Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (10 page)

“Okay that’s enough of that. You’re not that good.” He turned to the others. “I really thought we were gonna have us a treat, didn’t you?” They all nodded and acted disappointed. “Well, guess we can’t be mad ‘cause you don’t dance good. Anyway we gotta get back to your education.”

I could feel the paint tightening on my skin.

“Now, we figure you’ve got the idea you’re the same as white ‘cause you’re in a uniform like us and ‘cause you dance at the shows and you go in and sit down with white men and because you think you got manners like a white man with your flowers and candy you give our women. So we gotta explain to you how you’re not white and you ain’t never gonna be white no matter how hard you try. No matter what you do or think you can’t change what you are, and what you are is black and you better get it outta your head to mess around with white women.

“Now lookit your arm. Looks white, don’t it? Well, it ain’t. Watch and see.” He poured turpentine on a rag and began wiping my arm in one spot. When my skin showed through the paint he grinned. “There. Y’see? Just as black ‘n ugly as ever!”

He rubbed some turpentine on his own arm. “See the difference? No matter how hard I keep rubbin’, it’s still white. So, like I said, white is white and black is black.” He poured the rest of the turpentine down the drain.

“Okay, you ugly little nigger bastard. We’re lettin’ you off easy this time. I mean we coulda been nasty and painted all the rest of you, but we figured you’re a smart nigger and you’ll get the idea fast, so because we’re peace-lovin’ fellas we don’t wanta hurt you none, so we didn’t do that. Now we’re gonna be leaving you here but remember that we did you this big favor, see? And if you should decide to tell anybody anything ‘bout our little lesson, well first of all we’d just have to admit we caught you makin’ passes at the Captain and that sure wouldn’t do neither of you no good, and then besides that we’d have to find you again and give you another lesson ‘cept we’d have to try harder to make you understand, like maybe open
up your skin a trifle and show you it’s black under there, too. So just take our little lesson in the spirit we meant and we’re willin’ to let bygones be bygones and you’ll stay away from the Captain. Right? Okay, Sambo, we’ll be goin’ now. Just try to remember everything we told you and we won’t have no call to teach you no more lessons.”

Then I was alone. I looked at myself in one of the mirrors. I wanted to crawl into the walls and die. I sat down on the floor and cried.

I looked at the part of my arm they had cleaned with turpentine. I rubbed the skin and watched it change color under the pressure, then darken as the blood flowed through again. How could the color of skin matter so much? It was just skin. What
is
skin? Why is one kind better than another? Why did they think mine made me inferior?

I stayed there for an hour, maybe two hours, I don’t know, I lost track of time, trying to understand it. Why should they want to do this to me? I thought of a hundred questions—but no answers. I’d have given my life to hear my father say, “Hell, Poppa, they’re just jealous of our act.” I wanted to believe anything but that people could hate me this much.

The more the paint hardened the more it drew on my skin. It was starting to pull the hairs on my arms and it itched terribly. I couldn’t think of any place where I could find some turpentine. I tried to wipe some of the paint off with toilet paper but it tore and stuck to the paint and only made it worse. I had to get back to the barracks. I dreaded being seen. Some of the guys would laugh and some would feel sorry for me and one would be as bad as the other. But I wanted Sergeant Williams to see me. I wanted to hear him tell me again, “You’ve got to fight with your brain.” I wanted him to see how wrong he’d been. Or I wanted him to give me an answer.

It was already dark. I’d missed evening formation. Most of the camp was in the Mess Halls, so it was easy to sneak behind buildings back to the barracks. It was empty. I got my towel and aftershave lotion and went into the latrine. I poured half a bottle on the towel and rubbed until it hurt but it didn’t help at all. There were voices outside, Sergeant Williams and some of the guys. I hid in the shower, praying they wouldn’t come in. When I heard the other guys’ steps going toward their bunks I ducked out and into Sergeant Williams’ room.

He pulled me inside and closed the door. “Who did it?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t be a fool. You don’t have to fear them. They’ll be court-martialed and sent to the stockade for years. Nobody can get away with this.”

I wasn’t afraid. I just wanted it to be over. I’d get no satisfaction out of putting them in jail. If they were arrested there’d be a trial and everybody in camp would know about it. I just wanted to forget that it ever happened.

There was no pity in his face—just sadness. Not only for me but for the depth of what he with his wisdom could read into what had happened.

He left the room, cautiously, so nobody would see me, and sent someone to the motor pool for turpentine. Then he locked the door, soaked his towel, and began wiping the paint off my skin. For the next hour and a half he didn’t say one word. I sat there naked to the waist until he was finished. Then he gave me soap and a brush and sent me to the shower room.

Bits of paint clung to my pores. I stood under the hot water brushing them out, rubbing until rashes of blood trickled to the surface, brushing, harder and harder, until I’d scraped the last speck of white out of my skin.

It wasn’t lights out yet but I got into bed. The guys were talking on all sides of me. I pulled the blanket over my head, trying to hear nothing. All I could think was, nobody, nobody in this world is ever going to do this to me again. I’ll die first.

The band was in the middle of the overture. George made room for me to peek through the curtain. The General was sitting in the first row. The house was packed.

For the first time in eighteen years of performing I didn’t want to go on. I scanned the faces waiting to be entertained. The Texan from my barracks was in the third row. How can you run out and smile at people who despise you? How can you entertain people who don’t like you?

George was holding out his hand. I put mine in his and he smiled, “Buddy, after they see our show I’m worried they’re going to want us around for ten years.” The music was two bars away from my cue. I took a deep breath and rushed on. I did my opening number,
forcing myself to concentrate on the one thing I was out there to do: entertain the audience.

As I was taking my bow, enjoying the applause, absorbing the payoff for a month of night-and-day work, I glanced over to where the Texan was sitting. He wasn’t applauding. Our eyes met and I caught something in his face that I’d never seen there before. It wasn’t warmth or respect—he was trying to show no recognition at all. At that moment, I knew that because of what I could do on a stage he could never again think “But you’re still a nigger.” Somehow I’d gotten to him. He’d found something of me in six minutes of my performance which he hadn’t seen in the barracks in all those months.

My talent was the weapon, the power, the way for me to fight. It was the one way I might hope to affect a man’s thinking.

I was bowing to the audience and smiling only by the reflex developed through years of hearing a sound and reacting to it, but my awareness of any outside happening was overwhelmed by the birth of potency surging through my being.

The same man who had caused the question had provided the answer. The man who had shown me that my fists could never be enough was showing me how to fight with whatever intelligence and talent God had given me.

We played the show for a week and when I was on that stage it was as though the spotlight erased all color and I was just another guy. I could feel it in the way they looked at me, not in anything new that appeared in their faces, but in something old that was suddenly missing. While I was performing they forgot what I was and there were times when even I could forget it. Sometimes offstage I passed a guy I didn’t know and he said, “Good show last night.” It was as though my talent was giving me a pass which excluded me from their prejudice. I didn’t hope for camaraderie. All I wanted was to walk into a room without hearing the conversation slow down, and it was happening. I was developing an identity around camp and it was buying me a little chunk of peace.

I was transferred into Special Services and for eight months I did shows in camps across the country, gorging myself on the joy of being liked, killing myself to give back as much as they were giving me. I combed every audience for haters who’d come in by mistake or because there was nothing else to do, and when I spotted them I was able to give my performance something even more than I usually
had, an extra burst of strength and energy, an ability that came to me because I had to get those guys, I had to neutralize them and make them acknowledge me, and I was ready to stay onstage for two hours until I saw one of them turn to his buddies and say, “Hey, this guy’s not bad,” or until I caught an expression that confirmed the power I knew I had. I dug down deeper every day, looking for new material, inventing it, stealing it, switching it—any way that I could find new things to make my shows better, and I lived twenty-four hours a day for that hour or two at night when I could give it away free, when I could stand on that stage, facing the audience, knowing I was dancing down the barriers between us.

I wished I’d made it person to person. The manager of The Chetwood, a small hotel in Los Angeles, seemed to be taking an hour to get them to the phone. Finally I heard the receiver being picked up.

“Poppa? That you?”

“I’m out of the army, Dad. I’m taking the next train.”

“… cut it out, Will. How c’n I hear what he said with you askin’ what he said—”

“Sammy? This true?”

“Hello, Massey. Yes, it’s true. Get my clothes cleaned and pressed, I’m coming back into the act.”

I paid the operator for the overtime and left the PX. I walked around the camp, remembering my first day in Cheyenne, waiting outside the barracks. Now that I was leaving the army I had a detached feeling about it, almost as though it had happened to someone else. But it was me all right, and I wasn’t about to let myself forget it.

Prejudice had been forced on me and crammed down my throat. I’d gone into the army like a kid going to a birthday party, and I’d seen it. They’d taught me well all that my father and Will, with the help of show business, had so carefully, lovingly, kept from me.

I’d learned a lot in the army and I knew that above all things in the world I had to become so big, so strong, so important, that those people and their hatred could never touch me. My talent was the only thing that made me a little different from everybody else, and it was all that I could hope would shield me
because
I was different.

I’d weighed it all, over and over again: What have I got? No looks, no money, no education. Just talent. Where do I want to go? I want to be treated well. I want people to like me, and be decent to me. How do I get there? There’s only one way I can do it with what I have to work with. I’ve got to be a star! I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.

Almost everybody in the coach was asleep in their seats but I was wide awake all the way to Los Angeles, planning what I was going to tell my father and Will. A new life was starting and it was going to be a different one. There could be no picking up where we left off. No more, “We’ll make it if we’re meant to.”

They were waiting for me in the Los Angeles station. They’d had no way of knowing what train I was on so they’d met them all until I arrived. Their clothes were wrinkled from sitting around the station half the night and they were dead tired, but they looked great to me.

At the Chetwood, I got out of my uniform and changed into one of my old suits. It fit perfectly. My father was sitting on the bed. He was looking at my wrist. “Where’s your gold watch, Poppa?”

I still had it wrapped in paper. When he saw the smashed, twisted parts, he looked at me, hurt, heartbroken. “How’d that happen?”

What would be gained by making him suffer through the stories about Jennings and the others? They were just history now.

He was staring at the watch, probably remembering how he and Will had gone into hock to buy it. “Gee, Poppa, you shoulda looked after a watch like this. It’s valuable.”

He could never know how valuable it had been. “I’m sorry, Dad. But it wasn’t my fault. It got smashed on maneuvers.”

I was silent for a few minutes, lost in thoughts of Jennings and the others like him, loathing them, yet grimly grateful to them for wising me up. My father was studying me, his eyes shadowed, questioning. His voice was quiet. “It wasn’t no fun, huh, son?”

I shrugged a denial. “It was the army,” and I turned away.

“Hey, Poppa?”

I looked around.

“Betcha I c’n make you laugh.”

He put on his poker face and stared at me solemnly. I was suddenly terribly depressed, remembering how that had never failed to
send me into hysterics and obscure any problems we had. All my life we’d just laughed and looked away from trouble.

The poker face grew even more solemn.

I forced a smile, then a laugh, but there was a terrible, frustrated look in his eyes as he, too, realized that it just couldn’t work any more.

Will came in and my father smiled as though he’d been waiting for him. “Poppa, here’s your homecomin’ surprise. We’re set to go back to work as a trio. At four hundred a week.”

Will nodded. “The way it come about is that we bumped into an old pal of ours, Arthur Silber. You won’t remember, but we worked the same bills together ‘til vaudeville went under. Today he’s the biggest independent agent in the West. Soon as we hung up from your call we went over and saw him and he signed us for a big show he’s putting together for the Japanese-American troops in Hawaii. We leave for Honolulu in ten days.”

My father said, “Only drawback is we gotta go up in a plane to get there. Fact is we almost canceled out when we heard about it, but four hundred a week and a connection like Arthur Silber ain’t something to fool with.”