The Shining Girls A Novel

Zora

28 JANUARY 1943

The ships rise up in steel edifices above the prairies, all set to sail out of their berths and away over the frozen cornfields. Where they are actually going is down the Illinois River, into the Mississippi, out past New Orleans and into the Atlantic, chugging over the sea to hostile beaches on the other side of the world, where the big bay doors cut into the bow will crank open and the ramp will lower like a drawbridge to discharge men and tanks into the icy surf and the line of fire.

They build them well, the Chicago Bridge & Iron Company, with the same attention to detail as they did the water towers before the war, but they push them out so quick they don’t bother to name them. Seven ships a month with space for 39 Stewart Light tanks and 20 Shermans in their hull. The shipyard operates twenty-four hours a day, clanking, grinding industry, pushing out Landing Ship Tanks as fast as they can make them. They work straight through the night: men and women, Greeks and Poles and Irish, but no other negroes. Jim Crow is still alive and well in Seneca.

They’re launching one of the ships today. A lady dignitary from the USO in a dainty hat bashes a bottle of champagne against the bow of LST 217, its mast laid flat on the deck. Everyone applauds and whistles and stamps their feet as 5,500 tons slides sideways down the ramp, because the Illinois is so narrow. It hits the river port side, sending up individual plumes like cannon shots that turn into a monster wave, setting the LST to rocking crazily in the water before it rights itself.

It’s actually the second launch for LST 217, because it ran aground on its way down the Mississippi and had to be towed back for repairs. But no matter. Any excuse for a party. You can raise morale like a flag up a pole if there’s drinking and dancing after.

Zora Ellis Jordan is not among the work crew that have ‘abandoned ship’ for the night shift to go out and celebrate. Not with four kids at home to feed and a husband who is never coming home from the war, his ship blown out of the water by a skulking U-boat. The navy sent his papers back to her as a keepsake, together with his pension. They didn’t issue him with a medal, because he was black, but they did include a letter from the government expressing their deepest condolences and praising his valor for dying in the service of his country as ship’s electrician.

She’d been working at a laundry in Channahon before this, but when a woman brought in a man’s shirt with burn marks on the collar, she’d asked her about it. When she applied, she was given the choice between welder or bucker. She asked which paid more.

‘Mercenary, huh?’ the boss said. But Harry was dead and the condolence letter hadn’t specified how she was supposed to feed and clothe and school Harry’s children all on her own.

He didn’t think she’d last the week: ‘None of the other coloreds did.’ But she’s tougher than they were. Maybe it’s because she’s a woman. Dirty looks and ugly words slide right off; meaningless compared to the empty space next to her in the bed.

But it means there is no official housing for coloreds, let alone colored families, and she rents a small house, two rooms with an outside latrine, on a farm three miles away on the outskirts of Seneca. The hour it takes her to walk there and back every day is worth it to be able to see her kids.

She knows it would be easier in Chicago. Her brother, who has epilepsy, works for the postal service. He could get her a job, he says. His wife could help with the kids. But it’s too painful. The city is haunted with memories of Harry. At least here, among the sea of white faces, she doesn’t catch glimpses of her dead husband and rush to catch up, to take his arm, only to have him turn towards her to reveal himself a stranger. She knows she’s punishing herself. She knows it’s stupid pride. So? It’s ballast – the one thing holding her up.

She earns $1.20 an hour and an extra five cents on top of that for overtime. So by the time the launch is done and another hull is being hauled in to 217’s berth, Zora is already back on the deck of another LST, with her helmet on and her torch sparking, and little Blanche Farringdon crouched nearby, meekly handing up new rods whenever she asks for them.

They complete the ships in phases, different crews with different specialties doing their thing and then passing the ship along to the next team. She prefers to work above decks. She used to get claustrophobic deep in the ship, welding the curb plates, like a baseboard for the wiring or the wheel valves that would flood the ballast tanks with water to weigh the flat-bottomed ship down for ocean crossing. It felt like she was hunching down in the husk of some giant, frozen metal insect. She’d taken her overhead welding exam a few months back. This pays better and lets her work in the open air, but, more importantly, it means she gets to weld the gun turrets that will tear those Nazi shits into mincemeat.

Snow is falling, big powdery flakes that settle on their thick men’s overalls and melt, leaving little damp patches that eventually soak in, the same way the sparks from the welding torch singe through. The mask protects her face, but her neck and chest are pockmarked with tiny burns. At least she has her work to keep her warm. Blanche is shivering pathetically, even with the spare torches arranged around her and burning.

‘That’s dangerous,’ Zora snaps. She’s angry with Leonore and Robert and Anita for taking off to go dancing, leaving the two of them on their own.

‘I don’t care,’ Blanche says, miserable. Her cheeks are flushed with cold. Things are still off-kilter between them. Blanche tried to kiss her last night in the shack where they store their communal gear, standing up on tiptoes to press her mouth against Zora’s as she pulled off her helmet. Little more than a chaste peck on the lips really, but the intent was clear.

She appreciates the sentiment. Blanche is a lovely girl, even if she is skinny and pale with a weak chin, and once let her hair catch on fire because she was vain. She tied it back after that, although she still wears make-up to work and sweats it off. But even if she’d had time between nine-hour shifts and trying to look after her kids, Zora simply isn’t engineered that way.

She’s tempted. Of course. No one has kissed her since Harry left for the Merchant Marines. But having arms like a wrestler from building ships doesn’t make Zora a lesbian, any more than a nationwide shortage of men does.

Blanche is only a child. Barely eighteen. And white. She doesn’t know what she’s doing and besides, how would Zora explain it to Harry? She talks to him on the long walk home every morning, about the children, about the grueling labor of constructing ships, which is not only useful work, it keeps her mind occupied so she doesn’t miss him so much. Although ‘much’ doesn’t describe the aching emptiness that she drags around with her.

Blanche scurries across the deck to haul back the thick cable for Zora. She thumps it down at her feet and says ‘I love you,’ quickly into her ear. Zora pretends not to hear. The helmet is thick enough that she might not have.

They work in silence for the next five hours, communicating only perfunctorily, Hand me this, Can you get me that, Blanche holding the anchor pad for Zora to get a bead on it, and then using the hammer to knock off the slag. Her blows are clumsy today, mis-timed. She can’t bear it.

Finally, the whistle blows for end of shift, releasing them from their mutual agony. Blanche bolts down the ladder and Zora clambers after her, slower in her helmet and the men’s work boots that she has stuffed with newspaper to fit her size-eight feet after seeing a woman in loafers get the bones of her foot crushed by a falling crate.

Zora jumps down onto the dry dock and walks between the crowds of the shift change. Music is blaring from the speakers mounted on poles beside the spotlights playing cheerful radio hits to keep spirits high. Bing Crosby segues into the Mills Brothers and Judy Garland. By the time she has stashed her gear and is walking out between the ships in various stages of assembly and the trenches cut to accommodate the crawler cranes, the speakers are playing Al Dexter. ‘Pistol-packin’ Mama’. Hearts and guns. Lay them down, mama. She never meant to mislead little Blanche.

The crowd thins as women head off to their car pools or towards the cheap workers’ housing nearby, its wooden beds stacked up as high as the bunks they weld into the berth of the LSTs.

She heads north up Main Street through Seneca proper, which has swelled from a tiny township with no movie theater or school to a bustling labor camp of 11,000. War is good for enterprise. The official family housing for workers is at the high school, but that doesn’t extend to her sort.

Her boots crunch on the gravel as she steps over the thick sleepers of the Rock Island line that helped civilize the West, carrying hope in every railcar packed with migrants, white, Mexican, Chinese, but especially black folk. You wanted to get the hell out of the South, you hopped on a train for Charm City and the jobs advertised in the Chicago Defender, or sometimes, as in her daddy’s case, at the Defender, working as a linotype operator for thirty-six years. The railroad brings in prefabricated parts now. And her daddy’s been in the ground for long years already.

She crosses over Highway 6, spookily quiet at this time of night, and up the steep hill that climbs past Mount Hope Cemetery on the way to the farm. She could be further away. But not by much. She is halfway up the slope when the man steps out from the shadows of the trees to meet her, leaning on a crutch.

‘Good evening, ma’am, may I walk with you for a bit?’ he says.

‘Oh no,’ she says, shaking her head at this white man who has no business here at this time. It is a byproduct of her job that she thinks ‘saboteur’ before she thinks ‘rapist’. ‘No thank you, sir. I’ve had a long day and I am going home to my kids. And besides, I think you’ll find it’s morning.’ It’s true. It’s just gone six, although it’s still dark and cold as a witch’s tit.

‘Come on, Miss Zora. Don’t you remember me? I said I’d see you again.’

She stops dead, not really believing that she has to deal with this shit, now. ‘Mister, I am tired and I am sore. I have worked a nine-hour shift, I have four kids waiting for me at home, and you are giving me the willies with your talk. I suggest you limp away and leave me the hell alone. Because I will drop you.’

‘You can’t,’ he tells her. ‘You shine. I need you.’ He is smiling like a saint or a madman and, perversely – wrongly – this puts her at ease.

‘I am in no mood for compliments, sir, nor religious conversions if you’re one of those Jehovah types,’ she dismisses him. Even in daylight, she wouldn’t have recognized him as the man who lingered on the steps outside their apartment block twelve years ago. Although the talking- to her daddy gave her that evening about being careful filled her with such dread and defiance that it stayed with her for years. Even once earned her a cuffing from a white shopkeeper because she was staring. But she hasn’t thought about that in in a very long time, and it’s dark and exhaustion has sunk into her bones. Her muscles ache, her heart is sore. She doesn’t have time for this.

The weariness drops away when she sees him, from the corner of her eye, pull out the knife from his sports coat. She turns, surprised, giving him the perfect opening to punch the blade into her stomach. She gasps and doubles over. He pulls it out and her legs collapse like a shoddy weld.

‘No!’ she yells, furious, with him and her body for betraying her. She grabs his belt, pulling him down with her. He struggles to raise the knife again and she punches him so hard in the side of his head that she dislocates his jaw and breaks three of her fingers, the knuckles crunching like popped corn on the stove.

‘Yew unt!’ he screams, his consonants mangled, jaw already swelling up like an orange. She grabs hold of a handful of his hair and smashes his face into the gravel, trying to get up on top of him.

Panicked, he stabs her under her armpit. It’s a clumsy blow, not deep enough to reach her heart, but she cries out and pulls away, instinctively, clutching at her side. He seizes the opportunity and rolls onto her, pinning her shoulders down with his knees. Zora might be built like a wrestler, but she has never been in the ring.

‘I got kids,’ she says, crying in pain from the wound in her side. He has nicked a lung and there is blood bubbling on her lips.

She has never been so afraid. Not even when she was four years old with the whole city at war with itself in the race riots, and her daddy running with her bundled into his coat because they were pulling black folk off the trams and beating them to death right there in the streets.

Not even when she thought Martin, who was so little and five weeks early, was going to die, and she locked herself in the room with him and sent everyone away, enduring it the only way she could, minute to minute for nine weeks, until she brought him through.

‘They’ll just be waking up now,’ she gasps through the pain. ‘Nella will be making breakfast for the little ones … getting them dressed for school … even though Martin will be trying to do it himself – putting his shoes on the wrong feet.’ She manages a half-sobbing cough. She’s hysterical, she knows, rambling. ‘And the twins … they live a secret life, those two.’ She can’t seem to get control of her thoughts. ‘It’s too much responsibility for Nella on her own … She won’t manage. I’m only … twenty-eight … I have to see them grow up. Please…’

The man shakes his head, mutely, and brings down the knife.

He leaves the baseball card tucked into the pocket of her overalls. Jackie Robinson, outfield Brooklyn Dodgers. Taken recently from Jin-Sook Au. Shining stars linked together through time. A constellation of murder.

He trades it for the metal Cooper Black letter ‘Z’ from an old printers tray she carried around like a talisman, that her daddy brought home for her from his work at the Defender. ‘Fighting the good fight,’ he’d told the kids, dropping a letter for each of them, stamped with Barnhart Brothers & Spindler at the bottom. Defunct now. ‘But you can’t stop progress,’ her daddy had said.

The war is over for Zora. Progress will go on without her.