Retracing My Steps

 Readers of my historical novel, Though An Army Come Against Us, often report encountering episodes that are simply too much for them to believe. They set the book down, shaking their heads, and saying to themselves, "Rick, you really went too far this time." Then they google the incident and discover that it is, instead, simply true.

I tell them that my imagination isn't all that good. I tell them that the history of this country can be so dark that I don't need any imagination to conjure up these horrors. And it surprises me because I have spent all my adult life looking into those corners. Some were astonished by the presence of gas chambers at the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border crossing that was a model for Hitler's gas chambers. Some were surprised by the coal mine explosions I described in Dawson, New Mexico and Littleton, Alabama, or by the fact that seventy-two of the miners killed in the latter were convicts leased by the company from state and county prisons. One reader hadn't heard about the massacre of striking miners' families in Ludlow, Colorado. Another learned for the first time about the Tulsa Massacre that has been so present lately in popular culture.

But my imagination is really not that good, and even many of the minor details in my fiction are factually and historically correct. Unfortunately my notes are not all that great either, because I am not preparing them for academic publication. I have sources listed in multiple notes in Apple Notes on both my phone and laptop. I have highlighted passages in Kindle from ebooks I read. I have PDFs saved in a folder on my laptop. I have files sent to me from various archivists and librarians. And I have handwritten notes in steno pads and notebooks. Retracing my steps can be a colossal challenge, especially when the information was obscure and hard to find in the first place.

This morning I was writing a Facebook post about the experiences Black soldiers had with racist violence while they were in Europe during the First World War. There is an episode in Though An Army in which Rector Beauchamp, a Black Seminole soldier, is nearly lynched by white soldiers led by two white officers who are jealous that a French girl turns to him to rescue herself from them. But a year and a half after I published this, several years after I wrote those particular pages, and who-knows-how-long after I researched them, I couldn't remember why I thought there were lynchings in the American Expeditionary Force in 1918.

I googled those words and easily found references to the Red Summer of 1919 and to lynchings of returned veterans. It took me about 45 minutes to find a popular magazine article by Professor Chad Williams, and then a note in an article that cited a book he wrote titled Torchbearers of Freedom:African American Soldiers in the World War I Era. That was a familiar title, so I looked in my Kindle library. Success!

Instead of using the Kindle search function I simply scrolled through the passages I had highlighted and there it was. Some Black officers had aroused the envy of white officers over the attentions of some French women so the white men got two truckloads of white enlisted men and ordered them to lynch the Black officers. Moreover the incident had been reported by First Lieutenant Charles Hamilton Houston. Yes, that is the Charles Hamilton Houston. He had been an English professor at Howard before enlisting, but after his wartime experiences he attended Harvard Law School. He returned to Howard as a law professor and trained the entire generation of NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys that included Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

1st Lieutenant Houston

When I read this again this morning I wondered briefly why I left C.H. Houston out of my novel. But I remembered that I still have too many characters. Something like his part in the story and that of an unnamed captain are taken in Though An Army by the historical figure Osceola McKaine who was a captain in France, served in the infantry before the war in the Philippines and Mexico, and was a figure in the movement for Black rights after both the first and second World Wars. In Houston's story, retold by Professor Williams in Torchbearers, the two French women are described as "sporting girls." I chose to remove that characterization and turn them into one young teen who is both confused by the attention of the white officers and in danger of being raped by them. The whole thing reminded me of how it is sometimes when people ask me the specific source of some of these stories and I can't really remember.

It also made me wonder about how Professor Houston had told this story. That was another hour-long rabbit hole. The footnote in Torchbearers cited a series in the Pittsburgh Courier that Houston wrote in 1940 as the U.S. was about to get into another World War. I immediately went to the Library of Congress website because they have digitized huge numbers of newspapers. Nope. After hunting around for who might in fact have it I discovered a Proquest database, but my university alumni privileges don't extend to that. A recent laptop update erased my New York Public Library password, but I found it in one of those steno pads I have piled up and - Yes! - a few minutes later, having scanned through thirteen pages of the Courier on the listed date, I found episode ten of Houston's article, which contained more details. (The story also had to be continued on page 13 of the next issue, but that didn't take as long to get to.)

Then I started wondering again why I left Professor Houston out of my novel, especially since I had an entire short chapter take place in the "Colored" Officers Training Camp at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. And that led me to think about the contemporary souvenir book about that camp that I remembered reading online. Another hour. Not in Google Books. Not in the Library of Congress. Not in Iowa Pathways, although they did have PDFs of newspaper ads for the book. I finally found a link to an "online books page" at University of Pennsylvania Library which led me to a HathiTrust page which was where I am pretty sure I originally read this book however long ago.

Do I want to do this again? Not for these particular sources. I started a document with the links and basic information and I'm calling it Annotations. I don't want to track everything down, but I think that every time I do, I should save the links in that document. My memory only promises to get worse with time.

This is a split group photo from that souvenir Fort Des Moines book. It shows all the Howard University grads at the training camp, the largest group of alums of any college.

Though An Army - Final Chapter

Harlem, NY 1922 

 

“Rector!” welcomed Nessa as the apartment door opened. She sounded as enthusiastic as if she hadn’t seen him in a month. 

“How do you know it’s me?” laughed Rector Beauchamp. “Anybody could come walking in through this unlocked door.” 

 “Were you able to get a day at P.S. 119?” Nessa asked. The school was diagonally across from their apartment on 134th Street and a sometime source of employment. But as she came out of the kitchen and saw him in his work clothes, she knew the answer. 

“Miss Larson said she didn’t need a substitute teacher today,” he explained. “I changed real quick, hurried downtown with Jim Rosco, and was able to get a day loading the S.S. Lafayette on Pier 51.” Rosco was a boarder with their upstairs neighbors, Tony and Ella Stevens. He worked as a longshoreman on the West Side, mostly handling passenger luggage for the French Line. 

“When do you think you’ll be able to get a regular teaching job?” wondered Nessa. 

“My best guess?” asked Rector. “Never.” He had been thinking about this for the better part of a year now, since not long after their arrival in New York City. “I don’t think they want to hire any regular teachers at all, not to mention Negroes. They hang on to those Class 1 licenses like it’s their grandma’s engagement ring. They save so much money by hiring subs, it’s no wonder they won’t give out a regular license.” 

“Sadie got a job over there,” objected Nessa. 

“The cake lady? She taught for five years in North Carolina before she got here, and they still wouldn’t hire her until she got a master’s degree from Columbia. And hired a locution teacher so she could learn to talk like a white woman. And why do you think she sells all those cakes? She got that Class 1 license and she still can’t live on what they pay her.” 

“It sounds to me like you’re giving up,” said Nessa. “Did you even go over there this morning?” 

“Yes, I did, baby.” He paused because he didn’t like her challenging his word this way. He took a deep breath and then went on, “Yes, I did. But I am really thinking about signing on regular on the ships.”

Nessa understood his pause; appreciated his restraint. She waited a moment before going on. “Baby, you have a college diploma.” 

“Yes, I do,” Rector answered. “But not one that they recognize here in New York. Leastways not when it’s held by a Negro.” 

This was something that Nessa understood very well. She had been going downtown with Ella Stevens everyday to clean rich white ladies’ homes and she didn’t like it. Maybe these South Carolina Negroes were used to taking care of white folks, but she was from Boley, Oklahoma and she was a high school graduate. For her it was like anthropological fieldwork, not a career. And she had something to say on this same subject that she hadn’t told Rector about yet. “I went to register at Hunter College today,” she began. 

“That is great news!” smiled Rector. “How did that go?” 

“Not well,” admitted Nessa. “They don’t recognize my diploma.” 

“Don’t recognize it?” He began shaking his head. New York. “Any options?” 

“Actually, the lady there took some time asking about Boley High and the courses I took there. She listed the exact credits I still need to get a New York diploma. And she told me who to speak to at Wadleigh High School if I want to take them now.” 

Rector was thunderstruck. “With a bunch of young girls?” he asked. “You’re a grown woman.” 

“Yes, I am,” said Nessa. “But that is not what’s making me hesitate.” She smiled. 

Rector shook his head again, this time in puzzlement. He shrugged and made a face as if to ask, “What?” 

Nessa smiled a little more broadly. “I’m three weeks late,” she said. 

The puzzled look stayed for another second or two. Then understanding dawned across his face, his jaw dropped, his eyes opened wide, and he rushed to take his wife in his arms. “Baby,” he laughed. “That is the best news! You had to wait all this time to tell me that?” 

“We won’t know for awhile. I could just be late. But I couldn’t wait any longer. I just had to let you know.” 

Rector just said, “That is the best news!” And then, again, “That is the best news!” He hugged her and hugged her. 

Nessa finally pushed herself back a few inches from his tight embrace. “Baby, I have to ask. If it’s a boy, can we name him Ezekiel?” 

He pulled her close again. “Why would you even need to ask?” said Rector Beauchamp. “Of course we willl. Of course our son will be Ezekiel.” Nessa blinked back her tears. “Ezekiel Owalv,” she said, adding the Creek and Seminole word for “prophet.” “Because our children can never forget that they’re native, too.” 

Somewhere nearby a neighbor cranked up a Victrola. The trumpet and trombone notes of the opening bars were unmistakable, “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.” It was the most popular recording in Harlem that year. Already embracing, Nessa and Rector began to dance along. But the juxtaposition of sad and happy news gave the song a different meaning. Rector would give up teaching, Nessa college; but there would be a new baby. Nessa’s Daddy was gone, but perhaps she would have a son. The world as it was had taken so much from them, but there was still promise of a world to be. They were still living. They were still standing. They could still continue the struggle. 

So Nessa began to sing along with Ethel Waters. And now the song had stopped being a story about a disappointed lover. Today it had turned into a story about entire peoples and about that promise, the promise of a world to be: “There’s a change in the weather, a change in the sea From now on there’ll be a change in me My walk will be different, my talk and my name Nothing about me’s going to be the same.” 

When the record ended, Nessa wanted to say something more about Ezekiel, her Daddy. But the elevated train was going up Eighth Avenue, just down the block, and it drowned out all conversation with its loud clatter. Today, though, even the rattle of the IRT had taken on a new meaning: He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live again?” And I said, “Lord God, only You know.” There was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. So the Lord God said to the bones, “Here! I bring breath into you and you will live! The breath entered them and they came to life, a vast multitude. 

And so it was.