Mudbound (6 page)

But I reckoned wrong. There were plenty of white people over there all right, but they weren’t like the ones back home. Wasn’t no hate in them. In England, where we spent our first
month, some of the folks had never seen a black man before and they were curious more than anything. Once they figured out we were just like everybody else, that’s how they treated us. The gals too. The first time a white gal asked me to dance I about fell out of the box.

“Go on,” whispered my buddy Jimmy, he was from Los Angeles.

“Jimmy,” I said, “you must be plumb out of your mind.”

“If you don’t I will,” he said, so I went on and danced with her. I can’t say I enjoyed it much, not that first time anyway. I was sweating so bad I might as well to been chopping cotton. I hardly even looked at her, I was too busy watching every white guy in the place. Meantime my hand was on her waist and her hand was wrapped around my sweaty neck. I kept my arms as stiff as I could but the dance floor was crowded and her body kept on bumping up against mine.

“What’s the matter,” she asked me after awhile, “don’t you like me?” Her eyes were full of puzzlement. That’s when it hit me: She didn’t care that I was colored. To her I was just a man who was acting like a damn fool. I pulled her close.

“Course I like you,” I said. “I think you just about the prettiest gal I ever laid eyes on.”

We didn’t stay in their country long, but I’ll always be grateful to those English folks for how they welcomed us. First time in my life I ever felt like a man first and a black man second.

In October they finally sent us over to where the fighting was, in France. We crossed the Channel and landed at Omaha Beach. We couldn’t believe the mess we seen there. Sunken
ships, blasted tanks, jeeps, gliders and trucks. No bodies, but we could see them in our heads just the same, sprawled all over the sand. Up till then we’d thought of our country, and ourselves, as unbeatable. On that beach we came face-to-face with the fact that we weren’t, and it hit us all hard.

Normandy stayed with us during the four-hundred-mile trip east to the front. It took us six days to get there, to this little town called Saint-Nicholas-de-Port. We could hear the battle going on a few miles away but they didn’t send us in. We waited there for three more days, edgy as cats. Then one afternoon we got the order to man all guns. A bunch of MPs in jeeps mounted with machine guns rolled up and parked themselves around our tanks. Then a single jeep came screeching up. A three-star general hopped out of it and got up onto the hood of a half-track. When I seen his ivory-handled pistols I knew I was looking at Ole Blood and Guts himself.

“Men,” he said, “you’re the first Negro tankers to ever fight in the American Army. I’d have never asked for you if you weren’t the best. I have nothing but the best in my Army. I don’t give a damn what color you are as long as you go up there and kill those Kraut sonsabitches.”

Gave me a shock when I heard his voice, it was as high-pitched as a woman’s. I reckon that’s why he cussed so much—he didn’t want nobody to take him for a sissy.

“Everybody’s got their eyes on you and is expecting great things from you,” he went on. “Most of all, your race is counting on you. Don’t let them down, and damn you, don’t let me down! They say it’s patriotic to die for your country. Well,
let’s see how many patriots we can make out of those German bastards.”

Course we’d all heard the scuttlebutt about Patton. How he’d hauled off and hit a sick GI at a hospital in Italy. How he was crazy as a coot and hated colored people besides. I don’t care what anybody says, that man was a real soldier, and he took us when nobody else thought we were worth a damn. I’d have gone to hell and back for him, and I think every one of us Panthers felt the same. That’s what we called ourselves: the 761st Black Panther Battalion. Our motto was “Come Out Fighting.” That day at Saint-Nicolas-de-Port they were just words on a flag, but we were about to find out what they meant.

A
TANK CREW
’
S
like a small family. With five of you in there day after day, ain’t no choice but to get close. After awhile you move like five fingers on a hand. A guy says,
Do this
, and before he can even get the words out it’s already done.

We didn’t take baths, wasn’t no time for them and it was too damn cold besides, and I mean to tell you the smell in that tank could get ripe. One time we were in the middle of battle and our cannoneer, a big awkward guy from Oklahoma named Warren Weeks, got the runs. There he was, squatting over his upturned helmet, grunting and firing away at the German Panzers. The air was so foul I almost lost my breakfast.

Sergeant Cleve hollered out, “Goddamn, Weeks! We oughta load you in the gun and fire you at the Jerries, they’d surrender in no time.”

We all about busted our guts laughing. The next day an armor-piercing shell blew most of Warren’s head off. His blood and brains went all over me and the other guys, and all over the white walls. Why the Army decided to make the walls white I could never understand. That day they were red but we kept right on fighting, wearing pieces of Warren, till the sun went down and the firing stopped. I don’t remember what battle that was, it was somewhere in Belgium—Bastogne maybe, or Tillet. I got to where I didn’t know what time it was or what day of the week. There was just the fighting, on and on, the crack of rifles and the
ack ack ack
of machine guns, bazookas firing, shells and mines exploding, men screaming and groaning and dying. And every day knowing you could be next, it could be your blood spattered all over your buddies.

Sometimes the shelling was so ferocious guys from the infantry would beg to get in the tank with us. Sometimes we let them, depending. Once we were parked up on a rise and this white GI with no helmet on came running up to us. Ain’t nothing worse for a foot soldier than losing your helmet in battle.

“Hey, you fellas got room for one more?” he yelled.

Sergeant Cleve yelled back, “Where you from, boy?”

“Baton Rouge, Louisiana!”

We all started hooting and laughing. We knew what that meant.

“Sorry, cracker,” said Sarge, “we full up today.”

“I got some hooch I took off a dead Jerry,” said the soldier. He pulled a nice-sized silver flask out of his jacket and held it up. “This stuff’ll peel the paint off a barn, sure enough. You can have it if you let me in.”

Sarge cocked an eyebrow and looked around at all of us.

“I’m a Baptist, myself,” I said.

“Me, too,” said Sam.

Sarge hollered, “You want us to burn in hell, boy?”

“Course not, sir!”

“Cause you know drinking’s a sin.”

We all had plenty of reasons to hate crackers but Sarge hated them more than all of us put together. Word was he had a sister who was raped by a bunch of white boys in Tuscaloosa, that’s where he was from.

“Please!” begged the soldier. “Just let me in!”

“Get lost, cracker!”

Reckon that soldier died that day. Reckon I should’ve felt bad about it but I didn’t. I was so worn out it was hard to feel much of anything.

I didn’t talk about none of that when I wrote home. Even if the censors would’ve let it through, I didn’t want to fret Mama and Daddy. Instead I told them what snow felt like and how nice the locals were treating us (leaving out a few details about the French girls). I told them about the funny food they had over there and the glittery dress Lena Horne wore when she came and sang to us at the USO. Daddy wrote back with news from home: The skeeters were bad this year. Ruel and Marlon had grown two whole inches. Lilly May sang a solo in church. The mule got into the cockleburs again.

Mississippi felt far, far away.

LAURA

D
ECEMBER
7, 1941, changed everything for all of us. Within a few days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Jamie and both of my brothers had enlisted. Teddy stayed with the Engineers, Pearce joined the Marines and Jamie signed up for pilot training with the Air Corps. He wanted to be an ace, but the Army had other plans for him. They made him a bomber pilot, teaching him to fly the giant B-24s called Liberators. He trained for two years before leaving for England. My brothers were already overseas by then, Teddy in France and Pearce in the Pacific.

I stayed in Memphis, worrying about them all, while Henry traveled around the South building bases and airfields for the Army. He remained a civilian; as a wounded veteran of the Great War he was exempt from the draft, for which I was grateful. I didn’t mind his absences once I got used to them. I soon realized they made me more interesting to him when he was home. Besides, I had Amanda Leigh for company, and then Isabelle in February of ’43. The two of them were as different as they could be. Amanda was Henry’s child: quiet,
serious-minded, self-contained. Isabelle was something else altogether. From the day she was born she wanted to be held all of the time and would start wailing as soon as I laid her in her crib. Her demanding nature exasperated Henry, but for me her sweetness more than made up for it.

I was bewitched by both of them, and by the beauty of ordinary life, which went on despite the war and seemed all the more precious because of it. When I wasn’t changing diapers and weeding my victory garden, I was rolling bandages and sewing for the Red Cross. My sisters, cousins and I organized drives for scrap metal and for silk and nylon stockings, which the Army turned into powder bags. It was a frightening and sorrowful time, but it was also exhilarating. For the first time in our lives, we had a purpose greater than ourselves.

Our family was luckier than many. I lost two cousins and an uncle, but my brothers survived. Pearce was wounded in the thigh and sent home before the fighting turned savage in the Pacific, and Teddy returned safe and sound in the fall of ’45. Jamie lost a finger to frostbite but was otherwise unharmed. He didn’t come home after he was discharged, but stayed in Europe—to travel, he said, and see the place from the ground for a change. This baffled Henry, who was convinced there was something wrong with him, something he wasn’t telling us about. Jamie’s letters were breezy and carefree, full of witty descriptions of the places he’d seen and the people he’d met. Henry thought they had a forced quality, but I didn’t see it. I thought it was natural Jamie would want to enjoy his freedom after four years of being told where to go and what to do.

Those months after the war were jubilant ones for us and for the whole country. We’d pulled together and been victorious. Our men were home, and we had sugar, coffee and gasoline again. Henry was spending more time in Memphis, and I was hoping to get pregnant. I was thirty-seven; I wanted to give him a son while I still could.

I never saw the axe blow coming. The downstroke came that Christmas. As we usually did, we spent Christmas Eve with my people in Memphis, then drove down to Greenville the next morning. Eboline and her husband, Virgil, hosted a grand family dinner every year in their fancy house on Washington Street. How I hated those trips! Eboline never failed to make me feel dull and unfashionable, or her children to make mine cry. This year would be even worse than usual, because Thalia and her family were driving down from Virginia. The two sisters together were Regan and Goneril to my hapless Cordelia.

When we pulled up at Eboline’s, Henry’s father came and met us at the car. Pappy had been living with Eboline since Mother McAllan died in the fall of ’43. One look at his grim face and we knew something was wrong.

“Well,” he said to Henry by way of greeting, “that stuck-up husband of your sister’s has gone and killed himself.”

“Good God,” Henry said. “When?”

“Sometime last night, after we’d all gone to bed. Eboline found the body a little while ago.”

“Where?”

“In the attic. He hanged himself,” Pappy said. “Merry Christmas.”

“Did he leave a note saying why?” I asked.

Pappy pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. The ink had run where someone’s tears had fallen on it. It was addressed to “My darling wife.” In a quavering hand, Virgil confessed to Eboline that he’d lost the bulk of their money in a confidence scheme involving a Bolivian silver mine and the rest on a horse named Barclay’s Bravado. He said he was ending his life because he couldn’t bear the thought of telling her. (Later, when I was better acquainted with my father-in-law, I would wonder if what Virgil really couldn’t bear was the thought of spending one more night under the same roof as Pappy.)

Eboline wouldn’t leave her bed, even to soothe her children. That job fell to me, along with most of the cooking for a house full of people; Henry had kept the maid on for the time being, but he’d had to let the gardener and cook go. I did what I could. As much as I disliked Eboline, I couldn’t help feeling terribly sorry for her.

After the funeral, the girls and I drove home to Memphis while Henry stayed on to help his sister sort out her affairs. He would just be a few days, he said. But a few days turned into a week, then two. The situation was complicated, he told me on the phone. He needed more time to settle things.

He took the train home in mid-January. He was cheerful, almost ebullient, and unusually passionate that night in our bed. Afterward he threaded his fingers through mine and cleared his throat.

“Honey, by the way,” he said.

I braced myself. That particular phrase, coming out of Henry’s mouth, could lead to anything at all, I never knew what:
Honey, by the way, we’re out of mustard, could you pick some up at the store? Honey, by the way, I had a car accident this morning.

Or in this case, “Honey, by the way, I bought a farm in Mississippi. We’ll be moving there in two weeks.”

The farm, he went on to tell me, was located forty miles from Greenville, near a little town I’d never heard of called Marietta. We’d live in town, in a house he’d rented for us there, and he’d drive to the farm every day to work.

“Is this because of Eboline?” I asked, when I could speak calmly.

“Partly,” he said, giving my hand a squeeze. “Virgil’s estate is a mess. It’ll take months to untangle, and I need to be close by.” I must have given him a dubious look. “Eboline and the children are all alone now,” he said, his voice rising a little. “It’s my duty to help them.”