The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  Yet I can look inside myself and see that the best parts of me come from that narrow lane cut through the sugarcane fields once worked by African slaves, including my great-grandfather Aristile. Those fields and that path were walked by my forebears, for whom it was a road to somewhere better than any generation of African Americans will know since they were brought to this land in chains. For me, the path to success began on that humble country lane, where my beloved mother grew up in the cradle of a close family and community whose love and strength prepared her for the crucibles through which she and all of black America would pass in the middle of the twentieth century.

  Half a century after she left home for good to marry my father and settle in New Orleans, I sat with my mother in Mamo and Papo’s old house, which was then occupied by Tee Mae, talking about the old days. I asked her what College Point meant to her. A light within her welled up, and her face bloomed.

  “College Point means home to me,” Tee said. “College Point means family to me. College Point means forever to me, because that’s where my roots are.”

  THREE

  THIS LAND IS OUR LAND

  The childhoods of both Daddy and Tee taught them the big lesson that every African American parent must pass on to his or her children: that things are going to get better, and people are going to change, but never, ever forget that that ugly side of human nature is not going to go away. You have to buffer yourself against it even as you work to evolve yourself and the rest of society away from it.

  My father, Amos Edward Pierce, Jr., came out of the projects, back when that was nothing people felt shame over.

  His family was one of the first tenants in the newly built Calliope housing project, a Depression-era development built as a place for working-class black people and their families in New Orleans. But he did most of his growing up in Gert Town, a neighborhood near Xavier University.

  Even in the midst of Jim Crow, New Orleans was a very spatially integrated city, more integrated than people know. When Daddy was growing up, the nearby Uptown district of New Orleans, long the neighborhood of the city’s wealthiest whites, was more diverse than you might think, he said. He had all kinds of boyhood adventures roaming the streets of Uptown: playing on the levee, throwing rocks in the canal, jumping on and off the streetcar.

  No matter how idyllic it sounds, and however far removed his urban childhood was from the harshness of black country life, you could never forget the reality of race. When I take him riding around town these days, Daddy will point out all the places he and his mother, Blanche, used to go.

  “And there’s Palmer Park,” he once said. “We had to fight the white boys to go across it all the time.”

  “Whoa, what?”

  “Oh, yeah, we’d have to fight the white boys to play in Palmer Park,” he said. “We knew we would have to get that out of the way before we could play there that day.”

  I heard that, and I was thinking, Oh my God, here beginneth the lesson.

  In 1930s New Orleans, my father had to fight in that park simply to be allowed to play the way any white boy could. Little did he know that forty years later, he would be sitting down with me, his third and youngest son, teaching me the same lessons he learned as a little scrapper in Palmer Park. Change comes to society, but it comes too slowly.

  Daddy was an only child. As his mother raised her boy, his father, Amos Sr., was an inconstant presence. The man died before I was born, but he had never really been a part of his son’s life. He was a chef on the railroads, and he chased women. Whenever my father would see his dad in the neighborhood, he was with another woman, parading her through Gert Town, indifferent to the pain and humiliation that must have caused Blanche.

  Amos Sr. decided that he wanted to be part of his son’s life when he married “up”—my mother was a schoolteacher, and for black people in those days, that was considered social advancement.

  Amos Sr. died not long after his son married Tee. The pain of fatherlessness made my own dad pledge to himself and to God: I will never, no matter what happens to my wife and me, abandon my kids.

  Daddy didn’t have to talk about the responsibilities fathers have to their children, or about strong family values. He lived them. And he wasn’t the only one, in the neighborhood where he and Tee raised their three boys.

  The family values debate in our culture is more politicized than it ought to be. Everybody on both sides of the argument understands the value of the nuclear family. The fact is, when we had intact families, we had fewer problems. As the history of my own family demonstrates, when we African Americans held our families together, we drew from them the strength and solidarity we needed to combat the evils of racism, prejudice, and attack from the enemies of our community.

  The French novelist Honoré de Balzac said, “Hope is a memory that desires.” The hope I have now for the restoration of Pontchartrain Park, the single-family black neighborhood where I grew up, and which was destroyed by Katrina, comes from the memories I have of growing up in a time when every home there had a mother and a father in it. With all those moms and dads around, I felt protected. I knew if anything happened, there was an adult who would help and protect me. I want black children and their families to experience this. My memory of Pontchartrain Park, and my desire to bring it back to life, is the source of my hope.

  Daddy went to elementary school at St. Joan of Arc, a Josephite-run Catholic school for black children on Burthe Street in the shadow of the Mississippi River levee. As Daddy tells it, he came home one day and told his mother he wanted to be a Catholic. She was a practicing Baptist, but she agreed. It was important to her that her son be able to make up his own mind. That was a simple act of parental generosity, but it had a ripple effect in the lives of Blanche’s grandchildren. From her, my father learned the importance of letting your children make their own choices in life, even if you disagree with them. When I was in high school, Daddy did not understand why I wanted to be an actor, but he made it clear that if this was the road I chose to walk down, he would respect my decision and not try to stop me.

  When he was seventeen, Daddy was living with Blanche in the Calliope project when he received his notice to report for the U.S. Army draft. He had not yet finished high school, but war was raging in the South Pacific and his country needed him. He and two buddies walked the mile from the projects down to Lee Circle for their induction. Young men were streaming in from all over the city.

  After the physical, an officer summoned my father and his two friends back to the induction center. “Out of two hundred men, only sixteen of y’all passed,” the officer said. “You men should be proud.” He told them when to report back for basic training.

  It was a long walk home. Just before Daddy and his buddies made it back, all three began to cry.

  “What’s the matter?” Blanche said when her son slumped in weeping.

  “I got to leave home,” Daddy said. Not once in his life had he been outside the city limits of New Orleans. It was an overwhelming prospect.

  Daddy enlisted as an Army private on July 1, 1943, and was eventually assigned to the 24th Infantry Regiment. Not even in the ranks of the military of the nation he was willing to die for could my father and men like him escape prejudice. Until 1948, segregation was the rule. White commanders—and they were all white—typically assigned only menial tasks to black servicemen. In the South, the black MPs who sometimes guarded German POWs were forbidden to sit down in the same restaurants that, on occasion, served our Nazi enemies who were allowed excursions away from camps on the honor system.

  But military segregation was not absolute. Before shipping out to the South Pacific, Daddy had a brief sojourn at Fort Lewis in Washington state, where the sight of snow-capped Mount Rainier dazzled a young man who grew up in a subtropical city that sits below sea level. Once, he and some army buddies went to a USO in Seattle and, as southerners, were shocked to see tha
t, unlike USOs in other parts of the country, that club was integrated. When a white girl asked him to dance, he froze, declining out of fear he would get shot. You can take the man out of the segregated South, but you can’t take the segregated South out of the man.

  And to be fair, prejudice didn’t stay in the South alone—but neither did human decency. In Seattle, my dad and his buddies wanted to get a beer, but the bar refused to let black servicemen through the door. A white street cop saw the soldiers turned away and got so angry, he went into the bar, bought beers for them all, and took the beers out to them. “If you can fight and die for this country,” the cop said, “you can damn sure drink a beer.”

  AFTER TRAINING IN SEATTLE, Daddy’s regiment lived in the hold of a troop transport docked in San Francisco Bay, awaiting orders to ship out. When the word came down that they were going to sea, everyone knew that they were finally going to war.

  When the big ship got under way, every man went to stand on the deck, in total silence. The ship sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge, from which hung a giant American flag. The men remained on the deck for as long as they could, straining to see land receding behind them. They did not know if that would be the last time they would lay eyes on America, their home.

  My father was in an Army division attached to the Marines. He participated in the 1944 invasion of the Japanese-held island of Saipan, part of the Mariana island chain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, bringing supplies to the front lines. They were spared the barrage endured by Marines at the tip of the invasion spear, but the Japanese knew that Daddy’s unit was keeping the front lines supplied with ammunition, so they targeted them with artillery. The fire raining down on them like a monsoon took a heavy toll on Daddy and his men, at least on their nerves. During the worst of it, all they could do was hunker down in foxholes and pray that a shell wouldn’t find its way in.

  The Battle of Saipan ended with the Americans killing nearly every Japanese soldier on the island. But it was costly, too, for the United States, which lost more than three thousand troops, including ten men from Daddy’s supply regiment, and suffered another thirteen thousand casualties—the deadliest and most destructive encounter with the Japanese enemy to date.

  Not long after the battle, my father got a Section 8 discharge after he was found to be mentally unfit for service. Incredibly, this was itself a story of racism, one that I didn’t learn until I was in high school. As a child, I remember checks coming to him regularly from the government, but Tee didn’t explain them to us until we were older.

  It turns out that after Saipan, my father was granted a rest-and-relaxation break and he took a transport over to a nearby island to see his New Orleans cousin. He arrived just after his cousin had departed. Overcome by frustration and exhaustion, Daddy told his commanding officer that he was tired of this war and wasn’t going back.

  “The hell you’re not going back,” his shocked commander said.

  “No, sir, I’m not going back,” said my dad. “I want to go home to New Orleans right now.”

  “No, you’re going back,” the officer countered. And that was the end of that. Daddy had no choice.

  But here’s the interesting part of the story. After Daddy rejoined his unit, he wasn’t cited for insubordination, as he could have been, but was instead given a Section 8 discharge for combat fatigue. Talking back to a white officer was considered so beyond the pale that the military concluded that this Negro soldier had to have lost his mind. Unexpectedly, the war ended early for him because of racial prejudice.

  Back stateside, as Corporal Amos Pierce was being processed through Fort Hood, Texas, he informed the military WAC officer, a white woman overseeing things, that he had commendations from his Army unit from the Saipan invasion. Daddy’s papers hadn’t caught up with him yet, so the officer dismissed his claim.

  “You don’t believe me?” he said, nonplussed.

  “Yeah, right. I don’t believe you,” she said. The message to Daddy was clear: Black men aren’t capable of heroism in battle.

  Later, when the Army wrote him about his unclaimed medals, the pain of being humiliated at discharge compelled him to ignore the letter. He didn’t want the damn medals. It was part of the raw deal black veterans got when they returned from laying their lives on the line to defend the same country that continued to treat them like second-class citizens at home. Daddy could go to Saipan under artillery fire, but he couldn’t go to the French Quarter for a drink.

  It’s interesting that Daddy didn’t pass on his bitterness over this to my brothers and me. In fact, my older brother, Ron, is a West Point graduate and retired from the U.S. Army at the rank of major. Our father raised us to be proud of our country and to love her for what she will one day be, not for what she is today. This was the legacy of the “Double V” campaign, a World War II initiative that was huge for the black community.

  In 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor, as hundreds of thousands of black men were reporting to draft induction centers, an African American named James G. Thompson, from Wichita, Kansas, wrote a letter to the editor of The Pittsburgh Courier, the most popular black newspaper of the era:

  Being an American of dark complexion and some 26 years, these questions flash through my mind: “Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?” “Will things be better for the next generation in the peace to follow?” “Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life?” “Is the kind of America I know worth defending?” . . . “Will colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?” These and other questions need answering.

  Thompson proposed what he called the “Double V” campaign: “The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies within. For surely those who perpetuate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.”

  The letter electrified black America. Two weeks later, the paper launched its Double V campaign in an editorial that said, in part:

  Americans all, are involved in a gigantic war effort to assure victory for the cause of freedom—the four freedoms that have been so nobly expressed by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill. We, as colored Americans, are determined to protect our country, our form of government and the freedoms which we cherish for ourselves and for the rest of the world, therefore we have adopted the Double “V” war cry—victory over our enemies at home and victory over our enemies on the battlefields abroad. Thus in our fight for freedom we wage a two-pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who would enslave us.

  WE HAVE A STAKE IN THIS FIGHT. . . .

  WE ARE AMERICANS TOO!

  Black newspapers around the country took up the cause and carried its banner throughout the war years. Of course, the promise of the Double V campaign was only half fulfilled. America won the war for democracy abroad, but refused to embrace it and prosecute it at home. Yet African Americans did not give up hope. They still believed in America, and wanted white Americans to believe in her too. The same faith in this nation’s promise would animate the civil rights movement. In 1957, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would give a Christmas sermon in which he paid respect to the Double V campaign, using the same rhetoric that would ultimately prevail in the war for the hearts and minds of America and its future. He spoke of turning the other cheek, of loving our enemies though they persecute us. No amount of white hatred, he said could make the Negro hate back.

  But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.

  In Dr. King’s soaring words, I can hear the testimony of my family. Burn our cars to teach us a lesson, ne
arly lynch our men for loving your women, piss on our children in church, steal our money and our right to vote, throw our broken bodies into an unmarked plantation grave, send us to a foreign land to fight and die for you, but deny us the medals we earned sacrificing for this nation—and we will not stop loving America. But we will win our freedom with a victory against the enemies—from within.

  THIS WAS NOT SENTIMENTALITY for my father. This was reality. I’ll never forget the lesson he taught me as a boy, the night he took me to a boxing match at the Municipal Auditorium. Daddy hates cigarette smoking, but he wanted to see the fights, so he sat miserably with my brother and me in the uppermost part of the bleachers, surrounded by a billowing cloud of smoke, waiting for the matches to begin. This was the late sixties or early seventies, when the Black Power movement was in full swing. That ethos demanded that when the national anthem was played, black people protested by refusing to stand in respect.

  That night at the Municipal Auditorium, the national anthem began to sound over the PA system, signaling that the fights would soon start. Everyone stood, except some brothers sitting in the next row down from us. They looked up at my father and said, “Aw, Pops, sit down.”

  “Don’t touch me, man,” growled my dad.

  “Sit down! Sit down!” they kept on.

  “Don’t touch me,” he said. “I fought for that flag. You can sit down. I fought for you to have that right. But I fought for that flag too, and I’m going to stand.”

  Then one of the brothers leveled his eyes at Daddy and said, “No, you need to sit down.” He started pulling on my father’s pant leg.