by Tom Blair
While race prejudice was seen in all of the forty-eight states, it was most acute, most harsh and most unforgiving in the Southern states … those states that were the subject of the Emancipation Proclamation. And racial prejudice existed in the institutions that were part of the very same federal government that seventy-five years before had declared slavery abolished … the army and navy.
This is the story of a young, well-educated black man who rushes to join the fight after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; and his journey from a sheltered and genteel life in California to the raw prejudices of the South and the United States Military.
MY APOLOGIES. THIS LETTER SUFFERS FROM FLAT EMOTIONS. Mother claimed that in the arts there exists nothing worse than a writer of no artistic flair. Her writings were always resplendent with aesthetically apt adjectives and amplifying adverbs; prose mingling with poetry, artfully composed with a liberal application of Webster’s finest atypicals. I was as my father, all prose, no poetry; anemic verbs and diminutive subjects on a bleak white paper stage of drab costumes and stark sets.
My name is Warren, the sole child of Katherine and Benjamin. Another son died when Mother was in the family way with me. A photograph of Woodrow in an oval silver frame, attesting to his residence in heaven, rested during the day on the mahogany table in the parlor. At night Woodrow’s sepia likeness carried with care to the nightstand in Mother’s bedroom. I was never told the date of his birth or death; to have asked would have been cruelly inappropriate—like the opening of another’s diary to entries of the most personal. But the months I knew: Mother’s verve took its leave in the first portion of April and the week following Independence Day.
Oakland, California, was my childhood home. More tellingly, I was raised in cloistered academia. Mother was a professor of literature and Father a research microbiologist. Both PhDs, and in time both heads of their department. Mother retired as Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs.
Dinner conversation, try as I might, did not visit long on the exploits of Amelia Earhart, Babe Ruth, or Errol Flynn. During my younger years family meals were not unlike lecture classes, the partaking of sustenance a casual secondary purpose. Once in high school, dinners became much like PhD candidate orals. Ask me about Koch’s postulates, endosymbiosis, White’s Sketch of the Philosophy of American Literature, or Emerson as a Transcendentalist. Sunday dinners a respite from academics, rather discussions of the Bible and dissecting of passages; passages that as a teenager I would rearrange for my amusement during late night Mass:
As if walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I take you for my lawfully wedded wife from this day forward, or until as a rich man driving a Packard I pass through the eye of a needle to Knob Hill, where I will sit on the right-hand side of the mayor of San Francisco.
It was a pleasure when a professor or graduate student joined my parents as a dinner guest—I now relegated to the sidelines, subject to no exams. Nor, as a mere spectator to the intellectual handball played on our inlaid dining room table, was I required to return a hard-hit backhand of opinion.
Our china was calibrated to the academic standing of the dinner guest. Graduate students and unpublished professors were served with plates and silverware of every day. For guests possessing a bubbling intellect evidenced by their status as well-studied authors, Mother reverently set the table with her grandmother’s Doulton.
At times a guest challenged my parents’ ability to remain tranquil while literature and science scraped against their high-gloss religious beliefs. One such event was the visit by the author Zora Hurston, whose works formed a cornerstone to several of Mother’s lectures. After prerequisite cordials we were seated for dinner. As always Father led us with a grace, thus triggering Miss Hurston’s passionate discourse as to why she was an avid pagan. Dinner conversation was not as Mother hoped.
One of Father’s learned guests, Dr. Ruth Moore, brought forth a not dissimilar twisting of the bowels as had Mother’s novelist heroine. As Father carved a leg of lamb Dr. Moore spoke authoritatively as to how Darwin had proven that Genesis 1:27 had no more claim on reality than did the Easter Bunny. Another dinner of unexpected modulations.
My family’s dining habits are not the essence of my letter to you. Rather, these small anecdotes provide an insight into the home environment where I nested. Knowledge was both foundation and mortar to my family structure. As the firstborn son of a king will be himself a king, Father and Mother spoke as if my destiny was likewise set: I would become a learned professor in an institution of significance. Alternatively, I would somehow utilize a superb education to wedge myself into an even more notable layer of professional achievement. A prediction that found no resolution.
Something else I should tell you. I was blacker than black on a moonless night. The first several paragraphs of this letter led you down one path—many will have assumed I was a well-educated Caucasian—and then I sucker punched you for dramatic effect.
To my parents, being black was a transient state. Not transient for us as individuals, but for our race. Mother and Father promoted a theory that drew from their academic groundings. Evolution, not revolution, was the process that Father believed would bring the blacks to equal status with whites. He argued that any black slave who had told his master that he wished to become a doctor, lawyer, or professor, or even wanted to own a small parcel of land, would have been ridiculed … at best. But a slave who learned to read and write, by whatever means, might be, with the right circumstances, given the opportunity to use these skills. “You, boy, I didn’t know you could write. Get yourself some paper and go ’round to the barns and total up how many bushels we got. You’ll be a big help each harvest.”
Father told of the frog in boiling water. Drop a live frog in boiling hot water and it will react instantly, jumping clear of harm. Put a frog in a pot of lukewarm water and then place the pot on the burner, the frog will remain tranquil, not reacting to the gradual, steady increase in water temperature. As the water reaches a boil the frog will remain calm until its demise. Father said that blacks needed to bring the white race to a slow boil. By possessing the right education and skills, each generation of blacks will be offered—versus attempting to take—more mantles of responsibility. My parents believed that in time a black could be a romantic actor, a big league baseball player and—I’m not sure I believed this—even a Cabinet member. Father said that if each generation of blacks worries about being better than the last, rather than worrying about why they are not at the top, some future generation will be at the top.
While Father leaned on his biology teachings to explain life’s events, Mother built her arguments on the need to educate. For her, Father’s theory of evolution was contingent upon blacks possessing the requisite skills for their upward spiral. Books, in her view, were the matches and knowledge was the fire to bring the white man’s prejudices to that slow boil.
During my life, as I now lay it before you, I was a pilot: first for pleasure, then for survival. The imagined glamour of it caught my eye as a youngster. In the newspaper photos and newsreels airplane pilots looked different, a good different. Having just landed from some great adventure, they posed next to their fabric and aluminum beast. Confidently they stood, clad in leather like knight’s armor with goggles hanging loose around their necks, poised for the next aerial struggle.
On my seventeenth birthday flying became real, not imagined. From the slow accumulation of three months of fifteen cents a day for delivering the Oakland Tribune I paid for an hour of flight in a buttercup yellow Piper Cub. The instructor pilot smiled. Told me to relax. I sat behind him. Over his shoulders I could barely see dials with numbers measuring things of no meaning. My feet forward, straddling his seat, resting on bars that moved. Between my legs a stick growing from the floor. It moved in all directions. To my left a lever topped with a red ball. To the right, no side, no door, open to the air. A large man moved to the front of the aircraft, and the seated pilot and he exchanged words not unders
tood by me. Then the prop was grabbed by the burly man, he swung one leg for momentum, pulled the prop and the engine to life. Slowly rolling over the smell of just mowed grass, to the end of the field, pivoted to face the wind, the lever to my left moved forward by the pilot, the engine complained in a roar. To my right, to the side open, grass blades became not grass blades, but just green. Then, then for the first time, a time that would be repeated thousands of times, but a first time never again, I flew.
Lifted by a force of magic, we rose. Below, our shadow chasing us, its journey of hills, trees, rivers, all the dips and rises of the earth; our journey, smooth and perfect. Slowly higher. Below, fewer details, only broad brushes of the greens and browns. Before us clouds. Each a mountain of cotton balls, golden white, the tops washed by the sun’s uninterrupted blast.
Then the pilot, the pilot who had not spoken since the engine spun to life, turned. Speaking at a yell to pierce the engine’s growl and the wind’s rush, the pilot told me to place my hand on the stick and follow his movements. This I did, holding the stick with one quavering hand. It moved forward, the nose of the plane tilted down. Then the stick came back, but back further than before, the nose moved up and higher we drifted. Level again, the stick to our right, and as directed the right wing bowed and slowly we turned toward the low wing. The stick reversed, our turn reversed. Then to the neutral and the plane level.
The pilot looked back, grinned his biggest. Turned forward and put his hands behind his head, weaving his fingers as if settling in for a rest. I was the pilot. I flew. Next to clouds. Around clouds. Touching clouds. No edges to my road. My road opened before me wherever my eyes gazed. Before, I had only seen “sensual” from afar; that day it embraced me, never to release.
Even though it was expected, it was a jolt when the news burst upon us that late Sunday morning: We were at war. The economic and political stress fissures that conspired to bring the world to battle had been the entrée of many dinner conversations. Father and I accepted that war was inevitable. Mother argued not. Her argument, unlike most of her positions in life, was not based on a cold analysis, but rather on emotional hope—a hope that I would not journey to harm’s way.
Twice I had seen the USS Wasp in port, once the Hornet. Lashed to their flight decks Wildcat fighters and Devastator torpedo bombers. On the docks where these looming aircraft carriers were nestled, aviators—aviators being naval pilot officers—chatted, not condescendingly, but with a confident aloofness, with the crowds of civilian gawkers. Dressed in their “whites” with gold wings, no better looking uniforms ever draped a soldier or sailor. While I told my parents that I wanted to enlist to “see the world,” I felt more than a subliminal urge to wear the uniform.
Six months after Pearl Harbor, and two days after my graduation as a liberal arts major, I finished breakfast with Father, read the morning newspaper, then rode the bus down Market Street, past the police station and firehouse, to the navy recruiting office. Upon returning home in time for dinner I informed Father that the Nobel Prize was mine for the asking. Between breakfast and dinner I had discovered the missing link, the link between Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus, the connector in the evolutionary chain between ape and modern man. A chief petty officer was this elusive link.
After filling out two forms of no intellectual challenge, my number was called and I entered a small office with a fortyish, plump petty officer with a Southern drawl and a complexion more like ground beef than skin; skin drawn over a low forehead and accented with a single eyebrow spanning both eyes. He looked at me as if I was a turtle with fur. When asked what good I might do the navy, I responded by saying that I was a pilot and wanted to train as a naval aviator. His expression changed to someone discovering a turtle with fur that could sing. With no hesitancy nor emotion he explained that I could be either a house slave or a field slave. As a house slave I would be trained as a steward and would clean and cook for naval officers; as a field slave I would load navy cargo ships. Before I could respond he volunteered that a house slave was probably better because I was so scrawny. In silence I pushed back my chair from his desk and departed.
While Mother ever-so-softly touched on the safety of a port assignment, it was not for me. Congress had coerced the U.S. Army into operating an exploratory program for black pilots. I squeezed into the back end of the army’s pilot training syllabus because I was a licensed civilian pilot. As if to make certain that there would be as many hurdles as possible, the training base for black cadets was in the heart of the South, Tuskegee, Alabama. In late ’42 I burned four bland days on a train weaving from the West Coast to Montgomery. You might think that prejudice became more acute as I journeyed to the southeast; it didn’t, it just became less polite and more direct. In a restaurant in Chicago I was turned away because there were no tables available, even though I could see this was not the case. In the South restaurants merely placed a “No Coloreds” sign in the front window. Less time wasted.
My bunkmate at Tuskegee was a fellow from Lawrence, Kansas, Daryl Clark. We hit it off right away. Both of us felt the pressure; we had the opportunity to achieve something most blacks wouldn’t believe possible, and something most whites knew was impossible. In a few months we could be officers in the United States Army, flying the most modern aircraft in the world. Like me, Daryl was a college graduate with parents who pushed and coached. Neither of us suffered fools, no doubt because we both believed that we were exceedingly smart. While we were not as smart as we thought, Daryl and I were smart enough to know our vulnerability. It was us. The ego that bestowed enough confidence to think we deserved to become Air Corps pilots was the same ego that could be sandpaper on the face of whites—especially those white officers at Tuskegee predisposed to see blacks wash out. A confident white man could wear his ego as a top hat, proudly displaying it for all to see. A black man needed to wear his as a pair of socks. Daryl and I chose socks.
I had an advantage over most of the cadets in my class at Tuskegee. I found the academics, while not casual, not daunting either. A lifetime of dinners with my parents had my synapses holding hands, efficiently transmitting neurons. Plus, the army was clever at conveying the technical to percolating sacks of testosterone:
True Course
True
+ or – Variation
Virgins
= Magnetic Course
Make
+ or – Deviation
Dull
= Compass Course
Companions
In addition to a head start on academics, two years of side-slipping a Piper Cub gave me a natural feel for flight. While the PT-19 trainer was heavier, the aircraft was not unlike the Cub. The big difference was aerobatics. I had never been upside-down in a plane before. After a couple of flights where I savored my lunch twice, the unnatural became natural. By the time I moved to the advanced trainer, a T-6 with 600 horsepower and retractable gear, I could consistently perform a crisp four-point roll more precisely than any instructor.
At Tuskegee the most daunting challenge was the environment: “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” marked most every facility. A few of my classmates fought the system. In their minds they were army officers, not black army officers. They conducted a few successful skirmishes, but no battles won. I submissively accepted the prejudiced cuts to my dignity as a toll on the road to excel. At times though, my ability to remain passive was tested. How Green Was My Valley challenged my resolve. Actually, not the movie, but the movie theater on the base.
As we had done many times, Daryl and I, along with other cadets, headed to the base theater after dinner mess. I was in a foul mood. A senior check pilot had given me a Fair on my instrument work, not the mark of Good or Exceptional that I knew I had earned; for over an hour I had held the assigned altitude within a hundred feet and the heading within three degrees. As in all theaters in the South, the base theater separated whites and blacks; the seats to the left for whites, the ones on the right for blacks. But this night the
re was another segment of society seated in the white section: two rows taken by German POWs who worked in the fields around Tuskegee during the day.
There they sat in their prisoner of war uniforms, German officers and enlisted men with sworn allegiance to Hitler. Men who a year earlier had been battling British troops, America’s comrades in arms. A Homo sapiens masquerading as an officer in the U.S. Army had decided that while it was inappropriate for whites to sit with blacks, white officers would enjoy sharing their popcorn with Nazis.
After stewing in our seats for twenty minutes we got up to leave. One of the white officers called out in the dark, asking if the blacks didn’t like the movie. I halted, held my silence for several moments, then spoke to the darkness. I said it wasn’t the movie, we just didn’t think a U.S. Army officer should be gawking at Maureen O’Hara’s tits with Nazis who wanted to kill Americans. We stood across from the theater with our smokes. After a few minutes the white officers strolled from the theater, not glancing our way. The German POWs remained to enjoy American cleavage in solitude.
I prevailed. In March of ’43 I earned my Air Corps pilot wings; I was a Tuskegee graduate. All newly minted Air Corps pilots received fifteen days’ leave before reporting to advanced training. It took me three days and a half-dozen changes of trains to get to the West Coast. My buddy Daryl traveled as far as Kansas City with me. At one stop an elderly lady pushed a nickel into my hand and instructed me to carry her bag. I did, and I bought a soda with my wages. A black in a uniform at a train station could only mean porter to most. The navy whites would have looked better, but Mother and Father made much of the lieutenant bars and pilot wings pinned to khaki. We passed a pleasant enough visit, but I was anxious to move on with training—well, move on with flying. Mother and Father were just anxious. Anxious about my returning safely.