In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (19 page)

Now, in the late winter of 1944, Will Mastin and Sam Sr. were just two nearly anonymous Negroes—albeit well dressed—putting one foot in front of the other, sometimes tilting their heads to the sky, on the lookout for bombers like so many others. They saw a new year—1945—come into view. Evenings in Los Angeles grew lonely and strangely quiet.

Without their Sammy, they felt utterly lost.

Following his induction, Sammy was shipped off to Fort Francis E. Warren, in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

In 1943—a year before Sammy became a part of Uncle Sam’s army—America suffered through a season of explosive racial unrest. Whites and
Negroes battled in Harlem, in Mobile, Alabama, in Detroit, and in an additional three dozen other cities during that summer. The worst conflict erupted on June 20 in Detroit. As night fell, Negroes and whites began fighting on Belle Isle, a segregated municipal beach operated by the city. Tensions had been building over the Sojourner Truth Homes, a Detroit housing complex the federal government had constructed for Negroes but recently resegregated for white occupancy. By the time military police quelled the riot, twenty-five Negroes and nine whites were dead; 675 people had been injured.

With the onset of World War II, a great migration of Negroes from the South—more than half a million—took place. Negroes poured into northern cities in search of jobs. The exodus from the South would forever alter the social dynamic of the country. Negroes felt their allegiance to patriotism would also herald a call for active democracy. Campaigns were waged—using the war as backdrop—for better job opportunities and equal rights. The NAACP unveiled its so-called Double-V campaign, hoping for a double victory—abroad in the war and at home regarding equality. The organization was determined to “
persuade, embarrass, compel, and shame our government and our nation into a more enlightened attitude toward a tenth of its people.” The celebrated Harlem poet Langston Hughes asked a question wrapped in a poem:

The U.S. military had long had a peculiar and unsettling relationship with Negro America.

Many Northerners—at the instigation of Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists—began pleading that Negroes be used in the Civil War effort as Union casualties mounted. The idea made President Abraham Lincoln nervous, but the Union army needed help. Lincoln eventually relented. The Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment—a group of Negro soldiers led by white officers—distinguished itself during the war, particularly during an attack on July 18, 1863, on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. The soldiers of the Fifty-fourth were well aware of their fate if captured by rebels: hanging—or slavery. The exploits of the Fifty-fourth may have been duly noted, but it did not mean Negro entry into future battles would occur easily.

Southern politicians railed in 1914 against sending Negroes into World War I, envisioning nightmarish scenarios in which Negroes might return to America and overtake white communities. But the possibility of Negro troops in that war energized the Negro thinker W. E. B. Du Bois. He believed Negro service in the conflict would result in “
the right to vote and the right to work and the right to live without insult.” But many Negro soldiers who returned home from that war soon met unsettling times as race riots erupted. “
You niggers were wondering how you are going to be treated after the war,” a New Orleans city official told a group of soldiers. “Well, I’ll tell you, you are going to be treated exactly like you were before the war; this is a white man’s country, and we expect to rule it.”

The West—where Sammy was now stationed—was always tricky territory for the Negro soldier. There was plenty of proof in the infamous Brownsville, Texas, incident of August 13, 1906. In the darkness before midnight, a group of Negro soldiers stationed on the Brownsville base reportedly left their barracks and went into town. The soldiers had been complaining of being assaulted in town and not receiving service in the saloons. Once they were in town, shots were fired, and a white man was killed. Eventually, the soldiers retreated back to their barracks. (There had been rumors preceding the incident that a white woman had been sexually assaulted by a Negro soldier.) Many in the town feared Negroes had staged a revolt and might do so again. “
We look to you for relief; we ask you to have the troops at once removed from Fort Brown and replaced by white soldiers.” This was the end of an urgent telegram sent to President Theodore Roosevelt. There were emotionally charged stories in the national press. Roosevelt ordered the fort closed. Some of the soldiers were sent to a base in Oklahoma, others held under guard. There had been palpable fear a lynch party might attack them. During an inquiry the soldiers refused to answer questions. The silence angered Roosevelt and the Department of War. A day after his reelection—and absent any shame regarding the timing—Roosevelt ordered all 167 of the Negro soldiers dishonorably dismissed, without even a trial. Protests and demonstrations followed. The
New York World
referred to the Roosevelt order as “
executive lynch law.” Inasmuch as the soldiers never had a chance to testify in court, the case would forever be shrouded in mystery.

The Brownsville incident and others like it were dangerous and blighted tales kept far from the growing-up ears of Sammy Davis, Jr. For a little Negro child, Sammy had led a life with a certain protectiveness around it. From his years in vaudeville, Mastin had cultivated an underground world where he found dignity, respect, and certain manners. Over time, he had delivered the young Sammy into a world of soliticious theater operators; his father and Mastin’s humble acquaintances; flashy but doting women who knew and
respected both men. Mastin and Sam Sr. were shrewd and kept Sammy out of harm’s way. “Sam [Sr.] and Mastin sheltered him, saying, ‘Oh, we’re staying with a family,’ when the two old men knew they couldn’t get a room in a segregated hotel,” says Gloria Williams. Now Sammy was away from all that—the glue and the bookends of his father and Mastin—and in the war.

Fort Francis E. Warren had been an old and distinguished cavalry post established in 1867. Many of its troops had fought in the Great Sioux Indian Wars during the 1870s, when the installation was known as Fort Russell. In 1886 four Negro regiments were formed by Congress, and three of those regiments—the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, and the Twenty-fourth Infantry—served at Fort Russell. The Negro units, roaming the West from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande, became renowned for their fierce skirmishes with Indians. In time they became known as “Buffalo Soldiers,” a name reportedly given to them by the Indians in honor of the respect they held for the buffalo. The Negro units were hardly free of controversy. Henry Flipper, the first Negro to graduate from West Point and an officer with the Tenth Cavalry, was court-martialed. His crime: he had been spotted by white soldiers riding on a horse with a white woman. In 1930 the post was renamed Fort Francis E. Warren. It had long been noted for its harsh temperatures, and soldiers arriving knew to be prepared for the elements.

Sammy arrived to begin his basic training in the late summer, and cool air was already coming down from the mountains around Cheyenne.

The military still held its overall policy of racial segregation, but a month before Sammy arrived at Fort Warren, the army announced that its recreation and transportation facilities were to be desegregated. (Jackie Robinson, a young army officer at Fort Hood, Texas—son of sharecroppers and a native of Cairo, Georgia—had been court-martialed before the new ruling went into effect for refusing to sit in the back of a bus. Robinson, who had been a gifted multisport star at UCLA, fought the court martial and was reinstated. He left the army and joined the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League in 1945, two years away from cracking the color barrier in modern major-league baseball.)

On his first day on base at Fort Warren, Sammy heard the word “nigger”:
“I ain’t arguin’ you’re in charge,” he overheard a recruit say to an officer. “I’m only sayin’ I didn’t join no nigger army.” Sammy pulled his bags into the bunkhouse, got assigned a bunk, met another Negro soldier. A white soldier sneered at Sammy, telling him to shine his shoes. Sammy refused; the other Negro soldier did not. There was more sneering. Racial tension hummed all about. Every day, he seemed to be dropping down into a new temperature of
reality. Owing to the cocoon his father and Mastin had kept him in, he was as surprised as someone new to America and unfamiliar with its racial history.

Following an exchange of racially charged words, Sammy and another white private exchanged punches. The scuffle—which ended when others intervened—left him bleeding and shaking. At night, in his bunk, he lay with his nerves on edge, wondering when the next fistfight might come. He was suddenly in a nightmarish world—the hurly-burly of army life and racism pressed into his eyes. He seemed shocked. “
How many white people had felt like this about me?” he pondered. “I couldn’t remember any. Not one. Had I just been too stupid to see it? I thought of the people we’d known—agents, managers, the acts we’d worked with—these people had all been friends. I know they were. There were so many things I had to remember: the dressing rooms—had we been stuck at the end of the corridors off by ourselves? Or with the other colored acts? That was ridiculous. Dressing rooms were always assigned according to our spot on the bill.”

This was a different landscape from that of nightclubs and dressing rooms. These were soldiers in khaki. And while the American flag snapped over the base, the knuckle of a fist landed upon his chest because of the color of his skin. His father and Mastin were nowhere around to pull him to safety.

He was a dancer, in limber shape, and he made it through basic training. But he was not physical. Actually, he seemed almost too elegant to be a soldier. There was a feyness in his walk, something that made him seem vulnerable amid barracks and dirt. Army officers, unsure where to assign him, made him go through training a second time. The ropes, the calisthenics, the running, all over again. No one told him why, and he was too timid to complain.

He got assigned to latrine duty, which meant he was on his hands and knees scrubbing the toilet bowls in the barracks.

Another soldier crushed Sammy’s wristwatch under the heel of his boot. Sammy recoiled, a shy nineteen-year-old, terrified. “
Awww, don’t carry on, boy,” a soldier by the name of Jennings told him. “You can always steal another one.” There was no hiding in the raw Wyoming wind. Just soldiers; some nice, some nasty and mean. “
Overnight, the world looked different,” according to Sammy. “It wasn’t one color anymore.”

It really hadn’t ever been one color, but to a show-business kid, hustled and hustling from hotel to theater to train station—bags handed to the kindly Pullman porter—then repeating the process again, on end, for months, for years even, it might have seemed that way. Sammy’s hands never touched cotton bolls; his feet never trampled across a sharecropping farm.

There was another fight in the barracks, and blood oozed from Sammy’s face. He fought back, but with the same results, a beating. He dropped tears. He was in the army, and he was fighting, all right—but it was with an unexpected
enemy: his fellow soldiers. He was not his father, Big Sam, who’d made threats against whites in Wilmington, North Carolina, before he had finally fled that town. He was just a kid, coming up on his nineteenth birthday.

He heard about the base band, the 352nd Army Band, and pleaded to join. A stage had been his lifelong home. He wowed the army officers.

As a member of the band, Sammy began to relax. Which meant he began to hop about wildly. There was no more idle time in the bunkhouse. “He had more things to do than the average black,” Abe Lafferty, a member of that band, would remember.

His impersonations were riotously funny. He knew how to play several instruments. Over time, he would be allowed to organize musical shows. Gathered around musically inclined soldiers, he would yak into the blue moon about show business, about the theaters he had played, the cities he had seen. “You’d look on the bulletin board and it would say, ‘Lafferty, Sammy Davis. Such and such a time,’ ” recalls Lafferty. “When a company was getting ready to be shipped out,” he says, “we’d go give them a show.”

Having band mates, being around those who were appreciative of his skills, made Sammy’s confidence soar. He knew entertainment; no one could get him off a stage. “It was five of us who were always drafted to play a Sammy Davis show,” Lafferty says. “He was always good for laughs. He’d come over to our barracks for a bite to eat. Can’t remember any other blacks coming over there.” Lafferty was amazed at how Sammy simply took over the shows—a comic, a mimic, a musician, a singer. “He’d emcee the whole show. He’d run the whole thing. It was his show.” They were wowed—and stunned—by his impersonations. A Negro doing Jimmy Cagney, Boris Karloff, Edward G. Robinson, Frank Sinatra! (Frank was sitting out the war—a bad eardrum—and, with so many boys gone off to war, singing his velvety lyrics to a nation of lonely hearts.)

Sammy turned twenty in the army. There was no girl “back home” to send him perfume-scented letters. Still, his spirits improved greatly on account of the base shows, which gave him a measure of celebrity. He began to bounce back to where he was, regarding race, before he came into the army—race didn’t matter; the world was colorless. He believed if he could perform, he could drive the racism away. The applause had ushered the return of his naïveté. “
My talent was the weapon,” he would believe, “the power, the way for me to fight. It was the one way I might hope to affect a man’s thinking.”

It can be traced to the mountains of Wyoming, where Sammy first felt and thought seriously about the sting of race upon his back. He couldn’t decipher what it all meant. He believed that the quickness of his feet and the mimicry in his voice could defeat the hard glare of the redneck—any redneck—and he would, in their suspicious eyes, be transformed back to where he was with his
father and Will Mastin: in the middle, juicing things up. “
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,” he would say.