Mudbound (5 page)

And then I’m not. I feel a sharp pain in my head and am yanked up, back onto the roof, or into a boat—the dream varies. But the hand is always Henry’s, and it’s always holding a bloody hank of my hair.

More than a thousand people died in that flood. I survived it, because of Henry. I wasn’t alone on Eboline’s roof, she and my parents were there with me, along with her husband, Virgil, and their maid, Dessie. The water didn’t come and take me, I fell into it. I fell into it because I stood up. I stood up because I saw Henry approaching in the boat, coming to rescue us.

Because of Henry. So much of who I am and what I’ve done is because of Henry. My earliest memory is of meeting him for the first time. My mother was holding me, rocking me, and then she handed me to a large, white-haired stranger. I was afraid, and then I wasn’t—that’s all I remember. The way Mama always told it, I started to pitch a fit, but when Henry
held me up in front of him and said, “Hello, little brother,” I stopped crying at once and stuck my fingers in his mouth. I, who howled like a red Indian whenever my father or any other male tried to pick me up, went meekly into my brother’s hands. I was one and a half. He was twenty-one and just returned from the Great War.

Because of Henry, I grew up hating Huns. Huns had tried to kill him in a forest somewhere in France. They’d given him his limp and his white hair. They’d taken things from him too—I didn’t know what exactly but I could sense his lack of them. He never talked about the war. Pappy was always prodding him about it, wanting to know how many men Henry had killed and how he’d killed them. “Was it more than ten? More than fifty?” Pappy would ask. “Did you get any with your bayonet, or did you shoot em all from a distance?”

But Henry would never say. The only time I ever heard him refer to the war was on my eighth birthday. He came home for the weekend and took me deer hunting. It was my first time getting to carry an actual weapon (if you can call a Daisy Model 25 BB gun an actual weapon) and I was bursting with manly pride. I didn’t manage to hit anything besides a few trees, but Henry brought down an eight-point buck. It wasn’t a clean kill. When we got to where the buck had fallen we found it still alive, struggling futilely to get up. Splintered bone poked out of a wound in its thigh. Its eyes were wild and uncomprehending.

Henry passed a hand over his face, then gripped my shoulder hard. “If you ever have to be a soldier,” he said, “promise
me you’ll try and get up to the sky. They say battle is a lot cleaner up there.”

I promised. Then he knelt and cut its throat.

From that day on, whenever the crop dusters flew over our farm, I pretended I was the pilot. Only it wasn’t boll weevils I was killing, it was Huns. I must have shot down hundreds of German aces in my imagination, sitting in the topmost branches of the sweet gum tree behind our house.

But if Henry sparked my desire to fly, Lindbergh ignited it with his solo flight across the Atlantic. It was less than a month after the flood. Greenville and our farm were still under ten feet of water, so we were staying with my aunt and uncle in Carthage. The house was full, and I was stuck sleeping in a three-quarter bed in the attic with my cousins Albin and Avery, strapping bullies with pimply faces and buckteeth. Crammed between the two of them, I dreamed of the flood: the guessing game, the voice of the water, the big white hand. My moaning woke them, and they punched and kicked me awake, calling me a pansy and a titty baby. But not even their threats—to smother me, to throw me out the window, to stake me out over an anthill and pour molasses in my eyes—could stop the flood from coming to get me in my sleep. It came almost every night, and I always gave in to it. That was the part I dreaded: the part where I just let the water have me. It seemed a shameful weakness, the kind my brother would never give in to, even in a dream. Henry would fight with everything he had, and when his last bit of strength was gone he’d fight some more—like I hadn’t done. At least, I was pretty sure I hadn’t. That was the
hell of it, I had no memory of what had happened between the time I fell in the water and when Henry pulled me out. All I had was the dream, which seemed to confirm my worst fears about myself. As the days passed and it kept recurring, I became more and more convinced it was true. I’d given myself willingly to the water, and would do it again if I had the chance.

I started refusing to take baths. Albin and Avery added “pig boy” to the list of endearments they had for me, and Pappy whipped my butt bloody with a switch, yelling that he wouldn’t have a son who went around stinking like a nigger. Finally my mother threatened to bathe me herself if I wouldn’t. The thought of Mama seeing me naked was enough to send me straightaway into the tub, though I never filled it more than a few inches.

It was during this time that stories about Lindbergh started to crop up in the papers and on the radio. He was going after the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Orteig Prize, offered by a Frenchman named Raymond Orteig to the first aviator to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, or vice versa. The purse had been up for grabs since 1919. A bunch of pilots had tried to win it. All of them had failed, and six had died trying.

Lindbergh would be the one to make it, I was positive. So what if he was younger and greener than the other pilots who’d tried? He was a god—fearless, immortal. There was no way he would fail. My confidence wasn’t shared by the local papers, which dubbed him “the Flying Fool” for attempting it without a copilot. I told myself they were the fools.

The day of the flight, our entire family gathered around
the radio and listened to the reports of Lindbergh’s progress. His plane was sighted over New England, then Newfoundland. Then he vanished, for sixteen of the longest hours of my life.

“He’s dead,” Albin taunted. “He fell asleep, and his plane crashed into the ocean.”

“He did not!” I said. “Lindy would never fall asleep while he was flying.”

“Maybe he got lost,” said Avery.

“Yeah,” said Albin, “maybe he was just too stupid to find his way.”

This was a reference to the fact that I’d gotten lost a few days before. The two of them were supposed to take me fishing, but they’d led me in circles and then disappeared snickering into the woods. I was unfamiliar with the country around Carthage and it took me three hours to find my way back to the house, by which time my mother was out of her mind with worry. Albin and Avery had gotten a whipping, but that didn’t make me feel any better. They’d bested me again.

They wouldn’t this time. Lindbergh would show them. He would win for both of us.

And of course, he did. “The Flying Fool” became “the Lone Eagle,” and Lindy’s triumph became mine. Even my cousins cheered when he landed safely at Le Bourget Field. It was impossible not to feel proud of what he’d done. Impossible not to want to be like him.

That night after supper, I went outside and lay on the wet grass and stared up at the sky. It was twilight—that impossible shade of purple-blue that only lasts a few minutes before
dulling into ordinary dark. I wanted to dive up into that blue and lose myself in it. I remember thinking there was nothing bad up there. No muck or stink or killing brown water. No ugliness or hate. Just blue and gray and ten thousand shades in between, all of them beautiful.

I would be a pilot like Lindbergh. I would have great adventures and perform acts of daring and defend my country, and it would be glorious. And I would be a god.

Fifteen years later the Army granted my wish. And it was not. And I was not.

RONSEL

T
HEY CALLED US
“Eleanor Roosevelt’s niggers.” They said we wouldn’t fight, that we’d turn tail and run the minute we got into real combat. They said we didn’t have the discipline to make good soldiers. That we didn’t have brains enough to man tanks. That we were inclined by nature to all kind of wickedness—lying, stealing, raping white women. They said we could see better than white GIs in the dark because we were closer to the beasts. When we were in Wim-bourne an English gal I never laid eyes on before came up and patted me right on the butt. I asked her what she was doing and she said, “Checking to see if you’ve got a tail.”

“Why would you think that?” I said.

She said the white GIs had been telling all the English girls that Negroes were more monkey than human.

We slept in separate barracks, ate in separate mess halls, shit in separate latrines. We even had us a separate blood supply—God forbid any wounded white boys would end up with Negro blood in their veins.

They gave us the dregs of everything, including officers. Our
lieutenants were mostly Southerners who’d washed out in some other post. Drunkards, yellow bellies, bigoted no-count crackers who couldn’t have led their way out of a one-room shack in broad daylight. Putting them over black troops was the Army’s way of punishing them. They had nothing but contempt for us and they made sure we knew it. At the Officers’ Club they liked to sing “We’re dreaming of a white battalion” to the tune of “White Christmas.” We heard about it from the colored staff, who had to wait on their sorry white asses while they sang it.

If they’d all been like that I probably would’ve ended up fertilizing some farmer’s field in France or Belgium, along with every other man in my unit. Lucky for us we had a few good white officers. The ones out of West Point were mostly fair and decent, and our CO always treated us respectful.

“They say you’re not as clean as other people,” he told us. “There’s a simple answer to that. Make damn sure you’re cleaner than anybody else you ever saw in your life, especially all those white bastards out there. Make your uniforms look neater than theirs. Make your boots shine brighter.”

And that’s exactly what we did. We aimed to make the 761st the best tank battalion in the whole Army.

We trained hard, first at Camp Claiborne, then at Camp Hood. There were five men to a tank, each with his own job to do, but we all had to learn each other’s jobs too. I was the driver, had a feel for it from the very first day. Funny how many of us farm boys ended up in the driver’s seat. Reckon if you can get a mule to go where you want it to, you can steer a Sherman tank.

We spent a lot of time at the range, shooting all kind of weapons—.45s, machine guns, cannons. We went on maneuvers in the Kisatchie National Forest and did combat simulations with live ammo. We knew they were testing our courage and we passed with flying colors. Hell, most of us were more scared of getting snakebit than getting hit by a bullet. Some of the water moccasins they had down there were ten feet long, and that’s no lie.

In July of ’42 we got our first black lieutenants. There were only three of them but we all walked with our heads a little bit higher after that, at least on the base. Off base, in the towns where we took our liberty, we walked real careful. In Killeen they put up a big sign for us at the end of Main Street:
NIGGERS HAVE TO LEAVE THIS TOWN BY 9 PM
. The paint was blood red in case we missed the point. Killeen didn’t have a colored section, only about half of them little towns did. The one in Alexandria near Camp Claiborne was typical—nothing to it but a falling-down movie theater and two shabby juke joints. Wasn’t no place to buy anything or set and eat a meal. The rest of the town was off limits to us. If the MPs or the local law caught you in the white part of town they’d beat the shit out of you.

Our uniforms didn’t mean a damn to the local white citizens. Not that I expected them to, but my buddies from up north and out west were thunderstruck by the way we were treated. Reading about Jim Crow in the paper is a mighty different thing from having a civilian bus driver wave a pistol in your face and tell you to get your coon hide off the bus to make
room for a fat white farmer. They just couldn’t understand it, no matter how many times we tried to explain it to them. You got to go along to get along, we told them, got to humble down and play shut-mouthed when you around white folks, but a lot of them just couldn’t do it. There was this Yankee private in Fort Knox, that’s where most of the guys in the battalion did their basic training. He got into an argument with a white storekeeper who wouldn’t sell him a pack of smokes and ended up tied with a rope to the fender of a car and dragged up and down the street. That was just one killing, out of dozens we heard about.

The longer I spent around guys from other parts of the country, the madder I got myself. Here we were, about to risk our lives for people who hated us as bad as they hated the Krauts or the Japs, and maybe even worse. The Army didn’t do nothing to protect us from the locals. When local cops beat up colored GIs, the Army looked the other way. When the bodies of dead black soldiers turned up outside of camp, the MPs didn’t even try to find out who did it. It didn’t take a genius to see why. The beatings, the lousy food and whatall, the piss-poor officers—they all added up to one thing. The Army wanted us to fail.

W
E TRAINED FOR
two long years. By the summer of ’44, we’d about gave up hope that they were ever going to let us fight. According to the
Courier
there were over a hundred thousand of us serving overseas, but only one colored unit in
combat. The rest were peeling potatoes, digging trenches and cleaning latrines.

But then, in August, word came down that General Patton had sent for us. He’d seen us on maneuvers at Kisatchie and wanted us to fight at the head of his Third Army. Damn, we were proud! Here was our chance to show the world something it’d never seen before. To hell with God and country, we’d fight for our people and our own self-respect.

We left Camp Hood in late August. I ain’t never been so glad to see the back of a place. Only thing I’d miss about that hellhole was Mallie Simpson, she was a schoolteacher I kept company with in Killeen. Mallie was considerable older than me. She might’ve been thirty even, I never asked and didn’t care. She was a tiny little gal with a big full-bellied laugh. She knew things the girls back home didn’t have the first idea about, things to do with what my daddy calls “nature activity.” Some weekends we didn’t hardly leave her bed, except to go to the package store. Mallie liked her gin. She drank it straight up, one shot at a time, downing it in one gulp. She used to say a half-full glass of gin was a invitation to the devil. Seemed to me there was plenty of devilment going on with the glasses being empty, but I wasn’t complaining. I said goodbye to her with real sadness. I reckoned it’d be a long while before I had another woman—from what I’d heard, Europe had nothing but white people in it.