was staying with her grandmother, who lived on Grand Avenue. Although I still kept my serious thoughts largely to myself, she and I began to spend time together chatting, as young women do, mostly about young men. She took me to a USO dance at the YMCA where soldiers from Fort Knox were brought in by bus. I was ready to have some fun, but I felt inexperienced. I didn’t dance, smoke, or drink.
At that first USO dance I stood apart from the crowd like a wallflower, but one well-built fellow with classic features and shapely lips did ask me to dance. He showed me how to do the box step and stayed with me for the rest of the evening. His name was Norman F. Davis and he was from Brooklyn, New York. Nicky, as I called him, was handsome and sophisticated. He took me out for several weeks, taught me to dance, and I had my first drink, a whiskey sour, with him.
He was different from the other young men I had known. For one thing, his family was well-off financially; his father worked on Wall Street. Nicky played tennis and attended plays and concerts—activities to which I’d had no exposure. He showed me pictures of himself as a child dressed like a little rich kid, with fur on the collars of his coats and miniature Eton suits.
When Nicky was transferred to Fort Hood, Texas, I decided to go to Buffalo with Esther. She told me her brother went to the University of Buffalo and I thought I could save money and go there, too.
First, though, I had to get the money. Since it was Derby time in Louisville, I was able to get a job rather quickly as a waitress in the English Grill at the Brown Hotel. The first time a customer ordered a beer, I put ice in a pilsner glass and poured the beer over it. My customer was kind.
“Is this your first night here?” he asked.
I nodded yes. He pulled my face down to his and whispered, “Beer is not served with ice.”
I felt stupid, but I made $127 that week and soon had the money for my trip.
In Buffalo, Esther and I stayed with her parents. I paid five dollars a week to share her room at the back of their house, which was also a funeral home. Within a week I had two job offers—one with the Buffalo Telephone Company, and the other at the Curtiss-Wright Defense Plant. Since the defense job paid more, I took it.
On the job I wore blue denim overalls. Just like the famous Rosie, I was a riveter. I worked at the Curtiss-Wright plant, which produced C-26 cargo planes. We worked in pairs: one person would drill the hole in the metal and place the rivet in it while the other held a bucking bar behind the rivet and flattened it as the riveting gun pressed on the rivet head. My partner was a red-haired girl from Erie, Pennsylvania. Her name was Virginia Wright and she became my first true, close female friend.
Even making what to me, at the time, was the enormous sum of forty-five dollars a week, it was soon clear that I couldn’t save enough money to go to the University. By the time I paid rent, bought food and clothes, and sent some money home, there wasn’t much left. My parents hadn’t asked me for money, but I knew they needed it for my siblings still at home; I sent some every week.
I was still writing to Nicky, and it was clear from his letters that he was getting serious. I knew he was going to propose, but I didn’t know what I was going to say. I wasn’t head over heels in love with him, but I liked him a lot. Maybe you only feel that strongly about your first love, I thought, remembering Duke.
Not very long afterward, Nicky proposed and I accepted. Nicky was still in Texas, and so, boarding a Greyhound bus, I headed there. After a brief stopover in Louisville to see my parents, I took another bus to Temple, Texas. Walking down the aisle, I chose an empty window seat in the middle of the bus. A Black soldier sat down next to me. Late that night, in Dixon, Tennessee, the driver stopped the bus, came back to us and said, “You niggers move on back to the back seat.”
Trying to be brave, I replied, “I’m as far back as I’m going to go.”
“Let’s move on back,” said the soldier. “We don’t need this kind of trouble.”
Turning from him, I stared out the window at the darkness and lost my courage. I could easily end up a corpse, I thought.
“Either move back or get off the bus,” the driver ordered. I wasn’t as courageous as Rosa Parks would later prove to be. We moved back. But I never forgot the incident or the outrage I felt.
Nicky met me at the station. In his uniform, with his cap “broken down” like General MacArthur’s and his spit-polished shoes, Nicky was even more handsome than I remembered. He took me to a house where he had rented a room. The next day, we were married. He gave me a white gold wedding band with five small diamonds. After the wedding, we stopped at Western Union and Nicky sent his mother a wire. “Dear Mom. Everything is swell. Happily married. Love Norman and Georgia.” That night, his lovemaking was gentle. I am happy, I thought. I’ve made the right decision.
After two weeks, when Nicky’s leave ended, I went back to Buffalo and my job at Curtiss-Wright. A few days later, my brother John Albert called and asked if it would be all right for him to come to Buffalo. At seventeen, he had been working in Louisville washing buses at the Greyhound garage. When his White supervisor had called him a “nigger,” Albert hit him over the head with the metal pole he had been using to wash a bus. He needed to get out of Louisville.
I told him he was welcome and moved from Esther’s room into two rooms over the funeral home in the same building. John Albert moved in and I helped him get a job at Curtiss-Wright.
With only my brother for company and Nicky still in Texas, there was little to do but work. Ed, Esther’s husband, was a musician at a nightclub called The Moonglow. When visiting bands came to the club, Ed would have a party for them at a hotel after they performed. One night, when Louis Jordan and his Tympani Five were playing, Ed arranged a party and invited me. When I arrived, the band members were sitting in a semi-circle, smoking marijuana. They invited me to join them. I had barely even heard of pot. When I refused to join in, they “invited” me to leave. I left and didn’t give it another thought. I have always done pretty much what I wanted to do, and I do not enjoy being pressured.
Three months after I started working at Curtiss-Wright, I was promoted from riveter to expediter. I went from one department to another, looking for missing parts. I now wore dress slacks instead of the work pants I had worn as a riveter. After that, I had more than thirty jobs ranging from airplane riveter to data processor. With many men away during World War II, women who wanted to work could easily find jobs that would not have been available during peace time.
I would take a job and learn all I could about my duties and those of others working around me. Then, if I did not get promoted, I would become restless. Three months was about as long as I would stay at a job if I didn’t get a promotion. It wasn’t always that I disliked the job or the people I worked with; it was just that if I wasn’t going to move up, I thought I might as well move on.
Sometimes my thoughts turned to my almost forgotten dreams of finishing college. It was something that meant a lot to me, but there seemed to be no way to make my heart’s wish come true. Still, I did not forget; I told myself that my dreams weren’t lost, only deferred.
Soon after my promotion at Curtiss-Wright, Nicky’s parents sent me a telegram to come to New York. They didn’t give a reason, but I later learned that they had somehow received word that Nicky would be passing through there on his way to the European war theater. I had to wire them back that I was unable to get time off from work. It was too soon after the wedding to ask for another leave.
Sadly, Nicky left for battle without my seeing him. He was in the 761st Black Panther Battalion, America’s first all-Black tank battalion. During the next six months, they battled their
