along. And I couldn’t help throwing in a handful of buckeyes from the nice collection I kept under my bed.

  It was a crazy habit I had, collecting those buckeyes. Even being thirteen and being too old for dumb collections, I couldn’t seem to stop myself from picking them up. Under my bed, there were boxes and boxes crammed full of the smooth mahogany-colored seeds—some as large as the palm of your hand—from the shady buckeye trees in o
ur neighborhood. I could imagine Aunt Odella’s shocked expression when she stuck a broom under the bed and found the rest of them. Buckeyes rolling all over creation.

  Gotta admit the scene made me smile.

  Walking beside me, my aunt glanced over as if she wondered what in the world was going through my thirteen-year-old brain. “You still doing all right with that suitcase, Levi?”

  My shoulder was pounding like the devil, but I didn’t admit weakness to anybody. Especially not Aunt Odella. I nodded, hefting the suitcase a little higher. “Yes ma’am.”

  Right after that, she took a sharp left and headed down another block—a direction that surprised me because I figured we were going to one of the main streets where you could catch a downtown bus. Instead, she started walking through another familiar neighborhood of crowded apartments where me and Archie had shot loadies dozens of times. We were the best around at sending our greased bottle caps flying down those street gutters. Archie had a Dr Pepper bottle cap that had never been beat. I’d blown out the knees of a lot of my pants, kneeling in those gutters and seeing how far I could whip those bottle caps down the metal grooves.

  As we passed by more places I knew, I had to keep shaking my head and trying to ignore the sorry-tasting lump that was rising in my throat. Heck, I wasn’t ready to leave Chicago. Who would tell Archie and everybody else that I’d left town? And what was Archie gonna do without Goliath? And who would spit on the apartment steps and pick up all the perfect buckeyes from the streets? There was a lot I was gonna miss.

  4. Peace on Earth

  Aunt Odella didn’t stop for breath until we got to my great-uncle Otis’s barbershop on the corner of Forty-eighth Street. Uncle Otis was a legend in south Chicago. You couldn’t miss the big white-lettered sign painted on his store window: WE CUT HEADS HERE. When anybody asked why his sign said heads and not hair, he’d say, “One hair cut? What kinda fool would pay for that? You come here, I promise you we’ll cut your whole head.” If you heard him say it once, you heard it a hundred times.

  Great-uncle Otis was also the only person in our family—even counting distant half-white cousins—who was rich enough to own an automobile and buy the gasoline to run it during the war. Didn’t take me long to realize Aunt Odella must’ve asked him to give us a ride. When we got to the barbershop, his big chrome and green Chevrolet sedan was already pulling slowly into the space in front of the store. I’m telling you, it looked like an Allied warship docking.

  From the look Uncle Otis gave my aunt, I could see he wasn’t too happy about being there either. He was close to seventy, I’d say, short and dark as a stick of licorice.

  “Don’t know why you in such an all-fire, speedy-hurry about doing this,” he whispered to Aunt Odella as he came around to open the door for her. The words probably came out louder than Uncle Otis thought because he was going deaf and nobody in the family wanted to be the one to tell him. “War ain’t even over yet.”

  “Well, it’s all but over,” my aunt answered stiffly, motioning for me to slide in the back. The Chevrolet was a four-door model with a wide backseat of smooth tan leather that still smelled brand-new. Not a speck of dirt anywhere. Made you feel like you were sitting in a church. Up front, Aunt Odella yanked her door closed with an extra-loud thump.

  “War ain’t no place for a fine young man like Levi,” Uncle Otis said, easing slowly behind the wheel with a lot of annoyed sighing that I could hear even from where I sat. The car lurched backward as Uncle Otis kept talking. “I lived through two wars, you know, and the Great Depression and the Panic of ’29, so I know what I’m talking about, Odella.”

  My aunt’s voice rose a little louder. “How exactly am I sending him to the war? His daddy’s been training for months and months down there in the middle of North Carolina. Germans and Japs ain’t in North Carolina, are they? All this moving around and training he’s been doing for years and he ain’t fought in a single battle yet, so far as I know.” She leaned her head back and rubbed the crook of her neck the way she always does when she’s mad about something. “Don’t know why I gotta take everything on my two shoulders in this family. When’s my brother gonna decide to take responsibility for his own son? When the Pacific goes dry? You and me both know of people who’ve come home from their posts for a visit at least—but it’s been over three years and Levi’s own father ain’t even seen him.”

  I knew better than to jump into this regular argument with my two cents. Great-uncle Otis and Aunt Odella were worse than oil and water when they were together. Running my own mouth never helped either—although I couldn’t understand why my aunt often put the blame square on my father for everything. Why was it his fault that the army had sent him from Georgia to Texas to Arizona, then back to Georgia, and now North Carolina? Heck, none of those places were next door to Chicago, were they?

  Plus, most of the boys I knew in the neighborhood hadn’t seen their fathers or older brothers since the war started either. Take Archie and his family. His older brother Joe had been in the service for more than two years—and now it seemed possible they might never see him alive on this earth again. All you had to do was look around and you could count the gold stars in the windows of families who’d already lost somebody in the war. At least we didn’t have one of those. The star hanging in Aunt Odella’s apartment window was still blue, glowing like a tiny speck of hope up there on the third floor.

  Uncle Otis wasn’t ready to give up the argument with my aunt either. Being a barber, he could talk somebody bald. “How’s Levi gonna get along in the South?”

  “Same as he gets along up here. He’s a smart boy.”

  See, now my aunt was taking my side in a swift counterattack. She was sneaky that way.

  “The South ain’t like Chicago,” Uncle Otis snapped. “It’s no place for a colored boy from the North who don’t know the rules. If Charles wanted Levi to be down there with him, it seems to me he’d have said so.”

  Still keeping my opinions to myself, I silently agreed with this point. I didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of whatever important training my father might be doing down there in North Carolina. In one of his recent letters, he’d written about going through gas grenade drills, which still gave me the creepy-crawlies whenever I read over the details. How you walked into a tent with a gas mask on, then they closed the tent flaps and threw a poison grenade in a barrel, and you had to take your mask off and say your name and rank before you were allowed out, half dead from fumes. Nobody had any tears left to cry, my father wrote. Coughed for a week.

  God knows what would happen if I stumbled into a gas grenade tent by mistake down there in North Carolina. Had anybody in the family considered the fact that my father might be preparing for a serious war mission this time? Or where I’d go if he couldn’t keep me? What if I ended up wandering around the country like a war refugee pushing all my belongings in a rattletrap wheelbarrow? Good grief.

  In the front seat, Aunt Odella fanned herself with a cardboard church fan from her purse, not saying another word to Uncle Otis. There were two white doves on her fan with the words PEACE ON EARTH written above them, although there wasn’t much peace inside the automobile right then. The doves’ wings flickered back and forth in the air like little white-hot flames. But Aunt Odella kept the rest of her opinions to herself, and Uncle Otis didn’t turn around.

  5. Like Joe Louis in a Dress

  With it being Saturday and the streets not being too crowded, we arrived in downtown Chicago faster than a German Panzer tank division entering Paris. Uncle Otis could be a terror behind the wheel, let me tell you. He nearly got us killed right outside the train station when he slammed on the brakes in the middle of the intersection and hollered, “Great snakes, thought it was the next corner!” Spinning the steering wheel in a wide arc, he missed a Tip-Top bread delivery truck by inches, or we woulda all been sandwiches.

  “Sweet Jesus almighty, Otis!” Aunt Odella shrieked.

  I jammed my hands into the sea
t, waiting to hear every automobile in the city crunch into a pile of twisted metal behind us.

  We came to rest in front of Union Station, an enormous building that looked more like a Greek temple stuck in the middle of downtown Chicago than a train station. Huge white columns soared upward. Next to it, people scurried around, looking no bigger than ants.

  “We’re here,” Uncle Otis announced with just the smallest tremble in his voice as he turned off the motor.

  Although I’d been to Union Station before, the massive size of the place still made my scalp prickle. When my daddy left for the war, the whole family had come to the station to see him off. I could remember all of us being dressed up in our scratchy Sunday best as we sat together in the Great Hall, waiting on his train to leave. Probably looked like a sad bunch of funeral mourners. There was Uncle Otis and his new wife, my daddy’s two younger sisters, who’d since got married and moved away—and of course Aunt Odella. The way she remembers it, she spent the entire time telling me to stop sliding off the smooth wooden benches into a heap of boredom on the marble floor. I was only nine. “You were a handful until I got you straightened out,” she’d add. “Your daddy and Granny weren’t firm enough when they raised you.”

  What I recalled most about the day was Wrigley’s gum. They were selling gum at one of the newsstands nearby, and according to my aunt, I begged everybody in the family—and even some passing strangers—for some of that gum. “When your daddy goes and gets himself killed in the war, you’ll be sorry all you cared about was a pack of chewing gum,” Aunt Odella had finally snapped at me, shaking my arm hard enough to rattle my teeth in their sockets.

  Her dire prediction stuck in my mind for the longest time. I was sure I’d sent my father to certain death because of a pack of Wrigley’s. Never liked the taste of chewing gum much afterward. These days, all the Wrigley’s went to soldiers anyhow.