Jump into the Sky (31 page)

I shrugged and told him no, I’d thought about maybe working for a newspaper.

Uncle Otis shook his head. “Naw, you don’t want to do that. All they tell is made-up lies. Be a barber instead. We give people the real scoop about the world right here.”

My daddy grinned. “Nobody tells stories or cuts heads like you, Otis.”

“That’s true.” Uncle Otis nodded solemnly. “Can’t keep a wife to save my life, but I sure can keep Chicago looking good.”

You can see how everybody in the family was doing their best to get us to change our minds. It wasn’t easy to leave, especially when Aunt Odella handed us a bag of her good fried chicken and a framed picture of her and her fellow and started boo-hooing about never seeing us again. It was real hard.

But even with all the begging and bribery, me and my daddy stuck with what we’d planned to do. After spending almost a week in Chicago—which was both too long and too short at the same time—we bought tickets at Union Station and boarded the train again. Felt like I was repeating my own life. Same station I’d left from in May. Same destination. Only thing different was having my father sitting next to me, instead of a white lady with a cake box.

One whole day passed by our windows without much to worry about. We were on our second day of traveling—I think we were somewhere in Maryland—when we noticed a few of the folks around us getting up. Two colored servicemen carrying their army duffels on their heads left the seats behind us. A colored family near the front corner of the car stood up suddenly and left their seats as a whole group. “Must be something good cooking in the dining car
up ahead this morning,” my daddy joked. We were reading some penny comics and magazines we’d bought, not paying much attention to where we were, just having a good time. We’d already eaten breakfast at one of the train stations, so we weren’t hungry.

I remember the shadow that was cast across our seats by the conductor who came to stand next to us. Think me and my daddy looked up at the exact same time. The conductor wasn’t smiling. He had a thin face that coulda used a good shave and there were stains under the armpits of his wrinkled uniform, as if he was somebody who didn’t care much about how he looked. “Time to get up and move forward,” he said, pointing at the front door of our passenger car.

“Pardon?” My father set his magazine down slowly.

The man’s voice got louder and slower, as if we were ignorant fools. “I said, it is time to get up and move forward to the colored car.” Heads turned to look at us. All the faces around us were white. I suddenly realized there wasn’t a colored person left in the whole car. And let me tell you, if the eyes of the passengers sitting near us had been machine guns, me and my daddy woulda been full of holes.

“I’m Lieutenant Charles Battle of the U.S. Army, sir, and I’m staying right here in the coach seat I bought and paid for,” my father replied calmly. Very slowly he unrolled his magazine and began to read it again. My heart was pounding so hard, I thought my ribs might explode. Stared at my comics, not seeing a thing, just a dizzying blur of colors
and words. The back of my shirt melted into the blue seat cushions.

“If you don’t get up and go where you are supposed to go, soldier, I’ll have you removed from this train.”

Now, you gotta picture my daddy’s square army shoulders and strong parachute-holding arms. His sharp dress uniform with its perfectly creased blouse and tie. The paratrooper wings and polished brass. Think you woulda needed a tank to get him off the train.

“I’m an officer in the U.S. Army,” my father said, sliding out of his seat. As the train rolled down the tracks, he stood in front of the conductor in the swaying aisle. His head almost skimmed the ceiling. “I risked my life jumping out of airplanes and protecting this country from the enemy for the last three years. I saw one of my men lose his life for the war, and I have a right to this seat”—his hand smacked the cushions, making me jump—“as much as anybody in this country. And I’m not leaving it.”

He sat back down, not looking at me. You could see a shine of sweat across his forehead and the veins on his temple standing out, thick as roots. With a slow, deliberate move, he reached toward the floor and picked up his magazine again.

I think all the air had gotten sucked out of the car by then, because I sure couldn’t find any to breathe. I was convinced the conductor was gonna take us out of this world. Instead, he turned toward me. Even though me and my
daddy looked alike, I don’t think the conductor realized we were father and son. Most army officers didn’t travel around the country with their half-grown children.

The conductor pointed his finger at where I was sitting, next to the window. “You, boy, get up and follow me to the front right now. You know better than to be here in this car. Let’s go.” His face was hard.

This was the point when I realized that deciding not to leave somebody—and deciding to stay with them—are two entirely different things. Deciding not to leave my daddy was the easy part because all I had to do was follow him. Choosing to stay with him meant accepting the consequences of whatever happened to us—good or bad—together.

“I think I’m gonna stay where I am,” I replied, my voice not sounding too certain.

The conductor acted like he hadn’t heard me. Or didn’t believe me. Hard to tell.

“What did you say, boy?”

This time I found another voice. “I’m staying here with my father.”

The conductor’s expression was a flat plate of fury. The rest of the passengers still had their eyes aimed in our direction. You could feel the looks ricocheting around the car.

“You’ll regret not leaving when you had the chance. You get farther south, they’ll show you what’s what.” A mist of
spit from the conductor’s mouth splattered our faces. Then he turned and stalked out of the coach, keys clattering on his belt.

I know it probably sounds strange to say, but I believe that was the moment when the two of us—my daddy and me—felt like we were father and son for the first time. As we sat there in that southern train car splattered with spit, sweat pouring down our faces, I think both of us realized we were stuck together by what we had decided to do, no matter what happened next. We’d done a blackout jump together, as Cal would say, and there was no leaning back to close the door.

As the train rolled through town after town, getting deeper into the South, the two of us stayed side by side, waiting for whatever fate would come on board for us. Didn’t dare say a word to each other, just stayed face forward, our eyes staring at the seats in front of us. At one point my daddy’s hand reached over and squeezed my arm, like he was telling me to not give up hope yet.

We were on that train for what seemed like hours and we never moved one inch from our seats. Our spit dried up and our stomachs rumbled and pee backed up to our eyeballs, but we sat there like we were glued in place. Figured we’d never be able to unbend our legs again, after all that time. To this day, I don’t know why nobody came on board
to get us. Or why we weren’t arrested at one of the stations and dragged off to jail.

We rode in a coach car meant for whites only all the way to Fayetteville, North Carolina. When we peeled ourselves outta the seats finally, it was early evening. We stumbled off the train at the end of a long line of white people who were in a speedy hurry to make it down the aisle before us, as if we had some dread disease that might be catching.

Nobody was waiting to arrest us once we set foot on the ground, though—which was a big surprise to us because we sure thought they would be. Same dumb signs still hung everywhere, of course.
COLORED. WHITE
. Black fingers pointed out the direction we were supposed to go. But we stood there on the platform, ignoring all of them. Turning quick, my daddy wrapped his arms around me in an army hug that just about squeezed the pee into my brain. His hands thumped my back. “You are one darned brave person. I am so proud of you. So darned proud of having you as my son.”

“Well, I am too,” I replied, which didn’t make much sense, but that’s what I said.

As we headed to the army bus stop with the sun setting behind us, I knew our old lives had come to an end. Things were changing.

The world was changing.

Me and my daddy—we’d been away from each other for a long time, rolling through our lives like lonely rocks. Leaving had been a curse hanging over both our heads, but we’d
stood up to it on the train—looked it right in the face—and stuck together, no matter what harm coulda happened to us. And now that curse felt like it had finally been broken.

Maybe our new life together wouldn’t always be easy—I was sure it wouldn’t since me and my daddy were different people, you know, and we had a lot of catching up to do. Living in the South would be tough on both of us.

But as Aunt Odella always said, “The end of one thing is the beginning of something else.” As I walked next to my father under the cactus-orange sky, you could tell the new beginning was already starting for us. Even if I did have to practically run to keep up.

W
ithin the big stories in history, there are always many smaller ones—stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I first heard about the black paratroopers of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion from a veteran who had been one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, a group of black pilots in World War II. The few details he knew about the paratroopers and their mission intrigued me. He said the men of the 555th were sometimes known as the “Triple Nickles,” and they had once been part of a secret operation to protect the United States from Japanese balloon bombs and forest fires during World War II.

My search to find out more about this little-known part of World War II led me to an eighty-seven-year-old veteran named Walter Morris, who was the first African American in U.S. history selected to become a paratrooper. In early 1944, Mr. Morris was part of a small “test platoon” of seventeen soldiers who became the nation’s first black paratroopers at
a time when few African Americans had ever flown inside a plane, let alone jumped from one. This small group eventually became the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, or Triple Nickles.

Now, it is a rare opportunity for any writer—any person—to have the chance to talk to somebody who was there, who was a
first
in history. Whenever I spoke with Mr. Morris, I was always a little awed—and
jittery
, as Levi would say—to be able to interview this humble man who played such a unique role in World War II. I felt it was important to bring the fascinating story of the 555th and their mission to life.

And that’s where this book began.

Many of the names and places used in this story are real, including “Tiger Ted” Lowry, who once fought Joe Louis; the army cook called Emerald Jones, who washed out of the paratroops because he couldn’t jump; and the troopers nicknamed “Killer” and “Brothers.” Graphite was indeed the name of the paratroopers’ official army heap, a 1937 two-door Ford.

Today, there is still a small town in North Carolina called Southern Pines, where some of the black paratroopers’ families stayed during the war. If you look very carefully, you might find a trickle of a creek called McDeeds running through the middle of it. Our Lady of Victory Church still stands on the town’s main street, although it now serves as a community center. You can also find the old train station, where Levi arrived in nearby Fayetteville.

While few trains are pulled by coal-burning locomotives
today, the experience of what it was like to ride in the “Jim Crow cars” in the South hasn’t been forgotten by those who did. When I asked one black veteran what he recalled, he looked at me with an unflinching gaze and said, “I remember riding right behind the stinking coal car.”

Although the characters of Levi and his father are fictional, the war experiences they describe are as realistic and accurate as possible. Many scenes in the book were adapted from details found in the written and recorded interviews of the men who were part of the 555th, including the final scene, in which Levi and his father refuse to move to the Jim Crow car, and the storekeeper scene, in which Levi nearly loses his life by asking for a Coca-Cola.

As the army’s only airborne firefighting unit, the 555th made about twelve hundred individual jumps into forest fires during their service in the western United States, from July to October 1945. You can watch army footage of the real 555th in action during the war and see the men “hooking the trees” and parachuting into forest fires on the unit’s website:
triplenickle.com
.

Despite the hazardous nature of their work and numerous injuries, the Triple Nickles lost only one paratrooper during their mission. Tragically, just a few days before the war ended, a medic from Pennsylvania named Malvin Brown died in a fall from a tree during a firefighting run. Walter Morris was one of the soldiers who accompanied the soldier’s body home for burial.

Although most of the paratroopers in the 555th never saw a Japanese balloon bomb, it is estimated that between six thousand and nine thousand balloons were sent from Japan during the war. Parts of the balloons are held at several museums, including the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, near Dayton, Ohio. Historians believe some balloon bombs may still remain undiscovered in the West today. One was found in Oregon in 1978.

A few months after the war ended, the 555th left Oregon and returned to North Carolina, as Levi describes in the story. In January 1946, they were invited to join the 82nd Airborne in New York City for one of the largest victory parades in the United States. By the following year, the 555th had grown to thirty-six black officers and more than one thousand men as they became an elite demonstration unit for military training exercises and air shows across the country. In December 1947, they became the first black unit integrated into the regular army—long before integration happened in the rest of the country.

Lt. Col. (Ret.) Bradley Biggs, one of the 555th officers, wrote later that he didn’t join the black test platoon to prove that he could jump out of an airplane, but “to prove it should have been done all along.”