“NOT THIS DAY, NO SIR.”
As Ozzie waited for Big Jim to send him and the other Harlem Hellfighters up the Canyon of Champions, he kept whispering that vow of resistance at the Irish cop who was glaring vinegar at him from across the barricaded street. The morning was so bitterly cold that he figured not many would show up to see them returned home anyway. Behind him, he could hear the men in the regimental band cleaning their spit valves and blowing the stale out of their horns. He had the urge to rush back there and wish the tune boys good luck, but that cop looked downright pugilistic. Apparently the fuming paddy hadn’t been given an adequate explanation for why the governor would allow three thousand uniformed Negroes armed with rifles to march past the department stores and homes of upstanding white folk.
Word back in France was that the Army brass had sent orders to the military police to get rough with the uppity Negroes and put them back in their place before they got home. The MPs had been ordered not to salute black officers, and some of the men had gotten the Jim Crow treatment at the train station in Brest. But when the white goons had tried to make them wait to go last on the gangway to the ship, Big Jim would have none of it. On their last day in France, the lieutenant had loomed over the white officer in charge, greeting him with a smile that wasn’t a smile at all, but a warning that the regiment had one more battle left in it if required.
Not this day, no sir.
That’s what Big Jim had told the troublemaking cracker.
The 369th had been the only regiment in the AEF not to get a sendoff parade before the war. Denied entry into the Forty-Second Division, they’d been told that black was not one of the colors of the Rainbow. To lift their spirits, Colonel Hayward had promised them a parade on their return home, even if they had to fight their way up Fifth Avenue. They had served the longest of any American unit and were the first to reach the Rhine. Throughout their ordeal, they had never given up an inch of ground. Hadn’t lost a man captured, either. First into the trenches, first back home.
Nobody, not even the city’s finest in blue, was going to deny them their due today.
There it was, Big Jim’s whistle. And off they went, marching the seven miles up the most famous boulevard in the world, their hobnailed boots throwing off sparks and the glints from their bayonets calling down the shining angels to accompany them.
Moving in lockstep, Ozzie turned a conquering grin over his shoulder and shouted at the surly Irish cop still eyeing him, “Not this day! No, sir!”
Set in the French phalanx style, with sixteen men abreast and twelve deep, the regiment glided toward a pavilion of dignitaries just beyond Fifty-Ninth Street. Colonel Hayward, still favoring the broken leg that he had suffered in the Meuse-Argonne, limped ahead of them in the van. The standard-bearer at his side waved the blue regimental banner decorated with the Croix de Guerre. Next came Henry Johnson, who rode alone in an open touring car, an honor granted because he had won the French Croix de Guerre. Behind them came a fleet of ambulances carrying two hundred wounded Hellfighters.
The regiment turned north at Twenty-Fifth Street, and Ozzie teared up on seeing the manifestation of a glorious miracle: Hundreds of thousands jammed both sides of the avenue as far as the eye could see. Black folk in the hundreds—some from the San Juan Hill District, others who had splurged on taxis from Harlem—ran alongside the motorcade to shout at their heroes. Here above these sidewalks where he had danced and played for coins as a boy, every balcony and window shimmered with the Stars and Strips. Negroes stood next to whites, and mothers held up their babies and broke through the barricades to kiss the men. Some women wore the black armbands with gold stars given to the relatives of those fifteen-hundred men who would remain forever underground in France.
He couldn’t help but think back about how it all started with a ragtag militia practicing with broomsticks on their shoulders in the park. He stole another glance behind him. Big Jim, still coughing and weak from the pneumonia, was strutting and cutting the air with his drum major’s mace.
A black lady tossed a bouquet of lilies into the lead car and swooned. “Oh, you wicked Henry Johnson! Oh, you handsome Black Death!”
“Looks like a funeral, Henry!” shouted a black businessman.
Grinning, Johnson stood in the car and pointed at his old friends. “Funeral for them Germans, Burton! Sure is a funeral for the Boche, all right!”
Ozzie thought nothing could heighten the delirium, but as they reached the Arch of Victory, Big Jim and his ninety tune boys broke into a rendition of the Le Régiment de Sambre et Meuse, the anthem that had launched millions of poilus into battle. The Boss was sending a message to these white folks in the richest part of the city: The French had welcomed them to their sides when the white American doughboys had refused to fight with them. Showered by wrapped candies and packs of cigarettes, Ozzie felt a lift in his step as the saxophones behind him put some hot sauce on the gumbo and the thirty percussion boys kicked in with the drums captured from the Germans in Alsace.
For another two hours, it was all a blur of cheers and blared notes and kisses and speeches. And then came a change in the air: collards were cooking in some kitchen somewhere up ahead. The band broke into Here Comes My Daddy Now, and Ozzie, having lost all track of time and place in the haze of memories and aged faces, looked up at the sign for the next cross street.
One-Hundred-and-Tenth.… They had reached the outskirts of Harlem.
A whistle blew, and the parade jolted to a stop. Big Jim walked up from his position at the rear of the procession and nodded to Colonel Hayward, who returned the gesture. As the Boss came towering over Ozzie, the crowds along the street, almost all black now, fell silent, wondering why the festivities had come to a halt.
“You don’t look properly armed, Private Taylor.”
Ozzie stole at glance down at the bolt of his rifle and tried to figure out what component he had failed to clean this time. “Sorry, sir.”
“Private Hazard!” Big Jim shouted over his shoulder. “Step out.”
Ben Hazard made a crisp right turn from the phalanx and came marching up to Big Jim.
“Trade arms with Taylor here.”
Hazard snapped his weapon right front. He lowered it slowly to the asphalt, unzipped the canvas case it was stored in—and pulled out an oboe.
Big Jim circled around Ozzie. “Did you leave your weapon in France?”
Ozzie was stunned. The Boss had remembered the oboe he abandoned before they hit the trenches with the Frogs. That scary night, he’d finally come to accept that the instrument was useless to him, miserable a player as he was. Besides, he was convinced there was no way it was going to survive all that mud and the fighting. Now, as he took the oboe from Private Hazard and examined it, he saw that the bore had been oiled and kept clean as a whistle. Somebody had taken care of it like a baby all these many months.
“Article Fifteen-Seven of the Army code of conduct!” Big Jim shouted. “Any soldier who leaves his gear unattended will be subject to reprimand! Am I right, Colonel Hayward?”
“Right as always, Lieutenant Europe. Carry on.”
Ozzie was about to soil his pants at being called out in front of all these people. Then a thought came to him: If he was being mustered out, what the hell could the Army do to him now?
“You are now transferred to a unit more fitting to your level of competence.”
Ozzie’s voice cracked with shame. “Sir?”
There was a twinkle in Big Jim’s eye. “To the Three Hundredth and Sixty-Ninth Regimental Band.”
Ozzie blinked fast, not sure if he had heard correctly.
The men let out a deafening cheer as Big Jim took Ozzie’s rifle and thrust the oboe into his hands instead. “Get back there with the woodwinds, Taylor. And if I hear one false note out of you, I’m going make you swim back to France.”
Ozzie grinned from ear to ear. His dream had finally come true. He was now an official member of the most famous military band in the world. Protecting the oboe, he hurried off before the Boss could change his mind and, winking at Noble Sissle, squeezed in next to the clarinets.
Big Jim swept his famous wide glare across the crowds, until he found a little girl waving a flag at him. He strode up to the sidewalk, knelt down to her level, and asked her with solemn concern, “Hey, honey child, who’s been here since I’ve been gone?”
On both sides of the street, the crowds hushed to hear the girl’s answer.
She kissed Big Jim on the cheek and shouted, “A great big man with a derby on!”
Doffing his helmet, Big Jim arose from his knees and slammed his marching mace against the street like a black Zeus striking a thunderbolt to the earth. With that signal, the soldiers of the 369th changed formations, spreading out into wider lines so that their kinfolk could more easily see their faces. Cued to their grand moment, Ozzie and the band cut loose with the old Southern folk song, Who’s Been Here Since I’ve Been Gone?
Unable to hold back their emotions any longer, thousands of family members and loved ones poured past the cops and mobbed their returned sons and husbands in the street. Ozzie and his uniformed buddies eased their military discipline and, with sweethearts and mommas on their arms, put the pepper back into the grinder as they swaggered singing and dancing toward the armory, where they would feast and dance the night away.
Home at last were the Hellfighters of Harlem, those great big men with the steel derbies on.