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black slacks, and her hair was concealed by the jaunty red turban that she wore to work.
    For nearly a year now, NolaBee had been employed at Hughes Aircraft. The war, having scooped up ten million men, ravenously demanded armaments, and America’s Depression-racked industry had burst alive, revving up to three perpetual shifts, hiring workers of either sex, every age and color. Hughes’s employment office had taken on the inexperienced NolaBee without query or quibble. It tickled her funnybone to wonder what her Fairburn and Roy ancestors would think if they could see her riveting wings to B-19’s between two Negro women—the younger one the gold of brown sugar, the other a regular black mammy—and being right friendly with them both, too. Her ancestors and Chilton’s had owned slaves, and NolaBee, like the rest of the extended family, was without the least dreg of masochistic, retroactive guilt. Her people, she was positive, had been just in every dealing with their human possessions, had tenderly nursed each aged darkie—how could it be otherwise? Her people were Georgia gentlefolk.
    Turning a drumstick, NolaBee flashed Marylin a welcoming smile. Roy raised her curly brown head from her homework—she sat onthe floor between the wardrobes, an area designated as her room because her iron cot formed an angle with the cherrywood bookcase whose bottom shelf held her joy and consolation, a secondhand tablemodel Radiola. “It’s nearly six,” she said. “What kept you?”
    Marylin, who was the only one of them with any craving for order, smiled dazedly. Without thinking, she picked up her mother’s old jacket and Roy’s hand-me-down blue topper and hung them on the coatrack.
    “Yes,” said NolaBee. “I was getting a mite worried.”
    “The rehearsal—”
    NolaBee interrupted, cocking her head. “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. You’re starting on the play the screenwriter’s little girl wrote.”
    “BJ Fernauld.” Marylin spoke the patronym, her lips softening as for a kiss. “After we finished . . .” Her voice faded. Always exceptionally close to her mother, Marylin had never been afflicted with an adolescent’s stubborn secretiveness, yet as she started to explain her lateness, to tell Mama about Linc, her tongue went thick. She did not want to share any part of the last hour.
    “It’s the Junior-Class play, isn’t it?” NolaBee asked, not waiting for an answer. “I reckon there’ll be a lot of people come to see it.”
    “Probably just the kids, Mama. Anyway, it’s not until the end of next semester.”
    “Well, I reckon he’ll be there, the screenwriter,” said NolaBee. “I’ll help you learn your lines after supper.” Fat spattered as she flipped a chicken thigh. “Honey, I do wish you’d call if you’re walking home after dark.”
    “Somebody drove her,” said Roy. “I heard the car.”
    “A beau?” NolaBee’s cigarette waggled as she smiled.
    “Oh, Mama . . .” Marylin blushed.
    “What’s his name?”
    “Linc . . . Lincoln.”
    “Look at you, red as a beet.” NolaBee chuckled as she fished out pieces of chicken. “I reckon this ole bird is done clear through. Girls, let’s get at him while he’s good and hot.”
    *   *   *
    After they finished eating, NolaBee shuffled the slick mimeograph paper, cuing Marylin in her lines. Smoke drifted lazily around the red turban and the gold-gleaming pageboy.
    Roy stretched on her cot, listening to
Amos n’ Andy
with her head touching the cracked pink paint of her little radio. When Marylin was working on her roles, the volume had to be kept down. All pleasure and work revolved subserviently around that hoped-for, worked-for, yearned-for career of Marylin’s.
    It was problematic for a girl entering Horace Mann Grammar School as late as seventh grade to carve a social niche, and though Roy had made a few acquaintances to chatter with at recess and lunch period, she had never been invited to a classmate’s home.