The Grace of Silence

by Michele Norris

  I noticed something else while examining the warden’s docket—or, I should say, someone else. Below Woodrow’s entry was one for John Beaton, a twenty-one-year-old black male from 904 Avenue G, two doors down from the Norris house. He was signed in at 9:40 p.m., ten minutes before Woodrow. The Beaton and Norris families were close, and John had attended Parker High with Woody and Belvin. The docket showed that John Beaton had also been charged with robbery, the word “drunk” also added to his record after he was booked. That was all. Beaton was not charged with resisting arrest.

  John Beaton gave me another path to pursue. Woody and Belvin had taken the story of what happened that night to their graves. Woody kept it to himself, and my father never said a word to his family about the night he had spent in a Birmingham jail. But if John Beaton or other Beatons were alive, I might have another avenue to pursue.

  The Norris brothers appear to have had no cash when arrested, but Beaton had sixteen dollars on him. Woody’s prisoner effects were an overcoat and a fedora. “Disc. Papers” appeared under my father’s name. The term didn’t click with me at first, but eventually I figured out what it meant: military discharge papers. Belvin Norris’s service in the navy, it appeared, had recently ended, for he was still carrying his papers around. His welcome home had been perplexing, in light of the events on February 7, 1946. He escaped the war without injury. He wasn’t so fortunate when he returned home.

  8

  Service

  YEARS IN THE MILITARY HAD MARKED the men ruling the households in our neighborhood in Minnesota. Every time you stepped into someone’s living room, a distinguished man in uniform stared back at you. No matter how jowly or bald my schoolmates’ fathers were in middle age, the military portraits proudly placed on mantels and dining room buffets preserved their chiseled youth. Men fighting a sedentary lifestyle’s battle of the bulge would loosen their trousers and settle into their recliners to throw back a cold beer while watching the evening news or chuckling along with Johnny Carson. Every so often, when the daily grind would cease, they would gaze upon the old picture of a younger man looking past the camera, into the middle distance. Whether smiling or serious, their confident expression seemed to say, “We saved the world and we know it.”

  These World War II veterans didn’t need Tom Brokaw to tell them that theirs was the greatest generation. They had only to look at those vintage eight-by-tens to feel a shimmer of pride and gratitude. Perhaps they also felt a thud in their gut, remembering the berserk scrum of war. Now the boys in the photos were working-class men who had learned to compartmentalize their feelings with grim efficiency—a common survival tactic after climbing out of foxholes or submarines. Tending the nest is often women’s work, but I suspect it was the men who took it upon themselves to display their wartime portraits. They were the ones who nailed the hooks in the wall or created altarlike arrangements of their photographs and service medals.

  I remember visiting one of my father’s best friends, a fellow postal worker named George Newcombe. I loved going to the Newcombe house. Everything there was slightly exotic. Mrs. Newcombe was from the Ukraine, and her accent was as delightful as the sweet and sticky noodle kugels she churned out. The Newcombes had a bunch of rowdy kids who were all wicked smart. An afternoon at their home felt like a marathon session of the game show Jeopardy! because the kids were always involved in some sort of smarty-pants one-upmanship.

  “Name all the capitals of all the states that start with the letter M.”

  “Quick—Henry the Eighth had six wives. Name them—in order!”

  “What’s the difference between Euclidean geometry and Riemannian geometry?”

  “Who’s the voice of Foghorn Leghorn?”

  Dad liked to retreat to the relative quiet of the basement and ogle the latest addition to Mr. Newcombe’s impossibly elaborate train set. If you know anyone who has kept a train set, you can fix a picture in your mind. If you’ve never seen the work of a model-train obsessive, then imagine the layout of a miniature Norman Rockwell town, with dime stores, pie shops, and kids carrying books tied together with leather straps, a town that fits on a dining room table. Mr. Newcombe’s town sat on a ten-by-twelve-foot raised platform, slightly higher than a big dining room table. In that compact little metropolis, the excruciatingly detailed buildings were all about six inches tall. The trees “growing” out of the Astroturf even changed colors according to the seasons. A neon sign glowed outside the diner. The pole at the barbershop rotated. Fireplaces glowed in the houses along Main Street. A tiny train snaked through the elevated hamlet—over hills, through tunnels, and across pastures of Astroturf, blowing its whistle and belching little puffs of smoke.

  In the seventies, the South Side of Minneapolis was filled with train enthusiasts. They were always men who would meticulously transform their basements into hideaways, where they exercised complete control over a noisy little world of their own making. Perhaps that was the draw for working-class men whose lives revolved around forty-hour workweeks, thirty-day mortgage cycles, and fierce Minnesota cold fronts swooping in without warning.

  When George and my dad finally emerged from what we would now call “the man cave,” my father would yell upstairs, “Hey, squirt, get your stuff together, it’s time to get on home.” We always said our good-byes in the Newcombes’ formal living room, with its overlay lace curtains and replica oil lamps, a parlor that recalled the world of Doctor Zhivago. Mr. Newcombe would usually display a tic as we were leaving. I’m not sure that he was even aware of it. Walking us toward the door, he would pass by a low, long table where his army photo sat. His hands would slip out of his pockets for just a second. He would pause just long enough to reach out and slightly adjust the crystal frame, the way a mother, without thinking, might reach out to brush a stray eyelash off her young one’s cheek. In one small gesture, an involuntary surge of love, pride, and vulnerability. An essential part of his manhood was trapped in that frame.

  My father’s military service had always been a bit of a mystery. I had no idea how the experience had shaped him. He never spoke much about it, and although we had many pictures displayed in our home, there were none from his stint in the navy. His military photos were shoved in a box buried in a basement closet where we stored the Christmas ornaments. His service medal was hidden in a back corner of a bureau drawer, beneath a pile of letters and greeting cards, mostly from my sisters and me, drawn with crayons or adorned with tissue-paper rosettes. I discovered Dad’s medal when I cleaned out his bedroom after he died.

  But I was a child when I stumbled on the treasure trove of black-and-white vintage photos in the closet behind the basement stairs. Several showed Dad in a dark uniform. Sometimes he wore a white sailor’s hat. Sometimes a black tam with U.S. NAVY embroidered on the band across his forehead. I forget what I was looking for in that dank space when I found the photos. As I held up the pictures under the naked closet light bulb, a kid, it seemed, was staring back at me. In every shot, Dad looked directly at the camera, the way nine-year-olds pose and wait to yell “Cheese!”

  His grin was almost as wide as his sailor collar. His shoulders were so slim and his neck so twiggish that he resembled a boy who had just raided his big brother’s closet to play Let’s Pretend. To understand my father—a man I thought I knew so well—I had to understand the man-child in these pictures. I had to comprehend the journey he had taken to become the quiet man who taught me the most important lessons of my life.

  On August 6, 1943, convulsions of war were felt around the globe. Near the Solomon Islands, six American destroyers intercepted and all but demolished a small Japanese fleet attempting to deliver troops and supplies to an enemy base at Kolombangara.1 Also on that Friday, Italian government officials met with the German foreign minister to offer assurances that they would not negotiate a separate peace with the Allies. In Lithuania’s Vilna ghetto, more than a dozen Jews were shot while attempting to resist deportation orders. In Berlin, nonessential residents were evacua
ted from the city.

  On that day Belvin Norris Sr. proudly escorted his namesake to the navy recruiting station in room 25 of the Federal Building in Birmingham. Belvin Jr. was five days shy of his eighteenth birthday, so his father had to be on hand to sign the consent and declaration form for enlistment of a minor under eighteen.

  That afternoon they had set out from a home that had grown much quieter in recent years. Sylvester, the oldest brother, was working as a Pullman porter, spending most of his time traveling all over the country by rail. Simpson and Louis had joined the army, leaving just three of the Norris boys on Avenue G. Soon there would be only two. Though his brothers were in the army, Belvin set his sights on the navy, perhaps because the navy had set its sights on men like him.

  Though top leadership in the navy had long been opposed to the use of “Negroes in the Fleet,” things were changing by 1943.2 The navy was under tremendous pressure to loosen its policy. The pressure was coming from the White House, the War Manpower Commission, and even the army, whose commanding officers felt that their branch had accepted more than its share of black enlistees. It was also coming from surprising places. Elected officials from cities and towns throughout the South had expressed worries about population imbalance and social unrest: legions of able-bodied white men had marched off to war; most able-bodied blacks had stayed behind.

  The chairman of the War Manpower Commission, Paul V. McNutt, echoed this concern in a memo to the secretary of the navy. “The low percentage of Negroes in the Army and in the Navy has resulted in a higher percentage of Negroes in the civilian population,” McNutt wrote. “This condition has been the cause of continuous and mounting criticism. It poses grave implications … as the single white registrants disappear and husbands and fathers become the current white inductees, while single Negro registrants who are physically fit remain uninducted.”3 The message was clear: the combination of disproportionate numbers of single or unprotected white women and masses of single “physically fit” Negroes was cause for deep concern. Needless to say, this was not the only reason the navy shifted course.

  By mid-1942, only a little more than 5,000 black men were serving in the navy, representing a mere 2 percent or so of the navy’s male enlistees. Almost all were mess attendants or stewards. Now bowing to pressure, the navy, in January 1943, began admitting blacks to match their percentage of the total population. By February, black men in the navy amounted to 26,909; by the end of the year, more than 100,000 were on active duty.4

  To reach its goals, the navy sought men with the right temperament, education, and maturity. A. H. Parker High, in Birmingham, was a natural place to look. Founded in 1899 as Birmingham’s only high school for blacks, it was from its opening day held up as a citadel of excellence. With limited opportunities elsewhere, many of Birmingham’s sharpest minds turned to teaching, so the Parker faculty resembled that of a small college. Nearly every instructor had a master’s degree or a doctorate. Students from all over Alabama flocked to Parker, bunking with friends and relatives. Many walked miles to and from school every day. A. H. Parker High was so crowded that classes were in session both day and night, and graduation ceremonies were held in January and June.

  With its rigorous academic program, no-nonsense discipline, and vocational classes in printing, mechanics, and nursing, Parker was the most reliable ticket to a better life for blacks in Birmingham. The school also had a storied college prep program. Universities across the country took notice, and so did the military. Newspapers at the time said Parker was the place to find men of character.

  My father graduated from Parker in May 1943, and whatever ambitions he had were informed by the war raging across the ocean. Reminders of service and sacrifice were everywhere. Though he was on an accelerated-education track (taking physics, chemistry, and advanced math courses), college was beyond consideration. Money was tight. The nation was at war, so able-bodied men were expected to report for duty or to take an industrial job to aid wartime production.

  Dad had grown up in the shadow of the steel mills and the blast of furnaces that made the night sky glow orange for hours before dawn, illuminating the little bungalows of relative prosperity along Avenue G. Birmingham still had its share of mill- and mineworkers who lived in shanties or company-owned tenements. But the simple houses in my family’s neighborhood had a kind of aspirational charm, with curtained windows and proper outdoor furniture on the porch. If you stood at a corner and looked down Avenue G on an evening after the workday, you’d see cars parked in almost every driveway. To men and women whose parents or grandparents had been slaves, the stability must have afforded a peek of heaven.

  Even so, Belvin senior wanted more for his sons. “There’s a big ole world out there,” he used to say. These simple words were meant to shoo his sons away from the backbreaking work in steel mills or coal mines and their occupational hazards, such as lost fingers and broken limbs, away from strikebreaker squabbles and black lung insurance claims. My grandfather’s words were meant to encourage his sons to wander beyond a town where their station in life would always be defined by the color of their skin and where they could be killed for daring to question the status quo.

  So if one’s options were military service, work in the mills and mines, or other menial jobs, the choice was clear for high school graduate Belvin Norris Jr., who’d already spent three months sweeping and cleaning at the Phoenix office building downtown. A decision was reached: if Belvin junior had to wear a uniform, Belvin senior wanted it to be a military uniform.

  When I tracked down Dad’s service records I understood why he looked so young in his navy photos. At just over five foot eight, he weighed only 137 pounds. He had twenty-twenty vision and good blood pressure, and though he had suffered a bout of diphtheria as a kid, his health was deemed to be excellent. He enlisted for two years. At some point during the enlistment process someone had stamped his forms with the word “ruddy”—a term typically applied to dark-skinned whites. After his physical exam, the word was crossed out; “Negro” was typed to replace it. “Negro” was also stamped at least once, and often several times, on every document in his military file. “It is a unique art and special skill, this business of being a Negro in America,” William H. Hastie, civilian aide to the secretary of war, was once moved to remark.

  The year before Dad enlisted, the navy created a separate program for Negro recruits at Camp Robert Smalls, the naval station at Great Lakes, Illinois. Named in honor of a black Civil War hero, it had been established to prepare blacks for service beyond their conventional roles as stewards, mess attendants, and, occasionally, musicians. The camp was run by a white lieutenant commander, Daniel W. Armstrong, who was following family tradition. Commander Armstrong’s father was a brigadier general who had led black troops in the Civil War and later founded Virginia’s Hampton Institute, a historically black college whose alumni include Booker T. Washington. Armstrong held high hopes for the program, telling a Time magazine reporter in the first year of the war, “What we’re doing here is bending every effort to make these boys as good as any fighting men the U.S. Navy has. The country doesn’t yet know what a fine new source of fighting men the Navy has.”5

  Throughout the military, the majority of black men were assigned to noncombat roles, building bridges, digging roads, collecting trash, shining shoes, driving trucks, and working on docks. Even those lucky enough to be promoted to metal-smith, mechanic, or gunner’s mate received neither equal pay nor equal treatment. Decades after the war, historians would describe these men collectively as the physical backbone of the armed forces. Many of them had joined thinking that they were marching off to combat, or at least stepping closer to full citizenship. But, as they would come to learn, their service only confirmed their status as second-class Americans.

  For my father, that cold realization came early. Three months after he arrived at Robert Smalls he was placed in the cooks and bakers program, and on November 9, 1943, he was transferred, along with thirt
y-nine other “Negro” recruits, to New Orleans for sixteen weeks of advanced kitchen training. The assignment meant that thereafter my father had to wear a small C on his upper sleeve, a rating badge denoting that his military service was all about serving others in the military. Fixing their meals. Baking their bread. Scrubbing pots. Washing dishes. All of this, while white men arriving at Great Lakes, regardless of skill or literacy, were automatically trained for work of a higher grade, as navy records indicate.

  Over the course of my father’s enlistment, the navy adopted new attitudes toward Negroes and their abilities, deciding that the marginalization of men with able bodies and agile minds only served to undermine the war effort. In February 1945, the navy published a new pamphlet for all naval officers; called the Guide to Command of Negro Naval Personnel, it spelled out the reversal of policy: “In modern total warfare any avoidable waste of manpower can only be viewed as material aid to the enemy. Restriction, because of racial theories, of the contribution of any individual to the war effort is a serious waste of human resources.”6

  My father’s military file revealed a story he never spoke about, at least not to me. He wound up moving around quite a bit during his two and a half years in the navy. He was transferred to outposts in Pensacola and Williamsburg, San Francisco and Hawaii, and eventually to the supply division of the service support forces for the Pacific fleet, after, in March 1944, the navy decided that Negro cooks and bakers could assume new positions if whites were unavailable.7 Dad received an honorable discharge from the navy in January 1946. He left service to his country with a hundred dollars in his pocket and the right to a World War II medal.