IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON of the twenty-fifth day of August, Aunt Edith came downstairs from her apartment with freshly painted lips and eyebrows the shape of horseshoes. Ava and Martha followed, in their Sunday dresses. Only, it wasn’t Sunday.
“Girls,” called Aunt Edith, marching through the Baums’ living room. “Girls!”
Mother and Elizabeth were at the dining table sorting through Daddy’s medical bills, and Frankie and Joan were in bed with Daddy, taking turns reading the day’s newspaper articles to him. “I think you’re needed out there,” Daddy told them.
“What for?” asked Frankie.
“Why don’t you go see,” said Daddy, grinning. “I’m all right. Go on, I’ve got Bismarck to look after me.”
Frankie and Joan looked at each other and then took off down the hall. When they got to the dining room, Aunt Edith’s red lips were in a smile, and as Ava and Martha stood on either side of her, Aunt Edith had her hands covering their mouths. Ava and Martha were wiggling to get loose, but the three of them stuck close together like they were trying to hide a whale behind their backs.
“What’s going on?” asked Joan.
Mother smiled and said, “Go get dressed, girls. Aunt Edith is taking you to see a picture.”
“Really?’ said Elizabeth. “Which one?”
Aunt Edith said, “Well . . .”
Before she could get any more words out, Ava knocked her rear end into Aunt Edith’s thigh, setting her off balance and causing her hand to lose its grip over Ava’s mouth. “We’re going to see The Wizard of Oz,” announced Ava, victorious.
“No fair!” shouted Martha, when her mouth was free. “We were all going to tell them together! And now you ruined it!”
“The Wizard of Oz!” Frankie and Joan shouted together, jumping up and down.
Then Frankie stopped. “But what about Daddy?” she asked.
“It was his idea,” said Mother. “Don’t worry, I’ll stay here with him. You can tell me all about it when you get back.”
The girls got dressed in a hurry and returned to the dining room before Aunt Edith had a chance to finish a glass of iced tea. “Let’s go,” said Frankie. “Can we sit in the front row? I want to get as close as I can to Oz.”
The cinema was only a few blocks from the Baums’ apartment, and the six of them set out walking, with Joan and Frankie racing Ava for the lead. The farther they got, though, the slower Frankie’s steps were. She fell behind Ava, Joan, and Elizabeth, and then kept pace with Aunt Edith and Martha, even when Joan turned around and bet her she could beat her and Ava in a race.
“What’s the matter, Frankie?” asked Aunt Edith.
Frankie shrugged. “I guess I’m not used to being away.”
Aunt Edith squeezed Frankie’s shoulder. “That’s why your father thought this would be good for you. Being cooped up in that apartment for weeks upon end, that’s no good for anybody. And don’t you worry, now; your mother is home with him.”
It was an odd thing, Aunt Edith telling Frankie not to worry, when Aunt Edith worried more than anyone—except Mother, of course. But her reassurance seemed to work, at least for now, as Frankie put aside her troubles as best she could and got her legs into a run to catch up with the others.
As the cinema came into sight, Ava pulled ahead of Joan at the last minute and was the first to get to the movie poster that was hanging in the front window. “See,” Ava said, pointing, “here it is!”
When Frankie caught up, she couldn’t take her eyes off of Judy Garland as Dorothy. “‘Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Technicolor Triumph,’” Frankie read from the poster. “What does that mean?”
“It means the picture is in color,” said Elizabeth. “Not black and white.”
Frankie’s heart raced. “Come on, let’s go inside.”
Aunt Edith paid for their tickets and they made their way down the stairs into the dark theater. Frankie found six seats together in the front row. “Just think,” whispered Joan to Frankie, “we’ll be this close to Judy Garland.”
Frankie nodded, then looked behind her to see how many others were there to see the picture show. All around her the seats were filling up, but a young girl and her brother sitting in the colored section at the back of the theater caught her eye. The top of the boy’s head barely stuck out above the seat in front of him, and when he complained, the girl lifted him onto her lap. As the little boy squirmed and craned his neck to see, Frankie thought about Seaweed. What you see out of those green eyes of yours ain’t nothing like what I see. And what you see ain’t nothing like it is. She was able to sit in the front row and as close to the picture as a person could get, when that little girl and her brother couldn’t, when they didn’t even have a choice in the matter.
This was how the world was, she knew, for she had seen it every day. But she had hardly given it much thought before now, to tell the truth. Yet, the way Daddy was treated because of what people believed him to be set her mind thinking about how colored people were treated. All unfairly, and all because of what people believed them to be.
What a frightening thing for her to realize, that what some people believed could be so cruel, and could be so wrong. What a world this was.
The lights dimmed and Frankie turned around to face the screen. The newsreel started up, but there was no relief there from the world’s problems. There was talk of war and, of course, of Germans. “Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union surprised the world by forming an alliance and signing a nonaggression pact on August twenty-third,” read the news bulletin, “whereby both countries agreed to take no military action against each other for the next ten years.” Then President Roosevelt talked about these troubled times, and how democracy must be a positive force in order to maintain liberty against aggression abroad. Troubled times indeed, thought Frankie. The president seemed to be talking directly to her.
When the newsreel ended and the picture finally began, the words The Wizard of Oz appeared on the screen. Everyone in the theater cheered. Frankie looked for Judy Garland’s name and for L. Frank Baum’s, too, and when she saw them both, she elbowed Joan in the side.
“There you are,” whispered Joan.
The dull, gray Kansas sky was on the screen for some time. In fact, everything in Kansas was gray, it seemed, not unlike Hagerstown. Frankie knocked knees with Elizabeth beside her. “I thought you said this picture was supposed to be in color.” Elizabeth shrugged and then told her to be quiet.
A while later, after the cyclone lifted the house along with Dorothy and Toto and carried it away, Frankie whispered, “This is not what happens in the book. And that awful lady Miss Gulch was not in the story.”
“Shh,” said Joan.
Judy Garland or not, Frankie was having some doubts about this picture already. But when Dorothy opened the door to Oz, well, Frankie’s mouth fell open. The colors, oh my, oh my, those colors took all the words away.
Except for these last ones from Frankie, which she whispered to Joan: “I bet that’s what it felt like when you got to Aunt Dottie’s.”