Queenie's Place: A fictional book by Toni Morgan

Doreen and Queenie and how I came to write their story

People often ask if Doreen is me, since like Doreen, I too spent many years as a military spouse. My answer is that she is me, to the extent that all the characters have some of the author in them. All an author’s experiences and emotions are grist for the writing mill. 

In the early sixties, my husband and I lived in northern Florida while my husband was in school.  I was born and raised on the West Coast. Now, in person, I witnessed what I’d only read about in books: restrooms designated ‘colored’; the signs on the bus that read ‘coloreds to the rear.’ Every night after work, I rode a bus home and every night I was tempted to sit in the rear of the bus.  But I lacked the courage to do so.

After Florida we went back to the West Coast, my husband went to Japan for thirteen months and then another thirteen months in Vietnam. When he returned, we were off to North Carolina. The Welcome to Klan Country sign Doreen saw when her husband was transferred to a fictional base in North Carolina, I witnessed—Easter Sunday morning in 1972, just outside Goldsboro, North Carolina, on our way to Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point. I had about the same reaction as Doreen; how could this be allowed when Civil Rights legislation was now part of the law?

Another thing we both experience was the caste system of the military—‘where do you live?’ wasn’t asked out of curiosity, it was asked to establish the rank of your spouse.

            One memorable day while we lived in North Carolina, my phone rang. It was my neighbor. She explained that she’d gone out to pick strawberries at a U-Pick place advertised in the local paper, but on the way, she’d had a flat tire. She was using the phone in a house near where her tire had gone flat and would I come get her? I told her of course I would and she gave me the directions to where she was, then added in a whisper to please hurry as the house was kind of weird.  It didn’t take me long to grab my purse and head out.  Following her instructions I had no problem finding her car and the house.  It didn’t look weird. There were curtains at the windows and someone had planted flowers.

I walked up to the front door and knocked. A woman opened the door. She wore a very skimpy outfit, as did the three other women who wandered in an out of what appeared to be the living room. A toddler accompanied one woman. 

The place was a brothel. 

My friend quickly thanked the woman who’d opened the door for me and we left. And we giggled all the way home. What were we going to tell our husbands?

            I don’t know about my neighbor, they moved to north, we moved Maryland and then to Japan, but for years I thought about that very brief experience and wondered about the women I’d seen, who they were, how they’d gotten there, what their lives were like.  What they were like.

            Another woman I met along the way—this time on the small base in Japan—was unlike most officers’ wives (I did mention the military’s caste system, right?). This woman was loud, liked to touch people, especially men, nothing was off-limits for her to discuss, and she was often ridiculed for her ‘loose’ behavior. I said something uncalled for about her, thinking it to be funny and sophisticated. It wasn’t. It was mean, and I felt bad.

            Fast forward a few years and I went back to writing fiction instead of articles about finance, as I’d been doing, and I kind of put those things together in Queenie’s Place. I created Queenie (her place a roadhouse, not a brothel) and Doreen (a little tamed down, but with the courage I had so lacked) and with the military setting with which I was very familiar. Both women were searching for their place in the world. The fictionalized base and nearby town are modeled after a place and time I think is a reminder that we still have a long way to go before we can put Jim Crow firmly behind us.

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