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Every day she checks in with the officer on duty to see whether her orders have coh But day after day the answer is the saie Guess you’ll just have to stay here”

Here is not a bad place to be She follows the war news on the BBC and in the papers, and between the official reports and the rather less optimistic tales she hears fro in Italy It does not sound like anything she wants to be a part of, though she worries about Sergeant Green And the rest too, but mostly Walter Green

Here she has a nice clean bunk in an overheated room she shares with three American nurses and a Polish anesthetist, all fe there is a hot breakfast followed by a hotter shower Her uniforms are professionally laundered and pressed and contain no lice She has no gear to haul, no trucks to unload, no paperwork to fill out, and aside fro, no reason to be afraid

Best of all, she is getting to know Harder better He is fire to her soothing balm, but once she lets him have his rant about the oppressed workers and the valiant coreat fun They talk, they play board games or cards with patients, they work, each in their own function, and they take walks into the village

And they talk about Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June of 1921

They talk as well of the lynchings that used to happen several tih Harder of course had a long list of iven Frangie’s leg—through the little village It’s cold, but not h their field jackets, and even through the very welcome scarves knitted and donated by British women and folks back home

“They lynched a soldier out of Fort Benning Lynched him in full unifors “They promoted three colored men at a Packard plant up in Detroit? Just three Twenty-five thousand white workers went out on strike Knohat they said, those patriotic white boys? Said, ‘We’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work alongside a Nigra’”

“Maybe all this”—she waves in a way e, the hospital, the air base beyond, and the entirety of the ill change things”

Harder laughs cynically “Nothing is going to change, Frangie Nothing changes without revolution, a socialist people’s revolution”

Frangie steers the conversation onto safer ground by pointing to a flight of bo by overhead, on their way to Germany

Harder is still a fire-breather, still naive in Frangie’s eyes, despite his grand allusions to Marx and Lenin and the Soviet this and the Soviet that Most difficult of all for Frangie is the fact that he sneers at the faith she relies on The opiate of the masses

And yet, s, of beatings, of castrations, of the fear that pervades the South and has now moved north as black people follow the defense industry jobs into Chicago and Los Angeles and Detroit

She has not forgotten the white sergeant who tried to rape her She has not forgotten the slurs and the open hatred she’s gotten fronore the fact that even nohite officers con black units to thetasks

And now that she knows the truth of Tulsa in June of 1921, she cannot look at her own brother’s face, at the color of his skin, without being forced to i

There are good white people, she tells herself She’s ood white people And all people, all people of all colors, are the children of God, all sinners, all in need of redeination tortures her, playing again and again what must have happened to her ethan the one before