Lovely War

by Julie Berry

  “The scarring,” he says, “that makes a broken bone harder, stronger than it was before.” The one god flung down from Olympus as a child to land in a shattered heap upon the earth knows something about this. His bones are iron.

  Aphrodite leans her head against a cushion.

  He’s a god. He’s seen her a trillion times. But her beauty melts him still. Always. No less so for being eternally beyond his reach.

  He’s been thoroughly beaten down. Shown for the puny, jealous child he is. Humiliated by the web he wove—literally—to humiliate his cheating wife.

  And yet, she’s still here.

  He decides to try one more time.

  “You say perfection limits you,” he says. “But you’re not so perfect as you like to let on.”

  Her eyebrows arch. “Is that so?”

  “Yes, it is.” He turns his crooked shoulders toward her. “For one thing, you have terrible taste in men.”

  The corner of her mouth twitches. “Which one?”

  My dumb brother. “All of them,” he says. “You’ve picked a string of winners.” He shrugs. “You did marry me, after all, and I’m no prize specimen.”

  She glances at his form and looks at him as if to say, And?

  “You’re completely soft where mortals are concerned,” he tells her. “Heart on your sleeve. Vulnerable to everything. I don’t like to say it, but you’re a byword on Olympus for it. Way too invested, they call you. Too far down in the weeds with the mortals. It ruins your cool. Warps your judgment.”

  Her hackles rise. “Who says that?”

  “Oh, you know.” He shrugs. “Folks.”

  “Hermes,” she says darkly. “He’ll be hearing from me.”

  If this is his attempt at winning her, it’s working about as well as his last try.

  “All I’m saying,” Hephaestus says, with his heart in his throat, “is that, if love demands brokenness, don’t count yourself out.” He gulps. “And you’d have to search far and wide to find a more broken god than me.”

  She gazes at him. Her Mona Lisa smile reveals nothing.

  “What do you say, Goddess?” he asks her. “How about me?”

  She pulls her knees in close and wraps her arms around them. “I say it’s about time.”

  DECEMBER 1942

  About Time (Part II)

  HEPHAESTUS SCRATCHES HIS shaggy head. “What did you just say?”

  “You have no idea.” Her voice rises to a scolding pitch. “Years, I’ve been trying to get you to offer me that. To offer me you.”

  He blinks in disbelief.

  “How I’ve suffered through those god-awful meet-ups with your stupid, arrogant brother.” She rolls her eyes. “Making sure to strategically pose for Hermes’s camera. Ffaugh.”

  Hephaestus thinks the room may have started spinning.

  Aphrodite stretches out on the hearth. “He is so boring,” she says. “I thought I would start chewing my fingernails. And I would never.”

  “You . . . wanted . . . me?”

  “You never wanted me,” Aphrodite tells. “You’re the one god who didn’t. So Zeus sticks me to you like a postage stamp. Fine, you tell yourself, I’ll take a wife if I must. But you never chose me. You! The one god with half a brain and a quarter—oh, let’s say a third—of your typical Olympian ego.”

  “Half a brain?” he cries. “One third of a—”

  “But you resented me,” cries Aphrodite. “I was an embarrassing reminder that you were—what? The Olympian charity case? You were sure I could never love you. So you shut me out.”

  “How can you say such a thing?” he roars. “All I’ve wanted—”

  “You were willing to have a wife,” she says, “if Zeus forced you to. But you never got to know me.” She pokes a log in the fire. “Do you know how hard I worked to make sure you knew Ares and I would be here tonight? This little trial was months in the making.”

  Hephaestus wonders if he’s dreaming. Hallucinating. Losing his mind.

  “Months in the making?” he cries. “I planned this.”

  She pats his knee. “Yes, dear.”

  He looks away. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or smash a window.

  “So it really was me, on trial,” he says slowly. “On trial for being incapable of love.”

  “No, you blooming ass,” she cries. “You are charged with being capable of love. And of being loved. If you would for once look at me and know who I am.”

  The god of fires flexes his fingers. Nothing makes sense. This is all an odd dream.

  “You must have no idea how much I look at you, Goddess,” he tells his wife. “I tell myself, I can stop anytime.”

  She rises to her feet, an angry goddess in her full wrath, and the chandeliers begin to shake. “Then why haven’t you ever seen? Don’t you see how hard I’ve been trying to tell you? You could know me, if you tried. I would love you, if you let me.”

  Not even Poseidon, the Earthshaker, could make Hephaestus feel more wobbly.

  The mirror behind Aphrodite shows him his balding head, his bristly beard, his crooked form. His gnarled hands, singed and scarred by an eternity in his volcanic forge.

  “Would it make you feel better,” she asks, “if I took on a different appearance? Something a bit more—shall we say—average?”

  Hephaestus swallows. “That’s all right,” he tells her quickly. “We should be able to, er, be ourselves with each other.”

  Aphrodite snorts. She covers her face with a hand and snickers. In spite of himself, Hephaestus starts laughing, too.

  The laughter dies away. After all that’s been said, poor Hephaestus’s head lies in fragments on the floor. He feels shy now, beside his wife. Marriage was simpler, he realizes, when the game plan was “catch her in a net.”

  “So this was all your doing.”

  “You said it yourself,” she says. “I’m good at what I do.”

  He shakes his head. “I still don’t see how me catching the two of you together would—”

  “I needed to show you what love looks like,” she tells him. “How you each responded would reveal to anyone with the brain of a goldfish which of the two of you has a loving heart.”

  “The brain of a goldfish,” he echoes.

  Between the curtains, rose and gold sunlight bursts forth. Their all-night tale hasn’t prevented Apollo from serving up another breathtaking sunrise. Tailor-made, Hephaestus thinks, for a couple in love. He hopes that somewhere the Alderidges and Edwardses see it, too.

  “So, what happens next?” he says at length.

  She flashes him a wink that, by itself, would melt entire armies. “We could meet up some morning,” she says, “for tea and lemon cake.”

  Hephaestus stands and extends a hand. She takes it and pulls herself up to her feet.

  Now? Hephaestus wonders. Is now the time? He’s waited for this moment, far too long.

  Aphrodite helps him out. It’s what she does best, what she’s famous for.

  Kisses by the billions happen every day, even in a lonely world like ours.

  But this is a kiss for the ages.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Lovely War is a work of fiction, but several characters are real, and the timeline of Great War events depicted is real. The British Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.) privates and sergeants named are fictional, but the senior officers named are real. For more on the fate of the Fifth Army, see The Fifth Army in March 1918 by Walter Shaw Sparrow.

  James Reese Europe, composer and conductor of the Clef Club Orchestra, and first lieutenant in the 15th New York National Guard (later the 369th US Infantry), helped kindle France’s love of jazz, along with other black army band conductors. During his time in Aix-les-Bains, he joked about never sleeping but staying up each night to copy “three million notes” as he arranged new scores. (I
thought it would be fun to add Aubrey as his uncredited helper.)

  Europe’s star rose along with those of Vernon and Irene Castle, white dance-duo super-celebrities of the pre-war years. They danced to Jim Europe’s music, using versions of African American dances that he had taught them. They were global phenomena, trend-setters, and style icons, helping bring African American music and dance into the worldwide mainstream.

  Europe’s boundless creative energy and talent would surely have made James Reese Europe a household name had his life not been cut tragically short on May 9, 1919, by an unprovoked attack from a disgruntled drummer likely suffering from shell shock. For more on his remarkable life, leadership, and music, I suggest A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe by Reid Badger.

  Captain Hamilton Fish III, K Company captain, was a Harvard football star and the son of a wealthy family with deep roots in American history and politics. Following the Great War, Hamilton Fish III was elected to the US House of Representatives, where he served for decades, a staunch advocate for veterans and soldiers, and for peace.

  I used several Army Band members’ real names, including Pinkhead Parker (saxophone), Alex Jackson (tuba), and Luckey Roberts (piano). Jesús Hernandez (clarinet) was one of several horn players from Puerto Rico recruited by Jim Europe to round out his orchestra. Noble Sissle (drum major, vocals) went on to lead a band. His talent and charm are captured in footage available online. Sissle was one of Europe’s close friends, along with legendary jazz and ragtime piano composer Eubie Blake. (Blake claims it was Europe who coined the term “gig” to describe an event that a musician is hired to perform at.)

  * * *

  Events involving the Clef Club orchestra and the Harlem Hellfighters are all drawn from historical sources, starting with the Carnegie Hall “Concert of Negro Music,” and through to the victory parade marching up Fifth Avenue. Their experiences of persecution at Camp Dix, Camp Wadsworth, Saint-Nazaire, and Aix-les-Bains are all taken from the historical record. (A light postscript on the Carnegie Hall concert: some of my sources said ten upright pianos were used in the orchestra. Others claimed fourteen. I went with the smaller number, though this may be the only book in print that asserts ten pianos on a stage to be “the smaller number.”)

  BLACK SERVICEMEN IN THE GREAT WAR

  The story of America’s contribution to the final year of World War I is one of sacrifice, valor, and honor. But it’s not a story of unalloyed white heroism. The shameful truth of how black servicemen who risked all for their country suffered widespread hatred, betrayal, and violence from their country is a crucial part of the story.

  The US 369th infantry wasn’t the only black regiment to see combat in the Great War. Of nearly 400,000 black American soldiers who served, 200,000 were sent to Europe, and of them, approximately 42,000 fought. The rest worked as dockworkers, gravediggers, road and railroad builders, and other heavy laborers, in the military branch known as SOS (Service of Supply). Black SOS soldiers were cruelly misused, worked from morning till night seven days a week, often given minimal food, clothing, or housing. They faced brutality, humiliation, and violent reminders that they were to bow to white authority; and that restaurants, shops, train cars, and most of all, white society, particularly, white women, were off-limits. One SOS soldier described their treatment as being “in the spirit of slavery.”*

  THE LONG DARK NIGHT

  As the Great War broke, white supremacy in America was having its post–Civil War heyday. White America, long scarred by the bitterness and divisions of the Civil War, was tired of remaining adversarial, North versus South. The political, economic, and cultural opportunities possible in healing the breach between North and South were too tempting to pass up. Segregation, whether eagerly embraced or quietly overlooked, became the compromise that lubricated a nationwide reunification of northern and southern political and economic interests, at the expense of black Americans’ legal, civil, and human rights.

  Black activists described the period between 1890 and the Great War as “the long dark night.” With the 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that legalized “separate but equal” facilities, segregation, now legally blessed, soon infiltrated American life. Schools, trains, buses, restaurants, theaters, workplaces, churches, and civic spaces were segregated on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.

  White supremacy wasn’t the view of just a narrow, hateful fringe; it was ubiquitous, enshrined in the White House with the 1912 election of Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern Democrat elected since James Polk in 1844. As president of Princeton, Wilson had blocked all black applications to the university. As President of the United States, Wilson staffed his administration with Southern Democrats who dismissed and demoted black workers, segregating the postal service and the Department of the Treasury. Such policies helped residential segregation laws pass in southern state legislatures.

  White supremacy rested—and still rests—on greed, specifically, the desire to enrich oneself with free or cheap labor or stolen resources, or to reduce competition for jobs and privileges by suppressing other groups’ eligibility; on fears of black political power at the polls; on fears of the strength of armed black resistance; and especially, on fears of contaminating the “purity” of the white race through interbreeding. It rested, therefore, upon sex as much as on dollars, laws, votes, and guns. “Degenerate” blacks had to be kept far from white women, and from circumstances that would display their intellect, capacity, character, strength, resolve, bravery, and ambition.

  Where better to demonstrate these admirable qualities than through military service? Black Americans, eager to prove that black America could produce exemplary citizens and soldiers, flocked to the Great War, seeing it as a major opportunity. By contrast, white supremacist America—the America in full control of the reins of political power—saw armed black men trained in effective combat as their worst nightmare.

  EXPORTING JIM CROW

  Military white supremacists watched with alarm as the relatively egalitarian French embraced black soldiers as brothers-in-arms, fearing it would “spoil” them and further destabilize the “race problem” in America. The US Army forbade black soldiers from interacting with white women overseas, yet local women welcomed their company.

  Finally, in desperation, US Army officials induced French counterparts to distribute a memorandum to French military officials titled “Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops.” W. E. B. du Bois published it in the NAACP magazine, Crisis, in 1919. Below are a few illustrative excerpts.

  . . . the French public has become accustomed to treating the Negro with familiarity and indulgence.

  Americans . . . are afraid that contact with the French will inspire in black Americans aspirations which to them [the whites] appear intolerable. . . .

  Although a citizen of the United States, the black man is regarded by the white American as an inferior being with whom relations of business or service only are possible. The black is constantly being censured for his want of intelligence . . .

  The vices of the Negro are a constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly. For instance, the black American troops in France have, by themselves, given rise to as many complaints for attempted rape as all the rest of the army. . . .*

  The slanderous accusations regarding rape were utterly false.

  To their credit, when higher French military command learned of the memo, they ordered that it be gathered and burned. At the war’s end, the French Army lavishly honored the contributions of black American servicemen, and the 369th’s in particular.

  THE HEROES’ WELCOME

  When the war ended in 1918, and black servicemen returned home, their evident pride, self-respect, and confidence infuriated southern white supremacists. Lynchings spiked in 1919. Black Great War veterans were frequent targets, and many more were beaten, threatened, and abused. Some faced violence simply for publicly appea
ring in uniform.

  Conditions did not materially improve for most black Americans who served; for many, the aggressive backlash made things unbearable. But for better and for worse, black servicemen returning from the war were idealistic no more. They came home confident, angry, and determined; ready to organize and demand legal and civic rights. When World War II came along twenty-five years later, a million black soldiers served. Within twenty-five years of the Second World War’s end, the Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965), and Civil Rights Act of 1968, known as the Fair Housing Act, had passed. Fighting for freedom despite violence and oppression became part of the generational context from which civil rights heroes emerged.

  For more on black servicemen during and after the war, I recommend the extraordinary work Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I, by Adriane Lentz-Smith. For a closer look at the Harlem Hellfighters, see A More Unbending Battle: The Harlem Hellfighters’ Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home, by Peter N. Nelson; and Harlem’s Hell Fighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I, by Stephen L. Harris.

  A 1977 documentary film, Men of Bronze: The Black American Heroes of World War I, directed by William Miles, then the official historian of the US 369th, features original footage of the Harlem Hellfighters, along with interviews with Captain Hamilton Fish III and other survivors from the regiment. The murders at Saint-Nazaire of men of the 15th New York National Guard (as they were then called) by marines, followed by retaliatory killing, are described in those interviews.

  Many accounts chronicle the ugly reality of how all black Americans, Northern and Southern, were treated by white America during the early part of the twentieth century. I found Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, the autobiography of Richard Wright (also the author of Native Son), to be a riveting account of the chokehold racial hatred had during the war years and the decades that followed.