Growing up, my hobby was building model planes and ships. Just before the war, I got in the habit of stopping by the big public library we had here in Jamaica on my way home from school and looking up in Jane’s Fighting Ships pictures of all the ships. I’d make my little drawings, take all the information down, go home, draw it up to scale, and then I would build it.
When the war began, in December 1941, I had over two hundred models of ships. I just loved the ships. By March 1942 I was working downtown as a delivery boy, and I would see the ships in New York harbor, because the war had just begun. I first tried to enlist in March. I just had to get in the navy, with all these ships. Oh, that’s all I wanted to do, go to sea. Here I was living in New York, and I had to go to sea. But I didn’t get in that March, when I wanted to get in.
I had no idea that if I’d have gone in at that time, I would have been a steward. And I don’t think I could have handled that. It would have been just too much for me. I would have done something desperate. I just don’t know what it would have been. I didn’t understand what blacks were doing in the navy. I was just going to join up to fight for the country. That was in my head. I was a patriot.
But I had to wait until the end of the summer before I got in. The navy was changing; directives were coming down to open all ranks to blacks. They needed people to fight in the war. Don’t forget, in ’42, at the beginning of ’42, the Japanese were just wiping us out all over the Pacific. In the Battle of the Atlantic, the German submarines, instead of staying over on the European side, were coming up and down the U.S. coast! So I understood that part. But I didn’t know the different way blacks were treated in the navy.
So when I went in, I didn’t know what I was in for, because I was born and raised in New York. I had no idea of this color line or anything like that. And I went downtown to get in the group. They had about 250 white sailors down there, and about fifteen to eighteen of us black sailors.
And they said that they wanted us to swear in. Swearing-in time came, and the very first thing they said was, “All you Coloreds over there in the back.” That was the first day I had ever heard that, and I started thinking, “What is this? No, something’s wrong here.” So when they started the swearing-in ceremony, I mouthed it, I was so mad at the way they’d separated me from the group. I had been mixed in with everybody else. I didn’t know any better.
But when we boarded the train, the troop train to Chicago, I was riding Pullman service. I had a bed all night, and all those white sailors were sitting up in the coach. And I said, “Well, maybe this ain’t so bad. This just might be all right.”
Lorenzo DuFau was a little older when he enlisted. He was married and a father. He has a philosophic turn of mind. Manners matter to him. He has been raised to be courteous, almost courtly. He remembers as a boy walking streets so dark you could not see whether the wide, recessed porches contained neighbors fanning themselves against the hot Louisiana night or if they were empty. “I said ‘Good evening’ anyway,” he remembers. You had to “Hello the porch” because if you passed without greeting the people, you heard about it, or worse, your mother heard about it. White-bearded DuFau, a southern gentleman despite a lifetime in New York, is still ready to extend himself even if the porch is empty.
Lorenzo DuFau: Personally, I felt responsible as an American citizen first. I had a wife and kid down in New Orleans. I had a 3-A classification, so I was not going to be drafted. But once the navy announced they were opening the doors for us—that they were going to give rates—I decided to enlist. A recruiting officer in New Orleans who knew me personally, knew my family, tried to discourage me from volunteering. I said I wanted to, but he said, “You’ve got a 3-A classification; you don’t have to worry for awhile.” But I was determined.
I had a young son (he wasn’t two years old at that time), and I felt if I could get into the service and do good, it would be an opening for him and others like him. It’s just inbred in a man to want his child to be a little better off than he. That was one thing.
Also at that time I was hearing in the news about what was happening over in Germany with the repression that was going on, the terrible actions against the Jews. I heard about that through the newspapers. And I said, I can kill two birds with one stone. I could take part in trying to stop this action and also open doors here at home. It was a twofold thing. But I guess some people would look at me as being kind of stupid at that time, thinking I was young and foolish to get all patriotic, knowing what ordeals I was living under. But it was my home being violated, threatened, and I felt it was only right to defend it. A man will go forth and defend his home. You defend your family—you defend your country—because there’s no other place that’s home but here in America.
But times were tough then. Jobs . . . When I got married, believe it or not, I didn’t have a regular job. The day I got married, I worked on a golf course, carrying a golf bag—I was a caddie. I think I made seventy-five cents for carrying a bag eighteen holes. That seventy-five cents made up the amount that I had to pay the minister for marrying me. I think the total was about three dollars. My mother-in-law, for our reception, had some cookies and lemonade. That was our wedding celebration!
I got a job working at a drugstore, delivering for a drugstore. I was making three dollars and seventy-five cents a week, working four o’clock until ten o’clock at night. And if you worked from eight o’clock until four o’clock in the daytime, you made four dollars and twenty-five cents a week.
But then I got a job as a mess attendant for the nurses in an army hospital. I was making about ninety dollars a month, which was pretty good, and it was civil service. As I said, I was classified 3-A at that time, because I had a wife and kid, so no draft was involved.
The Louisiana Weekly, a local black newspaper, announced that the navy was going to open up for rates; they were going to have rates other than mess attendants. I had always felt some type of a desire to be a part of something because, as I said, it’s natural for a man to defend his home, when his family is threatened. Even under those conditions I still felt, “I’m defending my home.” If somebody attacked our country, it’s home to me. I have the right to do it. I feel obligated to do it.
The recruiter was a black fellow who had made chief petty officer. (He used to be a local singer. He had a beautiful bass voice.) When they announced the opening for rates, I said, “Well, this will be a good chance, if the right people get in, to open the door, and maybe when my son grows up things will be much better.” Because things were real bad at that time. It was real bad.
For example, riding on the trolley, you had what they called a screen: a little barrier that they used to put up and you had to sit behind. They still have the trolley there. I love to ride the trolley when I go back home now, because you can sit anywhere. It’s a wonderful place now, a wonderful place. That little board they put up there said, “Colored Patrons,” and you’d move it back and forth depending on how many passengers. You’d sit behind that. There used to be incidents about that thing because some people used to really just flop you out of your seat even if you were sitting way back. I said, “Well, maybe if I get in the service, it will be a chance to open doors. Things will be better.”
I wanted to prove my abilities and to get my kid from under that influence. But this recruiting officer resisted. He kept saying, “Are you sure you want to do this?” I said, “This is the chance to get my family away from New Orleans, and get my son out of here.” I was determined not to raise him under that. So it was an opportunity to serve my country, open the doors for the black man in the navy, and get my family out of the South.
Charlie Divers always seems to be sizing things up. Born and brought up in Maywood, Illinois, a suburban black community, he had always been competent and confident and has a Chicagoan’s delight in being in the know. When Oshun Mugwana, a Chicago film producer, and I went to interview him, we had a flat tire on the way to Divers’s house. Divers took us to a used tire store wh
ere they deferred to him and gave us a special price because he used to inspect the boiler when he was the town engineer of Maywood.
Charles Divers: Well, I was born in Chicago, February 8, 1922. I graduated from Proviso High School, Maywood, Illinois. I worked several jobs in heating and air-conditioning in ’39, ’40, ’41, until the Buick company opened a defense plant in Melrose Park, Illinois, and I was fortunate enough to get a job in there for seventy-five cents an hour. At that time that was very good money.
I signed up with the draft when the twenty-year olds were eligible. But then when I found out I was being groomed to go into the army, I volunteered for the navy.
I had had the experience of being in the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, where we worked in reforesting. It was one of the government programs established during the Depression. I found out there about sleeping on the ground, and that wasn’t my idea of the way to spend the war! So I opted for the navy, where we slept between clean sheets practically every night and got three hot squares a day, under most conditions.
Merwin Peters has no wrinkles, is all muscles, and barely looks fifty. Yet he is seventy and has survived total physical paralysis and great emotional distress. He sails in Alaska, and he and his wife still plan to take their boat around the world.
Merwin Peters: I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. I was in high school at the time the war started. My dad had been in World War I as an enlisted army man, and all my growing up time, all I used to hear from him was, “If you were in the army, you wouldn’t do this” or “If you were in the army, you wouldn’t do that.” After hearing that for some seventeen years, I decided I would never be in the army. When I learned that there was going to be a draft and that sooner or later I was going to be drafted, I decided that the army was not going to get me. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t going to go anywhere where you had to do any marching or walking around a lot.
So I tried to enlist in the navy. At first I couldn’t get in, so I tried the merchant marine. The merchant marine had a waiting list as long as your arm, and I couldn’t get in that. So I opted to wait to enlist in the navy. I got on a waiting list, and eventually I was called. So I avoided the draft that way and got into the service that I wanted to get into.
Albert Watkins is the oldest of the crew members. Another Chicagoan, he is an insider, connected to a network of leaders in the community who always wore suits and elegant shoes and knew which precincts were important. Yet on the Mason he’d been down in the engine room. He opened a bottle of French wine for us as he explained the first steps that led him to join the Black Gang and to become the “oil king.”
Albert Watkins: I had a minister who said he wasn’t going to let me go because I had a wife. But, they had drafted us, and I had to go downtown. Sometimes the recruiters would play tricks on you. The guy would ask, “What branch of the service do you choose?” You’d choose one, and he’d say “All right,” but he’d stamp something different on your hand. I said, “The navy!” and he stamped “navy” on top there. So it worked out. I went into the navy.
Benjamin Garrison radiates a certain authority that is obvious even if you did not know he had been a minister and a corrections officer all his life. He measures his words, even using parentheses when his listener needs further explanation. But he can joke at his own expense, and every once in awhile he lets something of his younger pre-pastoral self show.
Benjamin Garrison: After I graduated from high school, I worked for the army for two years on a base in Columbia, South Carolina. But I didn’t like the monotony of the army. I thought that if I went into the army, I’d stay in one place, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to travel and see things. I thought the navy would give me a better opportunity to do that, so I went to enlist in the navy. I’m glad that I met the recruiter that I did because he told me to come back six weeks later. At that point, blacks would be able to come in on an equal basis with anybody else. He said if I went in sooner I would be a member of the Seabees, which was a construction battalion, or a steward’s mate. When he described what my other option was, I decided to wait and take that.
Before that, black people could serve only in the food services; there was absolutely no chance to enter on an equal basis with whites. But as a result of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt’s agitation, when she joined with leaders like Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and leaders of church groups, black people got into the services. They thought we could do the job.
I think one of the main problems with blacks coming into the service at that time was that blacks and whites had to sleep together and eat together, and I think a lot of people didn’t want that to happen. That’s one of the things that prevented us from going in on an equal basis at the beginning.
I grew up in South Carolina, and in my own life, almost everything was segregated: waiting rooms at the train stations, bus stations, drinking fountains, theaters. On all the buses you had to sit in the back; in trains you sat in the front. And if you went to a restaurant, you couldn’t go in and order a meal like anyone else; you had to go to the back, and they’d give you a meal in a paper bag.
But you know, it’s strange. I didn’t realize until later how this should not be. When you’re living in a situation and involved with school and work, you just don’t realize. You can be in your own world, so to speak. And that’s the way it was with me. I didn’t really realize how it shouldn’t be until I went into the service. Then I realized that this shouldn’t be like it was.
Arnold Gordon is prickly and proud. Always aware that he does not look like a black man, he calls into question, rightly, the whole notion of ethnicity and the fallacy of race as a concept. He is writing his own book on the Mason and was both eager and reluctant to participate in this project.
Arnold Gordon: I was born in Chicago. My family was large; there were nine of us children, and we were very poor. When I was eight, my mother decided to move us to Michigan, about 125 miles from Chicago, so that we could live in a rural climate. My parents were both from the farm, in Mississippi, and they knew how to raise crops. It was in the Depression, so they took us up to the country where we could raise our own food, and that way we could survive. Nine kids was too many to be raising in a place like Chicago.
So I grew up in Bangor, Michigan, and joined the navy from Bangor. I had fallen for the advertisements about “Join the Navy and See the World,” and I was extremely impressed by the fact that navy sailors scrubbed down their ships every morning and that they all wore clean white uniforms. To wear new or clean anything was a rare treat to me. So I looked forward to being in the navy because it was so clean. Four days before I was eighteen, I finally talked my mother into signing for me to join the navy, and I went back to Chicago to join.
In Michigan we were not in a segregated environment because there were not enough people of color in the area. There was prejudiced treatment from various people, but I was able to put up with it. It was a problem, but it was not like segregation in the South. There were only two of us in the whole school, and there were only two other black families in town. We were treated with prejudice and disrespect, but we took that in stride.
When I went in the navy, I never thought anything about race because of the way I was raised. I went into the recruiting office, and they immediately took me in. I was sworn in and went through the physical. I was among a lot of recruits—and all of them were white. We were all in this examining room in the nude, and we were going from doctor to doctor taking various tests. We were given papers to fill out. One of these papers asked us to list our ancestry. And so, not being aware of or thinking about prejudice or race or anything like that, I just put down my ancestry—“German, Irish, Indian, and Negro”—in the percentage order.
We went through the line. They were testing us, examining each entry. Each guy would examine a different part of the papers. We came to this one guy, and he was studying my papers. All of a sudden, he looked up and glared at me. He had a real frown on his face, and he
examined me very carefully. Then he reached over and he got out a red pen. He wrote on the front of my jacket in over-an-inch-high letters, “Negro.” I was immediately ushered out of the group of white sailors and put into a group of black sailors. Then I was sent to Great Lakes and put into a segregated camp.
Needless to say, I was scared to death. I had never been around that many black people in all my life! But I soon accepted it. I was used to being treated with prejudice. I didn’t consider myself any different than anybody else. I made friends just like you would anywhere else. That’s how I got into the black navy.
Mel Grant was a dining car waiter on the Union Pacific when he joined the army. He had been reluctant to leave the troop trains and “beaucoup” money he was making “supplying soldiers whatever.” He told his story of being a slick operator while his little granddaughter snuggled up in his lap.
Mel Grant: I volunteered for the navy in 1942. I got a letter from Uncle Sam: “Greetings from the President of the United States of America. You have been accepted in the United States Army. Report for induction Saturday morning, 6 A.M., September 6, 1942.” (I’ve got the letter at home on my old-time radio.) That’s it. I had a 1-A card. I was from Kansas City, Kansas. All my friends from Kansas City who were in the army were going to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, and I wanted no part of Camp Shelby, no part of Mississippi, in 1942. I was a waiter on the Union Pacific, and I was making mucho money. “Beaucoup l’argent!”
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