Warday

We were the poorest, we starved first and worst. Because we starved the worst, we were the weakest, so the flu hit us the hardest. Look, I lost my husband. I lost my children. But a lot of whites had the same thing happen. The difference is, I also lost everybody I knew, and everybody at work, and all but a few of the people who lived around me. So now my life is full of new faces, and not a lot of them are black. And that is certainly not the white experience.

Whites, you talk to them, and they lost a family member here, a friend there. I’m talking about loss on a different scale. The church I belonged to, for example—there are just thirty of us left, out of a congregation of a couple of hundred. Not to say they all died, but half of them did. The rest, they moved away, most of them looking for work or relatives or just a better color of sky.

Whites look sort of surprised nowadays when they see this big coal-tar black woman, which is me, coming along. I see it time after time when I go down to the Loop. A Negro. A black. One of them.

Before Warday they’d sort of close up on you. Look right through you. Like you didn’t matter, or they wished you didn’t matter. Now they just look and look. You can see that they are fascinated by your black face. I look at them, and in my heart I say, “I am looking at you with two million eyes, for my face is a million black faces, and the look I am giving you is the reproach of a million souls.”

I hear the whole world singing in my memories. You’ll never guess it, but I sing for my supper now. You’ll ask, “How can this furious woman possibly be an entertainer?” But that’s what I am.

An entertainer. You ever hear of the Cotton Club on State? Well, I am the star attraction, practically. I sing for them. I am memory for them. Blacks and whites come. They mix together more easily now, probably because the whites no longer feel so threatened.

There I stand, on that little stage in that boozy and smoky hall, and I sing out all the sorrow that is in my soul. I sing until it hangs in the air around me and I am so sad I could die because that’s the blues, but inside me where nobody can see there is God’s glory, and that’s the part of the blues they never talked about, but the part that’s most important. The blues are true music of the human heart, the truest on earth, I think. How can we give up on the people who created this, and say they have no genius? Black genius doesn’t have names attached to it. Black genius is not named Leonardo da Vinci or J. Robert Oppenheimer. Black genius flows in black blood, and has to do with pain.

I say we had a worse time than you did. Sure, why not? We were living from hand to mouth, most of us. Black meant poor. It also meant noble, and it meant good and full of joy that maybe had no business in there with the pain.

Am I angry? No, not anymore. I am working and there is food on my table. I’m singing for my supper. Every night before I go to sleep, I remember Henry. I had a picture of him, but it got lost.

My profession is to remember my people, and spread my memories among those who remain. I do it in songs. That is what they are for.

Anger

As we crossed Indiana on our way to Cleveland, the character of the passenger complement began to change. The train was still almost empty, but there was something familiar about the people.

They pushed and shoved and muttered. They were noticeably more tattered than the passengers on the run from Kansas City to Chicago had been.

I recognized an accent, the harsh nasal twang of my old home-town. Refugees from New York have settled all through Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Jim went up and down the train and found that these people were almost exclusively former citizens of the Bronx, with a scattering of Manhattanites. Most of them were laborers, a few professionals. They were traveling for many different reasons: to visit or seek relatives; to look for work; to buy things such as clothing, car parts, or furniture, in Cleveland. None of them were making long-distance journeys. Although many expressed a desire to return to New York, those who had tried said that there was no way around the Army cordon.

Why the Army would cordon off what remained of New York was a puzzling question, one we were very eager to answer. It couldn’t be radiation, not after five years. Of course, the radlevel will be higher by far than prewar, but we live with that in other places.

On the train there was a certain amount of talk about the World Series, which was being held this year at Fenway Park between the Red Sox and the Pittsburgh Pirates. We hadn’t encountered much talk of sports on our trip. Dallas doesn’t have a baseball team and we were running too hard in California to find out about sports.

Nobody on the train was going to the Series, but a lot of people were eager to see what the Plain Dealer had to say about it when they got to Cleveland.