They unloaded five thousand tons a day in twenty-four-hour shifts. The French were stunned by their capacity and by their song. Together, the men sounded one note that was simultaneously a chord, in harmonies so close they were dissonant though whole, broken but holding as one great rolling arc of power—the baritone voices of a hundred men, a palimpsest. Might was subverted into song. Like the clay figures of saints cloaking the aura of orishas, the words spoke another language in the tones. Locked in the harmonies and rhythms, the hammer of Ogun cracked, driving them onward.
These were rhythms and a unity of action Osceola was used to. He had heard these harmonies all his life from the stevedores and draymen on the docks of Charleston. Most of the fellows in his unit were frightened backwoods, up-country boys, scared conscripts out of county lockup or sharecroppers taking the place of a planter’s son. A few were independent farmers, who would find their land stolen upon return.
“Pickin’ the Cotton, Cuttin’ the Cane,
Haulin’ Tobacco, Prayin’ fo’ Rain,
Listen up Cap’n, Ain’t it a Shame,
We in this Fight but, Nothin’ Ain’t Changed.”
Their song, a slow bent-note dirge marking the rhythms of field labor blended with the faster-paced waterfront jig rhythms, emitted a whole new sound that fascinated and intoxicated him.
Some had come to fight, to show that black men deserved respect. Others saw no reason to go off and defend a country that terrorized them. “Say President gon make de world safe fo’ democracy. He got the dem part right.” The vast majority were draftees. A handful, like Osceola, had enlisted. All, regardless, were consigned, confined to the work of slaves—digging latrines, building barracks, hauling, peelin’ potatoes, mess duty, and digging graves. They were manual laborers again, marched and drilled in coffles, bossed by poor white, tobacco-sluggin’ gang leaders shipped over from bayou work camps and transformed into sergeants. The officers, who were also white and mostly from the South, publicly humiliated the Negro troops. Example—the order for mandatory VD treatment for the colored: “Short arm inspection!”
Osceola stood in line, listening to the disgruntled banter. “It’s the officers theyselves got the highest count. Got they own private whorehouse givin’ em the clap, won’t let nigguhs eben into the town.” The American command made sure the French understood their policy toward Negroes. Colored troops were forbidden to fraternize with the French. You could get jailed for complaining, shot for doing it. Osceola braced himself as the duty nurse washed his penis with bichloride of mercury and gritted his teeth through the five-minute injection of argyrol. Just as the real pain hit him, they slathered his johnson with two grams of calomel ointment and pronounced him good to go. His legs in a momentary bow, he hobbled out of the infirmary cursing under his breath, “Ain’t never even had no woman. How I’mo get VD? Didn’t sign up for this!”
Such had been Osceola’s naivety, he had thought “signing up” with the army meant that he could sign up for wherever he wanted to go. His goal was to find James Reese Europe and that band from New Yawk. Word of their musical prowess had spread to all of the colored units throughout France. There were other military bands out of Chicago, Texas, and D.C., but hands down, Europe’s troupe was a cut above, a breed unto itself, the King’s musicians! Osceola had met the man once, but he had been so in awe, he had not even said he could play. He wasn’t going to allow that to happen again. Convinced he could cut it, he practiced numbers in his mind. “Take that! Top this!” He still held out hope that he could get to Lieutenant Europe and play for the man and prove his mettle in a face-off, but now his only thought was to make it back to the barracks without fainting from fear, relief, or pain, take your pick. Handling the silk-pouched talisman round his neck, he spoke under his breath, “Juss what kinda charm this pozed to be, Mah Bette?”
Just then, a military sedan sped by, stopped abruptly, and backed up. Osceola stood at attention thinking, If another one of these crackuhs mess wid me today . . . as a thin, delicate youth with an oversized cap and a crisp new officer’s uniform hopped out of the vehicle and approached him. He was a full head shorter than Osceola; his cap grazed dangerously close to his eyelashes. “At ease, soldier! . . . Hey Ossie, it’s me,” the cap whispered, “Flip.” Osceola remained at attention, eying his boyhood partner in crime, now a commissioned officer out of the Citadel, “One of South Carolina’s finest!” Still intent upon being Osceola’s one and only white man, Flip had a new scheme.
“With you in the saddle, I could ride in one of those little sidecars—hopefully away from the front and toward gay Paree.” Flip put his petite hand on Ossie’s shoulder and clucked, as he pulled the tarp off the spanking new bike. “A Triumph Model H Dispatch—English! American-issued Harleys only go sixty. This baby clocks in at seventy-five.”
When Ossie first got a look at the bike, he stood mute. Sitting astride it, he fell in love! Flip’s plan to get him reassigned to the U.S. Army motorcycle corps, which by some strange stroke of military fate was primarily colored, sounded fine, but no big city car on the road, no Buick 25 or Cadillac Landaulette had prepared him for the sensation of straddling the curved leather seat, gripping the sculpted handlebars, and imagining the sleek, spoked wheels spin beneath him in perfect symmetry. It was the most beautiful assemblage of polished metal and chrome with a wasp waist and high behind, luscious curved arms, silver slippers and a poundin’, pumpin’ heart. He knew immediately the bike was his Miss Lizzie.
“You owe me big-time, brothuh,” Flip chimed.
“How I’m to learn to drive it?”
“Already told ’em you could.”
McKinley never did make a very good plan by himself. Fast as the scheme got cooked, the fire got too hot. Flip’s dreams for Paris were dashed when the commanding general of the 2nd Army, General Robert Bullard, decided to embarrass the standing colonel of the 92nd, Charles Ballou, whom he hated. “Bullard and Ballou,” scowled Flip, “sound like a bad minstrel act.” General Bullard chose to seal his disdain for Colonel Ballou’s nigguh troops by proving them incapable of battle and the colored officers under his command unfit for service. Orders came down that the new colored divisions coming in were to be sent directly to the front. As soon as Flip surmised that the courier routes would take him in the wrong direction—toward the battle—he immediately determined that his driver could make it on his own.
Country boys—draftees, from Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, the Carolinas—were hit the first night at 2:30 A.M., with a rolling artillery barrage of three thousand seven hundred guns, twenty to thirty shells a minute. Sounded like the Devil’s freight train roarin’ straight outta Hell. Airplanes, machine guns, and cannon with trajectories a hundred times the distance capability of weapons used two years before were complemented by a new arsenal of barbed wire, tanks, and gas. In the strobe flashes of gunfire, the night sky was alight with a ghostly, pastel cluster of clouds. Mustard gas, named after the color of its mists, lingered with the smell of a perfumed bath, and after twelve hours caused the body to blister and rot from the outside in, the pain so excruciating the stricken had to be strapped to the stretchers. The second wave of gas, smelling of rotten fish, would drown its victims in their own lungs, while the pineapple pepper chlorine caused a slow conscious death, mixed with streams of delirium. The scene was madness.
As his motorcycle sped toward the front—headlights off—Osceola saw a surge of men running, falling back, their eyes round with terror or grimaced in fear. The roadway was clogged with sidelined trucks, the drivers squawking in terror out the windows. Behind them a fleet of flatbeds loaded with the heavy howitzer guns that were to provide the fire cover for the assault had taken a direct hit and were strewn about like the toys of a tempestuous child. The sky exploded, bursting stars of flame, cataracts of bullets. The night rained fire. The bike zigzagged, skidded, and tumbled on its side, ripping the side carriage from the wheel. As it spun off behind him, Ossie wailed, “Whoa, Miss Lizzie! Shake, shake that shim
my!” He righted the bike and pressed on. His body crouched low and shoulders hunched, he pushed up the fuel full throttle. Miss Lizzie growled, bucked, and screamed, the engine turning red hot. The sounds locked in his mind, a furious, relentless percussion. In the thick of battle, riding sixty-five miles per hour, with no headlights, his helmet knocked back by the wind, out from under Deke’s thumb, holding tight to his firecracker of a girl, Osceola felt himself a man among men. Gray shrouds of smoke gave way to giant yellow bulging clouds, pushing the winds back. “Gas! Damn! Hit it, baby!” Holding on to his Lizzie, he could outrun God—outrun the wind, outrun death—“Shit yeah! Go girl!”
The troops at the front had lost contact. Isolated, they were now in the center of the siege. Ordered to go forward at all costs, they charged in waves over the top of the bunkers and evaporated like beads of water on a hot skillet. Osceola sought an authority in the chaos. He pulled a folded message from his satchel and stood before a white officer, his face covered with soot, his body instinctively flinching at the assault of sounds, making the very ground tremble.
“What do they mean, ‘Advance’? They just gave us an order to retreat!”
“Yes, sir.”
The wide-eyed officer crumpled the missive in disgust. “Advance, retreat. Advance, retreat. Four times we’ve tried to attack! What do they think we—” A machine gun bullet richocheted off the ground, blasted through the officer’s forehead and out the back of his skull, burrowing into the mudbank.
“Jesus!” Osceola grabbed the message from the still-quivering hand. Holding his helmet fast to his head, he crouched low and moved swiftly through the maze of trenches, his nimble legs skipping past the singular scenes of war, Elegua’s crooked dance of death among the dazed, wounded, and gassed. A boy squatted, shaking and praying on his knees, “Help me, please help me, Lawd, Jesus, uh Mama!” The soldier beside him writhed in solitary agony, a hole blown through his shoulder the size of a softball. A pair of legs dangled from the top of the trench. Another rookie enlistee leaned against the earthen wall laughing, holding a rifle he had first beheld only three weeks before. The noise shook the earth like rolling thunder, the sky of misted smoke bright as a day with a thousand exploding suns.
“Who’s in charge here? Commander? Com . . . holy!” He came upon another officer. His tight jaws clenching the stub of an unlit cigarette, the young captain stepped over and through the tumult of men, checking to see who was dead, wounded, or stable enough to go on. Osceola fell in behind him and barked over the din, “Courier Corps, sir! With an urgent message from General Bullard.”
“Where yuh been?”
“Command lost contact.”
“Yuh think?”
“The troops are to stage another advance, sir. I’m to return with your response.”
“Sent us into barbed wire with no wire cutters. Rifles with no bayonets. No fire cover, not one grenade, not even a friggin’ signal flare. Advance with what?!”
“Sir? Your commander, sir.”
“How’s the song go? Over there!”
Ossie came upon the major, squatting in a ditch . . . crying.
“Sir, I’m in the Courier Corps. I have to return with your reply. My orders are to report back to central command the state of your—”
The world went silent. A trench mortar clipped his sentence and blew his body into the air with the power of a freight train. The bursting shell created a vacuum of silence that sucked up the air, then released it in a rush of wind, pulling the fluids from his spine into his brain. When his body hit the ground, his bones made the sound of a light bulb breaking. Then everything went white.
Miss Lizzie Mae had her a way,
Of walkin’ down the street,
That would make the sidewalk sizzle beneath her feet,
Yes, Lizzie Mae had her a way,
Of walkin’ down the street,
That could make a hungry fellah forget to eat . . .
Snatches of song, flashes of memory and conversation mixed with the pain, the gulps for breath, and the blinding whiteness of the sun as it split the horizon. The fierce night battle had lulled, it was quiet now. An incongruous symphony of forest birds heralded the day from the trees. Ossie awakened. Not dead. He opened his eyes cautiously, the slight traces of pepper gas still lingering. The landscape beneath the ashen morning sun revealed a field of slain and wounded, heaps of torn contorted sculptures emerging from water-filled shell-holes or fused with the broken carcasses of trees and split boulders. Abandoned and mangled artillery was draped with scraps of flesh, some still quivering with life. A tumbleweed spiral of barbed wire rolled of its own will. Amidst the pitched battle of the rats and crows over the bounty of corpses and the undulating whine of the flies, a defiant crimson poppy arched against the wind. The patient maggots gnawing through flesh made the sound of drying sheets, rustling in the breeze.
His head dropped back. While machine guns spat in competing languages, the whistle of metal sliced through the wind and the distant crack of sniper fire imploded in his head. A piece of metal was twisted into his leg, pinning him down. The drone of a high-flying squadron alerted him to the prickly smell of pineapples that soon invaded the air. Osceola tore at his uniform and ripped off a strip. He quickly urinated into the cloth and held it to his face, pressing it into his nose, mouth, and eyes as one of the old guys from the S.O.S. had told him, “It the only way to shield against the gas what smell like pineapple. Smoke helmit ain’t no good again’ it and they ain’t gon give colored no smoke helmit no way. Come to say, they dint eben gib most boys no reglar helmit.” Breathing in the rank, lifesaving smell of his own piss, Osceola smiled and drifted off.
Memories, the music, the trumpet and drums of a hot-tempoed band, blended with Lizzie’s voice and she swirled her hips and sashayed away to the jungle beat of the drum.
Miss Lizzie Mae had her a way,
Of walkin’ down the street,
That would make the sidewalk sizzle beneath her feet.
Yes, Lizzie Mae had her a way,
Of walkin’ down the street,
That could make a hungry fellah forget to eat . . .
He had been lying there for three nights. German patrols were nearing. It was their policy, when they came across black wounded, to shoot them, then bayonet the heart and private parts. In the darkness he heard them whispering in German. Their boots sank into the mud and their bayonets made sticking sounds. His eyes glazed, he lay there, not breathing as they slowly moved toward him. A band of pain squeezed his ribs, stemming his cough. A heaviness sat on his chest, challenging his breath. It was Lizzie or her spirit, vexing him, just like when they were children. She had his arms pinned down to each side.
“A starin’ contest,” she said.
“What the heck is that?”
“A starin’ contest. You look straight at me and I look straight at you. Whoever can stare the longest win. Cain’t smile, cain’t laugh, cain’t blink. Go!”
“I ain’t doin’ no sech thang,” Ossie muttered.
“Yes you is. First one blinks loses, or I’ll just sit here all day.”
A young German replacement paused over his body. A flaxen lock fell over the youth’s brow. Osceola held fast to his breath and stared like a dead man. Though he did not move, his eyes began to tear. The youth bent down and whispered, “I like your music, I like the Jass.” The youth smiled and chuckled, with the hint of a wheeze and, for the second time in his life, death passed Osceola by.
“Remember the first time we snuck in the Bijoux and seen a motion picture show? Was about uh army on horses comin’ in a charge, they swords raised and the dust flyin’. We bolt out that theater, thinkin’ they was comin’ straight fuh us.”
“No, baby, it ain’t nothin’ like that. This war ain’t nuthin’ like no picture show.”
Lizzie laughed. “Alla this to git inna band?”
He was aware that he might be left there to die, but he couldn’t move his legs, couldn’t get them out from unde
r the twisted carcass of metal that had fallen upon him.
In the whirls of smoke, Lizzie’s face appeared again, bright with freckles across her broad button nose. “Awrite, they goan. Now gib me yo han’.” She was kneeling on the edge of a tree limb. They must have been no more than seven or eight, stealin’ peaches from Yum Lee’s. She was on the limb and he was on the ground, his arm outstretched but not quite touching her distended fingers. “Come on, reach!” Slowly, with his one good arm, Osceola dragged his broken body backward toward the bunker.
“How come y’ain’t in uniform, nigguh?”
“Got flat feet. Say I cain’t walk fah.” Deke kept his eyes cast to the ground and lumbered in place with fake humility. He couldn’t bring himself to say “sir.”
“Flat feet or no, where yo papuhs?” Deke had gone out in the day, looking for his brother. The military police brought him in for not registering and discovered the year-old outstanding warrant from Georgia. He had escaped then, only to be returned, his feet and legs double-bound in chains that were looped through heavy iron wrist shackles that bit into his skin. His fingers tingled. To keep them from losing sensation, he kept drawing his palms into fists.
For years, it had been standard practice for many a Southern sheriff to lease out his prisoners to neighboring plantation owners. Farmers could supplement the local field labor with vagrants, charged with miscellaneous crimes, committed or invented, such as walking down the road or, in Deacon’s case, driving. Between the draft and the colored runnin’ off to the North to the tales of jobs and fast free livin’, as the war dragged on, scores of Southern planters found themselves short of workers. Before he could think of how to get word to Pilar of his whereabouts, Deke’s “time” had been sold to a turpentine plantation. In a lot with twelve others, he was shipped off to some God-knows-where swampland, harvesting pine sap for a crackuh with a thick, crusty mustache and eyes with no color at all—called himself the Keeper. They posed to be buying yoah time. Time be yoah life.