Jump into the Sky (6 page)

Margie had a new pink hat perched on her head and her lips were colored neatly with fresh lipstick, but her pretty seashell eyes were a mess. Looked like she’d been up all
night. Holding that mashed cake box on her lap, she was a picture of sorrow. “Hope you get to North Carolina all right, Levi,” she said, and then she pushed the cake box toward me. “I’ve decided I want you to have this for your trip.”

“No, miss, you keep it,” I tried to tell her.

“Nope.” She set her lips in a firm red line. “I want you to have it. I’ve made up my mind about what I’m going to do, and I’m not changing it back.”

I had the feeling her mind didn’t include Jimmie Ray anymore and giving me the cake was a sign of that. Even though I didn’t know her fellow at all, I felt sorry he probably didn’t have any idea what was coming next. It’d be like one of those German V-1 rockets dropping outta the clear blue sky over London. He’d never know what hit him.

Uncle Otis believes my daddy still pines for my mother. Says his heart is probably still chasing after Queen Bee Walker, so that’s why he’s never married again or settled down for more than a minute. Aunt Odella thinks his theory is complete hogwash. She says Uncle Otis knows as much about love as flies know about horse droppings. He’s already on his fourth wife.

“Take care, Levi.”

With a small wave of her hand, Margie with the Margarine Hair moved into the packed line of people heading down the aisle. You could see her pink hat bobbing up and down like a tiny lifeboat in an ocean of dark hats. I
waited until it disappeared before sneaking a peek inside the cake box. It was a sorry sight, like I expected. The perfectly swirled white frosting had hardened into something that reminded me of dried-up candle wax. When you touched it, little cracks broke across the top.

Tell you the truth, that cake was probably as good a picture of love as any. For most folks—except maybe Archie’s parents, who still held hands when they were walking around together—it seemed as if love always started out looking sweet and perfect at first. But the longer you carried it around with you, the worse it became. And finally it got so bad, the whole thing crumbled into little bitty pieces, and you had to leave those dried-up crumbs behind for other people to clean up.

Even though I didn’t want to keep the sad-looking cake from Margie, I didn’t know what else to do with it. I considered leaving it on the seat for somebody else to find. But later on, I was glad I didn’t. Margie’s cake would turn out to be the last piece of sweet kindness I’d get for a while, once I headed south.

A
fter the car I was riding in emptied out, a colored porter came down the aisle with his shiny cap tucked under his arm and asked me why in the world I was still sitting there. The whole car was empty and silent. It was just me and my suitcase and Margie’s cake box and a seat full of crumpled Milky Way wrappers. I was feeling like I’d been left on a desert island by the last ship.

I told the porter I was waiting to travel to Fayetteville, North Carolina, and I’d been told not to get off the train until we got there. Dug around in my pocket trying to find the mashed-up ticket.

The porter shook his head. “You been told wrong, son. This train ain’t going anywhere near North Carolina. It’s running back to Chicago. This is an east-west train. You wanna go south, you better find yourself a southbound one.”

Heck, I didn’t know what to do next. Felt like I was sunk.

“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.”

M
y 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!”