Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

“Things are changing, maybe,” Dorothy Marr says, uncomfortable with her daughter’s silence. “There are plenty of colored folks being called up to this war, that’s going to mean something.” Then, as if realizing what she is saying, she stops herself and says, “But that doesn’t mean—”

Frangie laughs. She has a musical laugh that always brings smiles to the faces of even her sternest teachers. “I won’t be enlisting for the sake of colored folk, Mother. I’ll be enlisting because Daddy can’t work. Let’s be practical.”

“Please don’t ever say that to him.” Her mother glances meaningfully toward the interior where Frangie’s father sits listening to a radio program, some horror story judging by the wobbling organ music being played between bits of dialogue. Her father loves radio plays, the more gruesome the better.

“I would never,” Frangie says.

“His pride . . .”

“His pride. He gets his hip crushed on the job, and the city gives him a severance that’s half what a white man would get. Doesn’t even cover the cost of whiskey to dull the pain.”

“It ought to be your brother going,” Dorothy says, whispering the last word. Frangie’s brother, Harder, is much older, nearly twenty-one now, but he is no longer welcome in the home, and never to be spoken of within her father’s hearing.

Harder is with the union, and he’s a communist, a revolutionary, at least he talks like one. Communists are levelers who want everyone to have the same—no rich, no poor, no bosses, and no differences between races. All that might be okay, but commies are also atheists, who reject Jesus and most likely other folks’ religions, too, all of them, not just some, and that’s unacceptable, intolerable to Frangie’s father.

“Well, it isn’t him, is it?” Frangie snaps. Then she laughs to take the edge off the sound of bitterness. A little thing with a great laugh, that’s Frangie Marr. Occasionally she would also be called cute, but that’s because no one ever calls her pretty. Cute she is, with hair still wild and natural—getting it straightened costs a half dollar and only lasts a couple weeks—and a lower lip that sticks out just a bit farther than its mate and gives her a pugnacious air. The feature that makes people look at her twice, sometimes with suspicious glances, is her eyes. They are too large, wide-set, slanted a bit. And they judge, those eyes do, they watch and they take note and they judge all that they see, and lots of folks do not like that much.

To the innocent, her eyes are arresting. To a person with something on his conscience, they seem too knowing.

Her mother sews another few dozen stitches, the machine making its crazed sound. “Life is hard.”

“Pay for a private is fifty dollars a month, and they have it set up where you can send almost all of that home. They call it an allotment. Well, I guess forty dollars a month would help a lot around here, especially with one less mouth to feed.”

Her mother can’t answer that and stares down at her work. The sewing machine bulb creates a sphere of lig

ht illuminating calloused, nimble fingers, a seamed, worried face, and the gleaming steel of the rapidly stabbing needle.

Of course the money will help. It will be the difference between scraping by and ending up on the street begging relatives to take them in.

“If only your father was well, he could get on at the bomber factory once it gets running,” Dorothy says.

Just then Frangie’s little brother, Obal, comes tearing out onto the porch to report breathlessly on his doings with friends and how his best friend, Calvin, found a broken-down bike in the dump. He thought maybe they could get it fixed up well enough for him to deliver papers, or maybe even telegrams, which pays better.

“I would help him whenever he couldn’t do the work. I could make a quarter maybe, fifty cents sometimes.”

Down the street toward central Greenwood the juke joint is warming up as the night ever so slowly cools. The ramshackle building with its single, blinking red florescent letter, R for Regent’s Club, vibrates with the sound of drums and trumpet.

“Diz is playing,” Frangie says wistfully. “I’d give just about anything to be able to play a horn like that.”

“Jazz,” Dorothy says dismissively. “Devil’s music.” But there isn’t a lot of intensity behind that judgment, and Frangie notices her mother has a tendency to move in her chair in response to the rhythm coming down the street.

“I’m going to do it,” Frangie says, as if waiting for an argument.

Her mother does not argue, and Frangie thinks, My God, I am actually going to do this. There’s something familiar in the sense of abandonment that wells up within her, and then she remembers the day when her mother first dropped her off at school. She turned and walked away while little Francine—as she was called then—bawled her eyes out and got a smack on the butt from her teacher. “Well, maybe it will be no worse than school,” she tells herself.

“I’m going for a walk,” Frangie says. “Can I bring you back anything?”

“No, sweetheart.”

There is something final about that word coming from her mother. Sweetheart. It’s a word she uses when comforting Frangie. She used it when her grandmother, Meemaw, died. “People die, sweetheart, even the ones we love.”

Frangie passes her father, asleep now in front of the ancient radio that only gets two of the four available stations. The program has shifted to a mystery.

Frangie goes first to her “hospital” in the backyard. It’s not much—a sort of doghouse constructed out of bits of this and that. It has a chicken-wire “yard” in front with a dish of water and one of food scraps. At present there are two patients—a cat recovering from burns and a pigeon with a broken wing.

Neither patient is happy about the presence of the other. But they are separated by some chicken wire on sticks.

“How are you doing, Cleo?” Frangie kneels and reaches in to pet the understandably jittery cat. “I am going to get you both out of here if I’m going away.”