Rosie the Riveter endures as the most instantly recognizable symbol of American women’s contributions to World War II, though the munitions and aircraft assembly lines were far from the sole opportunities women found for employment on the home front. In fact, countless jobs traditionally reserved for men opened to them — transcription, logistical support, translation, scientific research, engineering and industrial design, transportation, and much more. Government-sponsored propaganda posters like “We Can Do It!” glorified these jobs while at the same time reassured any doubtful (or, okay, sexist) husbands that it was their wives’ patriotic duty to work. While women were barred from serving in the United States armed forces until 1948, thousands joined civil defense groups like the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps or served as nurses in the field.
Hollywood, too, served an important function in the Allied forces’ efforts to unite public opinion and discourage the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan. Movies produced during World War II often featured critical comedic portrayals of the Axis leadership, rousing patriotic musical numbers, and sweeping dramas like Casablanca (whose epic ending Evie could surely sympathize with). While censorship in this period focused on preventing the leaking of information that could compromise military action, the Hays Code restricted studios from portraying anything that might “lower the moral standards of those who see it,” which unfortunately included homosexuality, as far as the code’s authors were concerned.
1.
I’D ALWAYS BEEN A GOOD GIRL. ALWAYS followed the rules. Kept my nose clean, as Granny liked to say.
Our farm was a whopping twenty-seven acres, and I had the run of the place. The garden, the orchard, the barn, the fields. When a hot breeze blew, I would follow it. Hike up my skirt, run off the porch and down our long grassy drive to the dirt lane that led to the rest of the world. Most times I could run straight out into the road and just stand there. Let the wind swirl around me as it tunneled between the fields on either side. Two cars a day passed by, maybe, headed to or from other farms down the lane. You could tell when they’d gone past, because those tires stirred up dirt and left a silt-brown cloud hanging above the avocado trees lining the drive. You could tell when they were coming too. The dust would rise, a long way off, and billow closer.
I’d never wondered much about life past the end of the lane.
We had a television set, out in the barn. Daddy liked to keep up with the news, but Granny wouldn’t allow such newfangled contraptions into her house. It took me my whole adult life to get used to having that radio in the living room, she always said. Then they go on and invent something new. No call for it. She had this scratchy-throat voice, from years of breathing in Granddad’s tobacco smoke. ’Course, he went on into the sky a few years before I came along into the world.
Daddy might have been the man of the house, but Granny sure enough ran the place. So the TV went into the barn. Daddy always did things how Granny wanted. “Get that girl some books,” she’d say. And sure enough, Daddy’d come home with some for me. I had quite a collection by that summer. Twenty-two books in all. That was more than anyone I knew, including the girls who still went to school. They had books, but they had to give them back at the end of the year. I’d gone to school over in town up until eighth grade, and then Daddy pulled me out. Needed help around the farm, he said, with Granny getting on in years.
“Let her learn,” Granny said. “I can manage.” But she couldn’t. Her back didn’t want to bend low enough to weed anymore. Her fingers shook trying to grip the handle of a broom or a rake. Sometimes she didn’t even see all the eggs that our hens laid, right in plain view in their nests.
We had a television set, out in the barn, I was saying. And I had all these books too. So I knew about the world. Daddy had a rocking chair out there that he’d pulled off the porch. Come evening, after supper, he’d go sit out there. Watching. Rocking. Muttering from time to time about the state of things. I watched with him, most nights. He only brought in the one chair, so I sat on the floor by his knee, far enough away not to get rocked on, sifting scraps of straw through my fingers.
The world came into our barn every night. And most nights, I was glad enough to be safe in that barn, and not out there in the rest of it. It sounded bad out there. On television some nights they pulled numbers out of a machine, and if your birthday matched, you had to go and fight in the war in Vietnam. If you were a boy, that is, and over eighteen.
Black people didn’t need to go all the way to Vietnam to find a war, Daddy said once while we were watching the draft. Sometimes the newspaper showed pictures of civil rights demonstrations. People protesting a system that said black people should live separate; black people should stay in their place, and that place should always be small. If you were black and you lived in the South, you had to fight. If you were black and you lived in a city, you had to fight. Didn’t have to go anywhere, even. That fight came right to you.
Nothing like that ever came close to our farm. I could walk through the field and get to town. There was a general store there, and a post office, and a restaurant, and a bar I couldn’t go into. Everyone knew me. Everyone was black.
The worst thing I’d ever had to fight was a jackrabbit, dead set on digging up my string bean plants. I was a good girl. The edge of my world was the end of that lane.
2.