My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  The socials were sanctioned with some reluctance, out of a grudging patriotic spirit that barely outweighed the administration’s wish to keep sailors and students apart. A navy band played all the standards, and I knew this was my chance to shine: I’d learned a lot of dance steps back in junior high school, and somehow, despite my lack of money, I’d amassed quite a stack of records, which I brought with me to parties, thus assuring my popularity. The records were at home, but I still had the moves. That night, I managed to score a dance with Marguerite.

  “You better be nice to me,” I said to her as the song came to an end.

  “Why?”

  “Because I might just end up marrying you.”

  Marguerite was shocked. “Why? Has the world run out of other men?” she declared. But beneath her scowl, I thought I detected the barest trace of a smile.

  From then on, I just kept after her. I’d hang out at her dorm after she came back from classes. I was never threatening, only humorous, and little by little she began to thaw. One day I found her outside her dorm in a circle of friends, one shoe hanging off her heel as she balanced it, unconsciously, on her toes. I saw my chance and snatched the shoe. I thought she’d demand it back, but she just stormed back into her dorm, one foot shod, the other stockinged. So I kept it. Now, every time she saw me, she asked when she’d get her shoe back. I said she’d get it when she went out on a date with me. Finally, she gave in.

  I’d met one challenge with Marguerite, only to realize, on our date, that I was up against another. She came from a family of high achievers. She herself planned to earn graduate degrees and become a child psychologist. Her four siblings either were or were becoming teachers of one sort or another. Her family lived in a house—not an apartment—in northwest Washington, D.C.

  “So what does your father do?” I finally asked.

  “He’s in the real estate business.”

  “The real estate business,” I echoed. “And what does he do in the real estate business?”

  “He works for a top real estate firm.”

  “And what does he do for that top real estate firm?”

  “He handles the money.”

  This was yet another group of American Negroes foreign to me: the segregated middle class. In Washington, the Byrds had no choice but to live in a Negro neighborhood, send their children to Negro schools and colleges, take taxis designated for Negroes, and ride in the back of the bus. But they didn’t mind any of that. Their neighborhood, from what Marguerite told me, was clean and well kept, the streets lined with handsome houses, many of them the fraternities and faculty housing of nearby Howard University, which infused the neighborhood with an ivy-and-brick, white-columned campus gentility. The public schools might not be quite as good as the white schools, but teachers and students shared the same strong drive to better themselves through education, and they did. Most important, in abiding by all the strictures of segregation, the Byrds and their neighbors communicated minimally with whites, and so felt almost none of the sting of racism that poor southern Negroes did on a daily basis. The Byrds lived in a bubble, but within it, from what I could tell, they were shaping their own version of the American dream.

  I was way outmatched—socially, economically, educationally—and I knew it. So I did the only thing I could think to do: I lied. Shamelessly, I told Marguerite I’d been chosen for a special team trained personally by Admiral Nimitz, so secret we had no idea what mission we’d be assigned to. Something with submarines, I said vaguely, something that would put us behind enemy lines, exposing us to grave and constant danger. I didn’t so much win her over as wear her out; and to a degree she was attracted by my storytelling, exaggerated though it might be. What crazy stories would that crazy boy from New York come up with next?

  As I realized how conservative her values were, I challenged her on racial issues, and our dates became debates. Our running argument was about whether, as Negroes, we should fight racism wherever we saw it, never accepting our status as second-class citizens (my view), or settle for the bourgeois comforts of a segregated black society and hope for the best (her view). Segregation hadn’t stopped Marguerite from working toward the career of her choice, so it just didn’t faze her, and she wasn’t the least bit angry about it. For those less fortunate, she took the long view: The Negro’s position in American society had improved a lot already, and was getting better with time. Marguerite was a serious student of black history and culture, and while she never cooled my own growing anger at racism, she did expose me to a lot of good books. As I struggled through them, I began to feel I might acquire an education after all.

  I felt bad about misleading Marguerite, so by our fourth or fifth date, I thought I might risk revealing that my mission had been changed to handing out sweatshirts and skivvies to sailors. To soften her up for that, I gave her a gold locket. To my surprise, she accepted it. Then disaster struck.

  I couldn’t have imagined that volunteering to give blood would land me in a military prison, but it did. In the town of Hampton, a woman had lost so much blood from giving birth that her life was in jeopardy. An SOS went out to all naval personnel for type-O donors. I qualified, and went to the hospital with four or five other sailors. Only two of us, it turned out, had blood types that exactly matched the need. We rolled up our sleeves, but after a short time the other sailor’s blood stopped flowing freely. Desperate, the nurses asked if I would give more than the usual limit. I did.

  I came back to the base feeling awfully woozy—too woozy for the nighttime guard duty to which I had been assigned. I explained my situation to the officer in charge, and asked if I could switch nights with someone. The officer, who was a dyed-in-the-wool redneck cracker, seemed to take special pleasure in informing me that I was at fault for giving blood when I knew I had guard duty. A sailor’s commitment to his duties was absolute! Off I went, blearily, to my post. I had a feeling he’d come by to check on me two or three hours into my shift, and I was right. “Sleeping on guard duty!” he shouted as he jumped out of his jeep. “That’s a punishable crime!”

  I said I wasn’t exactly sleeping, just trying to hold it together.

  “Sleeping on guard duty! I hereby order you to appear at captain’s mast!” Captain’s mast was a navy judicial panel.

  “Why don’t you go fuck yourself,” I said with sudden fury, and reared back to punch him.

  The officer’s driver subdued me—I wasn’t much of a challenge, barely able to keep my eyes open—and the pair of them promptly arrested me for attacking an officer. I drew a two-week sentence at Portsmouth Naval Prison, and found myself walking the yard amid a number of other imprisoned servicemen. The servicemen, black and white, wore rough denim uniforms with a big P on the back. In another part of the camp lounged a larger group of German prisoners of war. No prison-issue wear for them. They sported their own uniforms and fur-collared leather bombardier jackets. They ate separately from us, and got better food. Unlike us, they had no prison duties, at least none that I could see. Their daytime hours were all spent in the recreation area. We were told they were just being treated in accordance with the articles of war. We didn’t believe that for a minute. Here were Nazis who’d done all they could to kill American soldiers. Yet they were white, and we were black. The injustice of this sickened me.

  I came back to my barracks a notorious figure. Unfortunately, Marguerite had heard the news, too. Even when I explained the whole story, I could sense her wondering why she’d spent time with a sailor, and such a headstrong one at that. None of her other suitors had to worry about being thrown in the brig. They were big men on campus, with job prospects and money to spend.

  Before I could ease those doubts, I got my orders to board a troop train bound for some undisclosed location. Marguerite kept my locket and gave me a little hug good-bye. I wasn’t sure I’d ever see her again.

  Rolling westward, we guessed our destination easily enough: Camp Shoemaker, the vast “Fleet City” in the San Francisco Bay Ar
ea, where up to twenty thousand sailors at a time prepared to head off to war in the Pacific theater. We assumed we’d be assigned to various warships as storekeepers, then steam off to south China or Iwo Jima. Instead, we arrived to learn we’d be staying right there, in the part of the fleet city called Port Chicago. We wouldn’t be storekeepers at all. We would be loading live munitions onto merchant ships and other warships, which, like hungry animals, devoured all the bombs fed to them. Not only was this menial work, it was incredibly dangerous, the more so because none of us had had any training for it. We knew exactly why we’d been chosen. This was scut work for the lowliest and most expendable sailors in the U.S. Navy: the black ones.

  Not long before, on July 17, 1944, a vast explosion had rocked Port Chicago. Live munitions being loaded onto a merchant ship had detonated, causing a terrible chain reaction that killed 320 sailors and injured 390 more. Two-thirds of those sailors were black. In its aftermath, 258 black sailors at Port Chicago had refused to move any more munitions. As we arrived on the scene, with mangled structures and debris still in evidence, those sailors were being court-martialed, 50 of them sentenced to long terms for mutiny.

  Those sentences would be commuted after the war, but the sailors would remain dishonorably discharged, deprived of their pensions, barred from any civil service jobs—all because they’d dared to stand up to blatant institutional racism. We didn’t know that at the time. Nor could we know that the political reverberations of the Port Chicago disaster would help lead to desegregation of all the armed forces in 1948. We just wanted to get as far from Port Chicago as we could, as soon as possible. A day or two later came wonderful news: We were off the hook. The navy had filled its quota of black munitions loaders without us. Back east we rolled on another train, to another undisclosed location, like a newsreel in reverse. This time we emerged on the New Jersey coast, at the navy’s Weapons Station Earle, just south of Staten Island. We’d still be storekeepers for munitions loaders, and still be handling live ammunition ourselves. But at least the New Jersey base hadn’t blown up as yet. And it was close to Asbury Park, with its boardwalk and beach.

  For me, any fears of the job at hand were more than offset by the joy of being stationed just hours away from Marguerite, who had now graduated from Hampton and was living at home. On my first leave, I took a train to Washington, barely able to contain my excitement. When I emerged from Union Station, I had a taste of blatant, south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line segregation: I had to wait on the colored-only line for a “colored taxi.” Whites waited at the front of the station; the colored-only line was off to the side, in the station’s shabbiest part. As I would learn, “colored only” was always off to the shabby side, whether it pertained to a public bathroom, a movie theater entrance, drinking fountain, or roadside motel. The absurdity of this “colored-only” taxi line was that it didn’t even keep whites and blacks from sharing the same facilities. There wasn’t any difference between the taxis that came to the whites-only line and those that served the colored-only line—except perhaps that white taxi drivers could decide whether they wanted to pick up black passengers or not. Even if the passengers were U.S. servicemen risking their lives to protect the nation.

  The Byrds lived at 501 T Street—a very nice address, the black driver confirmed en route, in the heart of Washington’s black community. The block was tree-lined and pretty—no kids on the sidewalk shooting marbles here, only riding bicycles—and yet a faint suspicion stirred in my mind as I got out. The Byrds lived in a nice house, but it was a two-family house. Marguerite’s father might handle the money, but not perhaps that much money. I might have a chance after all.

  Marguerite’s mother opened the door, greeted me cordially, and gave my crisp white sailor’s suit an approving look. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I’ll get her.”

  Marguerite looked more beautiful than ever. She seemed pleased to see me, but kept her distance. Before long, she would warn me that she was dating someone new—a “Jodi,” as we called draft-age civilians who’d wangled deferments. Jodis tended to be college students with 4F medical classifications—not qualified for military service thanks to allergies or psoriasis, homosexuality or just a psychiatrist willing to deem them demented—or they’d found work in the war industry. One way or another, they’d kept themselves out of the war itself. Over the next months, every time I proposed coming down from New Jersey on leave, Marguerite informed me she was dating some other Jodi. She still kept my locket, though, which I took as a sign of hope.

  I passed the last months of the war in New Jersey, wheeling live munitions from bunkers to trucks, then driving down to the docks to unload them onto cargo vessels. They didn’t explode; that was enough for me. On our leave days, we’d head into Manhattan in groups of two or three, pick up dates through friends, and then go over to the jazz clubs. One night, I took a gorgeous girl named Dorothy Newby to the Copacabana to see the Ink Spots. I couldn’t wait to impress her with a table and a bottle of Champagne on ice. But when our turn came to go in, the big white guy at the door had us stand aside while he ushered in the next couple, and the next couple after that. “What’s going on?” I asked him finally. But I knew what was going on before he told me.

  “No more seats, buddy.”

  “How come all these other people are getting in?”

  “They got reservations.”

  I looked again at the long line of white people waiting and then at the bouncer. I wouldn’t attract many supporters once I took on this son of a bitch. Dorothy, fearful of what was to come, grabbed my arm and urged me to leave. The humiliation for us was severe, but the white cop standing by watching the incident seemed less than sympathetic to my plight, and he convinced me with his smirk that a black sailor on his night’s arrest sheet would suit him just fine. Our night was destroyed, and all I could do was slink off with my date, humiliated and my rage in check. Little did I know that I would one day have my payback with the Copacabana.

  My eighteen-month hitch ended December 3, 1945. I could have reenlisted—I had no better prospects—but I’d had enough of military service: not just the numbing routine and the mortal risks with munitions but the all-too-frequent incidents of prejudice that kept me in an almost constant state of simmering rage. All but broke, I made my way back to Harlem to live with my mother and her new husband, Bill Wright, my little brother, Dennis, and my two new half siblings, Raymond and Shirley, in their latest apartment, on Amsterdam Avenue. My stepfather, always kind, took me on as an assistant janitor at the buildings he serviced. I mopped halls, stoked furnaces, and made small repairs. Almost immediately, I sank into a funk much deeper than any I’d ever known. Whatever dangers there were in the military, and whatever racism I faced, I knew it was all temporary. As far as I could tell, janitorial work was what I’d be doing for the rest of my life, and I knew I could never settle for that.

  One day in January 1946, a tenant in the building asked me to hang her venetian blinds. When I managed that modest task, she gave me, as a tip, two tickets to a play at the American Negro Theatre. She was an actress, she explained; she and her boyfriend were in the play; perhaps I’d like it. I’d never heard of the “ANT,” as she called it, but I was curious. I had no money for the dinner that a date would have required, so I went on my own that night to the Elks Lodge on 126th Street off Lenox Avenue, where the ANT staged its productions. It was the first play I’d ever attended.

  Ushered to my seat, I turned to look at the forty or fifty people in semidarkness around me. They were talking in whispers. In any venue I’d known for entertainment—the Apollo Theatre, vaudeville, and movie houses—a different mood prevailed. There was always some kind of noise or laughter. This place was hushed, like a Catholic church.

  When the curtain rose and the actors appeared, so poised and confident, they radiated a power that felt spiritual to me. The play, titled Home Is the Hunter, by Samuel Kootz, was freshly written, about returning black servicemen trying to establish postwar lives in Harlem.
I knew these characters. I knew the problems they were talking about. That play didn’t just speak to me. It mesmerized me. This was a whole new world—an exhilarating world. And there onstage, among the other actors, were my tenants, Clarice Taylor and Maxwell Glanville. Outside the theater, I was just their janitor, but here in the darkness, I felt a kinship with them. Maybe I could be part of this, somehow, not as an actor but just … a helper of some kind.

  When the play ended and the houselights came up, I stayed riveted to my seat until everyone else had gotten up to go. Finally I ventured toward the stage, where audience members were greeting actors they knew. Shyly, I told Max and Clarice how much I’d enjoyed the play. As others came up to say hello, I noticed the stagehands emerging from backstage to strike the set; this was the last night of the play’s short run. I saw they could use help, so I went up to move braces and scaffolding. They just assumed I was a stagehand, too, so I kept working for an hour or more, until it was done.

  That night, I was too excited to sleep. I kept tossing and turning, thinking, How do I get possession of this? How do I find a way to make the theater and these people a part of my life?

  The next day I knocked on Clarice and Maxwell’s door to tell them again how much I’d enjoyed their performance. And did they, perhaps, need a volunteer to help move furniture over there at the ANT? Clarice laughed. She said, “Did I hear you say ‘volunteer,’ Harry?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She said, “Come with me the day after tomorrow. I’ll introduce you to our department of historic treasures.”

  The ANT had started up in 1940 as a community repertory theater in the basement of a Harlem public library called the Schomburg, to create plays, as W.E.B. Du Bois had urged, “by, for, about, and near” black audiences. The few black roles on or off Broadway were slaves, maids, or butlers, for the most part, with a few gangsters and prostitutes (Porgy and Bess), one jealous Moor (Othello), and one reprehensible tyrant (The Emperor Jones). The ANT was meant to redress that. It was a collective of sorts; the acronym indicated that everyone would pitch in together, like worker ants—black ants! Already, its founders’ ideals had faded somewhat, after a play called Anna Lucasta had gone from the ANT to Broadway and made stars of its cast, most notably Hilda Simms, who rode it all the way to London. The rest of the ANT’s troupe was left back in Harlem, hoping for a similar break that never quite came.