Page 153 of The Reformatory

Gloria patted down her hair and tried to straighten the creases in her dress. She spit on her palm and dabbed at dried flecks of mud on Robbie’s face. They both must still look a fright, but she couldn’t fix that now. She clutched the oversized pocketbook Miz Lottie had given her, which held both her money and the warden’s envelope.

“You hungry?” she said.

Robbie nodded. He had barely said a word since the Reformatory, seeming younger than he had been before, not as old as his haunted eyes. He needed more time, that was all.

Gloria stood up and held out her hand for him. “Come on, then.”

They swayed with the train cars as Gloria led Robbie away from the stench of the Negro car to the gangway outside. The air was already so different, cooler and lighter across their faces. Robbie’s hand tightened around hers when they entered the train car with white passengers.

“Don’t pay them any mind,” Gloria said, and they kept their eyes fixed ahead.

Gloria had never ridden on a train before now, but she’d seen plenty in picture shows. This one looked exactly as she’d imagined, with white passengers sleeping or hidden behind their newspaper pages, riding free from bad smells.

“Are we gonna get in trouble?” Robbie whispered as they walked.

Gloria couldn’t be sure, in truth, but she promised him they would be fine.

Finally, they reached a car unlike the rest—with crowded tables instead of just seats. They met a din of clinking silverware and conversations that dipped only slightly when they appeared through the doors, eyes rising to look at them. Gloria took her own advice and ignored the staring eyes, instead slipping into the first empty booth she saw. Instead of sitting across from her in the waiting space, Robbie squeezed in beside her.

The table had a white linen cloth over it like a church picnic and a basket of bread rolls. Plates, silverware, and glasses were already arranged. Robbie’s hand hovered over the basket of bread, waiting for her permission. Gloria nodded, and Robbie stuffed a roll into his cheeks practically whole, glancing around nervously, expecting someone to object.

A stout Negro man in a white uniform and chef’s cap came to their table and put down a menu. Robbie looked up at him with wide-eyed trepidation, as if he reminded him of someone he wanted to forget. “Y’all can afford these prices?” the man said gently, and Robbie relaxed at the kindness in his voice.

Gloria glanced at the menu’s dinner offerings of pot roast, swordfish, and stewed chicken. She had never heard of spending so much for a meal, but she counted out five dollars and laid it on the table. The man smiled at her, impressed and bemused.

“Where y’all from?” the man said.

“Florida,” Gloria said.

“Me too. Marianna.” He tipped his chef’s hat. “Welcome home.”

Union Station in Chicago was a city unto itself. As soon as Gloria and Robbie climbed down the steps, they were lost in waves of people rushing with casual urgency so different than in Gracetown: a sea of men in stylish hats and women wrapped in long, thin coats—even in summer! The night air nipped at their earlobes and fingertips. Whites and Negroes blended, matching each other’s strides, crossing each other’s paths without threats and epithets. Someone was playing a saxophone whose sultry song flew up across the ceiling nearly as high as the sky.

Gloria had memorized the address where Papa’s letters were mailed, so they only needed to discover how to get to him. Would it be by taxi? A city train? Miz Lottie had had no knowledge of Chicago, so she had told them to find the information desk. Miz Lottie had also promised to try to find someone to meet them at the station, but she told Gloria that she might have to navigate Chicago on her own, at least at first.

For a bare instant, Gloria wanted to turn back and return to the train. At least the train was something she knew, and every new sight in Chicago paralyzed her with the realization that she alone was responsible for Robbie now. She felt sick to her stomach at the thought of heaping yet more suffering and uncertainty on her brother. Robbie was pulling close to her again, clinging as he had as soon as they climbed out of hiding in Miz Lottie’s truck.

Gloria spotted the bright block letters at a booth in the center of the giant station: INFORMATION. White men and women in company uniforms waited at the counter, cheerfully answering questions and pointing out the way in the maze. Gloria hated the part of herself that hesitated to go to them, bracing for sneers or curses even if they were not in the South. Papa had told them that most white people in Chicago didn’t like Negroes either; they were just more quiet about it and didn’t post it on signs. Even after her first meal on an integrated train car, the memory of Mama eating ice cream without a care could not move her forward.

“What now?” Robbie whispered to her.

A knot of soldiers parted in front of the information desk, and Gloria was relieved to see the dark brown skin on the nape of a well-dressed man’s neck standing a few feet in front of them. His back was facing them, but Gloria could see how self-assured he was as he scanned the crowd, standing at his full height with his hat canted to one side, his coat folded across his arm; a city Negro who might have been John Dorsey if he had been taller. He did not cast his eyes down from passing white men, and white women passing close to him did not shy away in fear.

“I’ll ask that man there,” Gloria said, pointing, and Robbie nodded with relief.

The man whirled around as if they had called his name.

Before he had fully turned, they recognized his chin. His profile. Gloria was afraid to trust her eyes, which were mirrored in the eyes of the man who turned to face them. His mouth fell open with the same surprise and wonder.

Robbie pulled his hand free from hers. “Papa!”

Robbie’s shriek turned heads. But even strangers smiled at the reunion of this father and his children, how he lifted the boy up from the ground and swung him with deep laughter. And how he and his daughter hugged and swayed, openly weeping like a photograph from Life magazine of a soldier returning from war.

“You did it,” he said to Gloria. “I don’t know how, but you did it, girl.”

“We did it,” Gloria corrected him, hugging Robbie close. “Robbie got his own self free. Miz Lottie and I were just there to drive him away.”

That wasn’t the whole story. At the train station, Robbie didn’t tell his father about the living friend he had lost and the dead friends he had made. Those would be stories for another day. Gloria did not yet tell him about the evidence of atrocities she had hidden away. But just as she had once seen the ribbon into Ruby McCollum’s future, for once she saw her own.

They would be a family in Chicago. It would not be easy, but it would be easier.

One day she would walk on a college campus just like Mama had wanted for her. In years to come, she, Papa, and Robbie would sing freedom songs like the one that had come to her lips when she was afraid for their lives in the swamp.

When Robbie stared across the expanse of the train station with his father holding one hand and Gloria holding the other, a woman in a white dress shimmered in a bright shaft of light that shone from the ceiling like the roadway to heaven itself. Mama.

He didn’t see her anymore after he blinked, but no sadness dampened this reunion day. He had learned that the dead walked beside the living.

Sometimes the dead could help you fly.