I Shared the Dream. Georgia Davis Powers
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 way across Belgium and Germany, spearheading the Allied drive and inflicting thousands of casualties on the Nazi army. In its record 183 straight days in combat, including the Battle of the Bulge, the unit suffered a heavy casualty rate. A total of 36 men were killed and 260 were wounded; 71 tanks were lost.
During Nicky’s tour of duty, flying shrapnel pierced his leg and hand. He was shipped back to Lake Placid for thirty days of recovery. Leaving Buffalo and my brother, I went to New York City to be with Nicky and his parents until he recovered and we could make some plans. His father, J. Frederic Davis, a high-spirited, slightly built man who smoked cigars continuously, met me at the airport and took me to his family’s small apartment in Brooklyn. At the apartment, Nicky’s mother, Helen, was waiting to meet me for the first time.
“Now I can die happy,” were her first words to me. “Nicky is happy.”
The Davises had adopted Nicky when he was nine months old. His natural mother was a wealthy, White woman from upstate New York. His father was the family chauffeur. Nicky’s natural grandparents forced his biological mother to take him to Spence’s Foundling Home; from there he was adopted by the Davises.
My in-laws, who doted on Nicky, accepted me graciously and I stayed in New York after Nicky returned to duty. My father-in-law explained, apologetically, that he had lost money during the Depression and wouldn’t be able to help us financially very much. Although I appreciated his thoughtfulness, I never counted on getting assistance from my in-laws.
I knew I would have to work, and took the first position I was offered. The job was at the home of an Englewood, New Jersey family who needed someone to care for their infant grandchild. The room they gave me was small and dirty. When I arrived, the grandmother just handed me the baby and left. I had never had full responsibility for a baby before. I did the best I could, but the child cried all the time. Feeling lonely, I made friends with the family’s laundress, Della Powell, a stocky, mahogany-complected woman from Athens, Georgia. Della was good-humored and she let me sit in the basement with her, while the baby napped, as she ironed and talked nonstop.
On Sunday, after I had been there a week, Della invited me to church. I asked my employer for my pay and then took a cab. As I sat through the service, tears rolled down my cheeks. I’m sure the other worshippers thought the preacher must be delivering a powerful sermon to touch me so. The truth is, I was so discouraged by the situation I was in, I couldn’t help crying.
After the service, Della invited me home for dinner. She made fried chicken, greens, mashed potatoes, sliced tomatoes, apple cobbler, hot rolls, and iced tea. I hadn’t tasted food like that since I had left home! We visited for the rest of the afternoon. When I started to leave, she could see how sad I was.
“Georgia, you don’t have to go back there. You can stay here with me.” Quitting my job, I accepted her offer, staying with her until I got another job in a sewing factory.
On that job I learned to use the serger, a machine that over-stitched the edges of the seams on women’s blouses and pajamas to keep them from raveling. After working my usual three months, I began searching for something that paid better. I heard that Wright Aeronautical Corporation in Paterson, New Jersey was hiring and I got a job there checking defense items as they were sent down the conveyor belt. They paid me a decent wage and I stayed until the war ended and Nicky came home.
Nicky and I were excited about being together again, but we found that we had become strangers after so much time apart. He drank more than I remembered and kept a gun by our bed; his war experiences seemed to be preying on his mind, but I didn’t know how to assess his behavior. After all, we had only spent two weeks together as husband and wife. We both worked patiently at getting to know one another again.
Nicky’s father got him a job as a messenger on Wall Street and I became a counter clerk with Chock Full O’Nuts, working at whichever of their twenty-three stores in the New York area needed me.
As a native New Yorker, Nicky knew lots of exciting places in the City; he wanted to show me all of them. To my delight, we began spending our weekends in Manhattan. We would go to the Savoy Ballroom where big-name musicians like Erskine Hawkins would play. We would jitterbug all night every Friday, stay over, and go to the Paramount Theatre on Saturdays, where they always had a good stage show. We’d often go to the Dickie Wells club for a quiet evening of drinking and dancing. Like many young people at the time, we were enjoying ourselves without giving much thought to the future. After a while working at dead-end jobs, though, our thoughts turned to more serious things.
We decided it was time to start a family. After months of trying to conceive, and still not becoming pregnant, I went with Nicky to see a doctor. He tested us both, then said that we would probably never have children. The news was a blow. Even though I hadn’t wanted a large family, I had hoped to have at least one or two children. Nicky consoled me in his gentle way. “We still have each other,” he said. Nevertheless, for many years afterward I’d felt an overwhelming sadness whenever I picked up some other woman’s baby.
Nicky was an easy-going person who enjoyed simple pleasures and liked to dress in nice clothes. At home he would wear a velvet smoking jacket or silk pajamas. When we made love, however, it was only pleasant, not passionate. More often than not, our lovemaking was at my initiation. At first, because of the rape I had suffered as a teenager and the sexual assaults of my first husband, I appreciated Nicky’s lack of interest in sex. However, as I matured and my own sexuality developed, I knew there was something lacking. Looking back, I can see that we were not sexually compatible and that this was a major factor in the failure of our marriage.
In our family, it had always been understood that we would help each other. When my brother Phillip called to ask if he could come to Englewood and live with us after he graduated high school, I said, “Sure, come on.” Phillip got a job in a bakery, starting work at 4 A.M. and sometimes walked the twenty miles to Hackensack where the bakery was located.
For a while, things seemed to be going smoothly, but then Nicky began to drink more, and his once even disposition began to change. He was unhappy with his job as a messenger on Wall Street and decided to open a small, storefront restaurant in Harlem with a friend of his who cooked. It was a bad time to go into the restaurant business; meat was hard to get and sugar was rationed. I supported his efforts as best I could.