Jump into the Sky Page 5

  “Lemme see your ticket.” The porter sighed, as if I was just one more fly in his soup. He glanced at my ticket and pointed through the window. “Over there and to the left is the place you need to be. That’s the southbound train you want. You can see it on the tracks just past the end of our train.”

  I didn’t see it, but I told him I did so I wouldn’t look like any more of a complete fool. Lugging all my belongings down the aisle, bumping into everything, I stumbled in the direction he pointed. Outside, three more people had to tell me where to find the right train before I did.

  It was a filthy-looking one called the Atlantic Coast Line. All the passenger cars were covered in a layer of yellow dust so thick you coulda written your name on them, and the biggest coal-burning locomotive I’d ever seen was at the front. With all its greasy iron and steel parts, it coulda been a dead ringer for one of Hitler’s warships. I’m telling you, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see some artillery come poking outta the mean sides of that thing and explosives start flying through the air.

  Since there were no numbers on the passenger cars from what I could figure out, I picked one in the middle to climb on board. Only I didn’t even get past the first metal step.

  “You there, boy,” a voice hollered behind me. “You got yourself a ticket?”

  I headed backward like a fish drifting downstream, with people pushing and shoving past me. A white fellow from the railroad came closer, and you could see he was gonna be an old fussytail, just by the way he was acting. Big important ring of keys dangling from his belt. Chest puffed out as if he was something special.

  “Give me that ticket you got and lemme make sure you’re in the right place.”

  He took so long staring at my ticket that by the time he looked up again, I figured there probably wasn’t a seat left in America. “Where you from?” he asked me, squinting.

  “Chicago, sir.” I kept my shoulders square and my voice steady, like I was older than thirteen. People often thought I was.

  “Chicago. Only smart boys live there, I hear. You smart?”

  I shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. How are you supposed to answer an ignorant question like that? Aunt Odella probably woulda called it rude and none of his darned business. The suitcase handle dug uncomfortably into my hand. Hefting it a little higher and shifting Margie’s cake box to one side, I finally replied that some people might say I was smarter than others, but I didn’t have any opinion on it myself.

  The man chuckled to himself as if this was a funny answer to give. He ran his fingers through the few strands of greasy hair he had left on his head. “How’d you like to help me with an important job I got this morning?”

  From the expression on his face, he seemed serious about wanting somebody to help—and what choice did I have, since he was still holding on to my lousy ticket? I asked him what needed to be done.

  “Follow me.” He took me along the entire length of the train until we got close to the first passenger car behind the locomotive and coal cars. It didn’t have a lot of windows like the other ones did, only a few at the front, and the sides were covered in black soot so completely, they coulda been called painted. The man nodded in the direction of the odd-looking car. “That’s one of our special baggage and mail coaches. You board at the front.” He pointed toward a set of rusty steps. “You’re gonna be one of the sets of eyes and ears guarding the real important baggage and mail we’re carrying on this train today. You think you can do the job?”

  Tell you the truth, I figured he was asking me for help because of the war. No other reason even tiptoed through my mind. Everybody had to do their part back then. In Chicago, even the youngest, droolingest kids who couldn’t read a single word knew how to spot an enemy plane from the silhouettes they plastered all over our Wheaties boxes. Just because no enemy planes had flown over the city yet didn’t matter. You had to be prepared for anything to happen.

  So I shrugged as if it wasn’t any big deal and told the man, sure, I’d help with keeping watch over the baggage, if he needed a spare hand.

  “Good. Like Uncle Sam says, ‘We need you.’ ” He handed me my ticket and waggled one of his fingers in my face, pretending he was some imitation of Uncle Sam, I guess, and then he walked a few steps away. Still keeping one sharp eye on what I was doing, I could tell.

  Right then, I shoulda realized there was something strange about how the man was acting, even if I couldn’t put a name on exactly what it was. Being smart, I shoulda asked what the important baggage was and why, outta all the civilians and soldiers crowding on that train, he’d picked me, a thirteen-year-old kid from Chicago with a smashed cake box and a shabby suitcase, to guard it.

  Probably a second thought never crossed my mind because I often got picked for jobs at school. Teachers wouldn’t trust Archie to walk from the front of the classroom to the back, but for some reason they trusted me. One time, a teacher sent me to the corner store to buy a sandwich and soda for her lunch—right in the middle of mathematics, I got to stroll outta my education. Levi is one of the good boys, my teachers liked to announce in a loud and embarrassing voice to any visitor who set foot in our classroom. Big Man, everyone would chant, thumping their fists on the desks. Which was why me and Archie stuck together—so he could be better and I could be worse sometimes.

  Being a good kid, I headed toward the baggage car as if I’d been given a direct order by General MacArthur himself. But a worsening feeling came over me as I got closer and noticed how nobody else seemed to be sitting inside the car. Which was strange, because you could look down the entire length of the train—must’ve been at least two dozen passenger coaches—and people were packed together everywhere else. GIs hung halfway out the windows waving and shouting, and families stood in little worried clumps waiting to see the train off. But outside the baggage car, only a couple of fat pigeons pecked at some bits of popcorn.

  I was reaching for the railing to climb into the car when the whistle of that big locomotive let out a shriek and a hiss of white-hot steam shot out nearby. Scared the living daylights outta me. I cleared the last steps in a long jump that probably coulda won an Olympic medal and banged through the half-open door of the car with one shoulder and all my belongings.

  First thing I noticed was the terrible sour smell inside. Second thing I noticed was how there wasn’t a stick of baggage anywhere around. Third thing I noticed was the old Negro man slumped in the far corner seat like a bag of bones.

  When I came falling through the door, his head jerked up suddenly from his chest and he grinned with a toothless, skeleton smile.

  “Welcome,” he said with a deathly kind of cackle, “to Jim Crow.”

  10. Jim Crow

  My face must’ve looked as shell-shocked as I felt, because the old colored man kept asking me if I was all right. Still feeling shaky, I didn’t answer. Instead, I slid onto a wooden bench in the farthest corner from where he sat and prayed hard that somebody else, anybody else, would come on board to keep me from being left alone to guard the baggage car with a crazy skeleton man.

  “I says, you got a name, son?” the man hollered loudly from the corner. When I didn’t reply, he still kept on trying. “Hey, up there. You, boy. You deef or did ol’ Jim Crow scare off your voice?”

  Finally, when the fellow wouldn’t stop jabbering, I swiveled my head around and leveled a glare at him. “Never heard of Jim Crow. Now stop talking to me and mind your own business.” Made sure every word was loud and clear. Turned my shoulders into a fortified wall that you’d better not cross if you had any smarts.

  Guess the old man didn’t get the clear message I was sending, because he smacked his hand on the back of the wooden seat in front of him and chuckled instead. “You a polite northern boy, ain’t you? Setting there with your fancy starched shirt and store-bought pants and shoes. You never heard of Jim Crow before, has you? You is the very picture of innocence.”

  Outta the corner of my eye, I could see the stranger
stand up, bones creaking, and stagger closer to me. He wasn’t even wearing shoes, I noticed as he teetered down the aisle. Had raggedy trousers tied with a piece of twine. Good God. When he reached the seat next to me, he swung an unsteady arm through the air as if he was introducing himself. “Meet Jim Crow, son,” he hollered.

  Right then, the train whistle wailed for the final time. The front door of our car slammed shut, and the train jerked forward hard enough to send everything sliding. Jim Crow’s hands grabbed for the back of my seat, trying to stay upright. “Hold on,” he shouted over the earsplitting noise of the metal wheels shrieking to life. “We’re on our way.”

  As the train gathered speed, the space around us suddenly began filling up with heavy smoke from the locomotive ahead of us. A choking cloud of cinders poured through the open windows like black snow. Above the thundering roar of the engine, I could hear Jim Crow shouting at me about closing the windows.

  Well, I struggled like the dickens to shut the two open ones on my side while the old man tried to slam down the others. Even with the windows finally shut, our whole car was still thick with ashes. A metallic taste filled my mouth.

  Sagging into one of the nearby seats, Jim Crow spat loudly into a handkerchief and wiped off his mouth and nose. What was left behind on that handkerchief was the color of ink—I’m telling you the gospel truth, his spit was black. Criminy. I stared openmouthed at the sight. “That from the train?”

  “Where you think it’s from?” the old man snorted. “Few hours inside this car, you mark my words—you gonna be black on the outside and the inside too.”

  He wasn’t lying. Glancing down, I saw how coal dust already covered everything I was wearing. My brown pants, my white shirt, my skin—all of it sparkled with glittering-sharp bits of black. There was no brushing them off either. They stuck to your palms and left them smelling like rust. Made me think of the times when me and Archie climbed the spiky iron fence around the South Side cemetery. How our hands would smell of metal and death for days, no matter how much we scrubbed them.

  “Chains smell the same way, you know.” The old man spoke up from where he was sitting across the aisle.

  I’m telling you, that observation didn’t ease my mind much about him.

  “But up in the lily-white North where you come from, they probably don’t teach you nothing about our people being in chains, does they?”

  I shot right back that I knew plenty about chains and our people and history and such. People in the North weren’t fools. Take Aunt Odella’s church in Chicago, for instance—it had a preacher who’d become well known for his habit of bringing a heavy ship’s chain up to the pulpit for his sermons. Whenever he noticed the congregation drifting off, he’d drop the iron rope to the floor and give us all an instant heart attack. “Colored folks is still in chains!” he’d shout, and pound the pulpit with his fist. “Not real chains like the slavery ones from years ago. But chains nonetheless!”

  Then he’d go on with his message about the dangers of dancing the jitterbug or drinking whiskey or not honoring the Sabbath or something like that. Lucky for us, he’d given up his church chain for the war effort—donated it to one of the scrap drives in Chicago to be made into hand grenades. I figure there was probably enough metal in that chain to blow up half of Berlin. But the preacher still made me jumpy whenever he stood up to give the sermon. Who knows what he’d find to drop from the pulpit next. Boulders maybe.

  “They teach you about Jim Crow too, up there where you is from?” the old man said, coughing so hard I was afraid his lungs might come out on his hankie. “Or this the first you seen it with your own eyes?”

  Now, up until that moment, I still thought the fellow was calling himself Jim Crow. The raggedy suit hanging loose on his narrow shoulders coulda easily passed for the tattered wings of a bird. His skin was a dark ink-black. The man waved his arm through the air again. “Jim Crow. That’s where you setting. Real pretty, ain’t it?”

  His words weren’t making a crumb of sense. Aunt Odella probably woulda called him a few cards short of a full house. Again I cast a look around, trying to come up with another place to go, but there was nowhere else in sight. Only the coal cars and the engine rumbled in front of us, and our car didn’t have a back exit. There were just six rows of wooden seats and behind them was a solid wall with a locked door, where I figured the special baggage was being kept.

  “The car’s called Jim Crow,” the old man repeated.

  “What?”

  “You see any white folks around this place?”

  “No sir, just us.” I tried real hard to keep my eyes from rolling at his questions.

  The man snorted. “Us white?”

  “No sir.”

  “Well, then welcome to your first ride on Jim Crow.”

  I told the old man he was wrong about why we were there. Told him how I’d been sent to guard the baggage and help out with the war effort. He just leaned his head back and howled, his toothless mouth wide open, showing nothing but pink gums. “Son, you wasn’t sent to this baggage car to be a guard—you was sent here because of your brown skin.” He wiped tears of laughter out of his eyes. “You ain’t guarding nothing you wasn’t born with.”

  Heck, that idea was pure absolute nonsense. Heat warmed up my ears as the old wreck of bones kept up his howling. Who ever heard of cars called Jim Crow for colored people? My daddy had never written a single word about riding in them. And nobody on the Chicago train put me in a separate car, did they? Look at Margie with the Margarine Hair—she was a white lady who’d shared her seat with me and she’d given me a cake to keep. Was the old man just trying to make a fool outta me? Razzing me because I was from somewhere else and on my own and all?

  Well, it burned me up listening to him go on and on. Standing up, I headed toward the little washroom in the front corner of the car, figuring maybe I’d just slam the door and sit inside there for a while. Get some peace.

  But I didn’t even get one big toe through the doorway. The sour smell stopped me first. I pushed open the half-closed door and the odor that came pouring out was straight evil. There was no real toilet inside at all—only a wooden box with a hole in it and tracks flying right below that hole. Scores of flies covered the walls and ceiling. There was no washbasin. No water. No towel. The smell drifted up my nose. I backed out, feeling like I was gonna be sick.

  “No use,” the old man hollered when I tried pulling the door closed again. “I done tried all that before. You just gotta grit your teeth and live with what we got right here. No other choice. You gonna learn that lesson soon enough.”

  His words made me madder, as if somehow he was to blame for me being covered in coal dust and stuck in the worst car on the screwball train. Maybe he thought it was funny, but heck, nobody I knew would put up with this place. Not Aunt Odella. Not Uncle Otis. I didn’t give a fly’s behind what the car was called. I just wanted to be off it. Smacking into the corner seat again, I turned my face toward the window and let a bunch of curse words ricochet around in my brain for a while. Then I licked my dumb metallic-tasting lips and cussed inside my head some more.

  For a long time, the only sound inside the car was the rhythmic clatter of the wheels below us as they rolled along the tracks. Then I heard some music start up in the far corner. Glancing back, I saw the old man sitting there, bent over a banged-up guitar. His eyes were closed, but he swayed back and forth in his seat, plucking the strings and singing a little sideways song I couldn’t make out the words of.

  “You like music, son?” He stopped in the middle of his tune, like he knew I was watching, and opened his eyes.

  I didn’t answer, but he swung the guitar over his shoulder anyhow and came swaying down the aisle to take the seat behind me. “Here, I’ll play you a little something I made up,” he said, sitting down and strumming again with his fingernails, which were the yellow color of beeswax.

  “It’s a tune about coming and going, living and dying,” he said.

>   From what I could tell there was only one verse to his tune, so who knows if it counted as a real song or not.

  Wish I was a little rock a-settin’ on a hill,

  Without another thing to do, but just a-settin’ still.

  He sang those same words over and over, plucking different strings and tapping on the front of the box with his fingers, making up the accompaniments straight out of his head as he went along, it seemed like.

  In no time at all, of course, my mind started drifting to my mother—picturing her sashaying into a spotlight wearing a sparkly kinda dress with her hair done up in a shiny roll like a movie star. Music often afflicted me like that. Whenever somebody started singing, my mind went straight to thinking about Queen Bee Walker. Nobody in the family had a single snapshot of her, so who knows what she looked like in person. Aunt Odella always said the lady didn’t stick around long enough for a flashbulb to pop. I wondered what tunes she sang at the jazz club the night she met my daddy. Must’ve been good if he fell crazy in love after only hearing a couple of them.

  * * *

  The old man brought me back to where I was. “You hear the coming and going in my song, son? How sometimes you gotta move and sometimes you gotta stay where you is?” He stopped strumming and waited on an answer.

  Nope, I didn’t hear any of those things, but I nodded politely anyhow.

  “See, I sing what I’m feelin’ right inside here.” He tapped two shaky fingers on his chest. Looking at him closer, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he was a hundred. His eyes made me think of the old river catfish Uncle Otis sometimes caught and brought home. He had those same muddy catfish eyes that had seen a lot.

  “So where you coming from and going to, son?”

  I told him I was going from Chicago to North Carolina to see my father in the army. He shook his head slowly as if that was a bad idea and absentmindedly plucked a few strings on the guitar.

  “See, you just like that little ol’ rock I been singing about. You been setting on top of the hill in Chicago, living up there in the North where everything is fine and dandy, and now you about to come down from that pretty mountaintop, getting smaller and smaller the farther south you go. Once you step off this train in North Carolina, only one piece of you’ll be left. Know what that is?”