The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  “Right,” I said. “But there were no white soldiers in there?”

  “Not that we knew of,” he answered. “But there might have been.”

  Not really, but never mind. It wasn’t just about the Army for George Johnson; he seemed unwilling or unable to comprehend the notion of blackness, or at least to acknowledge it. His father, he stated, “was a light, light brown-skinned man.” Of his mother, he said: “Of course, she was naturally Caucasian.” His brothers and sisters “all looked Caucasian.” He described himself as “a very light brown-skinned man.” (He was; in old pictures I spotted around his house he looked Caucasian, though in person, at age 111, he did, indeed, look like he was at least part Native American.) His wife’s family, the Dulaneys, were also “very light brown-skinned.” Ida, his wife, had had “very light brown skin—you could take her for a, oh, French—average French.” He seemed mystified that I was even asking him about this. “What I can’t understand now,” he said at one point, “here in America, right here, I have so many people that come in here and ask me, ‘What nationality are you?’ . . . You know, in the last couple months I’ve been asked several times . . . and I don’t know why. All my life there I was, a young man born and raised in Philadelphia, you know what I mean? The color I am—never have I . . . just like you, right here right now, you have asked me more questions about nationality than I was ever asked in my life. Back in Philadelphia, we traveled with everybody. I went to school, there were German Jews and French, and Germans and Mexicans, everything, and we never—so God have mercy on my life—I never heard a single word spoken about what nationality were they, whether they were this or that. We never thought about it!”

  An unlikely story—I’ll just go ahead and say impossible—from a man who was already sixty years old when the Supreme Court handed down the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. I’m sure he thought about it, for instance, when he was inducted into the Army, which didn’t assign soldiers to colored units simply because they were swarthy. Like the rest of America, the Army determined race by blood, not appearance. Some light-skinned African Americans, I am sure, passed for white in the AEF; but George Johnson, I discovered years later when I found a copy of his draft-registration card, didn’t even try: On the blank space next to “Race,” he wrote, “African.”

  At some point, though, between 1917 and 2005, he decided to change his answer; and over the course of several hours’ conversation at his house that day, he inadvertently hinted, here and there, at why. There was the story, for example, about a fellow named Clarence with whom he used to work in the 1940s and ’50s, “and he was from Mississippi somewhere, and he was with me for ten or fifteen years and used to get me down . . . the way he would act—he would always act as if he was subservient to a lot of the people that come around. I don’t care how light or how dark they were, if they were considered white, he always acted subservient to them. And I used to say to him, ‘Clarence, why do you always act submissive? You don’t have to be like that, you’re just as important as they are. I say that day and time is gone. They fought a war for it. Just stop it, don’t bring it back for Christ’s sake!’” But it could be that the most traumatic thing, the episode that really shook his equilibrium to the point where he had trouble even recognizing the notion of race, at least for non-Caucasians, was something that actually happened to his younger brother, Herbert, who also served in World War I—in the Navy.

  Now, as little as you hear about the Navy in World War I, you hear even less about African Americans in the Navy in World War I. And, in some cases, nothing at all; Emmett Scott doesn’t even mention it in his 511-page Official History of the American Negro in the World War, an omission that might just lead you to believe that the American Negro did not serve in the Navy at all then. But he did. As Kelly Miller, a Howard University professor and editor of The Crisis, wrote in Kelly Miller’s History of the World War for Human Rights (embossed at the bottom of its front cover is the subtitle: “It is Fair to the Negro”) in 1919, “During the World War, there were approximately ten thousand Negroes who voluntarily enlisted in the navy of the United States.” Miller devotes an entire chapter to the Navy, in fact, most of it comprising tales of the heroism of individual black seamen. He lauds the Navy as an institution, contrasting it with the Army, “where segregation and discrimination of the rankest type force the Negro into distinct Negro units; the navy, on the other hand, has its quota of black men on every vessel carrying the starry emblem of freedom on the high seas and in every shore station.” He continues, in a passage titled “Work of Colored Seamen”:

  He formed a part of the crew of nearly two thousand vessels that plied the briny deep, on submarines that feared not the under sea peril, and wherever a naval engagement was undertaken or the performance of a duty by a naval vessel, the Negro, as a part of the crew of that vessel, necessarily contributed to the successful prosecution of that duty; and, whatever credit or glory is achieved for American valor, it was made possible by the faithful execution of his duty, regardless of his character. For, on a battleship where the strictest system of co-ordination and co-operation among all who compose the crew is absolutely necessary, each man is assigned a particular and a special duty independent of the other men, and should he fail in its faithful discharge the loss of the vessel and its enterprise might possibly result.

  True enough; but the Navy had its own system of segregation in place, designed to marginalize the colored seaman, and even though Miller is much more realistic in his assessment of institutionalized racism than Emmett Scott—going so far as to acknowledge that every black cadet who’d ever been admitted to the United States Naval Academy had been run out before graduating (Annapolis wouldn’t graduate an African American until 1949), that “the awarding of commissions was made to inexperienced white boys with no prior naval experience or demonstrated ability in preference to the Negro,” that in fact no black man had yet been commissioned as an officer in the history of the United States Navy—even he does not present the full story, which is this: The Navy, unwilling or unable to build and launch separate colored warships, instead created an unwritten but rigid caste system that kept the races separated onboard shared vessels by assigning them different duties. With just a handful of individual exceptions (all of them sailors who had already been in service before the war), blacks were consigned to kitchen and mess duty and, in a few cases, to engine and boiler rooms; and whites to every other station onboard. As Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels explained it in a letter to a New Jersey congressman: “As a matter of policy . . . to avoid friction between the two races, it has been customary to enlist colored men in the various ratings of the messmen branch; that is cooks, stewards, and mess attendants, and in the lower ratings of the fireroom; thus permitting colored men to sleep and eat by themselves.” In other words, no colored seaman manned any guns, swabbed any decks, or otherwise worked out in the open air on any United States naval vessel during the First World War—and of course, none worked side by side with white men. And here is where Herbert Johnson got himself into trouble.

  Nearly nine decades later, George Johnson recalled that his younger brother, Herbert, born in Philadelphia in 1896, “was lighter than me. Nobody would ever question him as to whether he was . . . everyone just figured he was completely white. He looked like a Caucasian.” And so, Mr. Johnson explained, Herbert, “being of a light color, when they went and drafted him, sent him to the ship, they asked him what was he; just like you ask me. He says, ‘I don’t know exactly,’ but he looked . . .” His voice trailed off.

  It’s questionable whether or not Herbert Johnson was drafted; the Navy generally relied on volunteers. And whether or not the conversation in question happened that way, on Herbert’s draft-registration card he crossed out the other three options under race—White, Indian, and Oriental—leaving just Negro standing; but the type is very small, and perhaps the Navy overlooked it. Or, more likely, Herbert didn’t wait to be drafted, but went ahead and enlis
ted in the Navy and, when asked his race at the recruiting station, decided on the spot that he would try to pass for white. However it happened, he was taken for white, and assigned to a battleship (his brother no longer remembered the name), which eventually set sail for France. “They had him working on the deck,” George Johnson told me that day in 2005. “Him being on the deck, he was there with most of the American soldiers.” American: i.e., white. “On the deck,” he said again, a minute or two later, “completely white sailors.” And Herbert.

  So there he was on some American battleship in 1917, far out at sea, “scrubbing decks,” his brother explained, “and washing the decks, and washing clothes on the main deck,” until, at some point, a rumor started circulating onboard regarding Herbert Johnson. “They probably suspected in some way that he wasn’t completely white, you know what I mean?” is how his brother chose to articulate it. And this rumor persisted, until, finally, four officers approached Herbert Johnson and asked him about it. “I guess they asked him his different nationality insofar as country was concerned,” George Johnson put it, in that strange, tortured way of his. And, asked about it directly, Mr. Johnson recalled, Herbert “said he wasn’t white.”

  “Why did he say that?” I asked Mr. Johnson.

  “I don’t know why,” he replied brusquely, then proceeded to put himself in the minds of the officers: “‘Oh my God, no, you can’t put him in the kitchen,’ because most of the people in the kitchen were all black,” he declaimed. And Herbert, he reiterated, “was like a white boy.” Hence the dilemma. “You’re too dark to be down there on the deck; you’re too light to be in the kitchen, because they’re all black in the kitchen.” And so, he explained, “the best thing they could do was take him, and ‘have you as our own, and let you take care of us.’” In other words, feeling that they couldn’t very well return him to work among the white seamen, but also unwilling to have him go work among the other black seamen, those four officers sent him, alone, upstairs to their cabins, and made him their valet. “Up on the very top deck . . . He had to fix their arrangements, their meals, take care of them and wait on them,” his brother explained. “Making up the beds . . . keep their clothes and everything clean and dusted.” It was an elegant solution for everyone—except Herbert.

  “Many a time,” his older brother told me, “he’d sit there and look down and see the men working on the deck, and wish he could do a little work . . . He wanted to get down there. He said they all weren’t just working like dogs—[they were] laughing and joking and having fun. He said he just felt so isolated.” He spent the better part of two years that way; became depressed. “You know, he felt kind of dreary up there by himself all the time . . . That was just like being in a prison,” George Johnson said of his brother’s “promotion.” “All the work he could do he would do in a couple of hours; and then, all day long, doing nothing but sitting up there, looking down at them.”

  This tale, of the bizarre contortions four Navy officers put themselves through in the name of White Supremacy, seems even stranger when you remember that it was Navy Secretary Daniels who first opened a branch of the armed forces to women. He even admitted a few black Yeomanettes. But just as all of the Navy’s women were discharged after the armistice, so were all the black seamen who had enlisted during the war. African Americans would not be allowed to enlist in the Navy again until 1932.

  As I said, George Johnson was actually the second African American World War I veteran I interviewed. Two years earlier, after months of fruitless attempts, I had found the first, one Moses Hardy of Aberdeen, Mississippi. Of the fifteen Mississippians on the French List, he was the only one still living. I had tried the other fourteen first, saving him for last because, at 110 years and eight months, he was by far the oldest in the lot. He was not listed in the phone book, so I dialed a number of other Hardys in Aberdeen until one—Frederick—answered. I told him who I was and why I was calling, and then asked, in a tone that strongly hinted that I knew the effort was futile, if he knew Moses Hardy and, more important, if there was any chance he might still be alive.

  “He’s my grandfather,” Frederick told me. “And he is.”

  I got down there in a hurry.

  Aberdeen is near the Alabama state line in northeastern Mississippi, a few hours from where I had lived in the Delta; it’s a pretty little antebellum village on the Tombigbee River, with a quaint downtown (featuring a great old movie house) and a sprawling historic cemetery filled with big old trees. As I strolled through that old burying ground the first time, thinking about the visit I was about to make, I noticed that a lot of the graves therein belonged to veterans, men who had served in every American war going back to the Revolution. Quite a few were Civil War stones, markers for men who had fought for states’ rights and the Confederacy, but also, whether they cared for the notion or not, to keep Moses Hardy’s ancestors enslaved.

  Did I say his ancestors? I meant: his parents. Morris and Nancy Hardy had been born slaves. And not just born; according to the 1900 census, Morris had been born in Texas in 1830 (or Tennessee in 1834, depending upon which census you believe), and Nancy in Mississippi in 1849, meaning they had been thirty-five (or thirty-one) and sixteen years old, respectively, when the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment officially abolished slavery. When they were married, on February 19, 1868—Frederick later sent me a copy of the marriage bond for “Mr. Morris Hardy, Freedman, and Miss Nancy Reynolds, Freedwoman”—Andrew Johnson, who had ascended to the presidency upon Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, was still in the White House, where he was doing his best to keep Reconstruction from proceeding. And now, in the age of cellular telephones and broadband Internet and HDTV and DVRs, I was about to interview their youngest son, Moses, named for that first Great Emancipator.

  Moses Hardy resided in a nursing home a few blocks from the old cemetery. It was a nice enough place, and the staff were friendly and helpful in that Mississippi kind of way; and yet it troubled me for some reason that, while they all liked the man pretty well, no one seemed to think it was any great shakes that he was there. Perhaps they might have had the same feelings about, say, the fact that I walk by the Empire State Building all the time without looking up; but this was a man, one of the oldest in the world, the son of former slaves, a World War I veteran. Surely, that was more remarkable even than King Kong’s erstwhile perch. Which I do look up at, sometimes.

  Frederick, who was in the process of moving to Tennessee at the time, couldn’t be there that Sunday afternoon, nor could his father, Haywood (who had served in World War II)—nor, possibly, Frederick had warned me, any other family members. I felt a bit concerned about interviewing a veteran without any relatives or friends present to help facilitate; someone or other had always been there in the past, and none of those men had been 110 years old. Worse still, soon after I arrived and set up and started talking to Moses Hardy, it became apparent to me that no one had even told the man I’d be coming to see him, much less why. He seemed a bit confused, if not wary, that first time—I would visit him twice more, the last time on the occasion of his 113th birthday—but he talked to me anyway. The second time I came by, about nine months later, he was much more comfortable; he seemed to remember me, though it’s entirely possible that I’m flattering myself. He was dark-skinned and almost entirely bald, with just a dusting of white hair on the sides of his head. I never saw him but that he was lying flat on his back, head propped on a pillow, blanket drawn up almost to his shoulders. Every once in a while, a thin hand would emerge from underneath that blanket and run its long, bent fingers across his forehead or stroke his chin. Aside from that, the only times I ever saw him move at all were when he would lift his head off the pillow in order to hear me better, an act that always made me feel slightly guilty. People at the nursing home told me they’d never seen him get out of that bed in the several years they’d been working there, and yet he never developed bedsores. Like Fred Hale, it would seem, Moses Hardy was some kind of a superm
an. Did I mention that he had worked his farm and held two other jobs his entire adult life? That he drove until he was 106, and stopped only because his children started hiding his car keys? That he served as the superintendent of the Mount Olivet Missionary Baptist Church’s Sunday school for seventy-five years?

  Maybe there’s something to all this clean-living business. Moses Hardy was raised on the 274-acre farm outside Aberdeen that his parents had purchased in 1874 for a dollar an acre, an act that in itself made them far more fortunate than most of their fellow freedmen and -women. They worked hard, ate and had only what they grew or harvested or made themselves. When I asked him what kind of farm chores he had done most often while growing up, he said: “Picked cotton and corn.” He ate carefully—a lot of vegetables, sweet potatoes and cabbage and peas, some cornbread, some buttermilk. Never drank or smoked. His one indulgence was Dr Pepper; he liked to tell people that was the only doctor he cared for. He didn’t go in for medicine. He was devoted to his wife. He was usually the first person to show up for Sunday-morning services at Mount Olivet, which he had helped found, and where he was also a deacon. “He didn’t put up with any mess,” his son, Haywood, once told a reporter.

  He was born, he told me, “January sixth, but I don’t know the year.” The 1900 census says it was 1894, while the 1920 census says 1891. The family, though, generally believes the 1910 census, which reports that he was born in 1893. “Might have been,” he himself said of that theory. “I don’t know.” He never came around on the matter; when I asked him about it during subsequent visits, he would only acknowledge, “That’s what they say.” And add, usually: “They don’t know.” (He also refused to acknowledge that he actually lived at the nursing home, insisting: “I’m just staying here for a while, until I get better.”)