You Can Fly by Carole Boston Weatherford

Author:Carole Boston Weatherford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Published: 2016-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

A wartime pinup is worth a thousand kisses.

Hollywood hands out thousands of glamour photos:

redheaded goddess Rita Hayworth,

buxom Jane Russell leaning against a haystack,

Dorothy Lamour wrapped in a sarong,

“The Sweater Girl” Lana Turner,

Betty Grable in a bathing suit

baring her million-dollar legs.

The top brass figure these pinups raise morale.

There is but one star you black troops call your own.

On stage since age sixteen, Lena Horne

started on Cotton Club’s chorus line,

hoofing to Duke and Cab’s big bands.

From there to Broadway and then Hollywood;

the first black actress signed to a studio contract.

But Lena will not play a maid,

so her roles are few;

mostly singing numbers that can be easily cut

for Southern theaters that refuse

to screen her black beauty.

Lena dubs herself “a butterfly pinned to a column.”

Still, she soars in black films like Cabin in the Sky

and Stormy Weather, whose title song

is her signature.

This songbird does her part for the war effort,

posing in an apron for a campaign to conserve energy.

And she performs live on USO tours

until black soldiers are barred

from one of her concerts

and seated behind German prisoners at another.

Lena knows racism well. She has headlined venues

where she isn’t allowed to sleep or eat. Fed up,

she stops working at whites-only establishments

and quits the USO tours, too.

Now Lena pays her own way

to perform for troops. When she visits Tuskegee,

she sings, perches in planes, and poses for photos.

How could you not fall for Lena?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.