came to an end in 1937 was my dad. He told me this story:
"One day in the spring of 1930-this was about six months before the fire at the Black Spot-I was coming back with four of my buddies from a three-day pass we had spent down in Boston.
"When we come through the gate there was this big old boy standing just inside the checkpoint, leaning on a shovel and picking the seat of his suntans out of his ass. A sergeant from someplace down south. Carroty-red hair. Bad teeth. Pimples. Not much more than an ape without the body hair, if you know what I mean. There were a lot of them like that in the army during the Depression.
"So here we come, four young guys back from leave, all of us still feeling fine, and we could see in his eyes that he was just looking for something to bust us with. So we snapped him salutes as if he was General Black Jack Pershing himself. I guess we might have been all right, but it was one fine late-April day, sun shining down, and I had to shoot off my lip. "A good afternoon to you, Sergeant Wilson, sir," said I, and he landed on me with both feet.
""Did I give you any permission to speak to me?" he asks.
"Nawsir," I say.
"He looks around at the rest of them-Trevor Dawson, Carl Roone, and Henry Whitsun, who was killed in the fire that fall-and he says to them, "This here smart nigger is in hack with me. If the rest of you jigaboos don't want to join him in one hardworking dirty bitch of an afternoon, you get over to your barracks, stow your gear, and get your asses over to the OD. You understand?"
"Well, they got going, and Wilson hollers, "Doubletime, you fuckers! Lemme see the soles of your eighty-fucking-nines!"
"So they doubletimed off, and Wilson took me over to one of the equipment sheds and he got me a spade. He took me out into the big field that used to be just about where the Northeast Airlines Airbus terminal stands today. And he looks at me, kind of grinning, and he points at the ground and he says, "You see that hole there, nigger?"
"There was no hole there, but I figured it was best for me to agree with whatever he said, so I looked down at the ground where he was pointing and said I sure did see it. So then he busted me one in the nose and knocked me over and there I was on the ground with blood running down over the last fresh shirt I had.
"You don't see it because some bigmouth jig bastard filled it up!" he shouted at me, and he had two big blotches of color on his cheeks. But he was grinning, too, and you could tell he was enjoying himself. "So what you do, Mr A Good Afternoon To You, what you do is you get the dirt out of my hole. Doubletime!"
"So I dug for most two hours, and pretty soon I was in that hole up to my chin. The last couple of feet was clay, and by the time I finished I was standing in water up to my ankles and my shoes were soaked right through.
"Get out of there, Hanlon," Sergeant Wilson said. He was sitting there on the grass, smoking a cigarette. He didn't offer me any help. I was dirt and muck from top to bottom, not to mention the blood drying on the blouse of my suntans. He stood up and walked over. He pointed at the hole.
"What do you see there, nigger?" he asked me.
"Your hole, Sergeant Wilson," says I.
"Yeah, well, I decided I don't want it," he says. "I don't want no hole dug by a nigger. Put my dirt back in, Private Hanlon."
"So I filled it back in and by the time I was done the sun was going down and it was getting cold. He comes over and looks at it after I finished patting down the last of the dirt with the flat of the spade.
"Now what do you see there, nigger?" he asks.
"Bunch of dirt, sir," I said, and he hit me again. My God, Mikey, I came this close to just bouncing up off "n the ground and splitting his head open with the edge of that shovel. But if I'd done that, I never would have looked at the sky again, except through a set of bars. Still, there were times when I almost think it would have been worth it. I managed to hold my peace somehow, though.
"That ain't a bunch of dirt, you stupid coontail night-fighter!" he screams at me, the spit flying off'n his lips. "That's MY HOLE, and you best get the dirt out of it right now! Doubletime!"
"So I dug the dirt out of his hole and then I filled it in again, and then he asks me why I went and filled in his hole just when he was getting ready to take a crap in it. So I dug it out again and he drops his pants and hangs his skinny-shanks cracker redneck ass over the hole and he grins up at me while he's doing his business and says, "How you doin, Hanlon?"
"I am doing just fine, sir," I says right back, because I had decided I wasn't going to give up until I fell unconscious or dropped dead. I had my dander up.
"Well, I aim to fix that," he says. "To start with, you better just fill that hole in, Private Hanlon. And I want to see some life. You're slowin down."
"So I got her filled in again and I could see by the way he was grinning that he was only warming up. But just then this friend of his came humping across the field with a gas lantern and told him there'd been a surprise inspection and Wilson was in hack for having missed it. My friends covered for me and I was okay, but Wilson's friends-if that's what he called them-couldn't be bothered.
"He let me go then, and I waited to see if his name would go up on the Punishment Roster the next day, but it never did. I guess he must have just told the Loot he missed the inspection because he was teaching a smartmouth nigger who it was owned all the holes at the Derry army base-those that had already been dug and those that hadn't been. They probably gave him a medal instead of potatoes to peel. And that's how things were for Company E here in Derry."
It was right around 1958 that my father told me the story, and I guess he was pushing fifty, although my mother was only forty or so. I asked him if that was the way Derry was, why had he come back?
"Well, I was only sixteen when I joined the army, Mikey," he said. "Lied about my age to get in. Wasn't my idea, either. My mother told me to do it. I was big, and that's the only reason the lie stuck, I guess. I was born and grew up in Burgaw, North Carolina, and the only time we saw meat was right after the tobacco was in, or sometimes in the winter if my father shot a coon or a possum. The only good thing I remember about Burgaw is possum pie with hoecakes spread around her just as pretty as you could want.
"So when my dad died in an accident with some farm machinery, my ma said she was going to take Philly Loubird up to Corinth, where she had people. Philly Loubird was the baby of the family."
"You mean my Uncle Phil?" I asked, smiling to think of anybody calling him Philly Loubird. He was a lawyer in Tucson, Arizona, and had been on the City Council there for six years. When I was a kid, I thought Uncle Phil was rich. For a black man in 1958, I suppose he was. He made twenty thousand dollars a year.
"That's who I mean," my dad said. "But in those days he was just a twelve-year-old kid who wore a ricepaper sailor hat and mended biballs and had no shoes. He was the youngest, I was the second youngest. All the others were gone-two dead, two married, one in jail. That was Howard. He never was any good.
"You are goan join the army," your gramma Shirley told me. "I dunno if they start paying you right away or not, but once they do, you're goan send me a lotment every month. I hate to send you away, son, but if you don't take care of me and Philly, I don't know what's going to become of us." She gave me my birth certificate to show the recruiter and I seen she fixed the year on it somehow to make me eighteen.
"So I went to the courthouse where the army recruiter was and asked about joining up. He showed me the papers and the line where I could make my mark. "I kin write my name," I said, and he laughed like he didn't believe me.
"Well then, you go on and write it, black boy," he says.
"Hang on a minute," I says back. "I want to ast you a couple of questions."
"Fire away then," he says. "I can answer anything you can ask."
"'do they have meat twice a week in the army?" I asked. "My mamma says they do, but she is powerful set on me joining up."
"'No, they don't have it twice a week," he says.
"Well, that's about what I thought," I says, thinking that the man surely does seem like a booger but at least he's an honest booger.
"Then he says, "They got it ever night," making me wonder how I ever could have thought he was honest.
"You must think I'm a pure-d fool," I says.
"'You got that right, nigger," he says.
"Well, if I join up, I got to do something for my mamma and Philly Loubird," I says. "Mamma says it's a lotment."
"That's this here," he says, and taps the allotment form. "Now what else
is on your mind?"
"Well," says I, "what about trainin to be an officer?"
"He threw his head back when I said that and laughed until I thought he was gonna choke on his own spit. Then he says, "Son, the day they got nigger officers in this man's army will be the day you see the bleedin Jesus Christ doing the Charleston at Birdland. Now you sign or you don't sign. I'm out of patience. Also, you're stinkin the place up."
"So I signed, and watched him staple the allotment form to my muster-sheet, and then he give me the oath, and then I was a soldier. I was thinking that they'd send me up to New Jersey, where the army was building bridges on account of there being no wars to fight. Instead, I got Derry, Maine, and Company E."
He sighed and shifted in his chair, a big man with white hair that curled close to his skull. At that time we had one of the bigger farms in Derry, and probably the best roadside produce stand south of Bangor. The three of us worked hard, and my father had to hire on extra help during harvesting time, and we made out.
He said: "I came back because I'd seen the South and I'd seen the North, and there was the same hate in both places. It wasn't Sergeant Wilson that convinced me of that. He was nothing but a Georgia cracker, and he took the South with him wherever he went. He didn't have to be south of the Mason-Dixon line to hate niggers. He just did. No, it was the fire at the Black Spot that convinced me of that. You know, Mikey, in a way..."
He glanced over at my mother, who was knitting. She hadn't looked up, but I knew she was listening closely, and my father knew it too, I think.
"In a way it was the fire made me a man. There was sixty people killed in that fire, eighteen of them from Company E. There really wasn't any company left when that fire was over. Henry Whitsun... Stork Anson... Alan Snopes... Everett McCaslin... Horton Sartoris... all my friends, all dead in that fire. And that fire wasn't set by old Sarge Wilson and his grits-and-cornpone friends. It was set by the Derry branch of the Maine Legion of White Decency. Some of the kids you go to school with, son, their fathers struck the matches that lit the Black Spot on fire. And I'm not talking about the poor kids, neither."
"Why, Daddy? Why did they?"
"Well, part of it was just Derry," my father said, frowning. He lit his pipe slowly and shook out the wooden match. "I don't know why it happened here; I can't explain it, but at the same time I ain't surprised by it.
"The Legion of White Decency was the Northerners" version of the Ku Klux Klan, you see. They marched in the same white sheets, they burned the same crosses, they wrote the same hate-notes to black folks they felt were getting above their station or taking jobs that were meant for white men. In churches where the preachers talked about black equality, they sometimes planted charges of dynamite. Most of the history books talk more about the KKK than they do about the Legion of White Decency, and a lot of people don't even know there was such a thing. I think it might be because most of the histories have been written by Northerners and they're ashamed.
"It was most pop'lar in the big cities and the manufacturin areas. New York, New Jersey, Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, Portsmouth-they all had their chapters. They tried to organize in Maine, but Derry was the only place they had any real success. Oh, for awhile there was a pretty good chapter in Lewiston-this was around the same time as the fire at the Black Spot-but they weren't worried about niggers raping white women or taking jobs that should have belonged to white men, because there weren't any niggers to speak of up here. In Lewiston they were worried about tramps and hobos and that something called "the bonus army" would join up with something they called "the Communist riffraff army," by which they meant any man who was out of work. The Legion of Decency used to send these fellows out of town just as fast as they came in. Sometimes they stuffed poison ivy down the backs of their pants. Sometimes they set their shirts on fire.
"Well, the Legion was pretty much done up here after the fire at the Black Spot. Things got out of hand, you see. The way things seem to do in this town, sometimes."
He paused, puffing.
"It's like the Legion of White Decency was just another seed, Mikey, and it found some earth that nourished it well here. It was a regular rich-man's club. And after the fire, they all just laid away their sheets and lied each other up and it was papered over." Now there was a kind of vicious contempt in his voice that made my mother look up, frowning. "After all, who got killed? Eighteen army niggers, fourteen or fifteen town niggers, four members of a nigger jazz-band... and a bunch of nigger-lovers. What did it matter?"
"Will," my mother said softly. That's enough."
"No," I said. "I want to hear!"
"It's getting to be your bedtime, Mikey," he said, ruffling my hair with his big, hard hand. "I just want to tell you one thing more, and I don't think you'll understand it, because I'm not sure I understand it myself. What happened that night at the Black Spot, bad as it was... I don't really think it happened because we was black. Not even because the Spot was close behind West Broadway, where the rich whites in Derry lived then and still live today. I don't think that the Legion of White Decency happened to get along so well here because they hated black people and bums more in Derry than they did in Portland or Lewiston or Brunswick. It's because of that soil. It seems that bad things, hurtful things, do right well in the soil of this town. I've thought so again and again over the years. I don't know why it should be... but it is.
"But there are good folks here too, and there were good folks here then. When the funerals were held afterward, thousands of people turned out, and they turned out for the blacks as well as the whites. Businesses closed up for most of a week. The hospitals treated the hurt ones free of charge. There were food baskets and letters of condolence that were honestly meant. And there were helping hands held out. I met my friend Dewey Conroy during that time, and you know he's just as white as vanilla ice cream, but I feel like he's my brother. I'd die for Dewey if he asked me to, and although no man really knows another man's heart, I think he'd die for me if it came to that.