Destined to Witness

  That lesson was driven home even more forcefully when, a few months later, our division was in convoy on its way to Texas for extended maneuvers dubbed Exercise Longhorn, up to that time the largest military training exercise ever held in the United States. Following a “pit stop,” one of my buddies, an exceptionally nice guy from New York by the name of Homer Travis, got into an argument over a coveted seat at the tailgate of the truck we were riding. When Homer, claiming squatter’s rights, refused to relinquish the seat the other had occupied prior to the stop, the enraged trooper jumped off the truck, picked up a rock the size of a coconut, and hurled it at Homer, hitting him squarely in the forehead. By the time the medics arrived, Homer was dead. For this senseless killing, which was officially listed as “involuntary manslaughter,” the trooper received a miserly sentence of four months.

  In the 80th triple A Battalion, a man’s worth and standing in the pecking order was determined simply by how many parachute jumps he had made, or, as they said in the 80th, how many times he had “hit the silk.” By that measure, I and other fresh-out-of-jump-school troopers were relegated to the bottom of the totem pole and contemptuously dismissed as “five-jump Charlies.” This made us ready targets for bullies who tried to impress themselves and others with their “badness.” It was only a question of time before it became my turn to have my mettle tested. It happened when a trooper with an impressive number of jumps under his belt decided to get personal with me after noticing a framed picture of my mother on a shelf above my bunk. “What’s this nigger doing with a white woman’s picture?” he hollered loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “That woman is my mother,” I informed him in a stern tone that was meant to tell him to back off.

  On hearing the word “mother,” everyone in the barracks went silent.

  “How come yo’s a nigger and yo’ mama’s white?” the soldier persisted.

  By this time one could hear a pin drop. Everyone seemed curious to find out how I would handle this ultimate intrusion into my private life. Realizing that anything less than an immediate and forceful response would brand me a coward and subject me to insults for the rest of my stay in the 80th, I decided to teach this brother a lesson he wouldn’t soon forget. With the confidence of someone who knew that he was in top physical condition, I hurled myself at the sneering soldier and attacked him with several hard blows to his head that took him totally by surprise. Instantly, his knees buckled and he hit the floor. His bewildered look as I hovered over him told me that, at least for the time being, my attack had broken his fighting spirit.

  “Be cool, bro! I didn’t mean no offense,” he mumbled in a conciliatory tone that was quite a departure from his earlier cockiness. “No need to get yo’self all worked up.”

  Strangely enough I believed him, but remembering Stone and his steel rod, I didn’t turn my back on him for months. The effect of my quick reaction was as intended; word got around not to mess with “that nigger from Germany,” and for the rest of my time in Uncle Sam’s Army, nobody did.

  I got along well with all of my fellow black troopers from the 80th, whom I came to appreciate in spite of their ever-readiness to go “upside somebody’s head.” They were a varied bunch, some good old country boys from Alabama and Mississippi, others streetwise city slickers from the Harlems of America, and a few well-read and college-trained at both black and white institutions. All of them, without exception, were outstanding soldiers, dependable buddies, and fearless paratroopers with whom I would have gladly “hit the silk” if ever I had to face an enemy overseas.

  Serving in a segregated unit was as much a learning experience for me as was army life itself. I soon learned that the axiom so eloquently expressed by Smitty, that sage messman from the Appleton Victory, held true not only for our Jim Crow battalion, but for the entire 82nd Airborne Division. “We don’t fuck with them, and they don’t fuck with us,” was Smitty’s brilliant assessment of race relations aboard his ship. The same, I discovered, held true for life at Fort Bragg, where it seemed one hand didn’t know what the other was doing.

  Between reveille and retreat, we went about our various duties and hardly saw our white comrades-in-arms who were doing identical duties in other parts of the sprawling post. Except for our white battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Linderer, and a sprinkling of white officers, we had no contact with white people whatsoever. President Truman’s executive order to integrate the armed forces had not yet caught up with the sleepy old Southern ways of Fort Bragg. Jim Crow still ruled supreme in virtually all post installations, including the PX barbershops. That is, until one day when the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division needed a haircut. He noticed that the only black barber in the shop cut both black and white soldiers’ hair if his white colleagues were busy but that the four white barbers stayed idle if there were no white customers, even though black soldiers were waiting in line. When the general demanded to know why the white barbers didn’t cut black soldiers’ hair, they told him that they didn’t know how. “In that case,” the general told them, “you have until tomorrow morning to learn. If you haven’t learned by then, don’t bother to come back.” Only one of the four white barbers returned to his job.

  Segregation was even more strictly adhered to during our hours off the post. As soon as we reached nearby Fayetteville, North Carolina, often on the same bus, white soldiers headed for the nearest honky-tonks that lined the town’s main drag, where white women waited for them. We black soldiers had to hike “way to the outskirts of town” where the pavement ended and where, in a few rundown barns that passed for nightclubs, black women waited for us. If we got into trouble with the law while off the post, our officers had warned us that we would be strictly on our own, since there was nothing they could do for us. Having barely squeaked by the Gestapo, I was determined not to act foolhardy and wind up in some redneck sheriff’s slammer. I had heard too many accounts—many, I’m sure, true—of how hapless black soldiers who had rubbed a white lawman the wrong way were “made examples of” or simply disappeared.

  Most of my black fellow soldiers seemed resigned to our Jim Crow status, and some preferred it that way. For me, however, it was utterly ludicrous that a nation that prided itself on its democratic traditions and looked down on the Nazis for their racial attitudes would segregate soldiers who served in the same army and who were expected to fight the same enemy. Despite my misgivings, I learned to take the bitter with the sweet.

  One day, the mail clerk from the orderly room handed me a telegram that made me the happiest man among the twenty thousand troopers of the 82nd Airborne Division. In it, my mother informed me that she had safely landed in New York Harbor and was on her way to her sister Hedwig’s farm in Bartlett, Illinois. Words are inadequate to describe what I felt. The moment I had waited for from the time I left Hamburg four years earlier—the moment I feared would never come—had finally arrived. We were both in the United States, and although we would not be able to live near each other right away, we could take comfort from knowing that we were no longer divided by foreign borders and an ocean.

  With the intervention of the Red Cross, I was able to obtain a short emergency furlough, and on a beautiful summer afternoon, I got off a train in Bartlett and ran half a mile up a country road while carrying a heavy duffel bag on my shoulder. Meanwhile, knowing my arrival time, my mother had set out running toward me on that same road. Somewhere at midpoint, in what seemed like a reenactment of the climactic scene of the movie classic Wuthering Heights, we ran into each other’s outstretched arms. We hadn’t seen each other for four years, four years that seemed like four eternities.

  Not long after returning to the post, I heard the familiar sounds of musical instruments coming from inside a barrack. I learned that the occupants were members of the Division Artillery (Divarty) Band, the black counterpart of the all-white 82nd Airborne Division Band. It didn’t take much for the bandsmen to convince me that blowing a saxophone at parades beat dig
ging huge craters for 40-mm antiaircraft guns, and with their encouragement I requested a transfer to the band and a change of my Military Occupational Specialty (MOS). A couple of weeks after passing an audition, my wish was granted and I moved in with members of the Divarty Band. My new duties were much more pleasant than my grungy antiaircraft-artillery chores. They consisted mainly of keeping my jump boots and brass shined, attending rehearsals, standing and marching tall at parades, playing classical concerts, participating in airport ceremonies for arriving dignitaries from Washington, and making an occasional parachute training jump.

  Not long after I joined the Divarty Band, we were ordered to pack our gear and move to other barracks near the main post. Integration of the United States Armed Forces had finally arrived, and with it the integration of the Divarty Band with the 82nd Airborne Division Band. In spite of the apprehension of some of my buddies, many of whom had never had any close contacts with whites, the move went smoothly. Before we knew it, we and our new white buddies were like peas in a pod. I found it amusing to watch how eagerly our white comrades tried to sound “colored,” something they hoped to achieve by prefixing the f word with the word mother. It never sounded quite right to us blacks, but we accepted our comrades’ good intention of absorbing black “culture.” More important, after several joint rehearsals, our newly integrated band not only looked like one harmonious ensemble, but it also sounded better and richer than either of the two groups had sounded alone.

  The only thing that could have put an end to my relatively blissful existence in the newly integrated 82nd Airborne Division Band was an order to ship out for combat duty in Korea. But that order never came. After serving the mandatory two years of a draftee in U.S. Army garrisons of the South, with its shantytowns reserved for blacks, I received my honorable discharge and returned to Chicago and civilian life. In the years ahead, there were many times when my infatuation with the United States would be severely tested, when I began to wonder whether my long-harbored vision of succeeding in the New World had been nothing but an adolescent’s pipe dream, and if my coming to America had been a monumental mistake.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t escape my blue-collar status by becoming a musician. A country that had produced hundreds of saxophone giants of the caliber of Ben Webster, Chick Webb, Ornette Coleman, Dexter Gordon, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, and Johnny Hodges was hardly looking for a kid from Germany whose main musical credentials were that he had played saxophone with the Three Ah-Yue Hon Lous. As much as I despised blue-collar jobs, I was lucky that there were plenty of them to keep me afloat, including driving a delivery truck for a liquor store and—what a comedown—working as a machinist helper in factories.

  After several years of paying dues, including journalism studies at two universities, things started to look up and fall into place. Ever so slowly, I began to see the light at the end of the long, long tunnel. I knew I had not only survived but succeeded when I went on my first major assignment for Ebony, to interview President Sekou Touré of newly independent Guinea at the Libertyville, Illinois, home of UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. When the two world figures sat down for an animated chat with me, the “racially inferior” dead-end black kid from Nazi Germany, it seemed to me that my coming to America had not been such a bad idea after all.

  GERMANY REVISITED

  The year was 1966. Eighteen years had elapsed since I had left war-ravished Germany to seek my fortune, first in Africa, then in the United States. We were cruising at about thirty thousand feet somewhere between Chicago and Frankfurt on a Germany-bound Lufthansa Boeing 707. As always during long plane rides, I had dozed off.

  “Are you feeling all right?” The concerned voice of the flight attendant interrupted my dream about the spine-chilling event nearly two decades ago when I narrowly escaped being lynched by a German mob that had mistaken me for a U.S. pilot.

  “I’m fine,” I assured the young woman, while wiping the beads of perspiration from my face.

  “Do you care for a pillow?” the flight attendant inquired.

  “Ja, bitte, wenn’s Ihnen nichts ausmacht (Yes, please, if you don’t mind).” I showed off my unadulterated German, amused at her surprise. African-Americans, I had long since discovered, weren’t expected to speak accent-free German.

  I would soon be back in Germany, the country of my birth, which I had left without regrets. I could still hear the taunts of children and their inevitable chorus, “Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger!”

  During the nearly two decades I spent away from my homeland, much had happened to me and the rest of the universe. After scuffling and “paying dues,” I was snugly ensconced in the so-called middle class, married to an African-American professional woman and the proud father of two adorable boys, aged ten and six. In addition to a journalism degree from the University of Illinois and a well-paying job as managing editor of Ebony magazine, I had acquired a home in one of Chicago’s “desirable” neighborhoods and with it a mortgage that negated any thoughts of early retirement. In short, I had found my American dream.

  With a dull screech, the wheels of the Boeing 707 touched down. The long-anticipated moment was here. Throughout my years in self-imposed exile, I often wondered whether racial attitudes in onetime Nazi Germany had changed and whether so-called non-Aryans were finally getting a fair shake.

  Hundreds of questions crowded my mind. Now that they were once again the masters in their land, what was the attitude of Germans toward blacks? Were they saddled with guilt over the extermination of six million Jews and other racial and ethnic minorities, or had their newly acquired material success and NATO membership made them callous and revived their old racial arrogance? I had exactly three weeks to find out.

  My first impression of Germany, gleaned from Frankfurt’s modern airport, was dramatic. Mingling with the airport crowd, I was engulfed in a whirling mass of colors and a cacophony of languages. The terminal buzzed with people from all corners of the earth. It was the typical cosmopolitan crowd one finds at international crossroads throughout the world. But to the traveler who remembered only the drab, dead-end Germany of the late forties, a Germany that had neither airports, airplanes, nor air passengers, it was an unexpected and refreshing sight.

  After a comfortable seven-hour train ride, I arrived in the city of my birth. “Hamburg Hauptbahnhof!” a blue-uniformed conductor shouted outside the compartment in the aisle. With a loud squeal, followed by a jolt, the train came to a stop.

  With the picture of a burned-out Hamburg still vivid in my mind, I was hardly prepared for what I found. The Hamburg I left had been a vast pile of rubble and empty building shells among which people, demoralized by hunger and defeat, eked out a questionable existence plying a furtive black-market trade. It was a city in which women sold their bodies for a pair of nylons, where mothers bartered the favors of their teenage daughters for food and husbands the affections of their wives for a pack of cigarettes. Had the British foreseen the far-reaching effects of their air attacks, they could hardly have thought of a more fitting name for their handiwork than their code name “Gomorrah.”

  It was inconceivable to me that anyone would be able to put Hamburg back together again. A slightly rebuilt Gomorrah I had expected to find, but instead I found a breathtakingly beautiful metropolis with brightly lit boulevards on which a bumper-to-bumper stream of shiny automobiles passed endlessly. There were miles of streets bustling with well-dressed shoppers and lined with row upon row of stores that bulged with quality merchandise.

  On fashionable Jungerfernstieg, Hamburg’s answer to New York’s Fifth Avenue, pleasure-bent throngs queued up under a movie marquee that in large letters proclaimed WAS GIEBTS NEUES, PUSSY? (WHAT’S NEW, PUSSYCAT?), another reminder of that all-pervasive American influence. Germany’s widely touted “economic miracle,” primed by Uncle Sam’s dollar-studded magic wand and sustained by German industriousness, had not been exaggerated.

  But there were other, quite different sights, also. Visiting my
former neighborhood on the north side of town, I stood stunned before a cratelittered vacant lot where on that memorable summer night twenty-three years earlier my home had been razed in an air attack. It seemed that the “miracle” hadn’t quite reached this point. Briefly, I paused at the site of the air-raid shelter where I had survived the crucial attack that had turned my neighborhood into an inferno. I remembered the charred corpses of the unfortunate people who had been unable to reach the shelter in time. On that site there now stood a spanking-new housing development with green play lots and children playing the same old games I had played as a little boy. As I watched them, I wished, somehow, that at least one of them would give me once again the old Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger routine, just for old time’s sake. But either German children had changed, or I no longer rated. Like a latter-day Rip van Winkle, I walked the vaguely familiar-looking streets where once I had known just about every lamppost, every tree, and every face, unrecognized by the people I met and recognizing none of them. For me, who had once been a celebrity of sorts in Barmbek, whom everybody had known, if not by name, certainly as der Negerjunge, it was an unfamiliar feeling. At that moment the full truth of Thomas Wolfe’s famous assertion hit me: you can’t go home again.