The tremendous volume of my father’s letters, combined with his unremittingly confessional writing style, was at times too much for me to handle. Reading them made me feel as though I were a child again, listening to Dad tell us about some of his harrowing army experiences. “One morning, my sergeant punished me for a minor infraction … ” I could hear his voice as I began shuffling his army letters into chronological order. Dad had unspooled his “crime and punishment” story in all its stupendous detail during our cross-Canada camping trip in the summer of 1962.
“It had been my turn to get my barracks up, but I’d slept through my alarm. That meant big trouble for me.” Knowing that Dad was about to face serious punishment had Larry, Karen and me fidgeting in the back seat of our station wagon, too spellbound by Dad’s continuing play-by-play to take in the beauty of the Rocky Mountains as they flashed past our windows.
“In full uniform, under the blazing Oklahoma sun, I had to strap a hundred-and-thirty-pound backpack over my shoulders. Then I was forced to dig a ditch several feet deep. Once I’d finished digging, I had to walk one hundred yards down field where I was given a thimble—”
“Are you certain you want to tell the kids this story, Dan?” Mom asked. But her objection was two or three gruesome details too late.
“I was ordered to scoop water out of a barrel with this itsy-bitsy thimble, walk one hundred yards back to the ditch and spill the remaining drops out of this thimble and into the hole. I had to do this till the ditch was filled. But I kept fainting.” At this point, Dad started talking faster. Something in his hurried cadence felt horribly wrong. Bending over, head between my knees, I stared at the candy wrappers on the car’s dirty floor mat so no one would see me wrestling back tears.
“My sergeant revived me, stood me back up on my army boots, pried open my mouth, stuck a salt tablet down my throat and made me keep going. I ended up fainting so many times I lost track. But I learned my lesson. I never slept in again.”
Bolting up from my slumped-over position in the back seat, I had to fight back an impulse to throw my arms around Dad’s neck and shoulders, and protect him. It didn’t matter that the damage to Dad had already been done. I needed, somehow, to undo it.
Now, as I sat slumped over a long metal table in the archives building, lost in Dad’s army letters, that strange protective reflex was being reawakened, leaving me feeling as powerless as I did forty-five years ago in the back seat of our family station wagon. To cope with all the messy emotions these letters provoked in me, I stayed dryly task-oriented, spending my first day in the Ontario archives building skimming and then listing the letters that were to be copied and sent to me. When, two weeks later, Dad’s letters were couriered to my house in a box as big as a suitcase, I felt sick with excitement. Actually, more sick than excited. What had I gotten myself into? The box containing so much of Dad’s life sat on the table, where it remained unopened for a few days.
What are you waiting for, boy? I could almost hear Dad cry out. Stop pussyfooting around! GET TO WORK! Still, I stalled, circling that bigger-than-life box once or twice each day, slowly inching closer, feeling guiltier the longer I put off the inevitable.
Although a musician who’d made my entire living stripping emotions bare in song, microanalyzing the unspoken minutiae of human relationships, there was a part of me that didn’t want to scrape beneath Dad’s inscrutable surface. I’d always wanted him to remain more archetype than actual flesh and blood. Anything but human: even his flaws I preferred to see as big and overblown, full of bravado and ballyhoo. So why dive into the back pages of my father’s life now? Was it a missing part of Dad I was looking for, or something lost, buried, inside me?
By the end of the week, as the box on the dining-room table started taking up more and more psychic room, Dad’s badgering voice clanged on: Time to be a man, son. No more running away from your responsibilities. Unable to bear that voice anymore, I made myself a pot of coffee, upended Dad’s box of letters on my dining room table and dove in.
In the early forties, despite months of monkeying around all night with his fellow Red Wine Boys and showing up late (if at all) the next day for work, Dad couldn’t believe that his foreman had finally made good on his threat and removed him from the protection of necessary work status, leaving him eligible for the U.S. draft. The army had reacted immediately, sending Dad a notice to report to its headquarters in Portland in ten days to undergo a physical. Barring the army doctors detecting cancer or sickle cell anemia, Dad was weeks away from being drafted. This was the last thing Dad wanted. He’d grown up with a father who’d been constantly plagued by war-related illnesses and injuries, a father who’d refused to disclose even the vaguest details about his experiences in the trenches, which had disabused my dad of any romantic notions of combat. All the more so since after patriotically fighting for his country, Dan II’s reward had been to return to an America every bit as racist. While my father was by no means blind to the horror of Nazi Germany’s death march across Europe, accounts of Hitler’s pogrom, an ocean removed, failed to have the immediate impact of the racism he was experiencing in America. Furthermore, although the majority of Americans believed they were fighting the Nazis to maintain the democratic freedoms inherent in their country of origin, Dad most certainly understood that there was a lot about the American way of life that was neither democratic or free, or worth fighting for. At eighteen years of age, Dad articulated what a lot of Blacks were feeling in one of his early army letters to his parents: “It seems that the Negroes are not going to tolerate anymore prejudice. I am with them and would just as soon clean up on these crackers here as to go overseas.”
But above all, four years in the U.S. Army meant four years without serious partying. As a teenager recently liberated from college (and his supercilious Uncle Joe), nothing—not a Methodist minister father, a sheltered upbringing or a work foreman who warned him repeatedly not to show up late or else—was about to stand in the way of his devoted drinking, clubbing and skirt chasing. Only the army had the capability of reining in what Dad’s parents were starting to view, with considerable alarm, as their son’s increasingly wild behaviour.
The extreme turn Dad’s life was about to take took some time to sink in. In the meantime, he purposely flunked his IQ test and then, for good measure, malingered through his physical. Exposed to this type of ruse every day, the army demanded that Dad begin his four years in the military at the end of the month, in Monterey, California.
Twenty years later, Dad would leave Larry, Karen and me laughing till our stomachs hurt, detailing some of the more novel methods soldiers used to get kicked out of the army.
“I had a buddy who got himself thrown out of the army by tying a hot dog to a long piece of string and dragging it behind him everywhere he went—”
“A hot dog?!” the three of us squealed.
“Yup! That daggum hot dog followed him to the outhouse like a trained poodle, even lay beside him on his pillow, stinking up the whole barracks …” Dad paused, scrunching his wide, flat nose until it twisted into a kind of deformed pretzel. Then, as if stumbling into the grossest of bathrooms, he issued two loud, shuddering sniffs.
“Ewww, Daddy, stop doing that thing with your nose, it’s like we can smell it!”
“You kids wanna know the last place he dragged that smelly hot dog?” Dad asked, in a playful chirp.
“Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“My buddy, crazy like a fox, skipped into his psych evaluation looking over his shoulder at his flea-bitten hot dog on a string and yelping, ‘Here doggy doggy, woof woof, come on pooch, come come!’ Then he fell to his knees and started petting and kissing that sorry hot dog. The army turned around and threw my buddy’s behind, hot dog and all, on the first bus back to his hometown.”
Not understanding the “crazy like a fox” point to Dad’s story didn’t prevent me from finding the whole loony act fascinating, all the more so after Mom commented, in her ho-hum style, “Dan. Come on now. Are you sure that wasn’t yours truly slinging that hot dog on a string, acting like a mad hatter?”
Now, almost half a century later, as the pages of Dad’s life in the service unfolded before me on my dining-room table, it occurred to me that Mom’s teasing may well have had an element of truth to it. Maybe Dad was the hot dog slinger, only his little caper, rather than earning him an army exemption, landed him in trouble. Sadly, the first letter that tumbled out of the archive box suggested that trouble clung to Dad like a second skin during his years in the army.
Fort Sill, 1943
Dear Family:
… The army is indeed a strange and hard thing to understand for it operates at times with feelings towards no one … I have caught particular h ever since I have been here at Fort Sill. Other of my buddies had left and gone to camps of advancement all over the country. Yet Buddy Hill remained here stuck; working K.P., doing Guard duty, cleaning toilets, doing clean up, flunky and humiliating work for white officers; taking insults, abuse …
If boarding at Uncle Joe’s had forced Dad, for the first time, to live in a world that was not always just, but often downright mean and cold-hearted, that was merely a taste of what he was in for during the next four years. While serving his country Dad would be blindsided by the full and implacable force of racism, U.S. Army–style. His letters home draw a vivid picture of a man retreating into comforting childhood memories, late at night, as a way of coping.
Dear Mom:
Many times I lay in my bunk thinking about the times you would rub me down when I was in bed with a cold. All of those things that you did for me will never be forgotten. I guess it’s when a boy is out on his own, bucking all kinds of situations, that a boy’s deepest appreciation of his parents comes.
Throughout his time in the U.S. Army, Dad relied heavily on writing letters to his parents, opening his heart in a startling manner, as a way of maintaining his sanity. Growing up with three sisters and a doting yet independent-thinking mother, it surely was a shock to the senses to be hurled into a regiment of men, all Black and primarily from the south, whose life experiences were completely different from Dad’s. Most of the army’s southern Blacks, poorly educated thanks to a segregated school system, had been subjected to a far more virulent form of racism and poverty than anything Dad had ever been exposed to. This meant that they were less likely than a relatively privileged northern Negro to be shocked by the army’s systemic racism.
Dad, at a loss as to what to do, reverted to his parents’ teachings, using his logic and intelligence to question and challenge some of his army superiors’ orders. While this thinking may have helped him in civilian life, it most certainly worked against him in the army. Dad was caught between being too educated and not quite educated enough. A university education would have enabled access to the Officer’s Commission School, and graduation from OCS would have put him in a rank well above the Black sergeants who delighted in making privates, particularly privates with attitude, suffer. On the other hand, having no education would have made him seem less threatening to his immediate superiors. Dad understood the advantages of playing down his advanced schooling to his less privileged army peers: “I do not speak of the fact that I am fairly well educated because if I did my comrades would feel as if I were above them for some of them can not read or write… I wrote a letter home for a soldier yesterday.” But his constant striving to better his military rank made him stand out, in the worst way possible, among his more passive southern comrades: “I went to see my Battery Commander today in order to find out what the delay was in sending me before the Board of selecting officers.”
Dad’s early service consisted of basic war training exercises: topping the list was the care and feeding of guns and ammunition of every conceivable sort, and later, marksmanship training. The firearm exercises were followed by endless hours of fitness drills, from calisthenics to marathon march-hikes (all the more onerous due to the hundred-plus pounds of equipment weighing down the backpacks) through the hottest and coldest of weather. If several hours of daily regimental marching, in endlessly changing formations, didn’t sufficiently break the soldiers down, the constant barking intimidation that hounded them, courtesy of the ever-present, ever-critical Negro sergeants, certainly had the desired demoralizing effect. These marches were also designed to prepare the soldiers for field training trips, complete with camouflaged snipers crouched in the darkness. Pow, pow, pow—like deranged bogeymen, these snipers would jump out of the woods to greet an exhausted soldier. The crackling explosion of blanks inches from their faces was known to give even the most resolute of men “loose piles.” And if the snipers didn’t sufficiently discombobulate them, the land mines placed randomly in the ground, charged with varying (but never full) levels of explosives, could easily injure anyone whose boot landed in the wrong place.
At first Dad tried to convince himself and his parents that he could make the transition to selfless soldier. The following letter, written from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in February 1943, was still early in his army career, when he undoubtedly wanted to present a positive spin to his loved ones.
Dear Mom and Dad,
… My days of individualism are over, I am beginning to realize that I am part of a group. Living, eating, sleeping, learning to fight side by side with my companions makes me realize that when I do wrong, the group as well as myself suffers. When I do right and strive to get ahead, the group advances.
But as the novelty of Dad’s new environment wore thin, it became obvious that a private’s life was a life of abuse: the physical labour alone, be it ditch digging, latrine and fence building, or constant cleaning and polishing of everything from army boots to shower rods, rivalled that of prison chain gangs. Sure, a soldier earned money, but what was the good of money when you couldn’t spend it? For one thing, the towns surrounding the various army bases weren’t hospitable to Black soldiers, populated with, according to one of Dad’s letters, “nothing but dirty, illiterate, tobacco chewing white trash with their prejudice. So, you see I would rather not to take a pass … By confining myself to the camp I eliminate the possibility of getting into unnecessary trouble.” Should a Black soldier decide to venture into hostile “white trash” territory, he’d be allowed to leave base only from 5:30 till 11:00 p.m. (Forty-eight-hour furloughs were few and far between.) The closest town was usually at least five miles away, and buses travelling into these towns refused to pick up Black soldiers, while the restaurants and movie theatres would also shut them out.
Hard as it was to witness the full-on prejudice that hovered outside the base, it was the racism inside the segregated Black barracks that most wounded Dad. The army operated on a kind of plantation system that plucked the “best behaved,” less independent-thinking Blacks—Uncle Toms, if you will—out of the throng of privates, and gave them the rank of sergeant—provided they kept the potentially uppity Negro soldiers, privates like my father, “in their place.” Dad’s newly minted army superiors took an instant dislike to what they viewed as a lippy northern Negro, sparing no opportunity to punish him. A 1943 letter to his mother shows the hostility was mutual: “Woe be unto those hypocritic, two-faced rotten Negroes who have tried to block you … Jealous, selfish, backbiting Negroes are a detriment to their race, as well as to society.”
Both inspired and haunted by his father’s officer status (Dan II had been one of over a thousand educated Black men invited to enlist in a military camp in Fort Des Moines, Iowa, where he was trained as an officer shortly before World War I), Dad was determined to earn this honour as well: “My application for OCS [Officer’s Commission School] is going in again, and again, until they finally admit me. They will soon tire of seeing me popping up in their Lily White Faces.” These “lily white faces” were the white officers who decided who’d be admitted into OCS. In Dad’s mind, these officers were the army’s de facto slave masters, the ones who yanked the strings of those “hypocritic, two faced rotten Negro” sergeants. And yet, Dad’s letters suggest that his greatest outpouring of rage and loathing was directed at himself. He acknowledged as much when he promised in a letter to his parents, “I will soldier to my utmost, because the pressure is on me and I must succeed. I am beginning to get that mental drive and inspiration that I had while at Lincoln. I lost it when I came home, due to my constant playing around, but it is coming back.”
Upon realizing that no amount of fake injuries or lunatic impersonations was going to exempt him from service, Dad resolved to make the best of his situation, straining at times to affect a measure of pride. This was, after all, World War II, when a certain status came with being a soldier. If not on the base itself, certainly from the outside looking in, from a civilian’s vantage point (notwithstanding the racist exclusion of Negro soldiers by the local population), he was one of his country’s protectors.
I guess I’m not doing anything that thousands of others are[n’t] doing in their all out sacrifice … I am making out in great style here. I feel as if I can really soldier for the army. My shoes shine so hard that they look like a mirror… There’s one thing that is essential in this man’s army, and that is a sense of humor, without it you are lost… the other night at retreat, the bugler messed up the call something awful… the whole company was laughing. Well it ended up in the captain giving us hell for laughing at retreat, and the bugler was made to practise his call behind closed doors all night.
Dad would soon find out that a sense of humour might offer the odd diversion, but not much more. It seemed that just as he was developing a sense of camaraderie with his fellow soldiers, he’d find himself or one of his new buddies transferred to another base in another state. (Part of the army’s grand scheme was to constantly shuffle around the Black soldiers: taking poorly educated sharecroppers from the south and depositing them in the north, while dumping Blacks from the north into southern camps, all the better to disorient and render them vulnerable.) This left my father with little choice but to turn inward, embracing, for the first time in his life, books and ideas. For a young man formerly known as Party Boy, who’d confessed only the year before in a scribbled note to his father that he’d “not quite found himself yet,” this represented quite a turnaround. After updating his father on the relative merits of scholarly texts running the gamut from E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States to fifteenth-century Persian mathematician and philosopher Omar Khayyám, Dad summarized, “I have found that constant reading of novels, fiction, history and poetry has done a great deal to keep my spirit up. By doing this I hope to never let my interest in further education leave me.”
This new commitment led Dad to rewrite and ace his IQ test, giving him the opportunity to enrol in a number of classes, which led to several teaching jobs: everything from basic health classes to self-defence to marksmanship and munitions training. The army was reinforcing the one hard and fast rule that Dad’s parents had always stressed: without higher education, particularly as a Negro, you are lost. Eager to let his parents know that he had finally come to see the wisdom of their ways, Dad wrote, “I took an exam for officer’s candidate school in artillery and passed. Two white boys and three colored took the exam. Only three passed. I was one … At any rate I am not stopping at anything short of a pair of bars. Lieutenant D.G.H. at 19 is my goal.”
As soul-destroying as the U.S. Army could be, Dad’s sheer effervescence, though sometimes blunted, was never far from the surface. His letters home could seem like notes from a Boy Scout camping excursion. Musing that all things positive in his life were the direct result of his parents’ loving tutelage, he wrote, “Oh yes, I made third highest out of 60 Negroes on the Rifle Range … the Lieutenant asked where I learned to shoot. I took great pride in telling him that my father was an officer in the last war. Taught me all I knew about shooting … Ask Dad if he remembers the time I shot all those ducks in the shooting gallery.” His outpouring of affection could also be generous:
Dear Mom,
… I keep [your] picture in my wallet, beside the dime Dad gave me that he carried in the last war. The dime with your first name and his first name on both sides. Little things like that mean the world to me and give me things to remember, memories that are worth living for.
But the more Dad reached out for the comfort of family memories, the more he was reminded of his father’s prestigious officer ranking in the previous world war. Which would then leave him panicked at the thought of not living up to his father’s achievements. Panic would soon give way to anger at a military system that remained determined to block his every effort to get ahead, and also, increasingly, at himself (a letter to his mom goes so far as to describe his past behaviour as “moody, apprehensive, and evil”).
As stir-craziness got the better of him, Dad abandoned his vow to avoid the local towns and took a five-hour pass to Lawson. Once there, he was reminded why he was better off staying on base, where, at least, his enemies were a known quantity. “We had a minor race riot in the town outside of camp … I really saw southern bigotry, hate, prejudice and ignorance with my own two eyes, plus a little violence. Things are really brewing down here and I expect the lid to be blown off soon. A Negro officer is being forced to relinquish his commission due to friction with The Whites.”
Through the ongoing swirl of white-on-Black antipathy, Dad continued to see becoming an officer as his one chance of rising above the fray, his only shot at redemption for his previous reckless behaviour. But redemption would not come easily. “My [battery] commander is a highly prejudiced, self centered man … He knows that I have qualified and he cannot hold me back much longer. I forced the issue, so soon my break for college or OCS will come.”
Instead the army would turn Dad’s ambitions against him, while methodically draining him, one defeat at a time, of his youthful braggadocio. In June 1943, still awaiting his acceptance for OCS, he informed his mother that “the other day they let 12 Negro boys out of OCS … not giving any reason for the dismissal at all. They were all splendid men. They told me it’s hard to write and tell the folks back home about it.” It’s as though he is preparing her, and himself, for the inevitable. That it would be but a matter of time before he would join the disgraced ranks of “splendid men.”
For most young men, the years aged eighteen to twenty-two bring with them a litany of dramatic changes. It’s hard, really, to think of any other four years that are suffused with so many questions, so much in the way of re-evaluation. Without question, it was my father’s religious views that underwent the most radical change. All evidence suggests that he went into the army a Christian and left the army an atheist. Initially, he kept his growing skepticism at bay. From Fort Sill, Oklahoma, he wrote, in 1943:
I wish to thank you again for the bracing, helping letter that you wrote to me when you mailed the check … those few scripture quotations and your telling me how I must stay close to God, helped me a great deal. Up until that time I had been a mighty discouraged, downhearted, beaten in spirit, young man … If I haven’t found the way, yet…
Your devoted son,
Buddy
But from this point on, Dad’s references to religion, which had been a consistent and positive theme in letters home during his first year of service, all but disappear, to be replaced by statements like these, written in early 1945: “I do not place my trust in anything any longer,” and “these last few days have seen me nearly lose faith in everything that is supposed to be just and fair in the army.”
If the seeds of his religious skepticism were likely planted early on in his army career, his letters home suggest that it wasn’t until he was well into his third year of service that his faith abandoned him completely. He’d finally had his big break. At first it had looked so promising: against what had felt like impossible odds, he found himself accepted into the Army Specialized Training Program (ASP).
Dear Mom,
I valiantly tried for an army program called ASP Army Specialized training program. Your I.Q. must be 115 or over and you must have a high school or college education for all of the phases. [If and when you pass intense questioning from] a stiff board of superior officers, the army temporarily dismisses you from active service and sends you to colleges and universities all over the country… if you have made good grades, you are able to apply immediately for ROCS in Military Intelligence … I tried and tried to get this chance to continue my collegiate training but some white officer in my immediate Battery did not send my request in, nor did he send my I.Q. in which alone qualifies me for the program … without notifying my superior white officers, I went to the Headquarters of my center to see one of the biggest men … I told [him] my aim [of getting into the ASP]. He was surprised that I had gone by unnoticed by my immediate officers, and immediately he put my name on the list to come before the examining board. One week later … I met the board with a salute … After stiff questioning and debate they accepted me. My days of dog life have ceased. I will be leaving to go to a College to be classified.
Dismissed from active service, Dad was transferred to West Virginia where he was enrolled in several college courses the army had offered as options. Given that this was the first time in two years that Dad was interacting with civilians, notably female civilians, it’s impressive that he was able to concentrate at all on his studies. Though thoroughly disgusted with every aspect of army life, Dad understood all too well the cachet of showing up for class in full military uniform. As he polished his army boots each morning in preparation for his grand school entrance, the image of his mother swooning over his father, decked out in full World War I attire, must not have been far from his mind. Within weeks Dad met a fellow student, Jo, and fell in love. In a year they were married. And, like so many unfortunate events that bedevilled my father during his army tenure, after his marriage crashed and burned, less than twenty months later, he resolved to never speak about it again.
I needed a break from reading Dad’s army letters. It felt like I was inhabiting him, cheering on his triumphs and then ducking in anticipation of his defeats. “Goodness, Dad, you’re wearing me out,” I mumbled as Dad’s letters kept coming. Fortunately, his constant ever-judgmental references to his sisters never failed to provide me with some comic relief. To be sure, his fussing was all too familiar.
“Oh yes, by the way, Marge did not get married,” Dad, as town crier, informed his mother, although how he would know more about his sister’s marital status—considering he was locked away on a remote army base in Oklahoma—than his mother left me puzzled. “This makes three times she jumped from boy friend to boy friend. She ought to get wise to herself, and know what she is doing and what she wants.” A few letters later Dad took Margaret to task directly, beseeching her to “make good at home, make the grade, the family is counting on you. Go to college, study, come out the finest social worker ever … I’m sacrificing my future, [so] you don’t have to do it, don’t let me down sis.”
“How on earth did Dad become so bloody condescending, so young?” I wondered out loud. It was easier to dwell on these peccadilloes because they distracted me from the bigger picture: even though I didn’t know how Dad’s big break—being one of a select group of soldiers accepted into the ASP—would pan out, I had that knotted feeling in the pit of my stomach, the sensation we all get when we know that our favourite character in a movie is about to get slammed. Coward that I was, I tossed all of Dad’s letters back into the archive box and hauled it over to my mom’s house. It was my intention that the two of us could talk, on the record, about Dad’s life in the army.
“How long is this interview supposed to take?” Mom asks, guardedly. Mom’s doll-like delicateness catches me by surprise every time I enter her house. (How very weird, that it’s no longer Mom and Dad’s house.) In my mind, I always picture Mom as bigger, a whole lot bigger, than she really is. So it takes me a few long seconds to reconcile my mental image of Mom—that of a hard-edged, independent woman who’ll cuss you out as quickly as she’ll hug you—with this delicately framed, white-haired woman who sweetly kisses me on the cheek and offers me some of her fresh-picked raspberries, even as she steels herself for the Interview from Hell.
Dad’s presence is everywhere, dwarfing everything. As I walk through the living room, my eyes land on the framed photograph of Dad receiving the Order of Canada from Governor General Adrienne Clarkson. Dad received this award in 2001 for his outstanding work in human rights and Canadian Black history. By then Dad’s health was deteriorating far too rapidly for him to travel to Ottawa, so the governor general came to the house for the ceremony. I automatically scan the wall for images of the virile, omnipotent Dad I worshipped as a child. There it is: a perfectly mounted photograph of him, decked out in his imposing World War II U.S. Army uniform. He looks impossibly handsome, with his ramrod-straight posture, serious salute, thin moustache and playful brown eyes. A photo of his own father hangs only inches away, looking eerily similar—just one war, one generation removed.
As I place my tape recorder in front of Mom and put it through its requisite testing, I joke about how foreign it feels for me to cast myself in the role of interviewer. I’ve always been the interviewee, the one who imperiously stares down the reporter, waiting for his first move, pondering which truth, or lie, or combination thereof, to tell. Mom laughs.
“You’ve always been a very good liar, Danny,” Mom says, like she’s giving me a true compliment. I remind her that Dad was an excellent teacher in this regard.
“Touché,” she says. Good, she’s starting to relax. But the interview gets off to a rocky start when I ask Mom whether some of Dad’s anger at his army experiences may have influenced his behaviour as a father.
“I’m not saying your dad wasn’t mean, Danny,” Mom says, frowning in response to my theory. “If you and Larry insist that he was, well, I guess you both can’t be wrong. But I have to say, honestly, I never really noticed that side of him.” With that, Mom shoots me one of those cut-the-psychobabble-crap looks. Then she shuffles within inches of my tape recorder, sees that the cassette is running and the red light is on and asks, “Did I ever tell you kids about the time your father tried to kill a vicious army sergeant?”
“What?!”
Mom gazes at me suspiciously, as though, really, she has told me about this event, it’s just that I, in my typically absent-minded fashion, have forgotten all about it.
“You’ve never mentioned this, Mom. I have a feeling I would’ve remembered.”
Mom stares back at me, still unconvinced. “Your dad didn’t offer up a lot of details.”
“No problem, just tell me what you can remember.”
“All I remember, Danny, is that he crawled onto the roof of a two- or three-storey building and dropped a big boulder on this sergeant’s head.”
“You mean, he hit the bastard?” I realize, too late, that I’ve asked this with too much enthusiasm.
“Oh no, the boulder missed. I think the sergeant had hunched over to light a cigarette and that saved his life.”
“Jesus. Was Dad caught?”
“Of course not. You think we’d be having this conversation if your father had been caught?”
What’s weirder, I wonder: Dad’s alleged murder attempt or Mom’s blasé attitude about the whole thing? I take a letter of Dad’s from the archive box and read it to Mom, explaining that it was addressed to his mother in 1943: “Tell Dad that I have a Top Sarge [who] is a hard, evil Negro. I strictly keep out of his way because he conducts a reign of terror on these Negroes.”
“I’d like to see that letter, Danny.”
“Sure, Mom. But why? You think I’m inventing this?” I’m joking, but Mom isn’t smiling.
“Actually Danny, your father didn’t talk that much about his time in the army.”
I interpret Mom’s comment as a gentle way of telling me that she doesn’t care to talk any more to me about Dad’s army period.
“Imagine,” Mom muses, “all three of you children, writers. What are the chances?”
I have a feeling that, at this moment anyway, Mom would have been a lot happier if we’d all been plumbers.
Back at home, I pick up the letters where I’d left off: right after he’d informed his parents of his acceptance into the ASP. Six months passed before Dad wrote another letter to his family—an unusually long silence.
Dear Family:
When I came home on furlough I was under the complete impression that I would be returned to Engineering School. You were all quite proud of me … though now you are entitled to feel any disappointment that you may in me.
The inevitable had happened: Dad had become one of those “splendid Negro men” faced with the task of informing his family of his shameful fall from grace. That Dad owned up to his failure and his resulting sense of humiliation, with such gut-wrenching honesty, undoubtedly moved his parents to be far more concerned about his plunging mood than his not making the grade.
I and 18 other men had been ordered to return to the field under a special request from my mathematics instructor who said that we had not successfully passed his course and could not be recommended to study further in mathematics. This one subject completely eliminated me from school. I had passed all other subjects … This failure, which is the same as disgrace to me, knowing the embarrassment my family must have gone through, hurt me worse than anything I have ever had to take in my life. It took the pep and spirit out of me and I did not know how to meet it for I’ve never failed completely, nor ever intended to fail in any enterprise I undertook on my own power
Dad still had two more years left to serve in the army. His letters home during this period were largely variations on the same theme: due to his dogged striving for advancement, a sliver of opportunity beckons, a door opens a crack only to be slammed in his face. Dad never did get into officers’ school. Realizing that his chances of army advancement at this point were slim to none, his behaviour started to turn openly defiant. What more did he have to lose? This would have been the time Dad may have entertained fantasies of revenge. And if nothing else, this cryptic letter to his father was enough for me to imagine Dad crouched over the edge of a tall building under cover of night, about to use a sergeant’s head as target practice.
Denver, 1944.
They tried their best to shanghai me … There are many many things I must tell you only in person … The only time that I’ll be able to give you the complete low-down on this incident that occurred is when I see you. (For obvious reasons, I’m not even mailing this letter from Camp because though letters are not opened or censored in the zone of the interior, I don’t put it pass these——s to try it. Jo is mailing it for me from the college. You talk about a tight mouth Negro. My girl really doesn’t know the spot I was in this week.)
Right after reading his son’s letter, Dan II, sensing impending disaster, caught the first train to Denver, where Dad was then posted. Over and over Dan II pleaded with his son to remember where he was—the army—and who he was being commanded by—people who had the power to do whatever they wanted to anyone of inferior rank, without fear of consequences. “You keep rocking the boat like this and you’re going to get killed. If you think you’d be the first soldier in the army to disappear without explanation, you’re mistaken.”
It may well have been the combination of Dan II’s timely counsel and his elite status as a World War I officer that saved Dad from imploding. Rather than someone contemplating murder, Dad comes off, in the letter he wrote immediately following his father’s “prop up” visit, sounding more like an appreciative young son.
… I want you to know that the few hours that I enjoyed spending with you did a great deal to pull me out of a rut that had nearly swallowed me up. I had been struck by so many adversities … Without a shadow of a doubt, I feel that you are as great a DAD as any son could ask for… I think there is a fair chance of my getting out of this thing called Quartermasters [and] into an ROCS in the Army Ground Forces. I will not, however, start on my plans until you notify me as to what you think I should do… I’ll continue to plod under all circumstances.
As Dad “plodded on,” his buddies, “the last of the old ASP men,” were shipped overseas, one step closer to engaging in direct battle with the Nazis. While his family was naturally relieved that their Buddy would be spared the possible fate of Dan II in World War I, or worse, my dad was left with the stigma of being one of the few soldiers held back.
When Dad’s term was finally over, at the age of twenty-two, he transitioned into civilian life a markedly changed person. Entering the army single and ambivalent about his further education, he left the army married and deadly serious about pursuing higher learning. He was also, due to the lowest-rung jobs that were forever meted out to him (his hard-labour punishment, while unimaginably demanding, paled compared to the class disgrace that went along with it), contemptuous of any kind of manual labour. This was a far cry from his days at Lincoln University, when he’d write to his dad about possibly working as a “cabin boy or cook’s aide, for awhile on a ship at sea.” In the place of his former teenaged whimsy was a deliberate young man with, as his December 1945 letter to his dad indicates, “a definite program ahead … My entrance in Columbia, an economical apartment in Jersey, and … I will work labor only as a means to get more money to stay in college and support a wife.”
Dad left the army totally disenchanted with any and all things associated with America. However, if the army planted a knee-jerk cynicism in Dad that would only crystallize over the years, it also gave him what can only be described as a four-year wake-up call providing him with a focus, drive and discipline that he lacked before being drafted. Dad re-entered civilian life in 1945 with the understanding that his ultimate profession would consist of trying to educate the ignorant and in doing so eradicate, to the best of his ability, America’s racial inequities.
A part of Dad, however, would always remain incensed over what he witnessed and experienced during his army service. In later years, Dad’s anger festered beneath his brashly mischievous persona, manifesting itself in unexpected flashes of cruel behaviour: his teasing edgy and dark, his manner of manipulation as effective as it was strategic. Of course these resulting traits were understandable, born out of self-protection. In many respects, it’s a testament to my father’s resilience (not to mention his parents’ unwavering, unconditional love and support) that he survived his four years of service with so few visible scars. More than a few of his Negro army buddies committed suicide—some by direct means, others through prolonged alcohol and drug abuse—once they became civilians.
Dad learned the hard way that to be Black, uneducated and in the army is to be at the bottom of the food chain. You are always at someone else’s mercy. You are never in control. More importantly, Dad understood that the army was a crude microcosm of American society at large, leaving him determined to never again relinquish control to any person, institution or religion. There was only one surefire way to ensure this: whenever possible, he would control everyone else. And yet, the army did give my father one great gift: his life’s calling.