Gloryland (16 page)

And that started the Tampa Riot, which raged all through the night of June 6, 1898. When some colored soldiers heard about the shooting, they went crazy and busted up some white-only saloons. I was stationed in an encampment just outside town, and the commanding officer had forbidden us to leave under any circumstances. There were a few officers from white regiments coming into the camp, enough to give us news of what was happening. Apparently,
the blood of colored people didn’t stop flowing through the streets till sunup.

And that’s about the time, or shortly thereafter, when the Florida Blockade began. At least that’s what I call the anger that clouds my sight every time I remember that night.

You see, I was hoping to say something bout colored men fighting in Cuba, bout how the Tenth Cavalry fought at Las Guasimas, or the Twenty-fifth Infantry at El Caney, or the Twenty-fourth Infantry, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries, and Roosevelt’s Rough Riders all charging up San Juan Hill. That’s what I was hoping, but the blockade won’t let me get there.

I got so much heat in me that I can’t see past Florida at all. Cuba just won’t come into view no matter how I strain my eyes. And the problem ain’t my vision, it’s that my anger’s so big I can’t see to the other side. It’s like bad weather filling up sky with white clouds and black lightning, filling you up till you choke and burn.

If Anger is a place to live in, then I think 1898 is the year I moved all the way there. But when you’re a good citizen of Anger, you’re living alone, and there ain’t no church, no God to hear you raging, and no family near enough to get singed by your heat, like I used to get burned sitting beside Grandma Sara.

I’m not living in Anger full-time anymore, but I’m still so mad bout what happened in Florida that I can’t feel good bout what happened in Cuba. I just can’t get there cause of that blockade in my heart. And it’s a shame, cause good men died in Cuba. They fought bravely, even gallantly, no matter what Colonel Roosevelt said later. Roosevelt was wrong to say what he said, and maybe he apologized, but it wasn’t good enough.

Colored soldiers running from a fight, he’d said. Colored soldiers who weren’t no good unless white officers were leading them. Yeah, he should’ve been sorry!

Like those white boys who started that riot in Tampa. After the streets “ran red with Negro blood,” like a newspaper said, those
white soldiers from Ohio could go to any restaurant they wanted, cause you work up an appetite pulling a trigger, or maybe they went to get something cool to drink cause they worked up such a thirst. But no matter where they chose to go, they would’ve been served like gentlemen, while a colored soldier could only hope to get served round the back, if at all. Do you think those white boys ever said “I’m sorry” for what they done?

So that’s why I can’t get to Cuba. I want to, believe me. I need to get to Cuba. I want to talk bout the heights of San Juan, bout gallantry under fire. It would be a helluva lot easier to talk bout war and grown men dying than bout some child who was used for target practice in Tampa.

But the blockade’s in my way, and until it clears, I won’t ever be able to see past Florida.

I
finally got over Tampa, got past the blockade, and saw what was on the other side.

The Pacific Ocean. The war with Spain ended just a couple months after it started. America won, so on a piece of paper called the Treaty of Paris, we got what had been Spanish property, including the Philippine Islands. The problem was that no one bothered asking the Filipinos how they felt about the deal.

They didn’t like it. Which is how Troop K and the rest of the Third Squadron, Ninth U.S. Cavalry, ended up on transport ships to the Philippine Islands, by way of San Francisco. We’d received orders to quell the revolt. I didn’t quite understand what
quell
meant till a corporal of mine, who was from Atlanta and had more schooling than me, said it basically meant the same thing as
suppress
.

Well, I knew that word front and back. After that, we all got drunk together, Corporal Bingham, that word, and me. And when it came to me that we’d be quelling people who’d been fighting the Spanish for their freedom, I felt like having another drink.

Freedom. There it was again. That word. And once again I felt like I was on the wrong side of it. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t get my bearings, couldn’t tell which way was north or south. Besides, I was out there in the ocean, and being in that big water without a compass was a bit like being on a battlefield when guns are blazing round you, and people are dying round you, and there’s so much commotion you’re not certain where the enemy is.

Bingham and I were afraid that
where
was about to be replaced by
who
, and that’s what led to the whiskey. It’s hard to explain the
feeling of going to war. You don’t completely know what you’re getting into, or if you can get out of it alive. Over that bottle of whiskey, Bingham told me he’d had the same feeling when he got married.

“No sir,” he said, when I asked him about it. “I didn’t know at all what I was getting into when I got hitched, but so far so good. Maybe cause Helen knows I’m the one with the revolver.”

I laughed, and he looked at me, smiled back.

“You’re a soldier,” he said, “you know as well as me that in war, it’s the man holdin the gun who gets to sort things out.”

“But Bingham,” I argued, still laughing, “in a war every soldier’s got a gun!”

“That’s right!” he agreed, his eyes bright, “and that’s why a cavalryman’s got the edge over a woman in a marriage.”

Once we landed in the harbor in Luzon, we figured the main enemy might be the climate. Manila was steam and a fiery sun, like a bath of mist, but no water you could drink except what was on your skin, and your clothes were never dry. Inside you were a forest that was underwater, and you were breathing rain, you were breathing clouds, and I felt suffocated. I could never get a breath without feeling like I was drowning.

The people were colored but not South Carolina colored or Mississippi colored, but Philippine colored, and they talked Philippine talk and wore clothes that could handle clouds and had faces that didn’t mind water flowing over them. They were sad faces and smiling faces at the same time, and even though they were strangers I felt I knew them, because they were colored. I never felt more like a stranger than when I was in those green mountains trying to find something cool enough to breathe without getting killed. Those Filipinos were fighting hard for their freedom, and I was fighting to take it from them . . . me, Elijah Yancy, who didn’t know what freedom tasted or looked or smelled like, but could take it out of the hands of a child.

And I had no choice cause I had enlisted. I had made my mark, signed my name on that piece of paper to get a job, a profession, a pension. A man taking names took mine, and before I knew it I was
killing people who could’ve been my family, but I didn’t have any choice cause I didn’t want to be a sharecropper.

You understand what I’m saying? I got sent to those islands, and nobody asked me how I felt about it, but it didn’t matter what I felt cause I was just supposed to say “Yes sir!” and do what I was told. So the ship took me there, and the islands took me once I was there, and once I saw how beautiful the people were and what they were doing, I knew I had made a mistake. But I couldn’t get out of the uniform.

It had me and it was tight, and if I took it off I would be naked and alone, so I kept it on and kept killing people, following orders that said kill the Insurrectos. And then when the Insurrectos were either dead or gone, things slowed down to confusion cause then I could really look round, see what I had done and who I had done it to. I didn’t like things being that slow, I didn’t like that I could focus clearly on what was before me and behind me, and it got to a point where I stopped looking over my shoulder cause it hurt too much.

My hands were scalded from the heat of my Krag firing, hotter than the sun in my hands, but no hotter than what was in my heart, what was in my throat. And I couldn’t say nothing, all I could do was follow orders and give orders and hope at the end that I wasn’t to blame, hope that something good happened at the end. I couldn’t see how, though, cause there was so much hate heating up a place that was already plenty hot. I’d come all the way across an ocean just to find more hate, mostly. It was hard to see these people fighting for freedom, and then see how they was treated by so many American soldiers, white soldiers, who treated them no different than colored folks back home, and that’s what started the war between us.

I can’t forget that white sergeant in Manila, his face the color of spoilt cream and his smile with no heat in it, the way he looked at me standing on a street corner, looked me over like I was meat hanging from a hook and he was wondering if I was fresh or rotten, good enough to eat or something to bury quick.

“What they call you, boy?” he asked, and his voice was a knife sticking in and turning.

“My men call me
sir
,” I said back to him, “if you want to know, Sergeant.” Cause he was a sergeant just like me, we were the same rank except he was white and I was colored, and he wanted me to know the difference, wanted me to feel it deep. He didn’t have to try so hard.

“Well,
Sergeant
,” he said, like he was spitting out something that tasted awful. Then he stopped and looked round at all the Filipino people that was passing by us in the street, sliding their eyes over us so we wouldn’t notice them. He looked at them the same way he looked at me. Then he started talking again, but not really to me, cause he didn’t really see me no better than my shadow on the ground.

“I’m from Minnesota, boy, and we got plenty of niggers round there, but I ain’t seen niggers like these before. Sure, the women are all right after a while, but they still stink like niggers, they feel the same, and I was wondering when I saw you, what you felt bout them, considering you a nigger too and all. And, well,” he paused again, “I consider myself a fair man, so I figure you got an opinion bout that, so I ask you, boy, what do you think of these niggers round here?”

Talk about smell, I hated his smell and his arrogance and his hate most of all, but I didn’t hate him cause he was sick, my mama would have said, and people who are sick need help, not curses.

I did want to curse him right there for all to hear, but all I said was, “Well, Sergeant, I been here several months now, and I’ve seen many interesting things and people who are even more interesting, but in all that time I ain’t seen any niggers. Now, seems like you seein something that ain’t there, so I’d be careful of drinkin any more of what you been drinkin, cause it’s makin you see what ain’t there and not see what is, which ain’t healthy for a soldier.”

He took a step back from me as if I had just jumped up out of the ground, like a dead man who decided to speak up and say things he could never say when he was alive.

“Nigger,” he snarled, “if we was back home, you’d be dead now.”

“Sergeant,” I replied, “maybe I’m already dead and this is heaven, and these are all angels round us, and you got off the train at the
wrong stop cause you weren’t meant to be here. Maybe none of us was meant to be here, but we got to make the most of it cause we’re supposed to be in hell, but somehow we got up to heaven and it’s only a matter of time before we’re found out. But if you keep raisin your voice, then we’ll be found out, so I’d whisper if I was you. If you ain’t careful, both of us is goin to end up in hell.”

He looked confused by all that, which is what I wanted. Sometimes talking crazy makes more sense than being reasonable. Plenty of colored people been killed in South Carolina trying to be reasonable with people who just wanted them dead. If you have to talk to crazy people, and you act crazier, maybe you can walk away while they’re trying to understand what wasn’t meant to be understood.