Jump into the Sky Read Free Page A

Those steps were a spit mosaic. A lot of it was mine and Archie’s, no doubt. We enjoyed letting a nice wet bomb hit the pavement now and then. Strange to think how I had to leave but my spit got to stay, you know?
    I remember how it was a pretty morning for Chicago too. Sunny. Warm. Big yellow dandelions had sprouted up through the cracks in the sidewalk, and I swear I never noticed dandelions growing there before. You could smell the coffee beans roasting at Hixson’s Grocery across the street and hear the faint sound of a saxophone playing, even at that early hour. Probably from the all-night clubs a few blocks over.
    I took one last backward glance at Aunt Odella’s building before we turned the corner. Never thought I’d feel sorry about saying goodbye to that old place, but I did. It was nothing special—just a plain old brick walk-up, three stories tall, with the usual rickety fire escapes zigzagging up the sides. Aunt Odella’s apartment was on the top floor. My window had faced the back and looked out over the tar roof of another run-down apartment building behind us. In the spring, you could see the reflections of clouds going by in the roof puddles, which was the only good part of having a rooftop as your scenery. Sometimes you could feel above the clouds.
    Aunt Odella walked faster down the street, like she didn’t want to give me time to start dwelling too much. The handle of the suitcase kept sliding in my sweaty hands, and I switched sides every time we stopped. In Aunt Odella’s opinion, I’d brought along way more than anybody’d need. “It’s probably that winter cap and all those extra things you packed, making everything so hard to carry,” she said at one stop. “I tried telling you not to take so much.”
    Maybe North Carolina wasn’t the Arctic, but the cap had been a gift from my great-uncle Otis and it was one of those nice leather aviator ones you see in the war movies. People always said it made me look like a mad African bomber pilot, so I couldn’t go and leave it behind.
    Aunt Odella hadn’t backed down on my Speed Jaxoncomics, though. “You gonna be too busy where you’re going to read junk.” Even before I’d finished packing, the whole stack of them got yanked outta the suitcase and smacked onto the floor. My aunt said she’d give them to the scrap drive. Paper was in short supply in 1945, but seeing my newspaper comics get sent for scrap just about tore my heart out because they didn’t have a mark on them.
    Still, I managed to slip in the scorpion when Aunt Odella turned around to fold up some of my shirts for packing. The scorpion wasn’t alive, of course—this was a dried-up one my father had sent two years earlier, thinking I’d get a kick out of it for my eleventh birthday.
    Back then, he’d been training in Arizona for a big war assignment the army changed its mind about and never sent him to. Which was a story that seemed to repeat itself over and over when it came to my daddy and his service. Archie was convinced my father was a spy for the U.S. Army. Or a secret commando. “No other explanation for how much moving around and training your daddy does. Man oh man, I bet he’s a big-time top spy for the Allies,” he’d try and tell me. Archie’s father was too old to serve, so maybe that’s why he admired mine.
    In some of his letters from North Carolina, my father had written about jumping out of airplanes with parachutes, and getting his “wings” and “jump boots,” but Aunt Odella had her own doubts about those details. There was no way my father—or any other sane Negro she knew—would jumpoutta an airplane, she insisted. “I grew up with your daddy and he couldn’t even look over the railing of a porch two feet off the ground without feeling sick,” she said. She thought it was more likely he drove an army truck, or worked as a guard, or something dull and ordinary like that. “He just throws in a few big stories now and then to keep us