It was especially bad in winter, when the Huffs had no coal for their stove. Edgar would tote a sack and go around to the white houses in Gadsden, the ones with coal furnaces, and ask if he could go to their bin, though he made it clear he would be grateful for anything, cinders or clinkers.
Edgar hated asking for coal. “Mr. Reed,” he’d say, “could I please go out ta you ash pile and see if I ken find ’nough coke for a fire tonight?” Mr. Reed was no “nigger lover,” but he was a kindhearted man and often said yes, but some of the others, even the Jenkinses, for whom his mother worked as a domestic, would almost always turn him away, no matter how cold it was. It was the Depression, and few families were in a position to be giving away coal. On those nights when he would return home empty-handed, Edgar would build a small wood fire that gave off little heat, and he and his mother would drag their chairs across the cold plank floor as close to the stove as they could. They would eat their dinner quickly, before the heat disappeared, and go to bed not long after sunset. On nights when he managed to bring home a small sack of coal, Edgar would sit by the fire with his mother while she told stories about the daddy he barely remembered.
When President Woodrow Wilson asked for a declaration of war against Germany, W. E. B. Du Bois urged young black men to take up arms, saying, “Our country is at war … if this is OUR country, then this is OUR war.” Edgar Huff Sr. heeded Du Bois’s call. Raised among Creek Indians—in fact, Edgar senior was part Creek—in the rough ridges of Attalla, Alabama, Edgar senior became fluent in the language. Much like the Navajo “code talkers” of World War II, Huff put that knowledge to use during World War I, serving as a corporal in intelligence and transmitting secret messages for the Army’s Signal Corps. It was a war that he had been determined to fight, though it was one he could have avoided. Before the American Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Native Americans were not considered citizens and were not obligated to serve.
Edgar junior could never understand why his father went to fight in a faraway place like Germany. Not knowing whether to be mad at his father or proud, Edgar junior once asked his mother as they sat near the stove, “Why couldn’t Daddy just stay home and fight some white folks uptown?”
When Edgar senior returned home after the war, he hoped that his service would entitle him to pursue the kind of life he wanted. His postwar life, however, was both disappointing and short. He felt that he had earned from white America some measure of appreciation and acceptance, but he, like thousands of other black soldiers, instead encountered full-blown animosity. Rage boiled, erupting in race riots from Texas to South Carolina to Illinois. James Weldon Johnson, the civil rights activist, dubbed the summer of 1919 the “Red Summer” because of the blood spilled on the streets of cities across the country.
Not long after the birth of his son, the elder Huff died from mustard-gas wounds sustained in France. With no one to support her, Emily Huff took a job as a domestic with a prominent local family. She pumped water, scoured, scraped, swept, cooked, and cooked some more, snapping beans and twisting the necks of chickens, digging the eyes out of potatoes, shucking corn, and kneading dough for what amounted to a pittance. The Jenkins family, who employed her, had a reputation for being wealthy but stingy. People in town laughed that the family still had fifty-five cents of the first dollar they ever made.
One day, Edgar woke up to find his mother too weak to get out of bed. Edgar begged her to let him get the doctor. She objected, saying they did not have the money. Edgar sat at the side of her bed, holding her hand, until she fell asleep. When a cousin stopped by, Edgar had him watch over his mother while he ran to town and brought the doctor back with him.
When the doctor finished examining Emily Huff, he took the sixteen-year-old Huff aside. “Son,” he said, “your mama is mighty sick. She needs attention,” then he paused, “or you’re going to lose her.”
This time it was Edgar’s turn to comfort his mother. “Don’t you worry, Mama,” he said. “Don’t you worry none.”
Edgar went to the Republic Steel Company in Alabama City, two and a half miles from Gadsden. A long line greeted him. It seemed to Edgar that nearly the whole state of Alabama was looking for work, white and black alike. The odds of his finding a job did not look good. Edgar took a chance and walked to the front of the line.
“Didn’t you see the men in line, boy?” the chief timekeeper asked.
“I did, sir,” Edgar responded. “But my mother is ill and I need a good job bad.”
“Times is tough,” the man responded. “I don’t need another nigger when so many white men are out of work.”
Huff felt the desperation rising in him. “I’m eighteen years old, sir,” he lied. “And I need the job bad or my momma’s gonna die.” Huff had not expected the emotion, but when he said those words, tears trickled down his cheeks.
The man gave Huff a “black boys need to know their place” look. What he did not need was an uppity nigger. What he did need, however, was a worker, and Huff looked as though he could do the work of two men. Whatever the case, Edgar left Alabama City with a job. The following day he was processed into the company’s health insurance plan. Later that week, Mrs. Emily Lee Huff got the medical attention that quite probably saved her life.
Edgar had dropped out of school, and at sixteen he was working eleven hours a day, six days a week, for $1.25 a day. A bus ran regularly from Gadsden to the steel mill, but the fare was five cents each way. Rather than spend the dime on the round-trip, Edgar walked. It didn’t take him long to wear out the soles of his cheap shoes; the October rains and the deep gullies of red mud were especially hard on them. Slipping cardboard into the bottoms, Edgar covered five miles a day, over three hundred days a year, returning home shortly before midnight. Edgar was no stranger to hard work, but the walk to and from the mill, in sleet, rain, and heat, hardened him.
On June 25, 1942, a foreman at Republic Steel approached Edgar, waving a paper. He poked his finger at a headline that said the Marine Corps was accepting blacks. “What do you think about that, Mr. Tough Man?” Edgar knew he was being baited. What the foreman didn’t say was, “Nigger, you ain’t tough enough for the Marines.” But that was the implication.
The next morning Edgar sat with his mother at the kitchen table. He could hardly contain his enthusiasm. He told her the news, and said that he intended to sign up. She shook her head. “I forbid you to join.” Mrs. Emily Lee Huff was a presence. More than once she said to her grown son, “You mind your tongue. You ain’t too big for me to take the ironing cord after you.”
Edgar did not argue. He had anticipated her reaction, and had already resolved to disobey her. Four months later, on October 10, 1942, an envelope containing a meal pass and a train ticket to New River, North Carolina, arrived in the mail.
CHAPTER 12
A War of Their Own
When Edgar Huff left for Montford Point, his mother took one of his large, callused hands in hers. Holding it gently, and stroking it as if he were not her six-foot four-inch son, but still a kid, she looked into his eyes and said, “Edgar, you don’t need to die to be your daddy’s boy.”
Edgar would never forget that. Eventually some of the black recruits crapped out. But not Huff. Determined to prove that a black man could take anything the DIs could dish out, he pushed himself through boot camp. At night, after lights out, he went to the dimly lit bathroom and sat on the toilet and read books that he had borrowed from the college boys in his platoon.
Huff was in the 9th Platoon, which was run by the meanest, toughest man Huff had ever encountered. The other DIs were hard on the recruits, but no one could compare with the man they called Chuck, an “old line” Marine for whom discipline was gospel. The thing Chuck liked to do more than anything else was run. He ran for enjoyment; he ran to punish. Gifted with the endurance of a marathoner, he could go forever, and he would push the men till they were ready to drop. “Run, run, run,” he would taunt them. “Run, you niggers, run.”
In D
ecember 1942, after eight weeks of training, Huff finished boot camp. The entire group of 198 graduates had something to be proud of. After two weeks of marksmanship training and a week of live firing at the rifle range near Stone Bay at the former Marine barracks, New River, now called Camp Lejeune, the men got a chance to fire for record. Many of them qualified either as marksmen or sharpshooters and displayed their badges on their uniforms. Sixteen of the men, including Huff, received promotions to private first class and sewed rank stripes on those same uniforms. Huff had definitely earned the stripe. For the last few weeks of boot camp, he acted as assistant DI, what was called an “acting jack,” to the NCO of the Special Enlisted Staff (SES), a group of handpicked white senior noncommissioned officers that oversaw boot training. In the final week, Huff took over command of the platoon.
Huff and the other graduates decided to go to Jacksonville, or as they called it, “J-ville,” to catch a bus to one of North Carolina’s larger towns, where they could celebrate their accomplishment and blow off steam in style. Just a few days after boot camp ended, they left the camp’s main gate. Jacksonville was not one of the politely segregated Southern towns where whites and blacks accepted a kind of genteel separation. It had a reputation as a mean, small-minded place.
When the townspeople saw hundreds of black Marines walking boldly down the middle of the street on the white side of the tracks, they trembled. All their long-standing fears about being overrun by black men had finally come true. It was not as if J-ville had not seen its share of Marines. White Marines kept the town’s stores, whorehouses, bars, restaurants, and theaters afloat. But black Marines were another matter.
Terrified merchants bolted their doors. To hell with J-ville, Huff thought. Let’s get out of here. He led the men in the direction of the bus station. When the ticket agent saw them coming, he, too, closed his office.
Now the group was angry. They were United States Marines, and they could not even buy a bus ticket. Some threatened to tear down the building with their bare hands.
It was 2:00 p.m. when Huff called the commanding officer of Montford Point, Colonel Samuel Woods. When Huff reached the colonel’s office, he was transferred to Woods himself. “Sir,” he said, “this is PFC Huff, and I feel that I need to apprise the colonel that we have a bit of a situation down here at the bus station. We are not being allowed to ride.”
“Just hold tight. I’ll be there,” Woods replied.
Minutes later, the colonel appeared and calmed the men. Shortly after, trucks showed up to take them to the liberty destinations of their choice. About half chose to go to the Negro USO in Wilmington. Others went to New Bern and Kinston. Under strict orders from Colonel Woods, the drivers waited in their trucks until the men were ready to return to camp.
By mid-December, Huff was excited as he prepared for his first furlough as a full-fledged Marine. Emily Lee Huff was eager, too. She would have her boy home for a week. She could not wait to make his favorite meals and to hear his stories and to show him the scrapbook she was putting together. She had already pasted in the two postcards that he had sent her from boot camp, addressed to the “Dearest Mother in the World, Mrs. Emily Huff.”
When Huff boarded the bus in J-ville, he felt proud. He had been pushed and challenged and taunted. Now he was going home a member of the United States Marines.
In Atlanta, a place that many considered to be the South’s most progressive city, Huff got off the bus to stretch his legs and noticed two white Marine Corps military policemen watching him. Walking in his direction, one of them called out, “Boy, where’d you get that uniform? You musta stole it. There ain’t no niggers in our Marine Corps!” When Huff showed them his leave papers, they accused him of impersonating a Marine, claiming the documents were forged. It was Christmas Day, Huff told them, and he was returning home to see his mother. He pleaded with them, “I’m going to Gadsen, Alabama.” “You ain’t going nowhere but jail,” one of them said.
While Huff was trying to reason with them, one got behind him and cracked his patrol stick over the back of his neck. Too dazed to resist, Huff fell, and they dragged him out of the station.
The MPs took the money he had in his pocket, his watch, and his papers. When Huff regained his senses he realized that he was in the drunk tank. When the jailers came by, he pleaded with them to let him out. He would make a phone call and prove to them that he was a Marine. “The Marine Corps don’t take niggers,” they yelled. “Now, keep that black mouth of yours shut till you get before the judge.”
For three days the two policemen kept Huff locked up. Then, on December 28, a representative of the 6th Marine Corps District came down, verified that Huff was indeed a Marine, and insisted that the jail release him. Now that Huff was out, he realized that the police had not returned his watch or his money, and without money it would be impossible for him to make it home. Wandering down the street, Huff passed a pawnshop. The only things he had of value were the shoes on his feet. So he sold them for three dollars.
Walking barefoot in the gravel at the edge of the southwest highway, Huff hoped for a ride, but was determined to walk all the way to Alabama if he had to. After all, he was a United States Marine. And he had not just made it through boot camp; he had distinguished himself. The saying was that if a black man could make it through recruit training, enduring the daily indignities on top of being pushed to his physical limits, he was tough enough to “march through hell singing a song.” So if he had to walk home, he would.
At a truck stop, he took a break to warm his feet and tend to the cut on his head, which had broken open and was bleeding. There he struck up a conversation with a man who was driving a cotton truck to Alabama. What the heck, Huff thought, I got nothin’ to lose. So he asked the man for a ride. The man looked him up and down. “Yeah,” he replied. “Only I can’t let you ride inside. You gotta ride in back.” It was December, and Huff knew it would be a long, cold trip. But it might be the only chance he had to get home, so he took it. Huff sat on top of the bales of cotton, trying to hide from the wind. By the time he made it to Gadsden, his feet were so cold he could barely feel them.
Huff returned to Montford Point on January 2. Colonel Woods called him into his office the following day. The black Marines referred to the commander as “the great white father of everybody.” They joked that if the sun were shining and the colonel said it was raining, their job was to put on raincoats. If everyone knew it was 8:00 a.m., but the colonel said it was 2200, they damn well better get sleepy fast. Woods explained to Huff that white Marines were getting ready to be sent overseas and that he and some of the others would have to take over the training of the black troops. In other words, the colonel continued, congratulations were in order. Woods was making Huff a legitimate DI in the Recruit Depot in charge of the 16th Platoon. The plan was for him to spend a few weeks in school learning to be a drill instructor, and then to head up the platoon.
Huff had hoped to stay with the 51st Composite Defense Battalion and go overseas to man the big guns, but now he had a new home and a demanding job ahead of him. As a result of President Roosevelt’s December 1, 1942, decision to make Selective Service the routine source of recruits for all branches of the military, one thousand African American draftees would walk through the gates at Montford Point every month. All would have to go through eight weeks of boot camp, and Huff was one of the men charged with training them.
As if driven by the devil himself, Huff pushed his men unrelentingly. Together with some of the other DIs, he put together a program that was as good as any the white Marines across the New River got. Huff took them through armed and unarmed training that included hip-level quick firing, bayonet, knife, and club fighting, judo, camouflage, and conditioning exercises, and demanded nothing less than perfection, ignoring the reality that the Marine Corps never intended for them to be fully qualified infantrymen. They would be limited to noncombatant roles in radar, gunnery, carpentry, mechanics, transport, cooking and baking, and supply.
By April 1943 the Montford Point DIs were churning out men. The problem was that because blacks could not serve in a combat role once recruit training was over, there was almost nowhere for them to go. Among Huff and the other DIs, the running joke was that they (blacks) needed a war all to themselves.
Seeing the potential for a crisis, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox intervened, authorizing the creation of a second defense battalion, the 52nd, as well as a Messman Branch to be commanded by a veteran of World War I and a restaurateur from Albany, New York.
Recognizing that a surplus of black Marines still posed problems, the Corps sought something more than a stopgap solution. By early March 1943, it had found its answer: Marine depot and ammunition companies. The Marine Corps, like the Navy, had been using white combat troops in a supply role. By opening new supply units to blacks, as the Navy was doing, the Corps could simultaneously send white Marines overseas and alleviate the problem of too many black Marines with nowhere to go.
The 1st Marine Depot Company was activated on March 8, 1943. Between March and December 1943, the Corps created ten more depot companies. The companies were labor outfits charged with loading and unloading ships and hauling ammunition and supplies to frontline troops. They would be involved at every point along the supply line, moving cargo from the United States through rear area and forward support bases, over the beaches, and to frontline Marines.
The Color of War Page 9