Marching to Zion by Mary Glickman Read Free Book Online Page B

all about, do you think?
    She looked up at her husband in the way she had, full of admiration and trust. It seared his heart when she looked at him that way. On occasion, he gave detailed opinion on subjects he barely knew about, because he could not bear to disappoint her and risk lowering himself in her eyes. This time, he was sure of his answer.
    It’s a lot a things. Boys been comin’ up here in droves since the Delta flood last year, for one. Between the flood and the weevil, there just ain’t the work what used to be. I told you about them factories sendin’ train cars south and offerin’ the cousins free passage north to streets paved with gold. Life got so desperate down there, more boys ’n ever fall for that one. But mostly, it’s that war ’crost the ocean. We’re goin’ to be in it very soon now, they say, the way those Germans keep sinkin’ our ships for no good reason but meanness. And it’s no lie there’s new jobs ’round here with the factories gettin’ ready for war. Good jobs, white men’s jobs, at near white men’s wages. Lots of them Germans and Poles used to work ’em went back home to fight their war. The ones that stay are angry folk, always strikin’, always complainin’. The bosses don’t mind replacin’ them with folk who’ll work for less and be grateful for it. Why shouldn’t the cousins come up here for work? Sure beats pickin’ beans and cotton while the boss plagues your wife and the babies starve. Why I heard there’s more’n a thousand a week come up t’ here.
    Mags shook her head and told him how lucky she was to have a well-established husband whose boss took no unseemly interest in her. Our baby will never starve, she said.
    George McCallum pulled up the rented wagon loaded with chemical bins. What baby? he asked.
    Why, our baby, she said, smiling and patting her belly. While cars honked and horses whipped into speed dashed around them, George, being the kind of man he was, embraced her there in the street and wept.
    Remembering that day and telling her daughter, Sara Kate, about it years later, Mags would say if it wasn’t for the war, life would have gone on from there like a happy dream. But she didn’t mean the war across the sea. She meant the one waged in chaos and blood on the streets of East St. Louis.

IV

War, even a war fought on the other side of the world, intensifies life on the home front. Every dawn brings anxiety, an expectation of no one knows what. The hours that follow are spent in heightened awareness, that sharp mental state in which every gesture, every word may harbor a clue of what comes next. Significance is attached to routine events if only to dispel the constant, fretful waiting for sirens, for telegrams, for howls in the night, for betrayals, for pronouncement, for orders, for release. After such a day, sleep is either rock solid or agitated by spidered dreams. At first light, suspense begins again.
    For Mags, pregnancy exaggerated everything. One day she was lighthearted, celebrating her news with George, the next she was heavy with anxious anticipation, imagining all the things that could go wrong when a woman is in such a condition at such a time. The morning St. Louis held its draft registration, she awoke to the sounds of church bells, train whistles, brass bands, cannon shot calling all men to the registry. A terror filled her that never quite left, even after George was rejected due to the miracle of her pregnancy, while so many of the able-bodied Negro men she knew were snatched up quick as you please and eager they were too for the job of soldier. George said they wanted to prove they were as brave and patriotic as white men.
    The Army needs cooks and ditch diggers as much as pilots and sharpshooters, he said. So there they are, lining up for the chance to face cannon with a dishrag in their hands.
    He spit off the porch railing, grumbling that none of them remembered the Spanish War, so why should anyone remember the