The Moon Above: Part 2

Chapters 3 and 4

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THREE

The Promised Land

“GOT ONE!” I said, but not too loud.

My friend Nelson Ray and I were playing World War I bomber pilots. Our bombs were acorns. Our targets, standing in for the Germans, were whoever walked under the largest oak on the western side of Washington Park.

In my memory, I spent nearly all my time in the park. I felt like I had the whole world open to me when I was there. It had everything: trees, horses, enough grass to make up two or three football fields, a lagoon as big as the ocean. That’s how it seemed at the time, anyway.

In those days, our folks let us out to run all day in the park. I’ve seen how your mother keeps an eye on you from her kitchen window. You get out of her sight for three seconds and she’s out the door after you. That’s not bad, I know she means the best. But that’s not the way things used to be. Kids were kids then, and they were supposed to be outside, and that was fine with me. If I dared stay inside too long, my mother would find me something to do.

Nelson was a tiny little boy, even smaller than me, but he was fast and could climb like a monkey. He lived to the east of the park somewhere — I never went to his house, and he never came to my kitchenette — but his father ran a dry-cleaning store in the neighborhood and was generally considered to be fair to Negroes. His father knew he played with me, because I sometimes met him at the store, but he obviously did not mind. That didn’t mean anything to me at the time. It does now.

“I don’t think you got her,” Nelson said from above.

He was higher up the tree than I was, sprawled over a limb like a panther.

“I did, too.”

“She didn’t look up.”

“I hit her, though. I saw it bounce off her foot.”

It actually was a little hard to scope out our victories because as soon as the bombs were away, we pulled in our arms and legs as best we could to hide. But I did think I saw it bounce off her foot.

“Here comes somebody,” Nelson hissed. “He’s mine.”

A large man passed underneath, wearing a natty suit and a fedora perched at a jaunty angle, complete with a small red feather. I waited to see the acorn go by, and to hear the simulated scream of a falling bomb, but nothing happened.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Did you see that guy?” Nelson responded. “He was huge!”

“So? He’s not going to climb up here after you, not dressed like that.”

“I don’t care. He’s big. I just wanted him to go on by.”

Just about then we heard a ragged, tearing sound. I looked up to see an old airplane towing a banner high in the sky above the city. The banner was touting a restaurant or something, but it was at an angle and I couldn’t quite read it. The aircraft was a biplane, a two-winged contraption left over from the First World War. It either sustained serious damage in the war, or had gone without repair, or both. It sounded like a motorcycle as it sputtered across the blue. We watched it until it disappeared behind the apartment buildings on the other side of the park, and half expected to hear a resounding crash.

When it was gone, I flattened my stomach on the branch and held my arms out straight.

“When I grow up, I am going to be a pilot,” I said.

“A pilot?” Nelson said. “What kind of pilot?”

“For the Army. A bomber pilot. Dropping real bombs, not acorns. I will bomb the Germans.”

“But we’re not fighting the Germans anymore. And anyway, you can’t be no bomber pilot.”

“Why not?”

“Johnny, take a look at your arms.”

I did. They were black, same as they are now.

“That’s why. You’re a Negro. The government won’t let you.”

“So what? I can still grab a stick and bomb Germany.”

“We’re not fighting the Germans anymore.”

“I know that. I can still bomb anyone who needs to be bombed.”

“I know you could. I don’t know if you’d be a good bomber, though, the way you drop them acorns. But anyway, it doesn’t matter, they won’t let you.”

“Who? The Army? Or white people?”

“It’s the same thing.”

“Why not, though? It doesn’t make sense.” I knew he was right; I couldn’t be born in Alabama and not know he was right. I couldn’t grow up in America and not know he was right.

“They don’t think you can handle it, I guess. You don’t ever hear white people talking. Some of them don’t even want you to drive, and so they sure don’t want you up over their heads in a plane.”

When Nelson was telling me things I already knew, it did not occur to me to hate him because he was one of the people wanting to hold me back. I knew he wasn’t like that. I could separate him out from the people we were talking about. If a child can do that, I don’t know why adults can’t. Well, I do know now, but I didn’t then.

That night, as I lay in my small bed in a corner of the kitchenette, I burned with the desire to be a pilot for the Army just because Nelson said I couldn’t. The desire had stayed with me that entire afternoon. Nelson and I had wreaked holy hell on the Germans below us with our explosive acorns until some of the older boys who played in the park threatened to come up to where we were and make us eat those acorns, or something worse. We had suspended our bombing campaign then, but I still thought about it.

The desire to fly was born in me that day. Unlike so many childhood interests, it did not die for many years. Nelson is dead now, though. I saw less and less of him as life pulled us apart, to the point that I probably wouldn’t have known him as an adult if I saw him on the street. I heard he took over his father’s store, had a couple of kids and then got drafted. He made a mistake; he didn’t fly. He was infantry. I heard he died in the Battle of the Bulge. So now he knows more about life and death than I do.

MY UNCLE ABE VISITED THE NEXT WEEK. I WAS STILL STEWING ABOUT MY lack of flying potential, so I took it up with him.

“Why so down, little man?”

“Leave him alone, Abe, let him be,” Aunt Eveline said.

She was reading a stack of newspapers borrowed from the Jacksons down the hall. Eveline was perfectly content to be quiet for hours on end, but Abe was not a reader and was not himself if he was not talking.

“I’m just asking the young man a question,” he said. “Read your papers, woman. Something’s got him upset. Look at that serious face.”

Abernathy, or Abe, was a big man with big appetites. He took up nearly an entire corner of the kitchenette whenever he visited, while Aunt Eveline would barely occupy a single chair. I do not know of any food he would not eat and eat a lot of. His chest was huge, almost as big around as one of the oaks in the park, and he draped it in the finest suits he could afford. He roamed all over the country in a gigantic yellow Cadillac with Aunt Eveline, moving fearlessly through the Deep South, even through the places where Negroes were not allowed to stop and go to the restroom, which was almost everywhere. Uncle Abe said he had the biggest bladder in the South and didn’t need to stop.

“I was just thinking about something, that’s all.”

“Tell me. Tell your Uncle Abe. You and Uncle Abe and God can sort it out.”

A few words about God and Uncle Abe: Mother’s “little” brother was a preacher of sorts. He had held a variety of jobs — some of which made my parents argue — but the most recent was jack-leg preacher. He felt the calling of Jesus, he said, and he wanted a flock to lead.

“He feels the calling of George Washington,” said Father when he heard the news. “And he wants some sheep to give him as many Washingtons as he can get his hands on.”

The problem for Abe was that he roamed so much that he was not a known quantity in Chicago. He could not just show up and get a church going.

“You got to get in there with the people and get to know the church,” he said. “You got to know what the people need. You got to find out why their current pastor is not giving it to them, then you got to provide.”

Uncle Abe became an assistant pastor at the South Side Baptist Fellowship, which met in a building that used to house a Jewish deli. It was where Mother and I went to church regularly, sometimes accompanied by a reluctant Father, occasionally by an even more reluctant Katherine. There was another assistant pastor, too, another shark in the tank. The jobs were unpaid and were mostly filled in case Brother Johnston was sick. It also gave the assistant pastors the opportunity to undermine Brother Johnston whenever they could so they could get their own churches started. Brother Johnston was in good health, at the moment, so Uncle Abe did not have much to do but lounge around the kitchenette and talk to me.

“I’m not upset. It’s just my friend said something the other day and I’ve been thinking about it.”

“What friend?”

When Uncle Abe was paying attention to you, he paid attention to you. His face settled into what looked almost like a parody of concern, but he was serious. It was a good trait for an aspiring preacher.

“Nelson. Nelson Ray.”

“That little redheaded white boy I’ve seen you with? His father has that dry cleaning place on 45th?”

“That’s right.”

“I hear good things about his father. I would rather see a Race man have that business, but if a white man must have it, I guess Nelson’s father is good enough. So, what did this young man tell you?”

“He told me that I couldn’t fly for the Army because I’m a Negro.”

Aunt Eveline, who was supposed to be reading, snorted a little laugh at that.

“What are you making noise at, woman?” Abe asked. “The young man has a serious concern.”

“Ain’t nobody, white or Black, ought to be flying,” Eveline said. “Birds and bats, because they have wings, and that’s it.”

She was quiet but consistent in her way and I don’t think she ever did fly in her whole life.

“Shush,” Abe said, turning back to me. “Well, Johnny, I have to tell you that your friend is right. You can’t fly for the Army. But that don’t mean you can’t fly at all.” “But how?” I asked.

“You don’t have to be a military flier. You can fly the mail, or just do barnstorming, if you want.”

“Abe, why don’t you just kill him now and be done with it?” Eveline said.

“I will not snuff out the dreams of the young,” Abe replied. “Now, Johnny, there is one problem. You’ll find it hard to get trained in this country. The white man will keep us down however he can, and that includes keeping us down on the ground. But there are places you can go where they are willing to look beyond the color of your skin. You need to get to France.”

“France?” I said, in unison with Aunt Eveline.

“That’s right, France. France has trained Race flyers. I read about it in the Defender. There was a Race man who went over to France in the Great War. The U.S. Army wouldn’t let him fly but he flew for France and could shoot down German planes as well as anybody. He became an ace. And there was Bessie Coleman. You heard of Bessie Coleman?” She sounded a little familiar, but I wasn’t sure.

“She was from right here in Chicago. A woman, to boot. Used to do up hair right here in the neighborhood, but decided she wanted to fly aeroplanes. She went over to France and learned how, and then came back and showed everybody how a Race woman could fly.” “And she crashed her plane and died,” Eveline said.

“Woman! I am trying to encourage this boy!”

“Encourage him to be safe, then.” Uncle Abe rolled his eyes.

“Come on, let’s go out in the hallway.”

He put his baseball mitt-sized hand on my shoulder and guided me out to the hallway, which was the opposite of our clean, well-organized kitchenette. It had three light sconces but only one bulb that held out against the darkness, and boasted several competing lengths of wallpaper, with old designs peeking out from under newer ones like the place was some half-finished archeological dig.

One of our neighbors, Mr. Roswell, was sitting in the hallway on a wooden chair, looking at the Defender under the dim yellow glow from the lone working bulb. He was about sixty-five years old, thin as a stick, but healthy. He never had two nickels in his pocket but always dressed like he was going to the opera. He kept the chair in the hallway because he could be sure to run across one of the many other residents of the kitchenette building, especially since his own tiny apartment was near the shared bathroom. The newspaper was an excuse to sit outside; he was barely literate. He sat on his chair and awaited his prey, like a spider.

“Abe! I didn’t know you was in town.”

Our neighbors always liked to see Uncle Abe, and he liked to see them. They tried to borrow money from him, and he tried to borrow money from them, and I think they ended up just passing the same old tattered dollars back and forth.

“Yes, George, I am. I see you’re looking well, as usual.”

“And hello, young Johnny.”

“Hello, Mr. Roswell.”

“You say hello to your mother and father for me, Johnny. And your sister, too.”

Katherine was starting to catch the attention of a lot of men in the building, and not only the young ones.

“I will, sir.”

“So polite. Abe, I hope you’re not bringing this young man out in the hallway to punish him for something?”

“No, not at all, George. I’m just trying to get him away from the negative influence of that crazy wife of mine. I’m trying to tell him that he needs to go to France.”

“France!” Mr. Roswell said. “Why would he want to do that? Do you speak French, Johnny?”

“No, sir.”

“See there?” Mr. Roswell said.

“You’re about as bad as Eveline. The boy can learn French, any fool can learn French if they want to. What he could get over there is freedom.”

Mr. Roswell seemed to think about that.

“Well, the white folks there seem a little calmer about these things,” he allowed.

“That’s right,” Abe said. “A Race man there can own property wherever he likes. He doesn’t have to live just with his own.”

“They have that Josephine Baker there, too, I heard,” Mr. Roswell said. “She dances in front of white audiences.”

“Who’s out here talking about Josephine Baker?” another voice said.

It was Lance Wilson from upstairs. He was a lanky man, not much older than Katherine. He ran policy numbers from a shop down the street, a kind of constant ongoing lottery that didn’t pay out much but didn’t cost much to play, either. My mother said he did other things, as well, and told me to keep away from him. But I always thought he seemed nice. He was also very tall, and that impressed me at the time.

“We are telling this young man that he ought to go to France,” Mr.

Roswell said, delighted to have an additional source of conversation.

“France? He ain’t going to France before I go,” Wilson said. “I’d get a lot more out of a Josephine Baker show than he would.”

“He wants to fly aeroplanes,” Uncle Abe said. He always pronounced it that way. The first time I heard him say it I thought he said, “arrow planes.”

“And he should fly aeroplanes if he wants to,” Uncle Abe continued. “They’ll let him do that in France.”

“They’ll let you do anything in France,” Wilson said with an air of authority, as if he had not just announced that he had never been there. “A Black man can go over there and have a white wife, if he wanted one. You can do whatever you want.”

“They let a Race man fly in the Great War,” Uncle Abe said. “You know, he shot down some planes, became an ace.”

“Yeah, I heard of him, too,” Wilson said. “Can’t remember his name, though.”

“I read about him,” Mr. Roswell said. “I can’t remember his name, either.”

“I better be going,” Wilson said. “Got a drawing soon. You all take care. You tell your sister hello, young man. And let me know before you head off to France.”

“I will.”

I started reading everything I could about France after that, looking at newspaper articles and books at the library. They spoke French. They had exquisite cooking and ate snails, which I found nasty but interesting. The population of the country was 40 million people. They used francs, whatever they were, for money instead of dollars. And they didn’t seem to hate Black people. A woman named Josephine Baker was indeed getting famous for dancing there and didn’t have to do it just in front of Black audiences. And Uncle Abe was right about the fighter pilot. He was Eugene Jacques Bullard. They let him fly for France in the Great War, and he shot down two German planes. He wasn’t an ace, though. You had to shoot down at least five airplanes to become an ace.

I decided I wanted to become an ace, if there was ever a war again.

FOUR

Katherine Falls

MOTHER WAS LIVID. There was no sleeping in the kitchenette that night as she paced like a lioness. She was not a lioness protecting her cubs.

She was going to eat one of her cubs, if that cub ever came home.

Katherine was entering her womanhood while she was barely a teenager. She was racing into womanhood, getting there as fast as she could, and she could go pretty fast. My sister was tall for her age, tall and slender but with curves budding in all the places guaranteed to attract men. There were plenty of men around with nothing but time on their hands. The economy was wrecked and there was nothing but time for them, and energy, with no work to sap it out of their young limbs.

She started staying out later and later. Times were tough and more and more people were following what our family had done and were pulling up stakes in the South and heading for Chicago, looking for the same thing we and everyone else were looking for. The schools were running in two shifts and Katherine had the late shift, and her arrival home kept getting later and later. She said she was studying but her grades did not reflect that.

“If those are the kinds of grades you get after all your studying, girl, you have a mental problem,” Mother said.

“It’s hard,” Katherine said, her voice as tight and sharp as Mother’s. “You wouldn’t know about it.”

They looked like bookends as they argued, because their bodies had adopted the same position: heads thrust forward, hips thrust out, right elbows crooked ninety degrees, hands on rumps. They looked somewhat alike, although Mother had gone round where Katherine was still angular.

“Girl, you know I am educated. There is nothing you are studying that I don’t know. And I know that you’re not studying. You don’t seem to be looking around you. If you don’t study, if you don’t educate yourself, nobody is going to do it for you. If you don’t educate yourself, you are going to go nowhere in this life.”

“Like here? If I apply myself, I can end up in a shitty kitchenette, working for white folks for peanuts and married to a man who can’t get a job? That’s what I’ve got to look forward to?”

Mother wanted to keep her in the house but ended up chasing her out the door. I think that was the first night things really came to a head between them, and after that it was almost as if Katherine had died, because she became a ghost. People talked about her, particularly the men, but she was rarely around, although now and then I thought I saw her face just before she slid into the shadows. She still came home, although it was not like she actually lived there, and the first cross word from Mother or Father and she was gone again, like the dirt father blew off the wood before he painted his signs.

I don’t think I ever really knew her well. She was four years older than me. That did not matter much in Alabama, but it was a lifetime in Chicago. She arrived in the land of temptation just at the moment she was looking for temptation. No road was closed to her. She was not a loud person, though. She was quiet, reserved, placid as the sea. She took after Father in that. She had his quiet ability to make friends, although, according to Mother, she used it only to make the wrong ones. She also inherited Mother’s steely will, but I think she only used it to oppose her.

I will take this time to remember Katherine, who has been gone from me for so long. I don’t know if she’s alive right now, or long dead. I will remember her as I would like to remember her, when she was just a teenager headed for trouble. She was lean, with smooth skin that was light enough to worry Mother. Both my parents were dark, my father especially; my sister was fair, as I said, and I was somewhere in between. Light skin was something to be desired in those days, in that place. Virtually the entire social structure of the South Side was based on skin color, and the less of it you had the better off you were. Negro newspapers that assailed the doings of the white man stoked their coffers with ads for creams guaranteed to lighten skin. Mother complained about these ads every time she saw them, and she knew the danger that her daughter’s hide placed her in, but she was powerless to stop it because it was something God had done and she always knew God was much, much bigger than her.

Late one afternoon, I was looking out the window watching a lot of people on the street. Then I saw Katherine, small down there, hugging her few books to her chest. There were other people around, but I hadn’t noticed anyone walking with her. Mother peeked out the window and saw her instantly and smelled trouble. She could spot Katherine’s wrongdoings a mile away, like a mother bat able to hear her babies’ shrieks in the din of a darkened cave.

“Who was that who walked you home?” Mother asked Katherine when she came through the door.

“Just a boy,” Katherine said.

I’ll give her one thing, she never lied. She might not tell you what you wanted to hear, but she didn’t lie.

“What have I told you about boys?”

“That I’m not supposed to pal around with them.”

“That’s right.”

“But I wasn’t palling around with him. He had talked to me at school and I told him where we lived, and he wanted to walk home with me to keep me safe. I thought it was very chivalrous.”

She was very smart, too. I did not know what chivalrous meant, I had to look it up. It was a French word. It was a double-edged sword, what she said. It showed our mother that she was learning things and, at the same time, got in a dig about our reduced circumstances. Katherine knew full well that we were living no worse than we had been in Alabama, but she rarely missed a chance to remind our parents that we could be doing better.

Mother leaned over the table and bared her teeth at her daughter like a wild dog.

“Chivalry is dead,” she hissed.

The thing is, Katherine did not seem to care much about boys one way or the other. She could not help but attract them, just like a flower can’t help but attract bees. She had only to open her petals and they would come. She was smart, when she felt like displaying it, and funny. She could draw wonderful pictures of anything. She once drew a picture of me looking out the window and I didn’t even know she was doing it. My mind was a million miles away. I was Flash Gordon protecting Chicago from the evil hordes of Ming the Merciless, who were flying down between the rat-trap buildings, forcing people to flee so fast the men had to hold on to their hats. I didn’t hear her scratching away. The picture looked like a photograph. I carried it with me for many years and wish I had it still.

She had more girlfriends than boyfriends, but they never seemed to last long because a boy always seemed to pop up and come between them. I remember her girlfriends coming over because Katherine would usually kick me out of the kitchenette, and I would have to do my homework in the park. My writing always looked bad because I never had anything proper to write on. I had to use the bark of the trees or the dirt or the cracked slats of the benches. But, like I said, then a boy would pop up and create some screaming hysteria between Katherine and some soon-to-be-former friend. I never understood it.

I made a few vows while watching Katherine grow up in Chicago. I vowed that I would never make my parents cry. She did that for sure, especially Mother. Katherine would make the rage rise in Mother like a volcano, but instead of lava she would erupt in tears, although only when Katherine left. She would never let her daughter see her cry. She would show only the rage, which was probably a mistake.

I also vowed that no one would tell me what to do. At first, I gloried in Katherine’s independence, in her ability to come and go as she pleased. It took a while, and it took some listening to some of Mother’s sermons before I realized, but it finally sunk in that she did not have real freedom. She was merely giving control to other people, namely the string of men that attached themselves to her. She was not free, any more than a picked flower in a vase is free. I know I keep mentioning her as a flower, but it is the only metaphor that seems to fit. She was a beautiful flower in a meadow, and everyone had to stand over it to see, and they cut off its sun and it died.

I also vowed, later, that I would be true to myself. I did not know exactly what this meant, not in a way that I could put into words, but I knew what I meant by it. Katherine had no goals for herself, no spine of purpose; she was happy to borrow the nearest spine around her. I would never be that way.

I broke all of these vows, one after the other. I made my parents cry. I most certainly did what I was told. And I lost myself, there for a while. But Katherine was always ahead of me. She made her mistakes rapidly, recklessly. It took me most of my lifetime to follow in her footsteps.

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