Two Souls Indivisible (11 page)

Because he could use both hands, he could help Cherry as an orderly would help a patient. The guards had given them a whiskbroom, so each day Halyburton swept the floor. He picked up the bowls of food left outside the door. He emptied their wastebucket. He hung up Cherry's mosquito net at night and lit his cigarettes. The men were permitted to shave once a week, using cold water and old blades, but Halyburton began to demand from the turnkey that Cherry be allowed to shower.

Halyburton was mindful of their reversed roles—a white man doing chores for a black man—but he didn't care. The tasks gave him something to do and relieved the boredom. His efforts, however, made a deeper impression on Cherry, whose own experience had not anticipated a living arrangement with Halyburton.

Born in 1928, Fred Cherry was raised on a small farm outside Suffolk, Virginia, a region known for a massive swamp that covered 400,000 acres across the coastal plain of Virginia and North Carolina. It was known as the Great Dismal, a name that evoked the harsh conditions of the region's black families and the sense that they were at the mercy of forces beyond their control: segregation, disenfranchisement, unemployment, poverty, disease. Most black men had to rely on their backs to squeak out a living. They spent their days planting, weeding, and picking corn, potatoes, or cotton. In 1930 only nineteen percent of rural black families in the Lower Tidewater owned their own land; the rest were tenants or laborers. Those who didn't farm worked in peanut factories, iron foundries, lumber mills, or a naval shipyard. Few if any went to college, and many did not finish high school because classes overlapped the harvest season.

The youngest of eight children, Fred was a small, wiry boy whose penchant for jumping, running, and scurrying about led others to say he had a lot of pep—so they called him Pepper. Like many rural blacks in the South, the Cherrys adhered to the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, the former Virginia slave whose response to white supremacy had been interracial cooperation, the encouragement of thrift and business among blacks, and the acquisition of land. In 1881 Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, its mission to train the "head, heart, and hand" of students who would then elevate the race culturally, socially, and economically. Progress would come not from dissent or confrontation but from self-improvement and accommodation. There were few alternatives. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the impoverished, agrarian South, with its history of black servitude and subjugation, was no arena in which to demand meaningful civil rights. The status quo would not survive; but long after the civil rights movement had roiled the South, the ethos of that earlier milieu—achievement through hard work, compromise, and accommodation—would continue to define Fred Cherry.

His mother, Leolia, rarely talked about race, but she did warn him about one of the great taboos of the South. "If you ever say the wrong thing to a white girl," she said, "you're dead." Fred had plenty of reminders of "blacks' place" in society. White children rode buses to school; Fred and his friends walked two and a half miles to theirs. Fred lived near a white family, the Gregorys, and whenever his mother sent him to borrow sugar or butter, she reminded him to address the adults by their last names preceded by "Mister" or "Miss." But Fred noticed that the Gregory children called his parents "Leolia" and "john."

Other examples of racism were not so subtle. Fred was once riding his bicycle with his older brother James along a two-lane country road. A car with two white teenagers pulled alongside; one reached out and knocked James on the back of the head, spilling him to the ground. The teens drove away, laughing.

Both James and Fred were furious, but their mother urged them to forget the incident. "James is all right," she said. "He's not hurt, so don't worry about it. You don't know who it was, so you can't mention it to their parents." Fred wasn't happy about it, but he realized his mother was probably correct—blind vengeance would be counterproductive. He also learned something else: to succeed in a white world, he would have to be a little bit tougher than everyone else, maybe a lot tougher. He remembered something his father had always told him: "Some things you can change and some things you just got to put up with. It's up to you to figure out which is which."

Racism didn't change after Fred became an Air Force officer. By leaving his insular black farming community, he encountered a more overt bigotry.

After serving in the Korean War, Cherry returned to the United States and, assigned to a new base, drove his family across the country. Though he often wore his well-pressed uniform off the base—dress blues or khakis, a silver bar on his collar—restaurants and motels routinely denied him service. But he never complained. And when traveling with white companions, he would decline their invitations to diners that he knew did not accept blacks, for he did not want to make a scene. He knew that confrontation of any kind could jeopardize him.

Housing was another problem. In 1957, when he was assigned to the Dover Air Base in Dover, Delaware, the town's black residential section had no vacancies, so his wife, Shirley, and their two sons initially lived with his family in Suffolk, Virginia. Cherry lived on the base until a "colored apartment" became available. Dover's segregation was even more unseemly in its public hospital, where Shirley gave birth to their first daughter, Debbie. The segregated wing and nursery were anticipated. Not expected was the unwillingness of the white nurses to bathe or change the baby; they just gave her to Shirley wet or dirty. Shirley complained to Fred, who demanded that his child be treated properly. When he returned the next day and saw that the neglect had continued, he finally lost his temper, cursing the nurses and telling his wife, "We're leaving!" He grabbed the baby, and as the three of them headed for the door, a nurse yelled, "You have to check her out." Fred shouted back, "The hell with you—we're gone!"

In the military, he often had to overcome others' perception of inferiority, and his cause was not helped by the dominance of white Southerners in the armed services' leadership. Cherry was the first black cadet sent for basic training to Maiden, Missouri, whose drab air base sat amid cotton fields in the Missouri Boot-heel. His flight instructors, hired as civilian contractors, refused to teach him, forcing the commander to offer a promotion to any instructor who would.

Cherry's peers didn't treat him any better. When his flight class walked across the tarmac, the four white students walked in one line and Cherry walked by himself. But it didn't bother the new recruit; he was accustomed to segregation and only cared about being a combat pilot, not making friends. Besides, his piloting skills won the others' respect: after he was the first member of his class to fly solo, the other students walked with him.

Later, discrimination robbed him of one of the most exciting assignments of the Cold War.

In 1955 Cherry was stationed on Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where he was one of several pilots recruited by the CIA for a highly classified mission: flying the U-2, a high-altitude spy plane with sophisticated avionics and reconnaissance equipment, over the Soviet Union to photograph its military capacity.

Cherry needed little convincing to participate in something bold, secretive, and dangerous.
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The highest he had ever flown was fifty-four thousand feet, whereas the U-2 would ascend to ninety thousand feet. With several other pilots in his squadron, he was cleared for the program and awaited orders to leave the base. One day, however, he realized something had gone wrong when the other pilots were packing up without him. He called his CIA contact, who promised to find out what was going on.

Calling back, he gave Cherry the news. "I'm sorry, but your folder has been removed from the rest," he said. "We can't keep you in the program." The CIA had nothing to do with his removal, the official said, but an Air Force lieutenant colonel, who had to approve the transfer, had pulled Cherry's folder.

He didn't mention race, but he didn't have to—it was understood. Each personnel file includes a mug shot, so the lieutenant colonel, believing that a black officer was not fit for such a sensitive position, squashed the transfer. There was nothing Cherry could do, no one to hear his appeal. His own commander had not even been briefed on the program. So his career as a spy pilot ended before it began, though he occasionally wondered what the earth looked like from ninety thousand feet.

Cherry had another reason to distrust Halyburton. Porter was with the Navy.

His bias against the Navy was partly based on the rivalry between the Navy and the Air Force. From the time of the War of Independence, the Navy considered itself the service of history and tradition and viewed the Air Force, established in 1947 as an offshoot of the Army, as high-tech parvenus. According to the Navy, its airmen possessed superior skills to take off and land on a ship, but they also had many other duties onboard (like tracking ordnance) while living in cramped quarters. Air Force pilots could focus exclusively on flying and lived on roomy bases. While limited ship space forced the Navy fliers to economize on equipment and material, the Air Force could splurge on extra radios and other accessories. Halyburton was surprised to learn that Air Force pilots could jettison empty external fuel tanks for greater mobility; Navy pilots, lacking extra tanks, could not. In their dark blue with gold trim, the Navy airmen viewed Air Force apparel—a lighter blue with gray trim—as utilitarian and called the pilots "bus drivers."

The Air Force was no less derisive of the Navy, which it considered stodgy and aristocratic. As the newest military branch, the Air Force was devoted exclusively to air power, and it believed it operated on the technological frontier. It attracted large numbers of educated engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, who made it the military's most progressive service. Not surprisingly, the Air Force integrated more rapidly than any other branch. The Navy was the slowest.

Fred Cherry knew about the Navy's dismal record in race relations firsthand, and he wanted to tell Halyburton about his experience. In 1949, he explained, he attended Virginia Union College, one year after President Harry Truman had signed the executive order desegregating the military. "In my second year at school," he said, "I heard that if you qualified in all respects, you could go from civilian life straight into aviation cadet training. So I went to see this Navy recruiter in Portsmouth. I didn't know the Navy didn't have any black aviators. The recruiter told me to fill out this application for enlisted service. I said, 'No. I want to be a pilot.' Then he told me that the individual I would have to talk to was not in the office, and I could stop in some other day."

He went back three more times, he told Halyburton, and each time was told the commander was out. The fourth time, Cherry said, "I saw this door creeping closed. I knew he was there and had been there every time before. I just sort of exploded. I kicked the door open. He thought I was coming across the desk. I said a few choice words to him. They were rather obscene. Then I told him I didn't want any part of his Navy."

From that day on, Cherry believed the Navy was "a bastion of racism," though he hadn't met another Navy man until Halyburton walked into his cell. Now he began to revise his judgment and recognize that progress had been made. Halyburton was embarrassed and tried to apologize for the Navy. "I can't believe the recruiter would treat you that way," he said. He knew that Cherry still resented his service but was glad he didn't bear that grudge against him.

Common ground was easy to find. Baseball, for example. The prisoners weren't fans of the major leagues, but each had played as a kid, Cherry in a cow pasture and Halyburton on a sandlot. Each knew the social order of the South and the very different circumstances of his upbringing. But baseball was safe, and their stories—of running, catching, and hitting a ball in the sunshine of their youth—were easy to embrace. They could also share war stories, tales that offered action and suspense while not forcing either man to disclose much of himself personally. But Cherry was feeling more comfortable with his cellmate, so when he described a daring airborne rescue effort, he ended the story with a painful twist.

In the waning days of the Korean War, Cherry and another pilot, both flying F-84Gs, were attempting to land on a base at Teague, but the other jet's nose gear didn't lock. "I called the tower and pulled up beside him," Cherry told Halyburton. "They cleared the traffic pattern but he was getting low on fuel. He tried his emergency gear lock, but that didn't work. The gear was still loose, so I told him to give me a ten-degree bank and hold steady. I was going to see if I could knock it down, and he said, 'Okay.'"

Cherry acknowledged that the idea was risky—others might call it outrageous. He wanted to use his wing tip to nudge the landing gear into a locked position, but beneath the wing of each plane were the fuel tanks. The quirky angle would also force Cherry to fly "uncoordinated"—in effect, without the usual navigational tools that ensured precise flying.

Nonetheless, at three thousand feet the impaired F-84G went into a slight bank, and Cherry slid right beneath him, steadied his aircraft, and kissed the landing gear locked. "It was dangerous," Cherry said, "because if his fuel tank bumped my plane, it would rupture and catch fire. If I touched him anyplace other than where 1 touched him, it would have been disastrous."

Halyburton asked where he'd learned such a move.

"I'd never heard of anyone doing that before," Cherry said, "but I felt if he could hold the aircraft steady, I could do it."

That wasn't the end of the story. Back on the base, Cherry went to the officers' club for a drink, eager to share his daring exploit. But he was never given a chance. Instead, he sat alone while a group of white officers fraternized among themselves. "They never said a thing," Cherry said.

But it was also the mindset of the military; it had been integrated in 1948 but not purged of its entrenched bigotry. While blacks had fought with distinction in American wars since the Revolution, they had often been ignored in official accounts or simply denigrated as unfit. In an influential 1925 report, the Army War College drew on racist anthropological studies to determine that blacks, with their "smaller cranium, lighter brain, [and] cowardly and immoral character," were lower on the evolutionary scale than whites, and they should be relegated to "special status" in the Army.