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  “Hurry up, Levi. Collect your things and get out. We’re holding up traffic.”

  You could tell Aunt Odella wasn’t in any mood to stand around gawking at the scenery. She was already hefting my suitcase outta the automobile before Uncle Otis had his door open.

  Watching everything with a disgusted look, the old man shook his head once he got out. “That woman is Joe Louis in a dress.”

  I was pretty sure the comment wasn’t meant as a compliment toward Aunt Odella, since Joe Louis was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Couldn’t imagine him ever wearing a dress—but it wasn’t too far-fetched to picture Aunt Odella knocking out somebody with a pair of quick left hooks. Nobody messed with her if they could help it.

  “Here, I wanted to give you something for your trip,” Uncle Otis whispered. He reached into his pocket and slipped a roll of dollar bills into my hand. Uncle Otis was always sly about money. Sometimes he’d drop by the apartment for a visit and the next thing you know, you’d find a dollar or two stuck in the sofa cushions. Or a quarter left under one of the crocheted doilies my aunt kept on her tables.

  “Told Odella over and over, it ain’t right to send you down there,” he said, keeping his voice low and leaning so close I could smell his familiar cigar and peppermint-candy breath. “But nobody ever listens to the advice of old men like me. Told her sending you down there to the South is like sending an innocent lamb to the slaughter.”

  He squeezed my arm hard. Even being seventy, he had fingers as strong as a pair of shears. “You run into any troubles down there, you find yourself a colored barber and you have him ring me up here in Chicago. I’ll pay for whatever it takes to get you home, safe and sound. You can always stay with me and my wife if you need to come back, you hear?”

  I knew Uncle Otis was just being nice, because it was a well-known fact his uppity wife didn’t like kids at all. Whenever I came for a visit, I had to take off my shoes and sit on towels spread across their good sofa. No way his wife would ever let me move in and become something permanent.

  Told Uncle Otis I’d be fine. Then thought I’d die of embarrassment when he suddenly reached up and patted the top of my head as if I was some toddling child in his barbershop—when the truth was, I was already a couple of inches taller than him.

  “You’re a fine young man, Levi,” he repeated at least three or four times. “You got a wise head sitting on those shoulders. Don’t let nothing happen to yourself down there in the South, you hear?”

  Well, I wasn’t as stumbling ignorant about what I’d be facing as Uncle Otis thought I was. I’d picked up a few things from my father’s letters during the months he’d been in North Carolina. Already knew the place was overrun with mosquitoes and nasty sand ticks that could make your hands swell to the size of a Christmas ham, according to my daddy. And there were some problems with snakes too. My father wrote about the fellows finding a large snake curled up in their army jeep one chilly morning, and waking up half the camp as they bailed out.

  Now, I wasn’t a big fan of snakes, but I wasn’t a lamb going to the slaughter either. Could watch out for my own two feet and put up with a few bugs if I had to. Soldiers were dying of a lot worse things in other places.

  Aunt Odella motioned at the two of us impatiently. “We gotta get moving or Levi’s gonna miss the train. You can head on back to the shop now, Otis. I know you got customers waiting. I’ll find my own way home after I buy Levi his train ticket and all. No need to keep holding up traffic.”

  With one last disgusted shake of his head, Uncle Otis got in his chrome and green battleship and drove away.

  6. Barbed Wire Pie

  You woulda thought the war had already ended, seeing how Union Station was packed to the walls with civilians and soldiers. I don’t know who was left to fight. Everywhere you looked you could see people hugging and waving and crying and holding babies and squeezing through the smallest spaces with army duffels the size of tree trunks. As me and Aunt Odella were heading down the big marble staircase to the Great Hall to buy a ticket, the whole crowd around us suddenly froze for a minute. My suitcase slammed right into the backs of Aunt Odella’s knees.

  “Good Lord, Levi,” she hollered over her shoulder. “You trying to kill me?”

  Nervous sweat pooled up in the middle of my back.

  At the ticket windows, the lines were a tangle of weary people, winding back and forth. My aunt searched slowly up and down the long bedraggled rows. I knew she was hunting for a few colored folks to stand next to—or better yet, a ticket window with a friendly Negro face smiling behind it. Only there weren’t any, so she had to get in one of the lily-white lines and hope for the best. Aunt Odella never trusted whites too much. She used to clean houses for them and one white lady sneaked her clocks backward to keep my aunt toiling away longer.

  “A few of them are good folks. But most of them you can’t even count on to give you the right time of day,” Aunt Odella had told me more than once. “You remember that, Levi.”

  I hadn’t formed an opinion yet and never went along with my aunt’s ideas on much if I could help it. A few of my teachers had been white ladies and they were nice enough. Plus, the iceman who came through our neighborhood was white, and on the hottest summer days he gave out free ice chips wrapped in newspaper to the neighborhood kids no matter what color they were.

  When we finally got up to the front of the line, our ticket agent was a white fellow with the biggest mustache I’d ever seen. It was hard not to stare. I’m telling you, he coulda painted walls with his face.

  “Can I help you?” the mustache man said in a bored voice.

  “I’m looking to buy a train ticket,” Aunt Odella announced firmly. She jabbed an elbow in my direction. “For him.” My aunt leaned closer to the ticket window, talking even louder. “He needs to get to Fayetteville, North Carolina, to see his daddy in the service. How do I go ’bout arranging that?”

  Standing there, I did my best to look like my respectful school self. Polite and serious. Archie used to say I had a face like a silent movie because he could never be sure what I was thinking whenever we were sitting in class. Kept myself out of a lot of trouble that way, so I used the look often.

  “There’s a war on,” the man answered without even bothering to glance up. “Is your trip necessary?”

  Don’t know if he realized the same words were printed on a war poster behind him, but it was hard not to crack a smile. With his cartoon mustache and the poster behind his head, I swear the fellow coulda stepped straight outta one of my comic books. IS YOUR TRIP NECESSARY? THINK BEFORE YOU TRAVEL. My eyes roamed around the walls—posters about the war were everywhere you looked. LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS. IDLE HANDS WORK FOR HITLER.

  My aunt’s chest went up like words were rising inside her too. Like I said before, she wasn’t a small person. “It is necessary,” she insisted, sounding as if she was teetering on the edge of taking offense.

  “Best you can do is wait and see if there’s any open space. Seats always go to soldiers first.”

  “His daddy is a soldier.” My aunt pointed an elbow at me again. “He’s stationed at Camp Mackall, all the way down there in North Carolina. He’s a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. His name is Charles Battle.”

  “What’s he do?” the ticket man asked, with just a shade of mocking in his tone.

  My aunt hesitated a minute. “He’s in the parachute troops.”

  You could see the fellow’s mustache go all twitchy-twitchy as he tried not to laugh at this outrageous fact. “That so?” he said slowly, and you could tell he didn’t believe one word.

  Like I said, we had our own doubts too—which we’d never share in public, of course. Every once in a while there’d be a story in the newspaper about a Negro learning to pilot an airplane, but it was always described as something rare. Like seeing an eclipse or something. If a Negro couldn’t fly a plane, it seemed beyond possibility he’d jump out of one, you know what I mean? When people asked us what my
daddy did in the war, we usually said he was in the army and stopped right there.

  The ticket agent shuffled through some papers. “Best I can do is sell you a one-way ticket going to Fayetteville, North Carolina, through Washington, D.C.”

  “Washington, D.C.?” Aunt Odella seemed suddenly confused by this information, and I began to feel the first prickles of real fear tiptoe across my scalp. Man oh man, did my aunt have any idea what she was doing? Did she even know the first thing about where she was sending me?

  “Is Washington, D.C., on the way to North Carolina?” she asked, deflating just a little.

  I guess the ticket man must’ve run out of his daily supply of patience by then. Leaning forward, he gave my aunt a look that woulda turned a lesser person into a pile of quivering dust. “Buy a ticket or get outta my line. I don’t have time for answering ignorant questions from coloreds.”

  Now sweat was popping out in cold nickels all over my forehead. You never called my aunt ignorant. No telling what she would do next. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her reach through the ticket window and wring that man’s scrawny little neck like a chicken.

  But her voice stayed dead calm. “Just asking.” She slid a handful of crumpled bills toward the man. “Give me a one-way ticket to Fayetteville.”

  Some change and a ticket slid back to her, and somehow we managed to slip away from the window like two enemy submarines, without causing any more commotion than we already had. Once we got outta earshot of the line, Aunt Odella handed me the ticket and huffed, “Like to give that man a big serving of my good barbed wire pie.”

  If this was a real pie, my aunt would’ve had to make a couple of them a day, she gave them out so often to people who made her mad. I was always careful eating her desserts whenever she was fuming at me, just in case she decided to put something metallic in mine.

  “Now, I got no earthly idea why this is the arrangement, but the train you’re taking goes through the city of Washington, D.C., on its way to North Carolina,” Aunt Odella repeated over her shoulder as she moved at a speedy pace toward the platforms for departing trains. Words came out between breaths. “Myself, I never been to Washington, D.C., before, but I’m sure it can’t be too bad of a place if the president of the United States lives there. All you gotta remember is not to get off the train until it gets to North Carolina. Just stay on and you’ll be fine.”

  She pulled a crisp white envelope outta her purse. “Once you get to North Carolina, there’s money in here for a bus to Camp Mackall, your daddy’s army post.” Her eyes narrowed, giving me one of her radar stares. “Don’t you go spending any of my hard-earned money on nothing foolish, you hear? I’m gonna be praying real hard for you the whole time, so I know you’ll be just fine.”

  My aunt was a powerful believer in prayer. She was also a powerful believer in short goodbyes. Probably because they didn’t leave much time for second thoughts or tears.

  I wasn’t much for boo-hooing either. Kids at school could come along and sock me right in the stomach and it didn’t make no difference to me. Their fist would make this oofing sound and they’d jump back and rub their hands. They’d have tears springing outta their eyes and I wouldn’t have any in mine. Big man, they’d gasp, you’re like some kinda strange pillow, nothing can touch you—you absorb stuff. Sometimes I worried maybe I was missing something, because most of the time I didn’t feel much of anything, good or bad. It was almost as if the fur coat my mother had wrapped around me as a baby was still there, muffling everything.

  Honestly, I could only recall crying once since my father had left for the war. Back when I was ten or eleven, he’d promised to come home for a quick visit at Christmas from the army post where he was stationed. A few days before he was supposed to arrive, everything was ready and waiting. I’d spent a whole week building a pretty darn good model airplane for him, which was sitting in the middle of the kitchen table like it had just landed there. Paint still shiny wet. Aunt Odella used half our ration book coupons to whip up a Christmas meal fit for a king. And then the telegram had arrived, saying he had other orders. Sorry. Can’t come home. Ordered to new post. Be good for Aunt Odella.

  I’d gone up to the roof of the apartment building, busted up the airplane into little pieces, and sat there by myself until I was almost froze solid, with tears and snot running down my face. Of course, it hadn’t done any good to cry. The army didn’t change its mind and send him home. Hadn’t bothered much with tears since then.

  Once we got to the train platform, Aunt Odella reached out her arms to squeeze my shoulders in a stiff hug. All around us, people were hugging and clinging to each other as if the Titanic was sinking underneath their feet. Next to them, we probably looked like two uncomfortable statues embracing. Then my aunt took a step back and pretended to search for something in her purse. “You better go and get yourself on that train, Levi, ’fore I fall apart and start crying.” She pulled out a perfectly ironed, starched hankie and pretended to pat her eyes, even though there wasn’t a single tear there.

  The two of us were alike in that way, I guess.

  I don’t think the torpedo of reality hit me until I started walking toward the train—how I was on my own—how I’d never been on a darned train before—how I’d never been outside of Chicago. As I reached the metal steps of one of the passenger coaches and began thinking all these crazy thoughts, I gotta admit my legs turned kinda weak and shaky. Jell-O legs, Archie woulda called them. Whenever we cut through the South Side cemetery coming back after dark, he’d always say, “Man oh man, this place gives me the jiggly Jell-O legs, Levi.”

  Heading on board that train, I had a bad case of those legs myself. Tripped over my own feet on the top step of the car and half fell over my suitcase. In front of me, a soldier with a fresh GI haircut turned and rolled his eyes, as if I was some kinda clumsy fool. Wanted to tell him at least I didn’t have a head that looked like an egg with fuzz.

  It didn’t help matters when I saw how the passenger cars were a lot smaller on the inside than they appeared from the outside too. Ducking my head through the doorway, I tried not to seem shocked by the sight of all the people stuffed inside that narrow space. I’m telling you, the inside of that car smelled like canned people. Everybody was pushing up their windows trying to get some air to breathe before they sat down.

  Sliding sideways down the skinny aisle, I started hunting around for an open seat. Even though Aunt Odella’d bought me a ticket, I guess that didn’t mean I’d get to sit down. Every row I passed by, people shook their heads and said, “Not here.” Or they’d throw a newspaper or a coat over an open spot if they had one and tell me it was already taken.

  Pretty soon I could hardly see where I was going on account of the fact I was so frustrated. Sweat was pouring down the middle of my back and my heart was thumping like a mortar lobbing shells. From what I could tell, there weren’t any other colored folks in the passenger car except me, and I began to get the strange feeling that’s why all the seats were suddenly full. The people in the car wanted to keep it that way. Or maybe they didn’t want to sit with a kid. Heck, what did they expect me to do? Did they want me to plop my big self smack-down in the middle of the aisle? Let everybody crawl over me all the way to North Carolina?

  Finally, at the far end of the passenger coach, a red-haired lady actually looked my direction instead of turning away. “This one free?” I asked the lady, and she shrugged and told me it was fine so long as I didn’t mind riding with a cake. She pointed at a big white bakery box sitting on the floor between the seats.

  Tell you the truth, I woulda sat down with a plate of cold Spam at that point. Sliding into the open seat, I tugged all my things into the space with me before the lady could change her mind. Don’t know what I would have done without that lady. She was some kinda white angel to me.

  7. One White Angel

  The lady told me she’d been carrying the cake all the way from the state of Kansas. I didn’t know how
far away Kansas was, but the cake box sure looked like it was in sorry shape. One corner was mashed in and a blue ribbon around the box had come loose. There was a scuff mark on the side like it had been accidentally stepped on. The lady seemed like she’d been on the train for a long time too, from the number of crumpled Milky Way wrappers scattered around her seat and how the bobby pins were dangling from her nice hairdo.

  “My name’s Margie,” she said with a tired but friendly smile.

  She was probably about twenty, I guessed. Her curled and done-up hair was nearly the same shade as the orange powder we mixed with the wartime margarine to make it turn yellow. Orange-red hair. Freckles sprinkled all over her face. With that hair and that name, I thought she probably coulda been a good hit song on the radio: “Margie with the Margarine Hair.”

  Reaching over, Margie handed me a wrinkled high school snapshot of a fellow. “This is who I’m bringing the cake for,” she offered without me even asking. I gotta admit the fellow in the picture didn’t look very happy about the fact she was bringing him a cake from Kansas, but maybe it was all the creases that made him seem gloomy and scowling.

  “His name is Jimmie Ray. He’s from Kansas too,” she explained. “He’s coming home from the war and I’m going to meet him in Washington, D.C., if this darned train ever gets there.” Stretching her arms toward the faded green seat in front of us, Margie yawned loudly. Candy wrappers tumbled to the floor. “How ’bout you?”

  I felt warm and tongue-tied. I didn’t talk to girls or white people much. “I’m Levi Battle. I’m from south Chicago.”

  “Levi. That’s a name you don’t hear too often.”

  “No ma’am.” I didn’t know what else to answer, not wanting to seem too talkative. I shifted around trying to find a comfortable place for my legs in the tight space. My old Weather-Bird school shoes hardly fit under the seats.