The Grace of Silence (11 page)

Even so, Belvin senior wanted more for his sons. “There’s a big ole world out there,” he used to say. These simple words were meant to shoo his sons away from the backbreaking work in steel mills or coal mines and their occupational hazards, such as lost fingers and broken limbs, away from strikebreaker squabbles and black lung insurance claims. My grandfather’s words were meant to encourage his sons to wander beyond a town where their station in life would always be defined by the color of their skin and where they could be killed for daring to question the status quo.

So if one’s options were military service, work in the mills and mines, or other menial jobs, the choice was clear for high school graduate Belvin Norris Jr., who’d already spent three months sweeping and cleaning at the Phoenix office building
downtown. A decision was reached: if Belvin junior had to wear a uniform, Belvin senior wanted it to be a military uniform.

When I tracked down Dad’s service records I understood why he looked so young in his navy photos. At just over five foot eight, he weighed only 137 pounds. He had twenty-twenty vision and good blood pressure, and though he had suffered a bout of diphtheria as a kid, his health was deemed to be excellent. He enlisted for two years. At some point during the enlistment process someone had stamped his forms with the word “ruddy”—a term typically applied to dark-skinned whites. After his physical exam, the word was crossed out; “Negro” was typed to replace it. “Negro” was also stamped at least once, and often several times, on every document in his military file. “It is a unique art and special skill, this business of being a Negro in America,” William H. Hastie, civilian aide to the secretary of war, was once moved to remark.

The year before Dad enlisted, the navy created a separate program for Negro recruits at Camp Robert Smalls, the naval station at Great Lakes, Illinois. Named in honor of a black Civil War hero, it had been established to prepare blacks for service beyond their conventional roles as stewards, mess attendants, and, occasionally, musicians. The camp was run by a white lieutenant commander, Daniel W. Armstrong, who was following family tradition. Commander Armstrong’s father was a brigadier general who had led black troops in the Civil War and later founded Virginia’s Hampton Institute, a historically black college whose alumni include Booker T. Washington. Armstrong held high hopes for the program, telling a
Time
magazine reporter in the first year of the war, “What we’re doing here is bending every effort to make these boys as good as any fighting men the U.S. Navy has. The country doesn’t yet know what a fine new source of fighting men the Navy has.”
⁵

Throughout the military, the majority of black men were
assigned to noncombat roles, building bridges, digging roads, collecting trash, shining shoes, driving trucks, and working on docks. Even those lucky enough to be promoted to metal-smith, mechanic, or gunner’s mate received neither equal pay nor equal treatment. Decades after the war, historians would describe these men collectively as the physical backbone of the armed forces. Many of them had joined thinking that they were marching off to combat, or at least stepping closer to full citizenship. But, as they would come to learn, their service only confirmed their status as second-class Americans.

For my father, that cold realization came early. Three months after he arrived at Robert Smalls he was placed in the cooks and bakers program, and on November 9, 1943, he was transferred, along with thirty-nine other “Negro” recruits, to New Orleans for sixteen weeks of advanced kitchen training. The assignment meant that thereafter my father had to wear a small
C
on his upper sleeve, a rating badge denoting that his military service was all about serving others in the military. Fixing their meals. Baking their bread. Scrubbing pots. Washing dishes. All of this, while white men arriving at Great Lakes, regardless of skill or literacy, were automatically trained for work of a higher grade, as navy records indicate.

Over the course of my father’s enlistment, the navy adopted new attitudes toward Negroes and their abilities, deciding that the marginalization of men with able bodies and agile minds only served to undermine the war effort. In February 1945, the navy published a new pamphlet for all naval officers; called the
Guide to Command of Negro Naval Personnel
, it spelled out the reversal of policy: “In modern total warfare any avoidable waste of manpower can only be viewed as material aid to the enemy. Restriction, because of racial theories, of the contribution of any individual to the war effort is a serious waste of human resources.”
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My father’s military file revealed a story he never spoke about, at least not to me. He wound up moving around quite a bit during his two and a half years in the navy. He was transferred to outposts in Pensacola and Williamsburg, San Francisco and Hawaii, and eventually to the supply division of the service support forces for the Pacific fleet, after, in March 1944, the navy decided that Negro cooks and bakers could assume new positions if whites were unavailable.
⁷
Dad received an honorable discharge from the navy in January 1946. He left service to his country with a hundred dollars in his pocket and the right to a World War II medal.

On those rare instances when Dad referred to his time in the navy, he was always breezy or humorous. At bedtime, he would march up the stairs like a soldier, trying to get the kids to follow him. Or he might hum military tunes while maneuvering his old-fashioned push mower. I can still see him striding up and down the lawn as he cut the grass, muttering, “Left, right, left, right, left!” He used to tell us that he learned to speed-peel potatoes and carrots on KP duty, boasting of his skill while making fun of our pathetic attempts to help Mom prepare supper.

My naïveté was laughable, as I’d imagined that just about everybody in the military had done KP duty, during initiation or as punishment. War movies I watched as a child on Saturday matinee television always showed men sweating over steaming cauldrons or washing mountains of dishes and silverware. I didn’t realize at the time that a sink hose sprayer was the closest thing to a weapon many servicemen of color had been allowed to wield in World War II.

What must it have been like for a young man, barely eighteen years old, to discover that his country, fighting oppression overseas, was unashamed to marginalize him? In those days a young black man fully expected to encounter racism in the South. But an optimistic fellow would also have assumed that whites in
the North were different, less prejudiced. Although the South could strangle your spirit, there was a bedrock belief that life would be easier up North, where the well-educated men who ran the country did not share in the fierce racial hatred consuming the offspring of the Confederacy. This optimistic young man might also have assumed that the collective wartime spirit would smooth over old divisions of race and class. But, as so many of these brown-skinned men came to realize, military officials everywhere, seated behind mahogany desks in marble-columned buildings, were prone to firing off memos that dictated laws and customs as biased as those propounded by Klansmen and race-baiting politicians enforcing Jim Crow laws.

I never had the chance to talk about any of this with my father. He didn’t bring it up, so I had no occasion to press him. Until I pored over his military file, my appreciation of his time in uniform was faint. I wonder how he described his service in his letters to his mother, father, or five brothers. I’ve combed through letters written by other black servicemen to get a sense of how, in a segregated military, they saw their country and themselves in the fight for human rights overseas.

For the most part, these men were at once patriotic and frustrated. An anonymous letter to the editor of the
Pittsburgh Courier
, sent by a private in the 47th Quartermaster Regiment, Company D, illustrates the point: “If ever there were a time that all racial prejudices and hatred should be put aside, now it is at hand, and the country should be unified in every possible respect.… Negroes like the whites are quitting their jobs to increase the military strength of this Nation, because we all think that a nation worth being in is worth fighting for. But in the view of this so called Unity and National emergency the age old Monster of Prejudice has raised its head high.”
⁸

In March 1944, the
New Republic
printed another soldier’s letter, one of several it had received about bias in the military.
The editors chose it because they believed it expressed a common sentiment: “Those of us who are in the armed services are offering our lives and fortunes, not for the America we know today, but for the America we hope will be created after the war.”
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LIKE HIS FELLOW COUNTRYMEN
, my father participated in the war effort to help win the four fundamental freedoms spelled out by President Franklin D. Roosevelt: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. But there was no freedom from want in Birmingham after the war, when Belvin Norris Jr. returned during the winter of 1946.

Although Birmingham’s economy had flourished because of increased wartime industrial production, life on the home front still demanded sacrifice. The city, like much of the country, was triumphant in spirit, even as virtually every material resource was stretched to the limit. Sugar, steel, butter, lumber, cotton, and corn were all in short supply.

Even clothing was a hot commodity, especially menswear. Tens of thousands of returning veterans needed to swap their uniforms for civilian clothes, but stores couldn’t get their hands on enough merchandise. At the outset of 1946, the government called on retail merchants to reserve hard-to-find garments for returning servicemen, whenever possible. Suits, overcoats, shirts, and underwear were to be set aside in “substantial proportions” for exclusive sale to veterans, noted the Civilian Production Administration, which also asked veterans, in turn, to limit their buying to their “immediate needs.”

If returning white soldiers were having a hard time finding civilian clothes, the difficulty was compounded for black veterans. Even in those retail establishments where they were
allowed to shop, they were denied the use of dressing rooms, as prescribed by segregation laws. Civilian clothes were in such short supply that some returning black veterans had to avail themselves of coveralls, jumpsuits, castoffs from mine workers, or hand-me-downs from church congregants—garments that were an insult to their pride and a reminder of their second-class citizenship.

There were shortages of everything. Meat was so scarce that fistfights broke out in butcher shops. The desperation in Birmingham was akin to what was going on all over the country. One widely printed newspaper story told of a melee outside a Philadelphia shop. A mob formed when word spread that the butcher had acquired generous cuts of prime meat. After much screaming and chanting by the mob outside, the rattled proprietor finally opened the door and tried to explain that he had only a single leg of lamb. A buxom woman shoved him aside and pushed her way in, grabbed the leg of lamb, and used it to bludgeon her way to the cash register.

In 1946, President Harry Truman asked for even more belt-tightening in the United States to avoid what he called “mass starvation” overseas. Under Truman’s directive, wheat could no longer be used as livestock feed or to make hard alcohol or beer. And a greater portion of the wheat kernel was retained, producing flour darker and grainier than what was customary in the spongy, store-bought bread Americans loved. The government was so worried that people would rebel against this change in their eating habits that the president, with the help of Department of Agriculture home economists, staged a taste test for the White House press corps, hoping to sell the country on the idea that dark bread was more healthful than white.

Clothing and food shortages were the least of it for black veterans, who returned to civilian life more acutely aware of the disparity between America’s promise of freedom and its continued practice of racial segregation. In the mid-1940s, Birmingham,
Alabama, was a place where even the best-dressed black man might have to step off the sidewalk if a white person—regardless of class—was heading in his direction. Strict segregation ruled all aspects of city life. Bathrooms, water fountains, restaurants, waiting rooms, public transportation, and private hospitals were all divided along the color line; only the boldest or most desperate dared to cross it. When asked to describe the racial climate in Birmingham, a local branch officer for the NAACP said that blacks in his city were “gripped with an almost paralyzing fear.”
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Birmingham was a city of boundaries, warnings, exhortations. Ministers preaching of brotherly love also insisted on the necessity to keep the Negro in his place. If the minister was a Negro, he might advise his congregants against trusting even the most benevolent white person. Black children were advised to lower their eyes and their voices when speaking to white adults, and white children learned that certain simple courtesies were never to be offered to a Negro. Nor was a Negro to be called “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” much less “sir” or “ma’am.” If respect was due because of age or affection or trust, then a Negro worker should be addressed as “Auntie,” “Uncle,” “Nanny,” “Mammy,” or by a first name. The white child was instructed that the world of white privilege would tilt off its axis if he or she called a dutiful family employee Mr. Otis or Mrs. Ella Mae or used any other form of address proper only for whites.

The code for blacks was strict and unforgiving, held in place by the unspoken though ever-present threat of loss of income, dignity, or even life. In her memoir
The Wall Between
, the activist and former journalist Anne Braden tells of a memorable conversation she had with a man from an older generation. She describes him as one of the kindest men she had ever known, someone she had always admired for his gentle spirit and courtly ways and the respect he showed to people of color. Nonetheless, she says, he embraced segregation with “a violence
that squared with nothing else in his personality.” When she suggested to him that an anti-lynching law might be a good idea, his response was abrupt and caustic, intended to stifle such foolishness on the part of a “well-bred” southern girl. He told her, “We have to have a good lynching every once in a while to keep the nigger in his place.”
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