Reflect that the chief source of all evils to Man, and of baseness and cowardice, is not death, but the fear of death. Against this fear then, I pray you, harden yourself; to this let all your reasonings, your exercises, your reading tend. Then shall you know that thus alone are men set free.
- Epictetus, former Roman slave, A.D. c. 125
Chapter 1
Muffled moans of a trumpet swell in and out my window.
The noise, attributed to a new, young trumpet player they call Satchmo from New Orleans, pours incessantly through the street. I am aware of Satchmo’s growing popularity only because he toured Tulsa last year and, as editor of the leading negro newspaper in Tulsa, it is my unfortunate responsibility to know these things.
The screeching and wailing trumpet punctuates my thoughts as if a needled phonograph found a home in Satchmo’s foot, rendering the bellows and staccato punches from his trumpet profane.
As we turn this corner here in 1921, W. C. Handy and Satchmo, and herds of musicians like them herald a new age in music, an age -I am told- that reflects the plight of our people.
I prefer Handy’s arrangements over the discomfort of Satchmo’s blare and, of course, neither compare to the ivory capers of Joplin, but herein I date myself. I am an unreliable arbiter on musical progress.
Perhaps my relic opinions on some matters are safer ensconced in my ‘acorn head,’ as a white drover once cruelly evinced, his foot firmly planted on my trachea. From the recesses of my memory, any bugler’s horn still summons me to scramble for my sanity as in that great gray dark of the war.
We were the mighty army of the 62nd United States Colored Troops, former slaves, freedmen, and refugees, liberated by the collective cry of our brethren and the sweat of our brow.
Most particularly, the sweat of our brow.
Many a Union officer wore freedom on his sleeve but abode slavery in his heart. Even General Sherman said he would rather have 300 negroes shouldered with spades and axes than 1,000 negroes with rifles. Detractors claimed, “The negro will never fight, he has not the strength, the intelligence, nor the fortitude, he will flee given his first opportunity.”
While liberation greeted us through enlistment, inequality deepened its root into the soil of the nation then, perhaps penetrating so deeply because we donned uniforms to defend her while she declared us unfit to do so.
Pickaxe, rifle, shovel, pen: each a weapon I have used with deadly force.
Pen preferred.
I cannot convince Andrew, my own dear son, that if given a choice, neither heavy artillery, nor bayonets, nor sharpshooters would affect the future of the negro like the arsenal of the alphabet, rumbling ranks of soldier-letters assembled on a page, marching toward the finished work this great war has wrought.
When Andrew and I stand to look man-to-man to discuss this topic, I’m afraid my words, once again, meet malice, a formidable foe. He was born into a lopsided world, his eyes grow hard squinting at the slant.
His argument, at times persuasive, is that words are the weak weapons of old fools and that the seed of revolution may begin in words but can only bear fruit by force. ‘How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat?’ he asks, quoting Du Bois.
Andrew sees through the rhetoric to my occasional dubiety, as children often do, and scoffs. His scorn for weakness is permissible given our loss of Benjamin, his son (my grandson) in the War, (the recent war that is; I am one of the few still living who must distinguish between “the war” and “the war”). Benjamin’s remains lay somewhere beneath the heels of French citizens. He once sent us pamphlets that Germany’s propaganda patrol dropped on our negro soldiers. The pamphlets decried our supposed freedom, providing a blistering assault on the resolve of our young men by questioning the American rights of negro soldiers fighting alongside whites. ‘They can die together but not vote together.’ Our nation percolates in nothing if not contradictions.
One would think Germany had enough prejudices not to contend with ours, and no one abrogates the horror that happened there, but the psychological missive hit its mark.
On Monday, Memorial Day, our young men will march the streets of Tulsa, not with the white soldiers they fought valiantly alongside but bringing up the rear of the parade, behind the jugglers and clowns, suffering the derision of cowards who scoff that a negro dare don a uniform of ‘liberty.’
Germans seemed to have no trouble sighting their rifles on all our soldiers regardless of skin color, their bullets judge indiscriminately. Andrew scolds me with Du Bois ‘we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.’
Though I do not speak it to Andrew, I know the peculiar scorn of a soldier’s indignation.
I bear a mantle to lead peaceably even when that dead man rises within me, the one slain long ago, left smoldering in a smithy of hate.