All Blood Runs Red

by Phil Keith

  His stay with the Stanleys soured when he was told that the tribe was going to continue its sojourn in America for a few more years instead of returning to England. Gene had more or less counted on his new friends getting him closer to France. Determined to continue his quest, he made up his mind to head on down the road. At that point, the Gypsy campground was near Bronwood, Georgia. Although Gene had made it as far north as Atlanta, initially, the Gypsies had gone south from there and, ironically, in Bronwood he was only about sixty miles from Columbus. His father did not know this, however, and likely Gene did not either.

  He struck out going farther south. Just five miles later, toward Leesburg, he was offered a wagon ride by a white gentleman named Travis Moreland. Scaring the teenager with tales of bears and snakes overtaking the local roadways at night, he induced Gene to ride home with him to the Moreland farm a mile east of Leesburg. In exchange for the ride and a place to sleep, Gene offered to rub down the horses, feed them, stow the gear and get the animals in the Moreland barn.

  It didn’t take long for Moreland to figure out that Gene was pretty good with horses. That led to an offer of work, which he accepted, at least until he could figure out what his next move should be. The stay at the Morelands’ lasted several weeks until the urge to move on grabbed him again, which it would—constantly—until Gene finally made it to his ultimate destination.

  His next stop was with the Matthews family of Sasser, Georgia. Mr. Matthews was a barber and Gene soon found himself sweeping out the barber shop and performing chores around the Matthews’s home. While staying in Sasser, Gene fell seriously ill with a mysterious “fever.” It was troubling enough that Matthews paid for both a doctor and a private room for Gene until he was able to recover. Gene insisted on working off the cost of his treatment and recovery, but the good-hearted Mr. and Mrs. Matthews demurred, sending him off on his continuing journey with the admonition to be patient, for “true democracy” would someday come to the South. Gene was not sure that would ever happen, nor was he willing to stick around and wait.

  The 1910 US Census records “Eugene Bullard, laborer,” in Thomasville, in southern Georgia. He was listed as a resident in a local boardinghouse, and his occupation was working at the local sawmill. Gene would have been fifteen at this point, and still circling within an area that encompassed most of the lower third of Georgia—and far enough away from Columbus that his father could not seem to find him.

  Dawson, Georgia, was his next stop, where he was taken in by the John Z. Turner family. “Zack” Turner was in the livery business, hiring out wagons and horses. He also served as sheriff of Dawson (and would eventually be elected sheriff of Terrell County). The Turner home was full of children, three boys and six girls, plus assorted hired hands and help, most of them black. The Turners were reasonably progressive but still called their black male workers “boys” and “niggers.” This included the new addition.

  One day early in Gene’s employ with the Turners he simply failed to show up for work. Zack Turner went looking for Gene, who was found sitting in the barracks, apparently healthy, but refusing to go to work. When Zack, somewhat miffed, asked why Gene was refusing to do his job, he looked Zack right in the eye and told him, in no uncertain terms, he was not going to be called “nigger” or “boy.” He insisted that he be called “Gene” or, at the very least, by his nickname, “Gypsy.”

  After a few uncomfortable moments of staring each other down, Zack turned on his heel, saying to Gene, “Follow me,” and the two marched outside. Turner called out all the workers and the family, telling them to gather round.

  Turner then announced to the assembled crowd, “This here is Gene. He wants to be called ‘Gene’ by everybody, not ‘nigger,’ and that’s what we’re going to do—even the rest of you niggers.” We can only wonder if the irony in Zack’s statement registered.

  Capitalizing on his previous experiences with the Stanleys, Gene soon fell into working with Zack Turner’s considerable stable of horses. Turner, an astute observer, saw great possibilities for Gene’s abilities as a rider, too. Not long after, with a series of greatly anticipated county races pending, Gene was decked out in Turner’s livery and set up as a jockey.

  Terrell County had a long tradition of horse racing, which had been suspended during the Civil War and not revived until many years later. By 1910, however, the races were back, with thundering hooves pounding down Dawson’s main street at breakneck speeds, cheered on by large crowds. When Zack Turner put up a $500 bet on each of two races at the 1911 fair, he guaranteed a tremendous turnout, large betting pools and a circus-like atmosphere. The attendees became even more curious when they learned that a “black boy” would be riding Turner’s racehorses.

  Dressed in Turner’s silks, Gene beat every other horse and rider in the two featured events, earning a great deal of money for his patron, and $25 for himself, for each race. It was more money than Gene had ever possessed at one time. Although it was only a small fraction of what his boss raked in, he felt as if he had earned a fortune.

  With the Turners, Gene entered into a peaceful time of acceptance and harmony, but he was not getting closer to his ultimate dream. There were also periodic reminders of what life could be like in a less salubrious environment.

  During the autumn of 1911, Gene requested permission to visit his uncle and cousins in nearby Richland, about twenty miles from Dawson. Zack Turner gave him some time off, and he made his way to the family’s home. The successful young man, wearing a new suit purchased with his winnings, sauntered into town one afternoon, casually strolling down the main street. Suddenly, a white man jumped up from the porch on which he had been rocking the afternoon away with his favorite beverage and accosted Gene, demanding to know where he had “stolen” such fine clothes.

  The angry white man chased Gene into a nearby store where he trapped him behind a counter and proceeded to beat him with a whip. After scooting under a table, Gene managed to escape and run back to his uncle’s house, stinging welts, torn suit and all. When his uncle asked him what had happened, Gene decided it was better to lie than blame a local white man, so he told his uncle that his cousins had attacked him. His uncle, suspecting the lie, took another switch to Gene, and rendered a few more licks on the hapless lad.

  Needless to say, the familial visit was cut short. Gene returned to the Turners’ home, saddened, and reminded once again, with crystal clarity, that life in America was still a challenge.

  Not many weeks later, Zack Turner gave Gene an assignment to deliver a prize horse to a gentleman who lived in the Florida panhandle, near Pensacola. Turner told Gene that after he handed over the horse and collected the money he could use whatever he needed from the funds to obtain transportation back to Dawson.

  Gene did exactly as he was told and brought the horse to its new owner and collected the monies owed, after which he had some sort of transformational revelation. While standing on the shore of the first ocean he had ever seen (the Gulf of Mexico) he made up his mind to renew his quest, then and there, to get to France.

  From the proceeds he had obtained from delivering and selling Zack Turner’s horse, he extracted what he was owed as his fee. He then made arrangements to send the rest of the money back to Turner. Gene bought a train ticket and hopped aboard—sitting in the rear car where blacks were allowed to ride. He never returned to Dawson or saw any of the Turners ever again. It was early in 1912, and the next long phase of Gene’s eventful life was about to begin.

  * * *

  The next leg of Gene’s odyssey began with a train to Montgomery, Alabama, and a short stay at Mrs. Palmer’s Boarding House. Within a few days he was on another train, this time back to Atlanta. On Decatur Street, he found a room for rent with the family of Charles Butler, a black man who worked for the railroad. It was with the Butlers that he saw his first motion picture, at the Bijou Theater, twenty-five cents a ticket. It was likely an “oater,” as the po
pular Western genre was then known. From Mr. Butler he also gleaned a great deal about train schedules and the destinations of the various lines.

  Gene and the Butlers formed an instant friendship—enough so that he felt comfortable confiding that he intended to find a ship to take him to France. The Butlers were surprised by Gene’s ambitions but admired his pluck. Mr. Butler, knowing a bit about southeastern geography, thanks to his work on the railroad, was able to steer Gene in the direction of getting to one of the Carolina or Virginia coastal cities where he could most likely find a ship bound for Europe.

  Gene felt a new suit was in order, in preparation for his next adventure, since his only good one had been cut up by the beatings he had endured from the drunken redneck and his uncle in Richland. Since then he had been wearing what was then known as a “Buster Brown” suit, in honor of the popular cartoon character of the same name. Knee britches and a short waistcoat were a bit too juvenile for Gene’s expanding worldly tastes as well as his physique, so he set out to acquire an outfit with the even more current “peg pants” (high-waist trousers that tapered to tight cuffs).

  He wandered the downtown Atlanta streets until he came across a men’s clothing shop that caught his eye. The owner was a Jewish tailor, aided by his son, who was about Gene’s age. Gene picked out some fabric and brought it to the tailor, who promptly asked, “Say little nigger, where are you from?”

  Once again, Gene heard the N-word. Gene dropped the fabric, turned on his heel and left the shop. The tailor, not wanting to lose a customer, sent his son running after him. The young man, apologizing for the slight, managed to convince Gene to return to his father’s establishment. The tailor, himself many times a victim of prejudice against Jews, apologized and agreed to make Gene’s new suit at cost.

  A few days later Gene, in his new duds, strode with obvious pride down the streets of Atlanta. On a busy street, headed back to the Butlers’, he was brushed by a tall white youth who bumped into Gene then quickly moved on. Seconds later, Gene noticed a slight pain in his left leg. He looked down to see a large slash, probably done by a razor, in his new pants and a shallow cut across his leg that stung and bled onto his new trousers.

  Mrs. Butler was able to mend the trousers, but not Gene’s pride. Venting his frustration aloud, he swore that as soon as he could, he was going to learn to box, so that “when anybody is mean, I can show them it don’t pay.” Gene didn’t know it but at that moment, he was accurately forecasting his first significant occupation.

  That night, he could not sleep. He was too angry. He resolved to leave the next day. With Mr. Butler at work, Gene donated his repaired new suit to Mrs. Butler’s only child, Sonny, and said a tearful goodbye. He went to the station and found a train he had previously scouted: it was a Seaboard Line passenger and freight hauler. The name “Seaboard” had convinced Gene the line must have something to do with the ocean. Rather than pay the fare, he snuck under the dining car and nestled his lithe body into the latticework of frames and rods.

  The train sped through the night, heading northeast, whistling through a myriad of towns and hamlets, nonstop. When it finally slowed to cross a trestle bridge over a large river, Gene wriggled out of his hiding spot and dismounted. He was outside of Richmond, Virginia.

  After daybreak, Gene walked down the tracks with his meager satchel until he hit the outskirts of the city. He found lodging with a black family named Hughes. Mr. Hughes was a brick maker and Eugene agreed to go to work for Mr. Hughes to replenish his dwindling stash of cash.

  After two weeks, Gene confided in Mr. Hughes, as he had others before, that he was bound for France. Would Hughes, he asked, point him in the direction of Norfolk, where he had heard he could catch a ship? Hughes advised that there was a port much closer by: Newport News. Gene decided that was where he would go.

  The Hughes family threw a small party for their affable young guest, then off he went, to the Richmond train depot. On Hughes’s advice, Gene hopped on a line of the Chesapeake & Ohio that headed due east. Instead of paying for a ticket, however, he once again decided to “ride the rails” under a bouncing passenger car. Gene stayed with the train until the end of its line, which happened to be right next to the “beautiful wide water,” as Gene remembered, “of Hampton Roads.”

  Exhausted and unfamiliar with the area, he elected to spend the night sleeping in a coal bin near the docks. He woke up the next morning covered in coal dust, which occasioned a passing sailor to comment, “Son, ain’t you already black enough?” Since the man had meant it as a joke, and not in a mean-spirited way, they both laughed. Gene asked the sailor which one of the nearby vessels might be headed to France. “Can’t say for sure,” the sailor replied, “but they all get there eventually. Pick any one you like.”

  Gene wandered down closer to the line of ships busily being loaded and off-loaded. He ended up near a long line of men hauling crates of vegetables up the gangway of a midsize steamer.

  A deep, booming voice shouted from behind his left ear, “Hey! Boy! I ain’t payin’ you to stand around! Now pick up that crate and move it!” Mistaking Gene for one of the local longshoremen, the stevedore in charge of loading the ship pointed to a crate of cabbages near Gene’s feet and angrily gestured to the ramp.

  Seizing the opportunity, Gene hefted the burden onto his back and joined the procession loading the ship. After several trips, he slipped between two large bales of cotton on the main deck and hid. Two hours later, toward late afternoon, the ship unmoored and sailed away; but, only three hours later, it docked again. Sensing that France had to be much farther away than just a few hours, Gene snuck off the ship.

  On the pier he ran into another black lad about his age. He asked him, “Where is this?”

  The other young man looked at Gene like he was crazy and replied, “Norfolk, Virginia, dumbhead!”

  It was, as he suspected, not France, but as he looked around, the ships were bigger than the one he had just sailed aboard. Surely one of these larger vessels would be headed to where he wanted to go. He picked the biggest one he saw and went to the slip where she was moored. Several men who looked to be sailors were standing near the ship’s gangway, chatting and casually smoking. They spoke a language that Gene had never heard before and did not understand.

  One of the men finally noticed Gene and motioned him to come forward. The sailor spoke passable English and explained that the men were crewmen from the ship, which was named the Marta Russ. They were all from some country called “Germany” and they were soon shipping out to their homeport, a city called “Hamburg.” They would, however, stop at a couple of ports along the way.

  The English-speaking sailor then said to Gene that he might be able to make a little money by running personal errands for the crew. They would be sailing in two days and most of the men were too busy with their duties to get extra bread, beer, and cigarettes from the local shops. The man told Gene to come back the next morning and he might find employment. Gene eagerly accepted—although he had another plan in mind that involved much more than running errands.

  He found a shabby, cheap room for the night, cleaned up his clothes and got some rest. The next morning, bright and early, he was back at the dock where the Marta Russ was moored. The ship was sailing on Monday, so that Saturday and the next day Gene stayed busy, meeting many of the crewmen and taking their orders for various needs. He ran all across the area picking up laundry, liquor, food items and newspapers. Every trip put a few cents in his pocket.

  Sunday, Gene went shopping for himself, buying bread, cheese, and filling a bottle with water. After the crew had bedded down for the night he slipped aboard the Marta Russ. He loosened the canvas on one of the lifeboats, slipped underneath, and hid.

  At dawn the next morning, amid a flurry of bells and whistles, the Marta Russ threw over her lines and sailed away. Gene had heard the crew talking about some place called “Aberdeen,” which he hoped was in
France, and that they would arrive before his food and water were exhausted. It was March 4, 1912, and the sixteen-year-old Eugene Bullard would not return to the shores of his native land for another twenty-eight years.

  ACT II

  The Fighter

  3

  UPON NEW SHORES

  The Marta Russ was a sturdy, single-screw steamship, slightly under three hundred feet long and two thousand gross tons. She was built in 1899 by Ernst Russ, of Hamburg, Germany, and named for his wife. One of hundreds of similar transoceanic general freight vessels built during the pre–World War I period, she gamely plied her trade across the North Sea and the Atlantic for a remarkable sixty-four years before she was finally broken up in Helsinki, Finland, in 1963. During her long career she hauled a little bit of everything, including cabbages, coal, lumber, and steel, and somehow managed to avoid the bombs and torpedoes of two world wars. Certainly one of her most interesting “consignments” was a young stowaway by the name of Eugene Bullard.

  After three days at sea in the lifeboat, his food and water ran out, and he was no doubt desperate for some clean air as well as nourishment. Though he had no clear idea how long the voyage would last, he at least felt the ship had sailed on long enough that it was not about to return to port and throw him off. He crawled out of his hiding spot and surrendered himself to the first startled crewman who strode by.

  The sailor immediately took the teenager to Captain Ernst Westphal, the skipper of the ship, who was none too pleased. He threatened to toss the young Bullard overboard, but when the stowaway pointed out “The fish have plenty to eat without me,” the captain laughed. Westphal was a decent sort and told his crewman to let the boy get cleaned up and feed him a meal in the crew’s mess. As soon as Bullard was seated in front of a steaming bowl of soup and slices of fresh-baked bread, several of the men recognized him as the boy who had been running errands for them in Norfolk.