by Amiri Baraka
At least once a month we’d have an “alert.” The sirens would rage and we’d have to get up in the middle of the night and dress and fly off to “bomb” some city, usually American, and then return. It was a recurring nightmare to me. The siren, after midnight, was like hell’s actual voice. You’d throw on your flight suit, the grey slick coveralls, check out a parachute, get your weapon, load your cannon, wait for orders, and take off. Sometimes we took off and came right back. Sometimes we’d go and land somewhere else and stay a few days. Sometimes we’d go right back to the barracks. And I was the only guy on my crew with the big awkward .45 automatic and a shoulder holster. Putting a parachute on over that getup was painful and dangerous. The rest of the crew had .38s, small and compact and buckled on at the waist. I was the only one that looked like Smilin’ Jack. And try as I might to get a .38, I never did.
When we weren’t flying we had to guard the plane. I was low man (stripewise and castewise), so I spent the most time. Like twelve hours a day. Everyday, except when we were flying. The sun breaking your head, white and scorching. Trying to read and having to keep something covering the book for fear of detection. And unerringly, whenever I flew, I’d catch cold! Those planes (B-36s) were not comfortable like commercial airliners. They were cold and drafty. Colder than air conditioning! An hour or so out, my nose would start running. I’d have on my flight jacket, but the whole flight I’d be freezing to death. My feet felt like ice cubes.
The K-rations we’d have to eat were always cold though there was some johnson in the plane that was supposed to heat up the food like a hot plate. But it wasn’t near my station so I forgot it. We’d have, like, cold canned spaghetti that would slide out of the can in a single solid blob. Or canned pound cake, or how about the hard tack, the round cement crackers, also canned, which were your bread? I couldn’t use any of it.
When we came back from flying, I’d feel like I’d been tortured. But, even then, I’d try to get on with my reading — being bothered by the AC’s instructions, the crackling radio, the racist jokes, the freezing airplane. But the next day we’d have off and I’d lay in bed and read or wander down to the BX and buy something if I had the dough or go to the library.
I’d have to wait most times till after duty hours to hook up with the salon, except those who were off or “sick.” But you had to notify the first sergeant the day before you went on “sick call,” i.e., the day before you got sick. So that put a crimp in that malingerer’s device. Sometimes when we got together to bullshit we’d have to have “music wars” to quiet out the hillbillies across the hall. They’d be playing something like “I’m in the Jailhouse Now,” which was standard, but if they got aggressive and turned it up to drown us out, we’d counter, turn up Diz or Bird or else we’d blow ’em off the map with Beethoven’s Seventh or Ninth!
One time a guy named Muck — no shit, a big thick terrible white mechanic from Chicago who was always covered with grease — came roaring down the hall cursing. He shouted he was gonna kill these nigger bastards and came rushing down toward my room. The room had one louvered wall, so you could hear clearly. I got my .45 and climbed up into the top bunk. Muck slammed open the door, slamming it against the bed, and rushed in. I was crouched on the top bunk and shoved the big gun down in his face as he turned. His eyes rolled up under the grease. He was drunk and sure enough he had a .38 like the crewmen had, snapped on his belt. But I had the .45 in his face and started cussing him, “You fat ugly stupid motherfucker, I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out!”
He gasped. He stood still, his head wobbling from side to side in a circle of dead drunkenness. He took a step back, turned, and split.
Muck was sufficiently pacified, but a couple days later a friend of his, a guy from upper New York State, exhilarated by the open displays of racism he must have seen on the base, wakes me up and he’s standing over me, a fist cocked, daring me to rise up. I said nothing. There was nothing to say. He spat out his threats, though none were specifically racial. He hated me, he said, for playing that fuckin’ classical music when I had CQ (change of quarters, like a nighttime security guard) in the hallway and we had clashed on this before. I looked warily up at his face as he kept talking and daring me to get up. I relaxed a little hoping some of my friends would come in. I wondered did this slob have a piece. But it was only his nasty fist. After a while he got tired and turned and left. I jumped up and got my .45 and stood by the door listening. Then I went out in the hall. No one there. Then I heard the motorcycle racing out by my window. Muck and this guy Martin were standing near it laughing. I rolled the louvered window open and stuck the big gun through the slats. “Hey Martin, Martin,” I called. “Come here, you bastard!” He laughed and threw me a finger. He got on the back of Muck’s cycle and they jetted. I never got revenge!
Going into town meant you were going to drink or go whoring. Laffy and I once bought two putas and screwed them in the same bed. Him pumping away at one end and me on the other. Afterwards, his woman tried to raise her price and we fled off into Mundango, the red light district, with these unfortunate creatures screaming at our heels.
But mostly, I didn’t go off the base too much. I read. I read. I read. I sulked. I bullshitted with the salon members. I played music. I read.
Dudes would tease me about not going off the base. They said I was going to whack my doodle off. I don’t think I was ever in danger of that, but what did I know? What changed my life and brought my air force days to a close was an anonymous letter. A letter was sent to my commanding officer saying I was a Communist. No shit! Why I, who at this time thought I was an aspiring Buddhist — I guess — was singled out as a Communist, I’ll never be completely sure. Except years later, Sid the Doctor met Amina and me at some party and he said he’s always remembered how rebellious (and, he said, “courageous”) I was in the face of various officers and noncoms. I’d never thought that. I always thought of myself as very quiet, retiring, reserved, painfully shy. But his description of me to me surprised me. “Whatta you mean?” I said.
“Well, you were always challenging those guys, disputing them. Putting them on. Dropping not-too-veiled insults on them. Defying them. Your hat pulled down over your eyes like a bandit. The dark glasses [I’d forgotten], the little illegal wispy hairs on the chin, the constant book under the arm or in the pocket. It was inspiring to me. The way you attacked those guys and never compromised!”
Shit. I had no idea at all who he was talking about. My whole life was worse than a compromise, to me. I remembered maybe a few exchanges and encounters. Like Lt. Col. Jones (he had become our squadron commander) and I bumping heads in the laundry. I was shoving my nasty fatigues in the washer and in comes a little beady-eyed baldheaded guy with powder blue pistol pocket pants. The pistol pockets were in dark blue. He also had on one of those manic Hawaiian shirts. I glanced up to see who it was and then continued my washing. He cleared his throat. “Airman, don’t you salute an officer?”
“I didn’t know sir you didn’t look like uhh I mean I didn’t recognize ” and saluted. He scowled and turned and walked out. I stood there holding the dirty fatigues and grimacing until one of the dudes walked in and asked me if I’d seen Colonel Jones.
I wonder if Sid was talking about shit like that? Accidental, inadvertent shit. The warnings for books and albums on the dresser. The Article 15s for cutting out on parades. Being late to work. Reading on the flight line. Needing a shave. Outta uniform. Playing music late. Back to the base after hours. Having to paint the whole barracks for fighting on CQ (Martin). Being weird in the plane (being out of position when given the order to “fire”). Reading. Being an elitist, a member of a khaki and fatigue salon of crying young boys.
But I was trying to become an intellectual. I was becoming haughtier and more silent. More critical in a more general way. More specialized in my concerns. More abstract and distant. I was being drawn, had been drawn, into a world that Howard prepared me for on one level — blunt elitism. Though the dee
per resolves of intellectualism I knew mostly nothing about, even though I’d been prodded to hook up self-consciously with the profoundest art of the African American, black music, by one man, titillated by another, I knew nothing consciously when I got out and went into the death organization — error farce.
Yet my reading was, in the main, white people. Europeans, Anglo Americans. So that my ascent toward some ideal intellectual pose was at the same time a trip toward a white-out I couldn’t even understand. I was learning and, at the same time, unlearning. The fasteners to black life unloosed. I was taking words, cramming my face with them. White people’s words. Profound, beautiful, some even correct and important. But that is a tangle of nonself in that for all that. A nonself creation where you become other than you as you. Where the harnesses of black life are loosened and you free-float, you think, in the great sunkissed intellectual waygonesphere. Imbibing, gobbling, stuffing yourself with reflections of the other.
Finally, I am an internationalist and it is clear to me now that all people have contributed to the wealth of common world culture — and I thought that then, if only on the surface! But I had given myself, in my quest for intellectualism, a steady diet of European thought, though altered somewhat by the Eastern Buddhist reading. That was what intellectualism meant! To me. It was certainly not conscious. But I had never been warned. (An old man in the South one time had said to me, “Some folks speaks too clear,” talking about my clipped northern speech. But, hey, that never registered.) Be careful in giving up the “provincial” that you do not include the fundamental and the profound.
I was being drafted into the world of quattrocento, vers libre, avant-garde, surrealism and dada, New Criticism, cubism, art nouveau, objectivism, “Prufrock,” ambiguity, art music, rococo, shoe and non-shoe, highbrow vs. middlebrow (I’d read the article), and I didn’t realize the deeper significance of it. I reacted to some of it, emotionally, like the New Yorker crying incident, but even that, the realization it brought, didn’t reach deep enough.
I was going down a road. Positive in the overall, but just now I was taking a twist and I’d answer for it, you bet.
The letter said I was a Communist. One day I got a message to report to the first sergeant and the adjutant and they said I had been removed from my crew, taken off “flying status,” and my “secret” clearance rescinded. I knew what was happening, I’d known from the giddy-up. In a week or so I had to go back again and they told me I was being transferred out of the 73rd Bomb to Air Base Group.
In group I was put on a gardening detail with other troops, who had mostly been busted down for various infractions. We were supposed to be planting flowers to beautify the base. One ex-tech sergeant I met, his arms bare except for the traces of his removed five stripes, was planting collards next to the flowers. So all over the base he had collards growing he’d pick and cook or sell. He’d gotten busted for sleeping with some warrant officer’s wife. When they were walked in on, she screamed “Rape.” Now the sergeant was on his way to Leavenworth to do nine to twelve.
I was a gardener for a month or so and the salon regulars thought it amusing, but I didn’t, in the hot sun digging holes for flowers. At least on flying status I got to sit in the hot sun guarding and reading.
I was then moved to another job, in the registration office at the visiting officers’ quarters. I also had been moved to an open bay in the Air Base Group barracks, which was like the torture of Chanute and Sampson. But with the move to the visiting officers’ quarters, I was moved into a room there, in the back of the joint. This was really the best job I had except for the library. I slept in a small room and came out to the front office to work my eight hours. Giving out blankets and pillows, making up beds, then going back in my room to read and drink.
The guy in charge of us (three of us) was an Italian dude, short, plump, perpetually smiling, named Cosi. That wasn’t his real name, but it’s OK. Cosi is an Italian word which means “like,” used like the blood use of “like,” like, you understand? Like this and like that. Cosi had an accent and had been born in Italy. He’d come over and after a few years of seeking opportunity had finally settled for the air force.
He was a sweet guy, a nonstop talker, always laughing and making jokes and saying “cosi.” We sat up talking on his shift or mine. He went out occasionally, but almost as seldom as I. He marveled constantly at my reading. He’d come in and whistle, “Hey, reading again? Maron’ a mia!” And start kidding me. Once he came in and I was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls. I was at the part where the hero, Roberto, is killed by the fascists and I was weeping like a baby. Cosi said, “A goddam book can make you cry? Maron’ a mia!”
I was in limbo for months and heard nothing from anyone about my case. Then suddenly, one day, I was brought in and questioned. I was shown a sheet which listed organizations and they asked me had I ever belonged to any. I put down the Civil Rights Congress because I had once gone to a meeting where a guy had talked about this organization. I wrote about this meeting in the space provided on the form. I was shown a copy of the accusatory letter, which had been sent anonymously. I got a chance to glance at a sheet which said that among the artifacts the air force was amassing as to my offense were copies of the Partisan Review!
I was asked if I belonged to an organization called the Congress of Cultural Freedom. (According to Lillian Hellman, a liberal defense mechanism to outdenounce the McCarthyites, thereby clearing themselves!) I said, “No,” and was shown the magazine which they’d gotten from my room. I hadn’t known the publishers. I had letters in my drawers with rejection notes and that address. It was lucky my ass wasn’t on the line. Shit, I wanted to get kicked out of the service.
The thing dragged on and I began writing letters home about headaches I was having. (The biggest one was the fuckin’ air force!) I had received a couple letters from Steve Korret, one in particular made reference to Zen and quoted Thomas. Korret said in answer to one letter I’d written him that I “was always crying. Cry, Poet!” And that was the first time I’d ever been called that. Poet. It dug into me. I had a photo he’d given me on my last leave. Taken at a party, with various of Steve’s friends, in particular a slim-faced white girl with a long ponytail and heavy eye pencil sending her eyes around the corners of her head. This flick fascinated me! Not just the wild-looking woman in black stockings, but the whole scene. A Village party with all the hair let down, all the cultivated wildness on display. This was the Village. Weird! Something else was happening other than what I knew about. Wild stuff. Free open shit. Look at that weird looking woman. I bet she’d fuck. I bet she knows about all kinds of heavy shit. And I bet she’d fuck. Not like them stuck-up bitches at the Capstone. Wow!
The shit dragged on for months with me still in limbo, still making beds at the visiting officers’ quarters, and at last I got orders to leave. We were sitting where we could see the flight line, drinking vodka ($1 a fifth) and cackling about the commander of all Strategic Air Command (Curtis LeMay) driving face down on a go-cart back and forth, back and forth, on the flight line like a juvenile delinquent!
We kept saying, screaming really, “This is the motherfucker in charge of us?” It made us hysterical!
Cosi brought me the orders. In the multicopied ditto those things come in. He was breathing hard and grinning, like he knew it was important. It was just that Special Orders were an event for any airman. You didn’t know what the hell was happening.
I had been discharged. Undesirably! What? UNDESIRABLY! I was to be discharged in thirty days. Being shipped to South Carolina in about two weeks, then undergoing two weeks’ processing.
The guys there whooped and hollered. What the fuck, Undesirable or up your ass and gone, getting out was what was happening. That news shot around to the salon members and other folks. The hip folks were happy for me. I was getting the fuck out. The squares were sorry I’d gotten a funny discharge. UNDESIRABLE!
Hey, I wanted to get out. It didn’t matter, long as I was sane
and healthy. I wanted out. Out! Undesirable or not, here I come.
And in a few weeks I was on my way to South Carolina. While I was being processed I got a chance to go up to Columbia to see my relatives. My aunts and uncles and grandmother. I spent most of the time talking to my tall, thin, dark, fast-talking aunt.
I was happy to see everybody else, including my tall, light brown, light eyed, slender aunt everybody agreed was beautiful. But to the tall dark aunt I poured out my heart, such as I could muster. I had been kicked out. My parents wouldn’t like it. Would they understand? I wanted help and she gave me that by listening, commenting on the obvious, and reserving comment on the abstruse. I stayed there talking a week or so and then got discharged formally and got a bus to ride twenty some hours back to Newark.
My air force career was over.
Six
The Village
In the South I was again formally disconnected. Although I was happy, very happy, to be out from under the torture of the air force, still it had been a form, it had given my life a shape, as hateful as it was.
I wandered around, just outside everyone’s reach. And then going north, back home on a bus, a seemingly endless ride. And finally to be back on the street, in the house, undesirably discharged from the air force, even talking to my parents and sister, my grandmother, wasn’t sufficient to snap me out of it. It was like being in a city of ghosts, even in my parents’ house. That recognition that it was their house was one aspect of that. I was no longer connected with that from the inside. I was a long-removed visitor returned to look through my old things for what few things I might need before I went off again, somewhere.