And there was no Freedom—no Democracy. And the world was sad—the whole damn world was the saddest place in all the universe.
Samuels said, “It doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense. It makes no—” His voice choked off.
Solly stood up and stared with wet eyes down at the bodies. “I promise you, my buddies, to never forget the way I feel this Monday morning. I will always hate war with all my heart and all my soul. I will always fight the men who beat the drums for war in the name of Holy Patriotism in any nation, any language. I will fight with all the strength that’s in me the goddamn bloated buzzards who profit from this madness.”
He sucked the tears back up his nostrils. He smiled at Bookworm. “And I promise you a Double-V.”
His eyes and ears played tricks on him. He thought he saw Worm’s lips break open and heard him speak as plain as day, “Where were you, Sergeant Solly? You shoulda been with us, cut buddy. We got our Double-V already.”
Solly blinked his eyes. “Thank you, Bookworm.”
And now he knew what he hoped he never would forget again. All his escape hatches from being Negro were more illusion than reality and did not give him dignity. All of his individual solutions and his personal assets. Looks, Personality, Education, Success, Acceptance, Security, the whole damn shooting match, was one great grand illusion, without dignity. Fannie Mae had called it manhood. Like something you keep reaching for that never was and never would be—without manhood. If he signed a separate treaty with Cap’n Charlie, would it guarantee him safe-conduct through the great white civilized jungle where the war was raging always raging? Would his son also get safe-passage? Anywhere any time any place? He had searched in all the wrong places.
“Thank you, Bookworm, buddy boy.”
Samuels said, “What’re you muttering about?”
“Thank you, Bookworm, buddy. Thank you, Baby-Face and Jimmy. Thank you, darling Fannie Mae. Thank you, Scotty!”
Never compromise your manhood, Fannie Mae had told him. Never sacrifice your manhood. He was a Negro and only with Worm and Jimmy and Baby-Face Banks could he achieve anything of lasting value. And Scotty and General Grant and Lanky. And Fannie Mae and Mama. And Junior. This was the ship to human dignity. All else was the open sea. Quiet Jimmy must have known this when he stepped out of line in Ebbensville.
His face was filling up again, kept filling up, and as he looked upon his buddies they seemed to be smiling at him, all three of them, all of the dead in South Bainbridge were smiling, all the fallen soldiers smiling smiling everywhere, and he turned his head from them, he tried to talk again, but no further words came now. He felt Samuels’s arms around his shoulder. They sat down again and this time they did not cry. They had no more tears to shed.
Solly thought, Scotty and Worm and Banks and Quiet Man and all the rest—they are not crying. In death they’ve won their victory and left me here behind to cry for them, and die, and they are dead already and left me holding the bag. In a way he envied them. In another way he took strength from them, and felt guilty.
He stared at Worm and Banks once more and Quiet Man, and his face was filling up again. He felt a deep guilt that he was alive and only he was alive and all the rest were dead and felt even guiltier that he was so happy he was living. Why had his life been spared and for what purpose? His heart shouted for the joy of living. I’m so glad to be alive, Fannie Mae, I’m ashamed of myself, but I’m glad glad glad! A sweet cool morning breeze caressed his sweating forehead, and he promised himself and promised them that the world would know their story. If he lived, he would write it. He thought aloud unknowingly.
“If I get back home, my brothers, I’ll tell the world about your battle here in Bainbridge. Maybe it’s not too late yet, if I tell it to the whole wide world, tell them if they don’t solve this question, the whole damn world will be like Bainbridge is this morning! The whole damn world will be like Bainbridge!”
He had forgotten Samuels altogether till he heard him saying, “Maybe well really have peace this time. Maybe after the war is over.”
Solly shook his angry head. “No peace—there is no peace—there is no peace till freedom. You can’t make a man a slave and have him live in peace with you.”
Two white soldiers came up the street toward them and stopped about ten feet from them. Solly and Samuels instinctively reached for their empty rifles.
One of the soldiers said in accent thick and scared and Dixiefied: “We ain’t looking for no fight, mates. We just want to sit down and rest a little while.” He was probably from Georgia. Or Texas or Louisiana or Alabama.
Solly jumped to his feet. “It’s a trick! It’s a lousy goddamn trick! They’re up to something!” He almost fell on his face.
The bareheaded cracker soldier said, “Ain’t no trick, mate. We just fagged out, beat down to the ground, and we ain’t got nothing against nobody, and the whole damn thing don’t make no sonofabitching sense.” He spread his palms upward as if he were feeling for a raindrop. “Look, we ain’t got no guns or nothing. We just sorry about the whole damn thing. Colored folks ain’t never done us nothing. I didn’t want to come into town. I swear before the living God, me and my buddy didn’t want to come!” Solly stared at the pale-faced dark-haired bastard whose eyes were filling up with tears. The whole damn Army was nothing but a pack of pissy-assed cry-babies.
Solly said, “The only way to do it is to beat some sense into your heads.” Maybe this way was the only way.
The soldier said, “You didn’t see what we saw tonight. It was the awfulest thing in the world.”
Solly sat back down, and the two men came and sat down near them but apart. The other white soldier said, “We ain’t got nothing against nobody.”
Solly mumbled, “Beat some sense into your heads. That’s the only way to do it.”
Trucks were coming up some highway some-damn-where, moaning and groaning, in his head he heard them coming, and dawn was breaking out in the bay, and way out in the Coral Sea the sun was making flames and torches to throw light on a brand-new day. And Solly thought, the world is waking up again. Let it stay awake forever.
He felt a heat all over him, consuming him. The whole damn world was burning down. He wanted to believe a new world would rise up from the smoking ruins. He wanted to believe whatever was left of the world would come to its senses and build something new and different and new and new and altogether different. He wanted to believe that East and West could meet somewhere sometime, and sometime soon, before it was too late to meet. Before the whole world was just like Bainbridge. And build something new that was neither East nor West nor North nor South, but something new, superior to anything that ever was. Like a new baby born of a particular man and a particular woman, with a part of each of them in it, but entirely different from either of them. He wanted to believe that Kipling’s lie was obsolete. He wanted fiercely to believe—that all this dying was for something. Beat some sense into their heads. If they don’t love you they’ll respect you. He remembered General Grant and his pure and righteous anger. Maybe he was the wisest of them all. With his “bottom coming to the top.” Perhaps the New World would come raging out of Africa and Asia, with a new and different dialogue that was people-oriented. What other hope was there?
Yes, Worm and Jimmy and Baby and Scott and Grant are dead, and the world is waking up again.
And we four soldiers sit here crying.
Five Negro soldiers stumbled up the street from somewhere.
“Which way to the bridge, mates?” one of them asked.
Solly stared up in their faces. Scared and lost and weary faces. He said, “Sit down, mates, and make yourself at home. This is the place where the New World is.” They stared at Solly and the others. Another one came around the corner.
The talker said, “Well sure, why not? I mean, we ain’t got no special place to go.”
And they came and sat and waited. For what?
General Jamison’s peace-mission trucks were now rolling i
nto town.
The world is waking up again.
And we poor bastards sit here crying.
APPENDIX—SELECTED REVIEWS
From Best Sellers, February 1, 1963
The law school studies of Solomon Saunders are interrupted by his entrance into the army during World War II. Saunders is processed at Fort Dix and eventually sent to a base in Georgia. Saunders and the other non-commissioned officers in his unit are Negroes. Saunders thinks of the war as a struggle of democracy versus fascism, but most of his fellow soldiers are critical of America’s and the army’s attitude toward the Negro. While visiting in a Georgia town near the military base, Saunders is seized by two policemen and taken to jail. When he appeals to a local army colonel for justice, he is savagely beaten by the colonel and the town policemen. Saunders becomes disillusioned and bitter; he realizes that the army is doing almost nothing to eliminate or control racial prejudice. Saunders and a few other soldiers write a critical letter which is published in several newspapers. As a result, Saunders and several of his fellow soldiers are transferred to an amphibious combat unit training in California. Prejudice is also encountered there. The Negro soldiers are allowed to use the Post Exchange only after staging a militant protest. The Negro amphibious group is shipped overseas to an island in the South Pacific. Soon Saunders and his unit are seeing violent action in the Philippines. Saunders is eventually wounded and sent to a hospital in Australia. There a white nurse falls in love with him. His wife had died in childbirth, but Saunders had previously found a Georgia girl named Fannie Mae who had attracted him. Saunders is again infuriated by the racial discrimination practiced in Australia by army authorities, although the Australians are free from prejudice. When the MP’s continue their harassment of the Negroe [sic] soldiers, a full scale battle breaks out between white and Negro troops. Hundreds of men are slaughtered. Saunders and a few other survivors wait patiently for a new world to be born, a world free from hatred.
Several obvious faults are apparent in this novel. Some of the characters are simply mouthpieces for various viewpoints. Other figures are too consciously motivated by the author. The love scenes are routine—torrid, raw, and overdone in the popular fashion. The style is often too rhetorical, too hysterical, too shrill; and yet one tends to forgive most of these weaknesses because of the importance and validity of Mr. Killens’s message. The author’s earnestness and the obvious justice of his analysis and warning are particularly compelling and sobering. Mature and thoughtful readers who are not easily offended by unusual frankness of language might find it worth their while to reflect on the problems American Negro soldiers faced in World War II.
Paul A. Doyle, Ph.D.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
From The Critic, “Education Shelf”, February-March 1963
This is a difficult book to review, for a variety of reasons. There is no doubt, first, that it contains some of the rawest, crudest yet most real and convincing dialogue ever transferred from barracks-room Army life to print and paper. Ex-soldiers tell us that after a few months in the Army they don’t even notice the continual vulgarity of their everyday language: after 200 pages of this novel the same thing happens. One becomes (for better or worse) inured to the language and then aware of its very real merits. This raises the second point of difficulty, for the subject matter—the life of a Negro soldier, an educated law student, from the time he is drafted into the Army early in World War II until the tragic events of race war between Americans in Australia near the end of the conflict—is, in some sense, dated. It is true that the real struggle still goes on, but the situations described here have to some extent been solved. So this story of discrimination in the armed forces is historical. Nonetheless it is terrifyingly real. The writer, who is gifted at writing dialogue while he often fails to create dimensioned characters, has raised a world for our inspection that is neither pretty nor pleasant to contemplate.
Reprinted from The Critic, February-March 1963. © The Critic.
From Herald Tribune Books, April 14, 1963
You must put yourself in the skin of a man wearing the uniform of his country who does not dance at the U.S.O. the night white soldiers dance there, and sees German prisoners treated with more human dignity than he has ever received, and who is far freer in a strange land than at home. “You must consider,” James Baldwin demands, “what happens to this citizen.”
“I’m a young deserving man,” the hero of Mr. Killens’s second novel decides on his honeymoon, “I will one day do my dancing at the Waldorf but will at the same time keep in touch with my folks who will still be stomping at the Savoy.”
Yet he resents his admiring bride’s assurance that “You’re going to get ahead in the world, darling.” That’s too explicit for Solomon Saunders. He isn’t out for “success” but for “achievement.” He isn’t ambitious: merely militant. He doesn’t talk to himself, but has interior monologues. And when he is inducted he resolves to be “the best damned soldier in the army.”
The men who share his barracks don’t share his resolution. “If Hitler wants to make a landing here I’ll be his guide,” one volunteers. It was no good explaining that, if Hitler conquered America, the Negro would be worse off. This party had done all his stomping at the Savoy.
Saunders’s willingness to risk his life for his country is ultimately paralyzed by reluctance to serve a ruling class as secretly fascistic toward himself as is the enemy openly. His attempt to resolve this impossible predicament by adapting the Double-V-For-Victory sign—victory over white supremacists at home as well as abroad—works out no better than had his dancing schedule.
Although the author carries us through two years of warfare with a Jim Crow cast, complete with Cracker captain, he does not resolve the impossible predicament any more successfully than his hero. Yet he does reach for it:
“Perhaps the New World would come raging out of Africa and Asia,” Saunders reflects, “with a new and different dialogue that was people-oriented. What other hope was there?”
Then he draws back. For while Mr. Baldwin’s report of oppression derives first-hand from the suffering of the American Negro, Mr. Killens’s report rings more like a program to which he is a conscientious subscriber. His novel so lacks the feel and smell of barracks and of the passion of men at war that we remain unmoved, at the close, by Saunders’s wistful wish “that whatever was left of the world would come to its senses and build something new and different and new and new and altogether different. He wanted to believe that East and West could meet somewhere sometime and sometime soon, before it was too late to meet.”
This rings as rhetorically as the Jewish lieutenant announcing in the midst of gunfire, “I am a white man, and I am your friend, and you are a Negro man and you are my best friend, and we are both friends of the human race.” As Archie told Broadway-The-Lightning-Bug, “I don’t hear no thunder.”
Nelson Algren
Reprinted from the New York Herald Tribune Books section,
April 14, 1963. © New York Herald Tribune.
From Library Journal, January 1, 1963
Eight years after “Youngblood,” John Killens has written another novel of social protest, this time about Negro-American soldiers in World War II. It has its faults. Its style and diction are often amateurish and overmannered. It lacks taste, the instinct for using the right word. But it is powerful, passionate, and rises to a rip-roaring climax. The hero, Solomon Saunders, Jr., is a handsome, educated Negro with ideals, ambition, and the desire to “pass” as far as possible into a white world of prestige, power, and wealth. A mounting series of incidents of oppression, discrimination, unfairness, and police brutality which would try the patience of Job finally convinces him that the fight of all Negroes for equality and justice is his fight. The book contains graphic descriptions of his three love affairs, with his wife, Millie; with Fanny Mae, a Georgia canteen girl; and with the white Australian, Celia. Some minor characters are well drawn: Lt. Samuels
, his Jewish lieutenant; Bookworm, the chronic AWOL and agitator. The battle scenes in the Pacific are vivid, as are those of a mutiny in Australia; and the language of the barracks and the field, accurately reported, is not for the Ladies’ Aid Society. An earnest, immoderate, different war novel. For collections of modern fiction.—Lloyd W. Griffin, Asst. Ln. in charge of Humanities, Univ. of Wisconsin Lib., Madison, Wis.
Reprinted from Library Journal, January 1, 1963.
Published by R. R. Bowker Co. (a Xerox company).
Copyright © 1963 by Xerox Corporation.
From the New York Post, March 31, 1963
The blood-curdling climax of this novel is as inevitable in fiction as it was in real life in World War II. For what Killens depicts in his closing chapters actually happened: Negro and white soldiers, all wearing the same U.S. Army uniform, finally turned the weapons of modern warfare on each other, and the only badge of the enemy was the color of his skin. It happened in Brisbane, Australia, and it was one of the best kept secrets of the war.
“And Then We Heard The Thunder” is not a polemic on race relations nor an assembly of cardboard characters repeating the old litany of white man’s inhumanity to black.
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 57