All the Days and Nights (38 page)

Belleville was so protected by the surrounding hills that the shells from the enemy guns at Metz almost never reached it. Lieutenant Dyer and another lieutenant were billeted in the ancient, dilapidated house of an elderly French couple. The officers’ second-floor room had one small window. On the walls and rafters were a few traces of whitewash. There was a fireplace and two immense wardrobes. Over their heads was a loft full of straw, in which rats, mice, and birds nested. Sometimes their frisking sent chaff down on the faces of the two men. The beds were good. Lying in his, Lieutenant Dyer listened to the sound of the German planes overhead and tried to gauge, by the whine of a falling shell, whether the explosion would be a safe distance away.

He set up his infirmary in a small electrical plant. Because of the constant cold and rainy weather, there was a great deal of sickness among the colored troops. (Not once does he speak of what in America was called “the Spanish flu,” but it was that, undoubtedly, that the men in his company were coming down with.)

Companies A, D, E, F, and G and their artillery, in training in the South of France since July, arrived in Belleville. (“Major Howard, my commanding officer from whom I had been separated about four months, called to see me … and complimented me on my good work, saying he had seen the Division Surgeon and not one complaint was made against me. During the whole month of October we labored on, hearing much talk of peace and were very anxious for the final drive, which would end forever Autocracy and give Democracy the right to reign. On the morning of November 8th, however, while we were in the midst of our activities, a terrible thing occurred at Belleville.… A colored boy who had been convicted of rape in August was hanged or lynched in an open field not far from my infirmary. The execution was a military order, but so openly and poorly carried out that it was rightly termed a lynching.”)

The next day, the drive against Metz began, and two days later, while
tremendous barrages were being laid down by the artillery in support of the infantry’s advances, the news reached them that Germany had signed an armistice. As everywhere else in the Western world, bells rang, whistles blew, people shouted for joy.

On December 6th, he and another officer climbed into a truck and after a two-hour ride through no-man’s-land arrived in Metz. He found it untouched by the fighting and the most beautiful city he had seen in France. The buildings were modern; the streets were wide and well paved and lighted with gas or electricity; there were streetcars riding up and down. But the people were cold and unfriendly to them, and spoke German mostly, and it was clear from the way a pack of children followed them in the street that they had never seen a Negro before.

On the night of December 15th, he was awakened by the orderly boy. In a heavy fog, a passenger train from Metz had plowed into a troop train full of happy French soldiers returning home from the front. It was a dreadful sight. The cars were telescoped and splintered, and the bodies of the dead and dying were pinned under the wreckage. The rest of the night he dressed wounds and put splints on broken arms and legs.

Three days later, the 317th began to leave Belleville. Now on foot, now in trucks or trains, they moved westward toward their port of embarkation. Sometimes he slept on straw, in dirty makeshift buildings that had been occupied by other soldiers before them and were infested with lice. For two days and nights he rode in a crowded railway coach with the rain dripping down on him from a leak in the ceiling. On Christmas Eve, in the ancient village of Domfront, in Normandy, the medical unit stood about in the rain and snow until 3 a.m., waiting to be billeted by a captain who, it turned out, had forgotten about them. Shivering in the cold, he remembered the Biblical text:
Foxes have holes and the fowls of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head
.

The people of Domfront were extremely hospitable, and the colored troops reciprocated by being on their best behavior. He was kept busy inspecting them daily for vermin and acute infections, but he found time to visit the places of historical interest and had his picture taken at the foot of the castle wall. Then he himself came down with influenza and had to be looked after by the men of his medical corps.

Late in January, his unit was ordered to proceed to the delousing station at Le Mans. The weather was cold, and there was a light snow on the ground. They reached Le Mans at eleven o’clock at night, after a twelve-hour ride. When he climbed down out of the truck, he had difficulty
walking. He took off his boots and discovered that his feet were frozen. (“For a week thereafter, my feet were so swollen and blistered that I was unable to wear a shoe or leave my quarters.”) During the two weeks he spent at the delousing camp he ran into several boys from Springfield that he knew. They had seen hard service with the 8th Illinois Infantry and showed it.

The unit made its final train journey from Le Mans to Brest, where thousands of soldiers were now crowded into the area around the port. The barracks were long wooden shacks with a hall running through the middle and small rooms opening off it. The only heat came from two stoves, one at either end of the hall. (“The weather was extremely damp and chilly at Brest, the raw wind off the ocean penetrating to the marrow.”) There was more sickness.

On the morning of February 22nd, the 317th marched to the port. They had been informed by a bulletin from headquarters that if there was any disorder in the ranks they would be sent back to camp and detained indefinitely. Their packs uniformly rolled, their guns and shoes polished, they moved in utter silence like a funeral procession. The
Aquitania
rode at anchor in the harbor, and they were loaded onto small barges and ferried out to it. Lieutenant Dyer’s cabin had mahogany fittings and a private bathroom. There were taps for fresh water and salt water, and the soap did not smell of disinfectant. While he was in the tub soaking, the room began to rock, and he realized that they had put out to sea. There is more, but why not leave him there, as lighthearted as he was probably ever going to be.

O
F
Dr. Dyer’s roughly forty years of medical practice in Kansas City there is no record that I know of. The pattern of his days must have been regular and consistent. I picture him with a stethoscope in the pocket of his white coat and a covey of interns crowding around him.

In 1946, Hugh Davis, who was then living in California and an architect, came with his wife to Lincoln for a family visit. While he was there, he got Dr. Dyer’s address and wrote to him to say that they would be going through Kansas City with a stopover of several hours and would like to see him. The answer was an invitation to dinner. There had been no communication between them for a good many years. The walls of the Dyers’ Kansas City apartment were covered with Bessie Dyer’s paintings, which the Davises liked very much. She was self-taught, with the help of
a book that she got from the public library. They all sat down to a full Thanksgiving dinner, though actually Thanksgiving was about ten days away. And the friendship simply picked up where it had left off.

Two years later, when the Dyers went out to California, they were entertained at Hugh and Esther Davis’s house in Palo Alto, along with a medical acquaintance the Dyers were staying with. My younger brother was also invited. He had just come out of the Army after a tour of duty in Germany, and was enrolled in law school at Stanford. He remembers Dr. Dyer as soft-spoken and very friendly, if a trifle guarded. He seemed to want, and need, to talk about the situation of educated Negroes in America — how they are not always comfortable with members of their own race, with whom they often have little or nothing in common, and are not accepted by white people whose tastes and interests they share. He was neither accusing nor bitter about this, my brother said. My brother mentioned the fact that Dr. Dyer’s mother had helped take care of him when he was a baby, and Dr. Dyer was pleased that my brother remembered her. Three or four times he interrupted the conversation to say “I never expected to sit down to dinner with a grandson of Judge Blinn.”

Hugh Davis’s widow let me see a few of Dr. Dyer’s letters to him written between 1955 and 1957. They are about politics (he was an ardent Republican), the hydrogen bomb, various international crises, a projected high-school reunion that never took place, his wife’s delicate health, and — as one would expect of any regular correspondence — the weather. They are signed “Your friend, Billie Dyer.” In each letter there is some mention of his professional activity — never more than a sentence, as a rule; taken together they give a very good picture of a man working himself to death.

In January 1956, at which time he was seventy years old, he wrote, “I suppose I should apologize for not having written you sooner but believe it or not, I am now working harder and with longer hours than ever before. Silly, you say, well I quite agree but the occasion is this. In the last four months I have been put on the staffs of three of the major hospitals in our city. I thought at first it was an honor but with the increase in activities which such appointments entail, my work has increased twofold. Since it is the first time that one of my race has had such appointments, I have been working diligently to make good, thereby keeping those doors open.” He was still acting as a surgeon for the Santa Fe Railroad, and also for the Kansas City, Kansas, police department.

Three months later he wrote, “Since I have taken on new hospital
assignments I have been working much too hard. I was in Chicago this week three days attending the Convention of American Association of Railway Surgeons and derived great benefit from the lectures and demonstrations on recent advances in medicine and surgery.”

In June he spent a couple of weeks in the wilds of Minnesota fishing and had a glorious time, though the fishing was poor. In August he wrote, “I am still working as hard as ever altho my physical resistance is not what it used to be & I find I must resort to more frequent short periods of rest.”

The letter he wrote in November is largely about the suppression of the Hungarian uprising: “My heart goes out to those people. I was in France in the First World War & I saw refugees going down the roads with a little cart pulled by a donkey & all of their earthly possessions piled high on it. They had been driven from their homes by the advancing German Armies & it was a pitiful sight to behold.” He also mentions the fact that the vision in his right eye is somewhat impaired because of a small cataract, and adds, “I am still working at a tremendous pace but realize that I must soon slow down.”

In March of the following year he wrote, “I hardly have time to breathe. Indeed I know that at my age I should not be trying such a pace but having broken thru a barrier which was denied me so many years …”

In July he wrote, “I too am having my troubles with a nervous dermatitis which all of the skin specialists tell me is due to overwork.… I am planning on spending a couple of weeks on the lakes in northern Minnesota for I am very tired and need a rest.”

And in August: “I will be 71 years old the 29th of this month and am in fairly good health for an old man of my years. I therefore thank the good Lord for His blessings.… I thought I would get out to California this summer but I had to buy a new car, so will have to defer my visit another year.… I agree with you that Ike has been a little wishy washy since he has been in the White House. It seems that he speaks softly but does not carry the big stick like Teddy Roosevelt once did. Hugh I shall never forget the political rallies and torchlight processions they had in Lincoln when we were boys. We don’t see anything like that any more, and when the circuses came to town with their big parades. How I pity the generations of kids today, who are denied such thrills. Remember the old swimming hole in Kickapoo Creek where we used to swim naked and have so much fun. Hugh those were the days.”

In January there was a notice in the Lincoln
Evening Courier
: “Dr.
William Dyer, a native of Lincoln, was found dead in his car after an automobile accident at Kansas City, Kan., Tuesday morning. He apparently suffered a heart attack while driving.”

T
HERE
have been at least three histories of Logan County. The first was published in 1878 by a firm that went through the state doing one county after another. It has portrait engravings and brief biographies of the leading citizens, for which they must have paid something. The style is a little like First and Second Chronicles: “Michael and Abram Mann, John Jessee and Thomas Sr., Lucas and Samuel Myers were from Ohio and are now in their graves.” Many natural wonders that the early settlers remembered found their way into this book — prairie fires so numerous that at night they lighted up the whole circuit of the horizon. And mirages. Also extreme hardships — the ague, caused by hunting their horses in the wet grass, and a drop in the temperature so great and so sudden, on a rainy December afternoon in 1836, that men on horseback were frozen to the saddle. And primitive artifacts, such as a door with wooden hinges, a wooden lock, and a buckskin drawstring.

Another history, published in 1911, was the work of a local man and is overburdened with statistics. The most recent is a large book — nine by twelve — heavy to hold in the hand and bound in red Leatherette. The likeness of Abraham Lincoln is on the cover, embossed in gold, as if somewhere in the afterlife his tall shade had encountered King Midas. There are hundreds of photographs of people I don’t know and never heard of, which is not to be wondered at since we moved away from Lincoln in 1923, when I was fourteen years old.

Someone who had never lived there might conclude from this book that the town had no Negroes now or ever. Except for the group pictures of the Lincoln College athletic teams, in which here and there a dark face appears among the lighter ones, there are no photographs of black men and women. And though there are many pictures of white churches of one denomination or another, there is no picture of the African Methodist Episcopal Church — only a column of text, in which the buildings it occupied and the ministers who served it are listed. And these sentences: “Mr. Arian [surely Aaron misremembered?] Dyer and wife Harriet moved here from Springfield, Illinois, in 1874.… The sinners in Lincoln found the hope in Christ and joined the church. Among them were Alfred Dyer and wife Laura.…”