Women
of the Post : A Novel
Joshunda
Sanders
On Sale Date: July 18, 2023
9780778334071
Trade Paperback
$18.99 USD
368 pages
ABOUT
THE BOOK:
For
fans of A League of Their Own, a
debut historical novel that gives voice to the pioneering Black women of the of
the Six Triple Eight Battalion who made history by sorting over one million
pieces of mail overseas for the US Army.
“What
a beautifully imagined and important narrative. Sanders’ clear-eyed and
powerful writing made this a hard one to stop reading!”
—Jacqueline
Woodson, National Book Award-Winning Author
"This is a novel to cherish and share.
And this is a history to sing about and affirm -- to proclaim.”
—
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, New York Times Bestselling author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, an
Oprah Book Club Novel
Inspired by true events, Women of the Post
brings to life the heroines who proudly served in the all-Black battalion of
the Women’s Army Corps in WWII, finding purpose in their mission and lifelong
friendship.
1944, New York City. Judy Washington is tired
of having to work at the Bronx Slave Market, cleaning white women’s houses for
next to nothing. She dreams of a bigger life, but with her husband fighting
overseas, it’s up to her and her mother to earn enough for food and rent. When
she’s recruited to join the Women’s Army Corps—offering a steady paycheck and
the chance to see the world—Judy jumps at the opportunity.
During training, Judy becomes fast friends
with the other women in her unit—Stacy, Bernadette and Mary Alyce—who all come
from different cities and circumstances. Under Second Officer Charity Adams's
leadership, they receive orders to sort over one million pieces of mail in
England, becoming the only unit of Black women to serve overseas during WWII.
The women work diligently, knowing that
they're reuniting soldiers with their loved ones through their letters.
However, their work becomes personal when Mary Alyce discovers a backlogged
letter addressed to Judy. Told through the alternating perspectives of Judy,
Charity and Mary Alyce, Women of the Post is an unforgettable story of
perseverance, female friendship and self-discovery.
BUY LINKS:
B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/women-of-the-post-joshunda-sanders/1142106285
Sneak Peek Excerpt:
One
Judy
From Judy to The Crisis
Thursday, 14 April 1944
Dear Ms. Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke,
My name is Judy Washington, and I am one of the women you
write about in your work on the Bronx Slave Market over on Simpson Street. My
husband, Herbert, is serving in the war, so busy it has been months since I
heard word from him. It is the fight of his life—of our lives—to defend our
country and maybe it will show white people that we can also belong to and
defend this place. We built it too, after all. It is as much our country to
defend as anyone else’s.
All I thought was really missing from your articles was a
fix for us, us meaning Negro women. We are still in the shadow of the Great
Depression now, but the war has made it so that some girls have been picked up
by unions, in factories and such. Maybe you could ask the mayor or somebody to
set us up with different work. Something that pays and helps our boys/men
overseas, but doesn’t keep us sweating over pails of steaming laundry for
thirty cents an hour or less. Seems like everyone but the Negro woman has found
a way to contribute to the war and also put food on the table. It’s hard not to
feel left behind or overlooked.
Thank you for telling the truth about the lives we have
to live now, even if it is hard to see. Eventually, I pray, we will have a
different story to tell. My mother always says she brought us up here to lay
our burdens down, not to pick up new ones. But somehow, even if we don’t go to
war, we still have battles to fight just to live with a little dignity.
I’ve gone on too long now. Thank you for your service.
Respectfully,
Judy Washington
Since the men went to war, there was never enough of anything
for Judy and her mother, Margaret, which is how they came to be free Negro women
relegated to one of the dozens of so-called slave markets for domestic workers
in New York City. For about two years now, her husband, Herbert, had been
overseas. He was one half of a twin, her best friend from high school, and her
first and only love, if you could call it that.
Judy had moved with her parents from the overcrowded Harlem
tenements to the South Bronx midway through her sophomore year of high school.
She was an only child. Her father, James, doted on her in part because he and
Margaret had tried and tried when they were back home in the South for a baby,
but Judy was the only one who made it, stayed alive. He treasured her, called
her a miracle. Margaret would cut her eyes at him, complain that he was making
her soft.
The warmth Judy felt at home was in stark contrast to the way
she felt at school, where she often sat alone during lunch. When they were
called upon in classes to work in groups of two or three, she excused herself
and asked for the wooden bathroom pass, so that she often worked alone instead
of facing the humiliation of not being chosen.
She had not grown up with friends nor had Margaret, so it
almost felt normal to live mostly inside herself this way. There were girls
from the block who looked at her with what she read as pity. “Nice skirt,” one
would say, almost reluctantly.
“Thanks,” she’d say, a little shy to be noticed. “Mother
made it.”
Small talk was more painful than silence. How had the other
Negro girls managed to move with such ease here, after living almost exclusively
with other Negroes down in Harlem? Someone up here was as likely to have a
brogue accent as a Spanish one. She didn’t mind the mingling of the races, it
was just new: a shock to the system, both in the streets she walked to go to
school and to the market but also in the halls of Morris High School.
Judy had been eating an apple, her back pressed against the
cafeteria wall when she saw Herbert. He was long faced with a square jaw and
round, black W.E.B. Du Bois glasses.
“That’s all you’re having for lunch, it’s no wonder you’re
so slim,” he said, like he was continuing a conversation they had been having
for a while. Rich coming from him, with his lanky gait, his knobby knees
pressing against his slacks.
A pile of assorted foods rose from his blue tray,
tantalizing her. A sandwich thick with meat and cheese and lettuce, potato
chips off to the side, a sweating bottle of Coke beside that. For years, they
had all lived so lean that it had become a shock to suddenly see some people
making up for lost time with their food. Judy finished chewing her apple and
gathered her skirt closer to her. “You offering to share your lunch with me?”
Herbert gave her a slight smile. “Surely you didn’t think
all this was for me?”
They were fast friends after that. It was easy for her to
make room for a man who looked at her without pity. There had always been room
in her life for someone like him: one who saw, who comforted, who provided. Her
father, James, grumbled disapproval when Herbert asked to court, but Herbert
came with sunflowers and his father’s moonshine.
“What kind of man do you take me for?” James asked, eyeing
Herbert’s neat, slim tie and sniffing sharply to inhale the obnoxious musk of
too much aftershave.
“A man who wants his daughter to be loved completely,”
Herbert said. “The way that I love her.”
Their courting began. Judy had no other offers and didn’t
want any. That they had James’s blessing before he died from a heart attack and
just as they were getting ready to graduate from high school only softened the
blow of his loss a little. As demure and to herself as she usually was, burying
her father turned Judy more inward than Herbert expected. In his death, she
seemed to retreat into herself the way that she had been when he approached her
that lunch hour. To draw her out, to bring her back, he proposed marriage.
She balked. “Can I belong to someone else?” Judy asked
Margaret, telling her that Herbert asked for her hand. “I hardly feel like I
belong to myself.”
“This is what women do,” Margaret said immediately.
The ceremony was small, with a reception that hummed with
nosy neighbors stopping over to bring slim envelopes of money to gift to the
bride and her mother. The older Negro women in the neighborhood, who wore the
same faded floral housedresses as Margaret except for today, when she put one
of her two special dresses—a radiant sky blue that made her amber eyes look
surrounded in gold light—visited her without much to say, just dollar bills
folded in their pockets, slipped into her grateful hands. They were not exactly
her friends; she worked too much to allow herself leisure. But some of them
were widows, too. Like her, they had survived much to stand proudly on special
days like this.
They settled into the plans they made for their life
together. He joined the reserves and, in the meantime, became a Pullman
porter. Judy began work as a seamstress at the local dry cleaner. Whatever
money they didn’t have, they could make up with rent parties until the babies
came.
Now all of that was on hold, her life suspended by the announcement
at the movies that the US was now at war. The news was hard enough to process,
but Herbert’s status in the reserves meant that this was his time to exit. She
braced herself when he stood up to leave the theater and report for duty,
kissing her goodbye with a rushed press of his mouth to her forehead.
Judy and Margaret had been left to fend for themselves.
There had been some money from Herbert in the first year, but then his
letters—and the money—slowed to a halt. Judy and Margaret received some relief
from the city, but Judy thought it an ironic word to use, since a few dollars
to stretch and apply to food and rent was not anything like a relief. It meant
she was always on edge, doing what needed doing to keep them from freezing to
death or joining the tent cities down along the river.
Her hours at the dry cleaner were cut, so she and Margaret
reluctantly joined what an article in The Crisis described as the “paper
bag brigade” at the Bronx Slave Market. The market was made up of Negro women,
faces heavy for want of sleep. They made their way to the corners and
storefronts before dawn, rain or shine, carrying thick brown paper bags filled
with gloves, assorted used work clothes to change into, rolled over themselves
and softened with age in their hands. A few of them were lucky enough to have a
roll with butter, in the unlikely event of a lunch break.
Judy and Margaret stood for hours if the boxes or milk
crates were occupied, while they waited for cars to approach. White women
drivers looked them over and called out to their demands: wash my windows and
linens and curtains. Clean my kitchen. A dollar for the day, maybe two, plus
carfare.
The lists were always longer than the day. The rate was always
offensively low. Margaret had been on the market for longer than Judy; she knew
how to negotiate. Judy did not want to barter her time. She resented being an
object for sale.
“You can’t start too low, even when you’re new,” Margaret
warned Judy when her daughter joined her at Simpson Avenue and 170th Street.
“Aim higher first. They’ll get you to some low amount anyhow. But it’s always
going to be more than what you’re offered.”
Everything about the Bronx Slave Market, this congregation
of Negro women looking for low-paying cleaning work, was a futile negotiation.
An open-air free-for-all, where white women in gleaming Buicks and Fords felt
just fine offering pennies on the hour for several hours of hard labor. Sometimes
the work was so much, the women ended up spending the night, only to wake up in
the morning and be asked to do more work—this time for free.
Judy and Margaret could not afford to work for free. Six
days a week, in biting winter cold that made their knees numb or sweltering
heat rising from the pavement baking the arches of their feet, they wandered to
the same spot. After these painful experiences, day after day all week, Judy
and Margaret gathered at the kitchen table on Sundays after church to count up
the change that could cover some of the gas and a little of the rent. It was
due in two days, and they were two dollars short. Unless they could make a
dollar each, they would not make rent.
Rent was sometimes hard to come up with, even when James was
alive, but when he died, their income became even more unreliable. They didn’t
even have money enough for a decent funeral. He was buried in a pine box in the
Hart Island potter’s field. James was the only love of Margaret’s life, and
still, when he was gone, all she said to Judy was, “There’s still so much to
do.”
Judy’s deepest wish for Margaret was for her to rest and
enjoy a few small pleasures. What she overheard between her parents as a child
were snippets and pieces of painful memories. Negroes lynched over rumors.
Girls taken by men to do whatever they wanted. “We don’t need a lot,” she heard
Margaret say once, “just enough to leave this place and start over.”
Margaret’s family, like James’s, had only known the South.
Some had survived the end of slavery by some miracle, but the Reconstruction
era was a different kind of terror. Margaret was the eldest of five children,
James was the middle child of eight. A younger sibling left for Harlem first,
and sent letters glowing about how free she felt in the north. So, even once
Margaret convinced James they needed to take Judy someplace like that, it felt
to Judy that she always had her family in the South and the way they had to
work to survive on her mind.
Judy fantasized about rest for herself and for her mother.
How nice it would be to plan a day centered around tea, folding their own
napkins, ironing a treasured store-bought dress for a night out. A day when she
could stand up straight, like a flower basking in the sun, instead of hunched
over work.
Other people noticed that they worked harder and more than they
should as women, as human beings. Judy thought Margaret maybe didn’t realize
another way to be was possible. So she tried to talk about the Bronx Slave
Market article in The Crisis with her mother. Margaret refused to read a
word or even hear about it. “No need reading about my life in no papers,” she
said.
Refusing to know how they were being exploited didn’t keep
it from being a problem. But once Judy knew, she couldn’t keep herself from
wanting more. Maybe that was why Margaret didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t
want to want more than what was in front of her.
Herbert’s companionship had fed her this kind of ambition
and hope. His warm laughter, the way she could depend on him to talk her into
hooky once in a while, to crash a rowdy rent party and dance until the sun came
up, even if it got her grounded and lectured, was—especially when James
died—the only escape hatch she could find from the box her mother was
determined to fit her future inside. So, when Herbert surprised her at a
little traveling show in Saint Mary’s Park, down on one knee with his
grandmother’s plain wedding band, she only hesitated inside when she said yes.
It wasn’t the time to try and explain that there was something in her yawning
open, looking for something else, but maybe she could find that something with
Herbert. Her mother told her to stop wasting her time dreaming and to settle
down.
At least marrying her high school buddy meant she could move
on from under Margaret’s constant, disapproving gaze. They had been saving up
for new digs when Herbert was drafted—but now that was all put on hold.
The dream had been delicious while it felt like it was coming
true. Judy and Herbert were both outsiders, insiders within their universe of
two. Herbert was the only rule follower in a bustling house full of lawbreaking
men and boys; Judy, the only child of a shocked widow who found her purpose in
bone-tiring work. Poverty pressed in on them from every corner of the Bronx,
and neither Judy nor Herbert felt they belonged there. But they did belong to
each other, and that wasn’t nothing.
Excerpted from Women of the Post by Joshunda
Sanders, Copyright © 2023 by Joshunda Sanders. Published by Park Row Books.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joshunda Sanders is an award-winning author, journalist and speechwriter. A former Obama Administration political appointee, her fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in dozens of anthologies. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships at Hedgebrook, Lambda Literary, The Key West Literary Seminars and the Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing. Women of the Post is her first novel.
SOCIAL
LINKS:
Author website: https://joshundasanders.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoshundaSanders
No comments:
Post a Comment