Every day she checks in with the officer on duty to see whether her orders have come through. But day after day the answer is the same, “Nope. Nothing for you, Miss Frangie. Guess you’ll just have to stay here.”
Here is not a bad place to be. She follows the war news on the BBC and in the papers, and between the official reports and the rather less optimistic tales she hears from wounded soldiers, she knows what’s happening in Italy. It does not sound like anything she wants to be a part of, though she worries about Sergeant Green. And the rest too, but mostly Walter Green.
Here she has a nice clean bunk in an overheated room she shares with three American nurses and a Polish anesthetist, all female. Every morning there is a hot breakfast followed by a hotter shower. Her uniforms are professionally laundered and pressed and contain no lice. She has no gear to haul, no trucks to unload, no paperwork to fill out, and aside from the occasional air raid warning, no reason to be afraid.
Best of all, she is getting to know Harder better. He is fire to her soothing balm, but once she lets him have his rant about the oppressed workers and the valiant comrades in the USSR, he can be great fun. They talk, they play board games or cards with patients, they work, each in their own function, and they take walks into the village.
And they talk about Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June of 1921.
They talk as well of the lynchings that used to happen several times a week, but have died down a bit since the twenties, though Harder of course had a long list of more recent atrocities. He’s doing that as they walk—slowly, given Frangie’s leg—through the little village. It’s cold, but not miserably so, except when the breeze freshens and cuts through their field jackets, and even through the very welcome scarves knitted and donated by British women and folks back home.
“They lynched a soldier out of Fort Benning. Lynched him in full uniform!” And his stories are not limited to lynchings and burnings. “They promoted three colored men at a Packard plant up in Detroit? Just three. Twenty-five thousand white workers went out on strike. Know what they said, those patriotic white boys? Said, ‘We’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work alongside a Nigra.’”
“Maybe all this”—she waves in a way meant to encompass the village, the hospital, the air base beyond, and the entirety of the war—“will change things.”
Harder laughs cynically. “Nothing is going to change, Frangie. Nothing changes without revolution, a socialist people’s revolution.”
Frangie steers the conversation onto safer ground by pointing to a flight of bombers passing by overhead, on their way to Germany.
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: i
t’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.