Dorothy’s mother-in-law tried to dig in her heels against the growing distance between her son and daughter-in-law that she must have surmised for some time to be inevitable. “You’re not going to take my babies,” she said to Dorothy, struggling against the changes that had been set in motion by Langley’s letter, but which had roots much deeper than that. A year after Dorothy left Farmville, so did her four children, starting the fall 1944 school year at Newsome Park Elementary School. The babysitter, who had come down with them to ease the transition, crowded into the apartment as well. Howard continued his itinerant hotel job. Dorothy had put herself and the children on a separate path forward, whereas the cycle of Howard’s life, despite the extensive travel to the exotic locations, still began and ended in Farmville. He made it down to Newport News when he could: it was too crowded, too noisy, too far away from his now elderly mother for him to convince himself to stay too long. Dorothy would send the children back home for summer vacations, and went back herself as she could, unwilling and unable to sever the ties with the people she loved deeply and would always consider her family. Her marriage with Howard settled into a state of limbo, never together but never completely apart either. It was a stable instability that would endure for the rest of Howard’s life, which was destined to be many decades shorter than Dorothy’s.
By 1945, five out of ten people in southeastern Virginia worked for Uncle Sam, directly or indirectly. The sylvan fields, forests, and shores had been mowed down, paved over, and built up with roads, bridges, hospitals, boatyards, jails, and military bases, cities in and of themselves. Housing developments sprawled for miles, a new feature of the landscape, neither urban nor rural but something in between; the names of the new asphalted places were reflections of the green spaces they replaced: Ferguson Park, Stuart Gardens, Copeland Park, Newsome Park, Aberdeen Gardens. On the peninsula was Military Highway, a modern ribbon of road whose wide, smooth lanes now connected all the you-can’t-get-there-from-here points along the finger of land from Old Point Comfort at Fort Monroe to the Newport News shipyard, with stops along the way at Langley Field and Langley. All of it was the product of the war emergency. But what was a war boomtown without the war?
V-J Day came on August 15, 1945, at 7:03 p.m. Eastern War Time. Into the vacuum of waiting and anxiety flooded “joyous tumult.” All the pent-up emotions of a nation weary from four years of war exploded in a paroxysm, nowhere as much as in the war communities leading the home-front effort. From Camp Patrick Henry and Naval Station Norfolk, Langley Field and Fort Monroe, soldiers and civilians streamed into the streets. Bars and USO clubs filled in a grand hurrah. Business owners locked their doors and joined the uncounted thousands of servicemen and civilians in the celebration that lasted through the night. Spontaneous parades erupted on Washington Avenue in Newport News. In Norfolk, middies held hands and formed a human chain, dancing around cars like kindergartners, madly encircling the standstill traffic. Cries of human jubilation and “indescribable noise-making devices” sounded off into the night. Makeshift confetti snowed from windows onto the celebrants in the streets below. Some exuberant revelers piled the paper into heaps and set them on fire, the bonfires further enhancing the primal joy of the outcry. The faithful filled churches, giving thanks and imploring their creator to allow this one to be the war to truly end all wars.
After the deluge, the uncertainty settled in. Three weeks after V-J Day, the Norfolk Journal and Guide reported layoffs of 1,500 Newport News shipyard workers and a “decrease for women workers, both white and colored.” “It seems impossible to escape the conclusion that employment in the shipyards and governmental establishments in the Hampton Roads area will be drastically curtailed,” commented the Washington Post. Returning servicemen were expected to have first claim on what jobs remained in the peacetime economy. Just as “victory” had been the watchword for the past four years, now “reconversion” came to the fore, with the United States trying to adjust its psyche and its economy to the peace. The war had been a freight train, traveling headlong at top speed. What now of the passengers inside, still moving forward with tremendous inertia? The word “reconversion” itself implied the possibility of returning to an earlier time, of a reversal even, in the changes large and small that had transformed American life.
With the war emergency fading into the past and without war production pressures, there would be no hire-at-all-costs demand for women. Two million American women of all colors received pink slips even before the final curtain fell in August. Many anticipated a happy return to domestic life. Others, fulfilled by their work, resisted the expectation that they should be reconverted back to the kitchen and the nursery. With work had come economic security, and a greater say in household affairs, which put some women on collision courses with their husbands. “Many husbands will return home to find that the helpless little wives they left behind have become grown, independent women,” wrote columnist Evelyn Mansfield Swann in the Norfolk Journal and Guide.
With victory over the enemies from without assured, Negroes took stock of their own battlefield. Almost immediately after V-J Day, some employers returned to their white, Gentile-only employment policies. The FEPC, however feeble it might have been in reality during the war, had nonetheless become a powerful symbol of employment progress for Negroes and other ethnic minorities. With labor markets loosening, the dream that many black leaders had of establishing a permanent FEPC slipped away with the war emergency, in spite of President Truman’s support.
No one was more opposed to the FEPC than Virginia’s Democratic senator, Harry Byrd, who called it “the most dangerous idea ever seriously considered” and likened it to “following the Communists’ lead,” an explosive epithet as the United States began to view its wartime ally Russia as the new threat. Byrd, a former governor, descended from a “First Family of Virginia,” one of the state’s multigenerational ruling elite. Heir to a newspaper and apple-growing fortune, Byrd treated segregation as a religion and ran a powerful political machine that kept the poor of all races divided against each other and at the bottom of the economic pyramid. “The Byrd Machine is the most urbane and genteel dictatorship in America,” wrote journalist John Gunther in his 1947 bestselling book Inside USA. Byrd’s father, who had also been a powerful state politician, had helped fellow Virginian Woodrow Wilson win the White House in 1912. It seemed too early to say if the activism and the economic gains made during the war years would carry forward into the future or give way in the face of subversion by politicians like Byrd, as they had after World War I. The generals of the Negroes’ war, however—leaders such as Randolph, Houston, and Mary McLeod Bethune, who served as an advisor to President Roosevelt—did not let their guard down one bit, preparing to rouse the troops for the next offensive. But Dorothy and the others who had built new lives during the war weren’t waiting for leaders or politicians to take the lead. They voted with their feet, betting their new lives that the social and economic changes brought about by the four-year conflict would last.
It wasn’t a risk-free wager. Dorothy committed to the lease on the apartment in Newsome Park even though Langley had not converted her wartime employee status to permanent. The future of the neighborhood itself was also uncertain. Neighbors in nearby Hilton Village, a World War I–era housing project for white, middle-class shipyard managers, were attempting to dismantle Newsome and Copeland Parks under slum clearance laws. Federal authorities planned to pry the houses off their bases and send the units to “war-devastated populations in Europe.” While the government and neighbors went back and forth over Newsome Park’s status—it was declared to be “not temporary in character,” yet “not permanent in its current location”—the residents brimmed with postwar idealism, calling upon each other to create a “model community, not just for Newport News, but for the entire United States.” And why would Newsome Park disappear? The great groaning defense machine and all the nooks and communities it had built in the last four years weren’t about to disappear. Gone were the small-town rhythms and the day of the waterman, replaced by connections to the larger world and the vitality of middle-class dreams. The jobs, the housing, the relationships, the routines—so many aspects of life that had been cut out of the whole cloth of the war emergency were now so intrinsic that it was easy to believe things had always been this way. Despite the best intentions of returning to their former lives, the come-heres tarried, realizing in small sips of awareness over the