Alex had worn a black velvet evening gown to dinner, with a big white satin bow at the low-cut waist in the back, to please her mother. She looked lovely in it, but she was almost sorry she hadn’t worn her uniform to remind them that there was a war on in the real world. They didn’t live in the real world, and never had. They were trapped in another century. The only thing they had noticed was the unpleasantness of the stock market crash fourteen years before, which had removed some of their friends from their social circle when they lost their money. But they were quickly forgotten, and others with larger, more stable fortunes had taken their place.
Their values made Alex feel sick, and she couldn’t imagine being married to any of them. It would have been her worst nightmare. She felt like a stranger in her own world, and even in her own home. She was sad to think that her four nieces would be brought up with her sister’s superficial values, believing that only people in their own limited world had any merit, and a woman with a job, or an occupation of any kind, was to be treated as a pariah, ridiculed and shunned. Alex had every intention of continuing nursing after the war, and she knew that would be a battle with her parents too. Everything she did elicited their criticism. She could barely make it through dinner without speaking her mind and losing her temper, but she managed to slip away when everyone moved into the drawing room for coffee and brandy. The crowd was large enough that her absence wasn’t noticed, and she sat peacefully in her own large pink satin bedroom, smoking a cigarette, and having a glass of champagne alone. This wasn’t her idea of the spirit of Christmas, a night of showing off, snobbery, and insensitive bragging, but it was the way her family spent it, and her older sister fit in perfectly with all of their views and traditions. Alex never had, and now even less than ever.
She was startled when there was a knock at the door. She said, “Come in.” It was her mother’s maid, a small Frenchwoman who had worked for her family since Alex was a child.
“Yes, Brigitte?” She was surprised to see her, in her evening uniform of black dress with white lace apron and cap. Alex knew only too well that if any of her fellow nurses in the army had seen the trappings of her home life, they would have ridiculed and shunned her too. She was a misfit everywhere, and she had kept this side of her life well hidden from her colleagues in the army, even Lizzie, whom she considered her best friend. But there were some things she just couldn’t share. They would never have understood.
“I just wanted to tell you that we, downstairs, are very proud of you. I am proud of you. My family is in Paris, living the Occupation. My nephew is in the Maquis, the Resistance, in the South. My brother has been in prison in Marseilles for three years for speaking against the Nazis and dropping leaflets in the streets. Some of our neighbors, Jews, have lost their homes and been sent to work camps, even children. The people in Europe need the Americans to help them get free again, and as a nurse, if they send you to Europe, you will help many. You’re a brave woman. You were even as a little girl, and you know the right thing to do. Thank you,” she said, bowed, and made a rapid exit before Alex could even react or comment, but there were tears in her eyes when she finished the glass of champagne. What Brigitte said had touched her profoundly. She had a feeling that conditions in Europe were even worse than they suspected, and she hoped that she would be part of the forces who were coming to help them. Brigitte was right. They needed American troops to free them. And those same troops needed Alex and the other nurses to keep them alive. Whatever her family believed, she was doing something important, and nothing was going to stop her. She didn’t even care if it cost her her life in the process.
From everything Alex could see, she had nothing to come home to. The one thing she knew was that she could never return to this world after the war, or live this life again. She would rather die in Europe than waste her life in New York. All she could see around her was the shame of indolence, snobbery, and false values. She wanted to go to Europe with the Army Air Forces for Brigitte, her family and friends, and others like them. More than ever, it all made sense. And she was about to take her first step toward her goal with her flight training class in Kentucky.
Chapter 7
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Louise Jackson had already been a practicing registered nurse for a year and a half. She had graduated from nursing school in June of 1940 at twenty-one, and as a Black woman she had attended a segregated but very respected school for Black women. She had grown up in Raleigh, North Carolina, and got a job at a respected all-Black hospital, Saint Agnes, as an operating-room nurse. Her father was a cardiologist, and her mother was the superintendent of a segregated school. Aside from their focus on education, the Jacksons’ origins were distinguished ones. Blanche Jackson’s family was originally Ethiopian, and Louise had the exquisitely fine features of her maternal ancestors. Ted Jackson had been able to trace his ancestors’ arrival on one of the original eighteenth-century slave ships that came to Virginia.
Louise was an only child, adored by both her parents, and the one thing they insisted on was that she studied hard, got a great education, and did well in school. Very little else mattered to them, and Louise had devoted herself to her studies accordingly. Her parents had had several requests to allow her to model in Paris from the time she was very young, since color was not an issue in France, as it was in the States. Her parents had declined every opportunity, which frustrated Louise in her teens, but by the time she entered nursing school at eighteen, modeling no longer interested her. She was a very beautiful young woman. She was twenty-one when she graduated from nursing school, and twenty-two when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
She had objected frequently, to her father, about hospital facilities being segregated, but it was something she had grown up with and was used to. It seemed profoundly wrong to her, but her parents said simply that the time had not yet come to change that. They hoped it would one day. North Carolina was their home and the place where Louise had grown up.
Louise profoundly shocked both her parents when she enlisted in the army as a nurse in January of 1942. Her father strenuously objected when she told them it was what she wanted to do. The United States Armed Forces were notoriously prejudiced and segregated, and he didn’t want his daughter exposed to ignorant racial prejudice, slurs, and abuse. He did everything to convince her not to enlist, but Louise was a strong girl with a bright mind and her own opinions, and she refused to be deterred. She said if racial prejudice was going to change one day, then brave positions would have to be taken, and she was determined to serve her country like any other American man or woman.
She was an intelligent, nonbelligerent person, who expressed herself in a respectful way. She’d had her share of run-ins with her superiors at the hospital where she worked and officers in the military, but always handled them gracefully, and often convincingly. She was stationed in Chicago, rather than somewhere in the Deep South, which was a relief to her father. She was assigned to a unit of Negro nurses, and stayed within the parameters that were expected of her. She was one of the most capable nurses in her unit, when she volunteered as a nurse in the Army Air Forces Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron. One of the reasons she did so was to get transferred to Europe, and her application was immediately accepted. She was told that she was the only “colored” nurse who had been accepted in the squadron, or had even applied. The unit had not been designated as segregated so far, and they could hardly separate a single nurse from the others. The officer who went over the applications was progressive and decided to try it as an experiment. They would have to see how the other nurses reacted, and the governors of the RAF Unit with whom they’d be housed if they sent her to England.