by Alan Duff
It should have been plain to us when we were segregated on racial lines that war or not, Whitey from the South was never going to consider us even remotely as equals. But we were so excited and anyway so used to only Negro company, we hardly gave the segregation a thought. When they told us we were going to a country called New Zealand, way down in the South Pacific, no one had ever heard of it. We imagined them to be brown- or black-skinned natives in grass skirts with bones through their noses — and likely cannibals. We would have put up with anything though just to experience how other folk lived.
What we arrived to was a modern society much the same as ours, except quite a few years behind. And the majority of the population was white. What a country, what marvelous people, what an experience, as backward as it felt to even us poor colored boys from the South, bars that closed at six o'clock at night, not a shop open past that hour and everything closed on weekends. But friendly, open, hospitable locals who gave their allies warmest welcome.
Including, to our shock, Negroes.
Which we didn't get, not at first: that white people could treat us as equals and their own dark race, the native Maoris, had the same rights as the whites, they played sport together, married one another, had representation at political level, a born right to be whatever they chose. How could Negroes be permitted to drink in the same bars as whites? Back home that would cause a riot, cops would arrest us, a white judge would throw us in jail.
Though we did discern an economic difference between the two races and hear the occasional disparaging remark about Maoris being inferior, the vast majority of whites were like what we'd heard some of our North American whites were: unprejudiced, color-blind. Some of those northern whites were even on our side, so we heard from Negroes who had lived up north.
We found the Maoris a bit like us, more physically robust and expressive in music and dance, and their men were very partial to a fight, which won our admiration as they were not scared of anyone. And all men love women. Their skin was brown to our mostly black and their features more like Mexicans'.
Then a bunch of us soldiers went to this thermal wonderland called Waiwera in the town of Two Lakes. Where I met a Maori woman; Lena was her name. At home she would have been called a mulatto, of more white than dark blood. That she was married made no difference: I was hit between the eyes with love.
Two unforgettable weeks together then war called for real, as we got sent in our thousands to Guadalcanal, to fight a Japanese enemy whose battle tactics in the steaming jungle were stealth and cunning and surprise, sometimes with open, near suicidal offensive. We lost tens of thousands. So did the Japs, except it seemed to have no effect on them. They kept coming at us. Thousands more of us went down with tropical diseases, died of infected wounds — even small cuts and grazes could kill a man.
It was the complete opposite of the glamorous war we had believed in. The enemy popped up from anywhere and quickly disappeared into impenetrable jungle, and yet we knew they watched our every move as they manoeuvred to hit us from another unexpected position. They snipered us till the very last of the usually brilliant sunsets, and snipers' bullets cracked the start of gloriously colorful dawns. We scanned the thick jungle growth, every second expecting it to answer with a bullet bearing our name. Mosquitoes, the other enemy, were constantly making us feverishly ill and killing us. Months and torturous months of real war's reality.
To think I felt relief to be wounded badly enough to get sent home to recuperate and maybe not have to return again. Back home less than six months when I was deemed fit enough for active service and this time the arena was Europe. I didn't mind in the least: I wanted to serve my country and do my bit to win respect from our white counterparts, and it was more new countries, quite different to the Pacific Island jungles and a far cry from Mississippi. I did think of Lena from time to time.
In Europe most Negroes found the attitudes of our white countrymen had softened markedly. Due to, we realized, northern whites' influence with their far greater tolerance, and just from fighting alongside each other and realizing racial difference was plain silly. It was from that experience that I think a lot of us Negroes came home expecting a heroes' welcome and even a small change in how we were treated. Not that on the boat home any of us dared to think an end might come to Whites-only and Colored signs everywhere or that integration of schools and other institutions might come about. Even if the more radical blacks talked of such impossibilities as civil rights and equality for Negroes.
It was not a heroes' welcome. We blacks got to march at the end of the parade in my small home town of Whitecave, Mississippi, where the majority white citizens were in a happy clamor for their boys and noticeably silent when we tail-end black Charlies filed past.
A few weeks later I and a black veteran buddy, Vernon Hill, went to register as voters for state and county elections at the local polling station. We were the only blacks in a room full of hostile white officials and fast realizing nothing of Southern racism had changed.
A big Confederate flag was on the wall behind tables lined with narrow-eyed men who ignored us a good twenty minutes. But damn it, we were determined to exercise our right to vote, bolstered by knowing we had earned it the hard way.
Two forms were pushed at us. These asked the registrant to read or interpret a section of the Constitution. Having schooled ourselves up Vern and I wrote accordingly. The man who took our forms gave cursory look and scrawled failed and stamped twice: INELIGIBLE VOTER.
Still under the illusion the war had changed things, I informed the official we had learned the quoted passage off by heart so why were we deemed ineligible? Reminded we had served our country in the war.
He told us that his decision was final and to get our nigger asses out of there before he called the sheriff.
As long as I live I'll never forget the waves of impotency that rolled over me in hearing, seeing that man, a portly, plain-looking individual who had control over me, over Vernon. Now here we were being treated like vagrant children. I had the strength to snap the man in half. Vernon, whose boxing skills had won him renown in our army division, could have held his own against several of these people. We were men being utterly disrespected and not able to do a damn thing about it.
So began an anger that took a hold of me and sent me plummeting into the abyss for a good number of years.
Walking into that polling station hall I had felt proud, believing I presented a respectable figure, tall and rather fine looking I don't mind saying, a man who carried himself well in the company of friend Vernon, who had similarly proud bearing. Two men who had fought for country, for this state, this Southern county, who had earned we thought the right to be treated as equals. And I knew the official's face, as you do growing up in a small town. I'm sure he knew ours.
But the face looking back did not recognize either of us, except as unwanted niggers who had better see sense quickly. I was close to saying something insulting, even threatening the man with physical violence. But a lifetime of training to bite my nigger tongue stood me in good stead, unless I wanted to be behind bars for years.
In our humiliation we left and found a bar — for coloreds of course — and got soundly drunk. Without my realizing it, something inside me had snapped. In Vernon too, and worse, I was later to find out. He ended up on Death Row for murdering a white couple who caught him ransacking their house. I happened to know it was his warped sense of revenge.
Within the year there was a Negro lynching in my county. The two victims were veterans of the Pacific. I first saw the photos published not in a newspaper but reproduced on a postcard that was circulating in the area, seemingly for certain white folks' amusement. A postcard.
It showed two black figures strung up, eyes closed, countless bullet holes in the bodies — as if lynching wasn't enough. Two fellow veterans, Negro soul brothers, dangling from a tree.
On the other side was the normal space to write address and a message, a marked rectangle for the
postage stamp. The wording describing the scene read simply: Rotten Black Fruit.
We weren't readers — our poetry was scat-talk — but we knew this was crude play on the poem 'Strange Fruit'.
It began with lines about the strange Southern fruit, then
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Niggers had had to burn and hang to inspire those words. But took a white man to write them, though Billie Holiday is known for singing them; Negroes too close to the suffering can't step far enough back. A Jewish school teacher, Abel Meeropol, composed it — and his race knew suffering. On an unimaginable scale at Hitler's hand, the world found out once the war ended. Our six million were slaughtered over three centuries and less systematically.
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
I had seen strange fruit once in the flesh, in my fifteenth year when witness to a lynching my mind stored away in some dark recess.
I met a girl and married too soon, we had two daughters in quick succession, and I only had a series of low-paid jobs. In our small town there wasn't much choice. So we moved to Jackson. I quickly gained employment at a print factory, manual work which was assumed the only suitable role for Negroes, but I managed to work my way on to one of the sophisticated machines, well on the way to learning a new craft, better money. I even dared to think I might have a future.
Till my wife announced she was taking self and kids back to her hometown, Biloxi: she felt we had nothing in common, she didn't like the big city and I think she saw the drinking signs in me — of a weak man going to succumb one day to himself, to the notion of being born a nigger forbidden to raise himself up, excluded from destiny by written laws and custom and therefore justified in turning to drink.
Too immature to think much about my daughters, too much getting by in a strange town knowing hardly anyone, I guess I got fogged up for more years than I care to admit. Lost my way to drink and anything that could be smoked or swallowed to get me out of it, took the momentary comfort of any woman available. I was a man full of nigger self-loathing. Thought I had good reasons why, and they were just too much for a nigger to fight against. After what I had given to my country it had ignored me, denied my basic rights.
Years I wallowed in self-pity. Till I had a dream as real as my own groping fingers for her, Lena being the subject.
CHAPTER THIRTY
TOOK SOME TIME TO ACCEPT it had been a delusion, that I was not the son of a white American hero. Near every song from records Jess had sent went off the band's repertoire and naturally my pals were wondering why. I lied and said the trend wasn't going that way, the Beatles had just arrived. English bands were all the rage.
But, they said, your voice doesn't suit the English band style. Thought they were paying me a compliment saying I sang more like a Negro, that I had a natural bent for black music, it was what I loved to sing and listen to, obsessively.
After a few weeks of misery I adjusted and came down from my throne to mix with the slaves of the world. It seemed my mother had this all worked out with Jess, for a parcel of records arrived from him and though it took a couple of sulking days to even open the parcel, I found a treasure trove waiting when I did. And knowing I was part Negro explained everything, including falling hopelessly in love with the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson's angelic voice. This new batch of recorded artists had set another benchmark, it seemed to me. And a person should know of his own kind.
So I was the descendant of slaves — the people hardly mentioned in school history books, those poor souls crammed into galley ships like livestock, transported from Africa to the Americas. To a life of slavery.
I was not high-born, not descended from a great Maori chief, not the offspring of an all-white American hero. I wasn't John Wayne Junior. Just ordinary Mark Hines of low lineage, a mix of bloods that some might say made me a mongrel.
Eventually I apologised to the band, reinstated every dropped song and added many more, every one of them by black artists.
Pulled out the two photographs of my father and said, guess who this is?
And three said almost in chorus, your old man?
Nigel, who did most of his talking through his very good lead guitar, did not look a bit surprised. Was him who drawled, yeah, well, we kind of figured your voice can't have been just good imitation.
The chief, the king, son of a gunslinging cowboy, replica of Elvis, slave owner, pharaoh, John Wayne Junior, was dead. Long live Mister Ordinary, descendant of a Negro slave.
I met Isobel at my flat about once a month; had an arrangement with my boss to start work an hour earlier and take a two-hour lunch break. My boss, who liked music, believed it was for guitar tuition.
Of late she'd been asking if we shouldn't end this, what with the age difference and even more her son's presence in the band.
But I didn't want to let go. I felt I was growing up more rapidly than the chronological norm; I was being prepared for adulthood in understanding women — yes, the plural, as I intended knowing quite a few more before settling down and marrying. I did want children somewhere down the track. As to what Isobel got out of the relationship, she didn't say. I presumed it was partly physical and something about our chemistry that just worked.
At least Isobel was surprised on learning my blood heritage. You'll recall I thought you had Latin blood, she said. Well, part Negro makes it even more interesting. And on the subject of interesting we moved like dance partners who were old hands and fucked each other to mutual fulfilment.
I think I'm ready to go to America to meet him, I told Isobel. She thought it a good idea, and did I have the money? Yes, I said, another money order came with the records. My father must be quite well off.
With winter coming on and no bookings for the band, I'd have the opportunity to go. So I decided to study up on where he lived as the stories I'd heard of Mississippi were not good, what with the Ku Klux Klan, the horrific things they did to Negroes. Wondering — fearing — how I would be treated.
Hours I had spent in front of the mirror trying to see how I must appear to others. If my band mates had always assumed I had Negro blood, but Isobel my intimately closer friend did not, what then did I really look like? If too obviously of Negro origin then my visit to America might not be something to look forward to, even do.
I drove the six hours to Auckland one Saturday, to see someone who would know in an instant which race I would pass for most. Mata. (And to see my nephew again, just a baby when I saw him last.)
Not giving Mata notice was deliberate. I just arrived: no need to bother about the niceties, not my own sister. But thankful her boyfriend was at rugby.
Ma? (What I called her in private.) What race do you think my father is?
My big sister asked, what sort of question is that? Do you really want to know? Haven't I told you what I thought as we grew up? Surely I did.
Not that I recall.
If she said Negro then I would have to prepare myself to eat in coloured-only joints, be subject to other restrictions and racial prejudice.
Come on, Ma.
I think you look a bit like Dad, actually. And she broke out grinning.
This is serious.
So am I. You look quite a bit like him, especially when he was slimmer.
How can I look like him?
Maybe he rubbed off on you. I don't know. Might be you picked up some of his mannerisms. You certainly sing the same.
This was total confusion. Do I look like I've got Negro blood?
A bit of that too. Mata didn't drop a stitch. But if you stood beside Henry Takahe, people would say you are his son.
Twelve hours driving there and back to hear this. Stil
l not sure what category the Mississippi whites would put me in. Maybe I wouldn't go.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
EVEN ON SKID ROW, WAKING up on park benches, you have moments of clearer thinking. I knew the year was 1952. In my mind I was the Dodger Jackie Robinson, hitting homers against the all-white teams. Before I'd fallen, before the war started, Joe Louis had been the heavyweight boxing champion knocking out the white men of the world. Told us we could do it too. Our athlete supreme Jesse Owens had stuck it right up Hitler at his own Berlin Olympics: Adolf had thought his kind was the master race till a Negro ran off with four gold medals, one of several Negro athletes who took gold at those games.
I thought of the musical giants — Duke, Cab, Brownie, Dizzy, Oscar, Ella, Mahalia, Billie, Charlie, Ray, Nat — the host of musical giants needing only first names, on the trail blazed by Louis Armstrong and every nigger with attitude who'd had the guts to stand up.
And where the fuck was this nigger?
Wiping vomit off my face, craving the next drink, wallowing in self-pity that had descended to unbearable self-loathing. Telling myself the same bullshit about serving my country only to be treated worse than a dog. Just another nigger drunk succumbed, convinced the system was too big to take on, no chance to make something of myself, eyes scanned for the miracle of a dropped coin, a fluke dollar on the park grass, someone to beg change from.
Then my eyes happened upon a newspaper page fluttering on a bench, like a hand beckoning. Under the headline BYE, BABY. FAREWELL, EMMETT I read of a fourteen-year-old Negro boy, Emmett Till, who was down from Chicago visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi. He had been showing pictures of his white girlfriend to his astonished Southern Negro cousins. Someone had dared the boy to say something fresh to a woman shop-owner.