Two Souls Indivisible (17 page)

John Cherry died from hepatitis when he was fifty-two; Fred was only eleven. No pictures of him survived, so Fred, as an adult, did not have a clear memory of his face. The death jolted Fred, who could not imagine how his family would survive. In the end, the tragedy heightened the role of the two people most responsible for raising him—his mother and his oldest sister.

His mother, Leolia, barely five feet tall, was known as "Miss Doll," a name that belied her strength and stamina in raising her own eight children plus a half-dozen grandchildren. She ran down chickens in the coop, then killed, cleaned, and prepared them for cooking. She worked many hours in the field, planting and pulling fruits and vegetables; then cleaning, preserving, and canning them. The family raised hogs, but when the smokehouse held no meat, she mixed chicken's feet into the rice for flavor. She made her own soap by boiling pig fat in a huge iron pot, mixing it with lye, allowing it to solidify, and cutting it into small blocks. At church, she used a washboard as a tambourine.

Even in her sixties, she would race her teenage grandchildren across a field. She could read, though she never attended high school and never learned to drive a car. Her Apostolic faith, whose followers believe in the literal word of the Bible, shaped her life. Almost daily she attended a church service, prayer meeting, or Bible class. Because she believed that a modest appearance reflected pious devotion, she always wore dresses that fell below the knee and shunned makeup and jewelry. Dancing was forbidden; drinking, sinful; personal sacrifice, sacred. She did not buy new underwear for herself so she could save for Fred's college education.

But she was also a tough country woman who punished her children for misbehaving, such as talking disrespectfully to an adult, cursing, or coming home late. She beat them with a switch or whatever was handy, once pulling an entire bush out of the ground and using the roots. "Better not run from me," she'd threaten the guilty party. She also kept a long-nosed, black .38 revolver in a paper bag, locked in a closet, and she was not afraid to fire it. If she thought she heard moonshiners in the woods or chicken thieves around the coop, she'd blast away. She also brandished the gun to enforce discipline. One teenage granddaughter, Joyce, living with her in the 1960s, attended a James Brown concert with a young man without asking for permission. It was a clear violation of the rules; the girls could not be with boys without adult supervision. Leolia grabbed her paper bag, marched to the concert, and found her mortified granddaughter. "Okay, let's go," she said. There was no need to show the gun. Leolia was in her seventies at the time.

If his mother gave Fred strength, endurance, and character, his oldest sister, Beulah, provided him with opportunities and fueled his ambitions. The two siblings always had a special relationship. When Fred was born, his mother handed him to Beulah, who was nineteen, and said, "This baby is yours." Leolia still mothered her youngest child, but she needed help with so large a family, and Beulah was pleased to dote on her little brother.

While Leolia bore the stamp of an earlier time, Beulah was thoroughly modern, a tall, sturdy woman who wore makeup, owned jewelry, and loved to drive. She was the first in the family to attend college (Fred would be the only other one) and was the only child to earn a master's degree. She worked in the Suffolk public school system for thirty-seven years, first as a teacher, then as a principal, and whether she was in school or at home, she demanded the use of proper grammar and respectful language.

She married well. Her husband, Melvin Watts, came from one of the area's wealthiest black families. They operated a bus service, owned part of a popular beach in the Tidewater area, and had other real estate interests. One brother was a doctor and one was a lawyer, while Melvin was a successful farmer. Like Beulah's own father, he was a truck farmer—except Melvin owned at least four trucks, plus a tractor, and would sell his bounty of collard greens, string beans, radishes, spinach, watermelons, and cantaloupes to the merchants on High Street in Portsmouth. He bought Beulah a comfortable home in Suffolk with comforts she'd never had before, such as a telephone, lamps, a refrigerator, and upholstered furniture.

The couple never bore their own children; they had a foster daughter, and they cared for their many younger siblings, nieces, and nephews. Beulah's strict rules and tough love were not welcomed by all. When a nephew fell behind on his mortgage payments, he asked Melvin if he could borrow $3,000. Melvin agreed but said Beulah had to give her consent. She refused. "It shouldn't have happened," she told him. He lost the house.

The bond between Beulah and Fred solidified when he was thirteen and became bedridden with a mysterious illness. Beulah volunteered to have him stay with her, where access to a telephone and car could help in an emergency. On the way to her house, Fred's body folded in pain and he stopped breathing. Beulah raced him to the hospital, where he was treated for acute appendicitis. When he was released, he went to Beulah's home, where he lived until he left for college.

The move meant one less mouth to feed for Fred's mother. More important, it put Fred under the supervision of two educated, financially secure guardians. Beulah did not want Fred to follow the path of his older siblings, who earned a living in various blue-collar or clerical jobs, consigning themselves to marginally better lives than those of their parents. Like his mother, she made him work hard, waking him up before dawn so he could load Melvin's watermelon truck, ride into town, and sell the produce to merchants. Beulah also pushed Fred to improve his schoolwork, discipline his mind, and prepare for college. She didn't badger him about his future but simply referred to it. "When you become a doctor..." she would say.

Fred didn't complain. For the first time he had his own bed, dressed well, and was one of the few students at East Suffolk High School who had regular access to a car. He was also assured of regular paying jobs on Melvin's farm or in other family businesses. While he enjoyed some of the work—he sold beer one summer on the family's beach—he loathed the long hours on dry fields beneath the hot Virginia sun. Picking potatoes, string beans, and strawberries was monotonous labor, frustrating his desire to accomplish something significant. Pulling cotton was even worse because the thorns punctured his hands, causing him to develop the same calluses that both his parents suffered from. He enjoyed driving the tractor, but Melvin sprayed his fields heavily with insecticide, which mixed with the dust that would swirl around Fred's face and penetrate his nostrils. When he blew his nose, the mucus was black.

Fred knew he didn't want to end up like so many of the sun-hardened farmhands around him, with coarse palms, stooped shoulders, and few pennies to save. He had learned how to hunt squirrels and trap raccoons and rabbits but knew it was no livelihood. And even though Melvin had enough money to send him to college, he did not want to be a doctor. Not at all. But he did have another idea, a notion more fantastic than anything even Beulah could imagine, a dream that, if realized, would be his ticket out of the Great Dismal.

In 1936, when he was eight years old, Fred was standing in a cornfield when he heard a rumble in the sky. He looked up and saw a plane descending smoothly in the distance. It was a mesmerizing, inspiring sight—the power and grace of a machine soaring effortlessly above a world where even a sputtering car was considered a mechanical wonder. Fred discovered that the plane landed in a nearby Navy auxiliary airfield, so he began looking for more and tracking their flying patterns. He trained himself to listen for the engines and amazed his friends with his ability to announce that a plane was coming before anyone could hear or see it. In school, he began making paper airplanes and winging them across the room.

After America entered World War II, the training flights accelerated, and Fred stopped whatever he was doing when he heard them. He watched the planes fly in formation, then peel off in mock battles, then twist and turn, the sun glinting off their glass cockpits. The "big birds" flew so low, a mere hundred to two hundred feet above the ground, that the pilots would wave at Fred, who would wave back. He wanted to jump up and get right in; instead, he would race after the aircraft, running through the woods, toward the airfield, then lie in the grass and watch the planes land and take off. "I'm really going to do that someday," he told a cousin, who stared at him in disbelief.

Plane crashes were common. Fred saw some himself, and he knew about others from the flatbed trucks that would cart pieces of the fuselage, wings, and other debris past his house. But the specter of death didn't bother him; if anything, it made the whole experience more exhilarating.

He shared his dream with few people, fearing others might tell him straight out that he was wasting his time, that no colored boy was ever going to be allowed to fly such a machine. He began searching for newspaper and magazine articles about airplanes and combat flying, but only after the start of World War II could he confirm that his dreams of being a black combat pilot were valid. He read about the famed Tuskegee Airmen, the black pilots whose exploits drew extensive coverage in the black newspapers. He closely tracked their every move in the weekly
Afro-American
and the
Norfolk Journal & Guide,
which described the bomber-escort and ground-attack missions in North Africa, Italy, and Germany. Fred kept grainy pictures of planes and studied their curves, dimensions, and capabilities.

He finally shared his ambition with his brother James, who was in the Navy, stationed off the coast of New Guinea. In his letter, he drew a picture of the Curtis P-40L War Hawk, which could fly 350 mph. It was armed with six fifty-caliber Browning machine guns and carried bombs and external fuel tanks. "This is what I'm going to be flying one day," he wrote. In fact, he wanted to be flying it right then. He already knew what kind of planes he wanted to command. Bombers didn't interest him. They flew straight and level; the pilots opened a hatch and the bombs fell out. It was predictable and dull, like driving a bus. Fred craved air-to-air combat, diving and swooping, making split-second decisions, firing bullets, eluding the enemy, soaring straight up and then down, and doing it all alone, without interference from anyone else, master of his own fate. And there was one other thing he wanted—to be the best.

At fourteen, he got his first chance to fly. Near him lived a white man who owned a Piper Cub, a light two-seater, in which he carried passengers for two dollars a ride. Approached by Fred, he expressed surprise at the boy's interest but said he would take him up if he had the money. Fred begged Beulah, who was initially skeptical but by now knew of her brother's ambitions. "I'm just so tired of you worrying about this flying thing," she said, and surrendered the two dollars.

On his first flight, Fred sat in the back seat and strapped on the belt. The man started the engine by twirling the propeller, then hopped in the plane. He maneuvered it across the airfield, reached 30 mph, and pulled the stick. The plane rose and Fred entered a new realm. "I looked down," he later recalled, "and there wasn't a building as tall as I was. I was above everything and everybody, and it made me feel good."

Cherry's wounds were not healing, and on April 10, he was again taken from the cell. His mosquito net, bedroll, and other belongings remained, but this time he did not return the next day or even the next week, alarming Halyburton. He assumed Cherry had been taken to the hospital again but couldn't be sure. He asked the guards what had happened but never received a straight answer. Figuring Cherry's risk for infection was still high, he worried about what kind of treatment he was receiving. His loneliness grew worse.

Every prisoner passed time differently. Some followed the animal life in the cell—the feeding patterns of a spider, the mating habits of a gecko. Others sought more physical activities. One POW crumbled a leftover bandage into a ball and began tossing it up in the air, counting five thousand catches within a few days. Another prisoner estimated that he jogged the equivalent of seven miles a day. Some spent hours just watching a shadow pass across the floor. The combination of physical abuse and isolation led one POW, Air Force Lieutenant John "Spike" Nasmyth, to write, "The POWs who were captured in my era, 1965 through 1968, all went a little crazy after a while."

While waiting for Cherry, Halyburton did a bit of everything. He increased his tap code conversations, he tried making his cigarettes last longer, he walked longer and more vigorously around his cell, sometimes until he passed out from exhaustion. He also tried being as neat as possible, not only in sweeping his cell but by folding his clothes inside his blanket. The Vietnamese had told the Americans how to fold their belongings, but Halyburton wanted to show them that he could do it better, that they were not slobs, and that military discipline and precision still existed in this sinkhole. It was only a blanket and a few garments, but he spent hours striving for the perfect crease.

He was taken to the prison "library," a cell with mostly Communist and pacifist literature, including the writings of Marxists like Wilfred Burchett and Felix Greene. Occasionally, American magazines appeared with antiwar stories. Though desperate for reading material, Halyburton was repulsed by the offerings and refused to return.

For no apparent reason, he was taken to another cell in the Zoo, and he feared he wouldn't see Cherry again, whose belongings remained in their old cell. He was devastated, and he stewed for several days. Then, again without explanation, he was returned to his old cell, where he was reunited with Cherry's clothes if not with the man himself. He continued walking, tapping, thinking, smoking, and folding, but his concern grew over his missing mate.

As Halyburton suspected, Cherry had indeed been taken back to the hospital, for the Vietnamese were determined to improve his condition. His shoulder was infected badly, oozing pus, so he again had surgery. While he was lying on the table—and before receiving any painkillers—his swollen left wrist hurt terribly, so he motioned for help. The doctor saw the problem and drew an X on the wrist. He then picked up a scalpel and cut it, splattering blood.