All Blood Runs Red
Page 28
Eugene Bullard first came to our attention via research Phil was doing on another book project concerning America in World War I. Buried in a reference to the pioneering aviators of that war was a short paragraph on Bullard who was referenced as the “first Negro fighter pilot”—a phrase that Bullard would later use on his own business cards. Digging a little further, Tom found that Bullard’s life story had been touched upon (albeit briefly) in the 2006 movie Flyboys. In that film, the actor Abdul Salis played the part of Eugene Skinner, an African American boxer who has been accepted as an athlete in France, and is motivated to “pay back” his adopted country. Both of us felt there had to be more to this intriguing character than just a historical footnote and a small role in a not-so-memorable movie.
To testify to Bullard’s place in history, which he clearly understood, he had his mechanic boldly paint a red heart, pierced by a dagger, on the side of his SPAD. In addition, Bullard had him add, surrounding the bleeding heart, the phrase “Tout Sang Que Coule Est Rouge” or “All Blood That Flows is Red.” This was a pointed reminder to all that no matter the color of Gene’s skin, his blood would run red just like everyone else’s. When Bullard began, very late in his life, to write his autobiography he chose the title “All Blood Runs Red,” which is slightly different but certainly carries the same powerful message. Out of respect for Bullard’s work, we have decided to keep the title as he last penned it.
The relatively few sources of information about Eugene Bullard’s legendary life compelled us to excavate deeper to learn what we could and to give extra scrutiny to the material we found. For example, when he was supposed to be stowing away on a freighter to France at age eleven, as Bullard often told his listeners, Phil found him on the 1910 Census for Thomasville, in Thomas County, Georgia, when he would have been age fifteen. He was then living in a boardinghouse and working in the local sawmill. We were fortunate that even minimal information like this existed at all because only scant records of the names, dates, places, and movements regarding middle and lower-class peoples in the South, especially minorities and the less educated, were kept. Adding to our dilemma, the few mentions of Eugene Bullard’s life when he was under the age of nineteen that have been published prior to this book are nearly all in conflict with one another.
As we researched the rest of his story we encountered more conflicting information. Bullard vividly describes his marriage to Marcelle Straumann, daughter of a French countess from a rich and aristocratic family. The surviving official records, many bombed, burned, purged or simply lost in the Nazi occupation of Paris, tell a different story. Marcelle’s father was, indeed, prosperous but he was a self-made, middle-class grocer. Her mother was no countess, but an everyday housewife, and Marcelle herself was a seamstress. Bullard relates that Marcelle “passed away” some years after their marriage, by Gene’s telling, sometime in the mid-1930s. The truth is that Marcelle outlived him. For reasons never expressed by either, they separated a few years after their second daughter, and last child, was born, which was in 1928. Marcelle was white, Eugene was black—was he ashamed that she left him, giving up the children to him? He never says, preferring the “noble” narrative of death over abandonment or divorce.
There are some anecdotes, even ones from Bullard’s unpublished memoir, that we could not include here because they were uncorroborated or even disproven. That did not make this book any less enjoyable to research and write. We discovered that, warts and all, Eugene Bullard’s verifiable story is more than worth the telling.
The best, by far, of the previous tomes on the very narrow Bullard bookshelf has been Craig Lloyd’s Eugene Bullard, Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris. Although Professor Lloyd’s work is rather slim at 150 pages, he has essentially bracketed the major events in Bullard’s life and did a great deal of excellent research to gather his observations. Dr. Lloyd also had the advantage of spending most of his career in Bullard’s hometown of Columbus, Georgia, and helped build the archive at Columbus State University that contains just about all the relevant materials available on Bullard’s life.1
From there, the task was to dig up as many contemporary accounts as possible and find anecdotes about, or at least mentions of, Bullard in autobiographies and biographies of luminaries he counted as friends and patrons, from Ernest Hemingway to Cole Porter, Josephine Baker to Louis Armstrong. Still, we have to accept the reality that 100 percent reliability as to the finite details of Bullard’s life was then and is now impossible. As narrators of his story, the best that can be accomplished, and the tactic taken herein, is to state with certainty only those details that can be triangulated. All major details and events related in these pages have, to the best of our abilities, been corroborated by at least two independent sources and, whenever possible, three.
Luckily, there are no doubts as to the major milestones in Eugene Bullard’s tale, and there are, certainly, more than enough to form a complete and amazing picture of this man’s incredible life and times.
Even today, with all the gadgetry, innovation, and the lightning speed of universal communication and travel, it would be hard to imagine one life, like Bullard’s, so jam-packed with adventure, twists, turns, and changes. He was ever ready to move on to the next phase, to grasp an opportunity, to turn adversity into opportunity. As he, himself, said at the very end of his life, “I guess I touched all the bases.” Did he ever—and he hit many home runs along the way.
* * *
1 Dr. Craig Lloyd, a native New Yorker, served as Professor of History and Archivist at Columbus State University until his retirement in 2001. Lloyd, a graduate from Middlebury College in Vermont, initially arrived at CSU, then Columbus College, in August of 1971 after completing his PhD at the University of Iowa.
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Carisella, P. J., and James W. Ryan. The Black Swallow of Death. Boston: Marlborough House, 1972.
Cockfield, Jamie H. “Eugene Bullard, America’s First Black Military Aviator; Flew For France During WW I.” Military History, February, 1966.
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McAuliffe, Mary. When Paris Sizzled: The 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and Their Friends. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The original idea to write about Eugene Bullard came to us via Joe Shaw, our editor and good friend at the Press Newspaper Group in Southampton, New York. His simple expression, “I’d sure like to read a book about this man,” propelled us forward, so it is to Joe we render “first honors” for getting this ball rolling.
The sole archive for papers, photos data and background on Eugene Bullard exists at the Simon Schwob Memorial Library at Columbus State University, part of the University of Georgia system, in Columbus, Georgia. Assistant professor David Owings is the head of the CSU Archives and was Phil’s affable and most helpful host when he spent time in Columbus plunging through the well-organized boxes of available information on Bullard, his family, and the area’s history.
All successful books begin with a well-prepared proposal to a talented agent who can grasp the vision for the project. We were so very fortunate to have just such an agent in Scott Gould at RLR Associates. Scott immediately saw the potential and worked with us diligently and expertly to bring this story to the right publisher. We could not have done it without Scott and we owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude.
We are very excited to be under the guidance and imprint of Hanover Square Press and our outstanding editors, Peter Joseph and John Glynn. Hanover Square has launched an exciting new line of important nonfiction works, and we are so very lucky to be part of this adventure. Our editors have kept a keen eye for what makes sense and how a story should flow and the guidance they provided was spot-on.
There are unfortunate wretches who toil alone over dimly lit keyboards and cold cups of coffee. Phil and Tom are not among those cave-dwelling types. “The Muse,” as Phil likes to call his invaluable partner, Laura Lyons, was there as a constant “lamp in the darkness” guiding his keystrokes and keeping him focused. This book could not have been completed without Laura’s love and constancy.
Also motivating Phil to move forward is his “best pal,” his son, Pierce, who is about to write his own story; that is, going off to college and the career that will help him achieve his goals and dreams—whatever those may be. Excellent sales of this book, dear readers, will also help us pay for this “launch party!”
Tom thanks Leslie Reingold for her ongoing support, his friends for being friends (including members of the “Roundtable”), and those who try in their everyday lives to shrink the racial divide that continues to trouble American society.
The pagination of this digital edition does not match the print edition from which the index was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.
INDEX
African Americans. See also racism
in American armed services, 109
boxers in US, 55–58
boxing in Europe, 49–50
in England, 47, 51, 53
news blackout about accomplishments, 288
in Scotland, 45
Alsace-Lorraine, 198–99
American Air Service, 116–21, 132–34
American Expeditionary Force, 110
American Legion, 234–35
American Volunteer with French Army Medal, 142
A Moveable Feast (Hemingway), 180
Arbuckle, Roscoe Fatty, 178–79
Armstrong, Alpha, 193
Armstrong, Louis, 172, 192–93, 305
“art crowd,” 163
Astaire, Adele, 179
Astaire, Fred, 179
Avord, 110–11
“Baby Don’t Baby Me,” 305
Bader, Roger, 250–51, 253, 256, 319–20
Baker, Josephine, 182–84, 241, 318
Baldwin, Chris, 47–49, 50
Baldwin, Roger, 263–64, 283
Bankhead, Tallulah, 185
Barron’s Exclusive Club, 173–74
Barrymore, John, 173
Battle of Somme Medal, 142
Battle of Verdun, 87–92
Battle of Verdun Medal, 142
Beach, Sylvia, 148, 181
Belafonte, Harry, 316
Belle Davis’s Freedman’s Pickaninnies, “Belle’s Picks,” 54, 59, 62
Bergreen, Laurence, 193
Bernhardt, Sarah, 151
The Big Sea (Hughes), 176
Bingham, Jocelyn Augustus “Frisco,” 194, 211, 303
Bleckley, Ernest, 119–20
Bolling, Raynal
C., 132–33
“Boston Tar Baby” (Langford, Sam), 59, 60–61, 62
“bottle clubs.” See also Le Grand Duc, 150, 151–52, 174
Bowe, Jack, 67, 70
boxing. See also Johnson, John Arthur “Jack”
African Americans, in Europe, 49–50
bantamweight championship match (1934), 193
Bullard’s Athletic Club and, 190, 193, 194–95, 232
“Great White Hope,” 57, 60
Johnson, 55–58
popularity of, in England, 54–55
styles, 60
boxing, Bullard’s career in
under Baldwin’s tutelage, 47–50
comeback fights in Egypt, 153–55
in England, 55
first boxing bout, 49, 50
in France, 59–61
as member of Brown’s company of fighters, 50, 53
Boyer, Charles, 308
Bradley, William C., 20, 24, 25, 26
Brooks, Charley, 56
Brown, Aaron Lister “Dixie Kid”
brawl with Americans in Paris, 160
career, 49–50, 56
fights in France, 59, 62
McCloskey and, 61
training of Bullard by, 53–54
Brown, “Panama” Al, 193
Bucket, Gut, 173
Bullard, Eugene, Jr. (son), 166, 210–11, 215, 313
Bullard, Eugene. See also boxing, Bullard’s career in
autobiography, 315–16
with Butlers in Atlanta, 35–37
cancer, 319, 320–22
characteristics, 186
childhood wanderings, 26–29
Columbus birth and childhood, 19, 21,
23–24, 25–26
in The Crisis magazine, 109
death, 322
death of Eugene, Jr., 210–11, 321
determination to go to France, 26, 29, 31, 35, 37–38, 214–15