by Gail Lukasik
Everything worked against my father from start to finish. In April 1942, his unit—the Thirty-Second Division, Company A, 114th Engineers—was ordered to go to Camp Edwards in Massachusetts, where they were to be trained for combat in Europe. Later in the year, they were scheduled to participate in Operation Torch in North Africa.
Those orders were altered when the Australians alerted the United States that the Japanese were attacking New Guinea and nearing the Northern Coast of Australia. Australia only had militia defending their homeland. The bulk of the Australian troops were fighting in North Africa. Fearing the Japanese would invade Australia, the Australian government appealed to the United States for troops. General McArthur decided that the Thirty-Second Division would be sent to New Guinea even though they were not prepared to go to there.
As his brother Stephen feared, the men of the Thirty-Second Division were ill prepared for war in the South Pacific. The soldiers lacked proper equipment and uniforms, were not trained in jungle warfare, and knew little about Japanese fighting techniques. At the time, the United States had the sixteenth largest army in the world. Italy had a much larger army. The United States had no air force, outdated weapons, very little artillery, and few tanks. Because my father’s division was originally slated for Europe, they shipped out from San Francisco with winter clothing. They would be the first troops to make contact with the Japanese and would suffer the consequences.
In September 1942, my father’s unit was flown from Amberly Field in Brisbane, Australia, to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, then from Port Moresby over the Owen Stanley Mountains to the village of Buna where they were to attack the Japanese who were entrenched there. The plane never made it to Buna.
In the Plain Dealer article, my father described the crash: “The crash was in the Owen Stanley Mountain Range. Part of our wing was clipped off. We got out and started toward Buna. When we reached a point thirty miles from Buna, we boarded a ship, which Jap dive-bombers promptly sank two hundred yards from the coast. One-quarter of the men exhausted by fever and marching drowned.”
What he neglected to mention is the arduousness of that march out of the mountains. Even when I pushed him for details, all he would say was, “We walked twenty days, and got supplied by air drop every third day.”
Other veterans’ accounts of that twenty-day hike out of the mountains are more forthcoming, calling the experience “a living, wide-awake nightmare,” from the unrelenting rains to the eerie ghost forests to the waist-deep channels of mud.
Tropical diseases flourished among the men, including malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, athlete’s foot, and ringworm.
When my father’s unit reached Buna, they were in poor physical shape. The battle of Buna began in earnest in November. American Historian Stephen Ambrose described the Allies condition as “hollow-eyed with jungle fever and hunger.”2 Casualties were severe. The Buna campaign was an army show and didn’t get as much notice as Guadalcanal, but the fighting was every bit as savage, and the cost in dead and wounded was even higher.
During the Papuan campaign my father would build bridges under Japanese fire, watch a friend get shot in the head sitting beside him, be wounded by shrapnel, almost lose vision in his right eye, and contract malaria and jungle rot.
“I made friends,” he explained. “But not too close, since they may get killed quickly. I was not afraid to die. If it happened, it happened. Those who were afraid to die became too careful and made mistakes.” He paused and added humorously, “When your number’s up, it’s up. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
The Army would be victorious in the battle of Buna, which lasted from November 16, 1942, until January 22, 1943. Allied losses in the battle were at a rate higher than that experienced at Guadalcanal. Overall, about sixty thousand Americans fought on Guadalcanal, suffering 5,845 casualties, including sixteen hundred killed in action. On Papua, more than thirty-three thousand Americans and Australians fought, and they suffered 8,546 casualties, of whom 3,095 were killed.3
US Army Lt. General Robert Eichelberger in his memoir, Our Jungle Road to Tokyo, written in 1950, stresses the losses suffered in the battle of Buna, “Buna was . . . bought at a substantial price in death, wounds, disease, despair, and human suffering. No one who fought there, however hard he tries, will ever forget it. Fatalities,” he concludes, “closely approach, percentage-wise, the heaviest losses in our Civil War battles.” He also commented, “I am a reasonably unimaginative man, but Buna is still to me, in retrospect, a nightmare. This long after, I can still remember every day and most of the nights.”
My father was awarded a Presidential Citation for action against the enemy in Papua New Guinea. He won another Presidential Citation for putting up a bridge under Japanese fire during the fall of 1942, as well as a Silver Star. His effort nearly cost him his sight in his right eye.
While my father was fighting the Japanese in New Guinea, my mother was in training as a cadet in the Women’s Army Corps (WACS). On November 9, 1942, in a flourish of patriotic fervor, she enlisted in the WACS, which had been newly created in July 1942. On her enlistment record she is an Aviation Cadet and her race is listed as white. Her term of enlistment is for the duration of the war or other emergency, plus six months. She lasted a few months, injuring her back lifting a heavy pot during kitchen patrol duty. That back injury would dog her off and on for the rest of her life.
Medically discharged from the WACS, she was once again back in New Orleans living with her cousin Theresa and her great-grandmother Mary Williams. All her patriotic dreams of serving her country were shattered.
In February 1943, a letter from my father offered her another option that would allow her to escape New Orleans.
“Why don’t you live with my folks in Cleveland until we get married,” my father wrote her. “It’s a big house with lots of room. You could share a bedroom with my sister Delores. She’s a good kid. You’ll like her.”
What did she have to lose? My mother accepted his offer. She’d already decided that once married she would live in Cleveland.
On her train journey north, whatever trepidation she felt must have been outweighed by the excitement of the road. Every mile moved her further and further away from her community where her identity was known and moved her closer and closer to a new place where her identity could be re-created.
Gazing out the window watching the landscape change as the train chugged north through Mississippi, Tennessee, Indiana, and Illinois did she feel changes inside her? Were there moments when she questioned her deception and vowed to tell my father the truth when he returned from the war? Or had she convinced herself that her mixed race didn’t matter? When clearly it did.
Like her stint in the WACS, her time with my father’s family only lasted a month or two. Insular, tribal, and entrenched in working class mores, my father’s family must have viewed my mother with suspicion and alarm. Her independence threatened their notions of female subservience.
To them she was as exotic and perplexing as a tropical flower. A flower they couldn’t name, had never seen before, with her curly, lush black hair, olive skin, and eyes as black as ink drops. Her Southern accent made them uncomfortable, putting them on edge.
And then there was my father’s mother, Mamie Kalina, a woman who ran roughshod over her passive husband. She was a hellion of a woman, with blazing strawberry blond hair and a stout, determined frame. My mother had met her match.
“They kept telling me what to do, where I could go, when I should be home. I wasn’t used to that. They treated me like a child. I felt like a prisoner. I couldn’t even go see a movie,” my mother complained to me. “They treated Delores like a servant.”
My father’s younger sister, Delores, obeyed their rules even though she was of age. My mother bristled under such parental restrictions, as foreign to her as another language. Her life mantra had always been “No one tells me what to do.”
And yet, she was uncertain how to handle the tightly knit
Kalina clan. Uncharacteristically, she called her mother in New Orleans who told her to come home.
When my mother threatened to leave, Mamie said, “If you leave here, you leave that engagement ring. That’s what Harold would want.” It was Mamie’s way or the highway.
My mother left her engagement ring and headed home to New Orleans. All her hopes of finding a stable family dashed. Restless and depressed by her broken engagement, she resumed her job as a hostess at the Meal-A-Minit restaurant on Canal Street. Once again working as white.
Though her foray in the North under the scrutiny of my father’s white family had bolstered her confidence in passing for white, the specter of discovery in a place where she was known as a mixed-race woman must have continued to cause her distress.
No longer engaged, she began dating again. But she saw no opportunities for herself in New Orleans. When Margaret, the cashier at the restaurant, invited her to accompany her to California, my mother didn’t hesitate. California offered her the kind of anonymity that she’d been seeking.
She would be part of the Second Great Migration, an influx of African Americans from the South to the North and California beginning in 1940. Though to most outside observers, she was a well-dressed Southern white woman pursuing her California dream.
17
California Dreaming
1943–1944
EVEN DURING THE war years California must have seemed like a place of dreams, especially to my mother who was seeking economic opportunities and racial anonymity. California benefited from the wartime economy. The coast became the primary focus of military-industrial production. “During the war years the federal government spent a total of $35 billion in California—one-tenth of the total amount spent on all domestic wartime projects.”1 With the wartime economy booming in California, millions of Americans sought better and more prosperous lives. My mother was one of them.
It was commonly known in the Creole community in which she lived that California was the “promised land.” Porters and train workers told of this place where jobs were plentiful, and if you were white enough, you could easily pass.2
In late 1943, she and Margaret took the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to Los Angeles, California, a two-thousand-mile journey. As she boarded the train did she feel a twinge of unease when the black porter asked if he could take her luggage and then escorted her to the cars reserved for whites?
The dark, olive-green train with the black roof passed through Texas, Arizona, the Mexican border, and California. As the train chugged west, even the heat and grit blowing in from the open windows added to her adventure of crossing from one place to another.
Toward the end of her life, she talked about her train trip and her time in California, sometimes wistfully, sometimes with regret, a lost opportunity she would never admit to losing. But that train trip remained a vivid memory for her.
“It wasn’t air conditioned and it was so hot we left the windows open. Dust and dirt covered everything.”
I listened quietly, watching the play of emotions on her face, disgust at the heat and dirt, and excitement at the unknown that awaited her in California.
When I asked her about why she went to California in 1943, she insisted that she’d gone there to meet my father who would land in California when he was discharged from the army. There are so many holes in her story.
It’s difficult to know when my parents reconciled. But I doubt that it was prior to her leaving for California in 1943. Even if they were reconciled, my father wasn’t due to be discharge until December 1944. Nor was it likely he would land in California.
No matter how many times I questioned her about why she traveled to California, she stuck to her story. Looking back now, I realize she was hiding her real reason for going to California, one she couldn’t tell me without revealing her racial identity.
In my mother’s life, it’s almost impossible to untangle dysfunction and race, truth and untruth. In crossing over to the white side, my mother took to the road, which has traditionally been a way to pass. The road offers freedom from discovery. Everyone you meet is a stranger, who doesn’t know you or your family.
In the physical distance that my mother put between New Orleans and Los Angeles, she created a space where she could re-create herself, a place where she could create a new identity, a white identity.3
My mother kept a secret photograph album of her time in Los Angeles. The album was sequestered from my father and given to me in trust prior to her moving out of her house and moving in with my brother and his family.
“I want you to keep this for me,” she instructed, handing me the fifteen-by-twelve tattered album, which was rubber-banded and wrapped in a Sears plastic bag.
I was honored. This album had special significance for her. She didn’t want it lost in the melee of moving or stored in a basement, forgotten and moldering in dampness.
“Promise me you’ll keep it safe,” she said.
By that time I’d proven myself a tacit torchbearer of her family history. The album would not only be kept safe with me but also cherished. She didn’t say so, but I believe she was also giving me another piece of her mysterious puzzle, a glimpse into the past she’d kept hidden from my father. She was eighty-nine years old and showing signs of dementia and failing health. She understood that her time was limited and I’d soon be free of my vow.
The album first appeared when we visited her after my father’s death. I never knew of its existence. When she produced the album, it unleashed a plethora of stories, all centered on California. Slowly leafing through the black felt-like pages with the white lettering and the photographs held in place with four black corners, she was finally able to share with us the life she created in California before she married my father.
The black-and-white photographs are revelatory of her transformation from a mixed-race identity to a white identity. In every group photo every person is visibly white. No family members visited her in California.
During her eight-month sojourn in California, she rented a room in a boarding house in Los Angeles run by Mrs. Jackson. It must have been a commodious house because in the photo titled “Jackson Household Picnic,” I count ten adults and one child. Under the photo’s title my mother printed: “A swell bunch of people.” Her childhood in her great-grandmother’s boarding house must have prepared her for sharing quarters with strangers. She was adept at courteous distance.
In the picnic photos, besides my mother, one other woman stands out from the other boarders. My mother identified the woman as Doris. In one photo Doris poses in the foreground clad in a halter-top and shorts, meant to show off her slim figure. The other lodgers are lined up after her. In three short years, Doris Jensen from Nebraska will star in the film Kiss of Death opposite Victor Mature. It will be her breakout role. By then her name will be Coleen Gray and she’ll go on to star in a string of film noirs in the late 1940s into the 1950s.
Thinking Coleen Gray might remember my mother and cast light on her time in Mrs. Jackson’s boarding house, I write her a letter after the Roadshow airs and enclose a copy of her in her picnic attire, hoping the photo jogs her memory. She doesn’t respond. She must have been ill because a few months later in August 2015, she passes away at the age of ninety-two. And I’m left with only the photographs to tell my mother’s California story.
The theatricality of the LA photographs attest to the masquerade my mother was creating. Only Coleen Gray outdoes my mother in projecting a memorable image, her shoulders back, her chest forward, making sure she’s prominently seen.
In many of the photos my mother sports her signature white flowers in her carefully styled dark hair. In every single photo one foot is slightly lifted as if she’s imitating a fashion model. Had she seen that pose in a fashion magazine? All the other women look ordinary in comparison, except Coleen Gray. What better place than Tinseltown for her to try out another persona, a place where the line between real and unreal was blurry if not nonexistent?
Besides the soon-to-be famous Coleen Gray, other show business people rented rooms from Mrs. Jackson—a nameless Disney animator and Horace, a film studio stuntman. My mother couldn’t remember Horace’s last name or the name of the Disney animator.
Horace seemed to have taken a personal interest in my mother: not only did he take her on location during the filming of a war movie but he arranged a screen test for her. She didn’t seem all that upset when she related how she’d missed the phone call for the screen test. Her one shot at movie fame gone. She claimed she was too shy to be a movie actress.
But I think she realized that under the glare of a camera she would be seen for who she was. At that time period, women of color roles went to the Italian-looking starlets. Was she fearful that someone back home would see her in a movie and recognize her? “Isn’t that Alvera Frederic? You know she’s mixed.”
The souvenir photographs of her and her dates, all soldiers and all white, taken at Los Angeles nightclubs attest to the white identity she was forging in California. In the 1944 Zamboanga nightclub photo, Eugene Landon has his arm around my mother and she leans into him. A postcard she saved from the Zamboanga South Sea Nite Club describes the Polynesian nightclub as a rendezvous of Hollywood stars and celebrities, as well as the home of the tail-less monkeys.
In the other souvenir photograph, from the Hollywood Palladium, my mother leans back against Mark J. O’Connell, who writes above his photo: “Please, I’m not drunk!” Though he does look drunk. Across the table from Mark and my mother are Eugene Landon and Corrine Jordan. Apparently there was nothing serious between my mother and Eugene. But if these August 1944 photographs are any indication, my parents still hadn’t reconciled.
To the delight of my children she told us about the midnight California beach party where she met Lloyd Bridges before he became famous, starring in the TV series Sea Hunt that launched his acting career.