The following day, Boykin and Cunningham returned to the Birmingham recruiting station. A doctor examined them and declared them fit. After scoring their Navy General Classification Tests, the recruiter told them to get home and start packing. Five days later Boykin and Cunningham were bound for the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, outside of Waukegan, Illinois, which had just opened its doors to blacks.
After traveling seven hundred miles north from Birmingham, Alabama, Sammie Lee Boykin arrived at Chicago’s Union Station. Aboard the segregated Louisville & Nashville line, Boykin and Cunningham had sat in a crowded, dirty car that smelled of stale sweat. Both young men were nervous, especially Cunningham, who was large but clumsy, and sensitive. Based on what he knew of boot camp, he might have had a premonition that he would never make it in the Navy.
When the train arrived in Evansville, Indiana, after groaning and lurching its way through a series of whistle-stops, both young men looked as if they had been farming in the Alabama bottoms. Because the Negro car was right behind the engine and the coal car, every time they opened a window to relieve the stifling heat, they would be covered in soot. In Evansville, when they transferred to the Chicago & Eastern Illinois, both were surprised to find that the cars were no longer segregated.
When the train arrived in Chicago, Boykin was awestruck. Never before had he even crossed the Alabama state line. Now he found himself in one of the country’s largest cities. Although it was early morning and shadows still darkened the station, there were people everywhere, hustling to and fro with a sense of purpose. Boykin, however, heeded his mother’s warnings about the vices and temptations of the big city. He stayed put and did not stray from Union Station until a Navy lieutenant led him and the other flustered and frightened eighteen-year-olds onto a bus that would take them north to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station.
Just three months before Boykin and Cunningham walked through the door of the Birmingham recruiting office, the Great Lakes Naval Station Bulletin proclaimed that “Great Lakes has been singularly honored by being chosen as the training station for the first Negro recruits to come to the service under the new program.” Despite the auspicious-sounding proclamation, the truth was very different. Many in the Navy were deeply uneasy about training black recruits for anything other than messman’s (steward’s) duties.
Heading up the new program was Lieutenant Commander D. W. Armstrong, son of General Samuel Armstrong, an officer in the Union Army and the founder and first principal of what would eventually be called Hampton University, the famous black college, where Booker T. Washington was educated. The young commander had been a trustee there, and was said to be someone who had the ear of Eleanor Roosevelt. Armstrong’s official title was “Assistant Recruit Training Officer in Charge of Negroes.” Eventually Armstrong would gain admirers who considered his policies enlightened and his advocacy work essential. He encouraged the recruits to recite a daily creed dealing with the advancement of the “Negro race.” It was clear that blacks were great drillers and marched with a “rhythm that whites did not possess.” However, their skill in parading served to underscore a stereotype that they were musical but simple-minded.
Armstrong believed that if the Great Lakes experiment had any chance of success, the recruits needed to overcome the perception in the black community that the Navy was a place “where men are men and colored men are cooks.” Quotas needed to be set up in the various service schools (Gunner’s Mate, Yeoman, Radioman, Machinist’s Mate, Shore Patrol, Cooks and Bakers, etc.)—which the Bureau of Personnel had opened to blacks in July 1942—and a specified number of spots held just for blacks who aspired to more than cooking and drilling.
Upon arriving, the hungry recruits were taken to the chow hall at Camp Robert Smalls, the segregated training center named in honor of a black Civil War hero. Then, after a quick meal in the basement of the chow hall, Boykin, Cunningham, and the rest of the men marched out to the drill field, where they were introduced to the Recruit Training Commander. The lieutenant welcomed them. They were the beginning, the first black seamen trainees ever to be part of the United States Navy. “Your performance will determine the fate of future black enlistees,” he said. “All eyes are on you.” He encouraged the men to aspire to the highest code of conduct and to come down hard on those among them who were a threat to what he called the “experiment.” “You are the first,” he continued. “You do not want to be the last. It will not be easy. Work hard and keep your eyes on the ball.” It was a message that the lieutenant would deliver often through Boykin’s twelve weeks of boot camp. In those three months Boykin would come to admire the white officer’s commitment and honesty. He told the men the truth: that change would not come easy. They would be taunted, mocked, belittled, and intimidated. It was their job, he said, always to maintain their cool and to keep their dignity. If they ever made it aboard ship, that composure would be tested. They would be vastly outnumbered. Many of the sailors would resent their presence, and some of the officers would deliberately make their lives miserable.
The Navy’s approach was to supply Camp Smalls with everything that the white training center had so that there was “no necessity for Negro recruits to mingle with whites.” In reality, despite the Navy’s attempts to achieve separate but equal status for its blacks, and despite Armstrong’s best efforts to bring parity to the camp, discrepancies were marked. On the firing range, the black units used .22s while the white sailors shot with Springfield rifles; white trainees fired three-inch antiaircraft guns and machine guns while the black recruits’ instruction was theoretical; white sailors trained on ships while blacks were confined to rowboats with oars.
Boykin had never expected to be treated like a white man. At the age of thirteen, he got a stark lesson in inequality. When a fight between black and white children erupted one Sunday afternoon, the police moved the entire black population to the other side of a string of high hills so that it was separated from the white neighborhood. No one dared to object.
At Great Lakes, if Boykin felt any bitterness, no one would have known it. He flew through basic training. He knew how to work hard, he could read and write—one out of five of the recruits was illiterate or nearly illiterate and was sent to Great Lakes’ “Remedial School”—he did not drink, smoke, or gamble, and he took pride in getting high grades during inspection. He was the ideal recruit and proved himself on the drill field, the firing range, the pool—he was one of the few who knew how to swim—and the commando course. As he excelled and drew the attention of the drill instructors, he allowed himself to dream. Perhaps he would be assigned to a destroyer or submarine in the South Pacific, or one of the service schools. There he could learn a trade that he could put to good use in the Navy and after he got out. That way he would never have to leave his family to scrounge for a job. He could be a provider and husband and father.
Sammie Lee Boykin was born in Camden, a small farming town in south central Alabama. When his father heard about the mining jobs in the north of the state, he packed up the family and moved it 120 miles to the steel center of Bessemer, just outside of Birmingham, one of the surging cities of the new South, where he went to work in the iron-ore mines, surrounded by slag heaps and pools of toxic effluent. For him, anything was better than life in the fields. In Bessemer, he and other black men extracted ore with picks and drills in dark, deep-shaft mines where the air was so bad that longtime workers had coughing fits every time they tried to take a deep breath. Some never even saw daylight. A supervisor escorted them to and from the mines in the pitch-black hours of early morning and in the evening after the sun had set.
Mine work was a backbreaking, dispiriting job that just barely allowed the elder Boykin to support his family. When cheaper imports from Brazil caused the mines of northern Alabama to shut down, Willie Boykin left home to work in the steel mills of the North. His intention might have been to send for his family, but that never happened. No one ever really knew what became of Willie Boykin. Perhap
s, like lots of other men, he was led astray by the nightlife, by the drinking, illegal gambling, and prostitution. Maybe he got lost in the squalor of a big-city slum. One thing was clear: at some point he decided to close the book on the Alabama chapter of his life.
When Willie Boykin left Alabama, Johnny Hicks, Boykin’s maternal grandfather, assumed an even larger role in young Sammie’s life. Outside the Boykins’ old hometown of Camden, Alabama, just eighty miles southwest of the once-sprawling slave market at Montgomery, the city that served briefly as the national capital of the Confederacy, Hicks sharecropped, and at various times raised hogs, goats, laying hens, and dairy cows, and put in a small cash crop of cotton and a garden of peas, beans, sweet corn, tomatoes, and cucumbers, which he kept exclusively for the family’s use. It was a hard life, but other area sharecroppers, most of whom lived in drafty, unpainted shotgun shacks with dirt yards, and often did not own a mule, had it even worse. Hicks at least had stock, which meant that he was technically a “share tenant” rather than a “sharecropper,” and depending upon the deal he struck with the landowner, he might get to keep and sell half of his cotton crop. Those who did not own a mule were entitled only to a quarter, which was not near enough for a family to live on. Mule or no, sharecropping was not much of a life; it left tenant farmers like Hicks barely better off than their parents or grandparents who had grown up in the grip of slavery.
The land that Hicks worked had once been covered from horizon to horizon in snakes, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and virgin timber. After winning government land grants, white farmers often used slaves to cut the teeming stands of oak, hickory, and pine, to dig up and burn the byzantine root systems, and then to drain and level the land for planting. It was a huge undertaking that literally transformed the landscape of the South from a place of vast, antediluvian forests and swamplands to one of neat row crops—especially cotton—cultivated by sometimes driven and pitiless planters.
From the day he got out of school for summer vacation, Boykin lived and worked on his grandfather’s farm, performing an assortment of jobs, the most important of which was tending the cotton field that represented his grandfather’s only means of income.
Johnny Hicks knew that he was destined for a life of poverty, prescribed for him by a system set up for the explicit purpose of keeping him poor and landless. Yet Sammie Boykin never saw his grandfather defeated or heard him utter a word of objection or regret. He swallowed the pain. Johnny Hicks would grow old, working from what sharecroppers called “Can’t see to can’t see,” waking at 3:45 a.m. to begin his day, finishing up well after supper, never quite extinguishing his debts to the white planter who owned the land he worked. At harvesttime, even if the rain and the boll weevils stayed away, and he brought in a good crop, he could be certain that he would get paid less than a white farmer bringing cotton to the same gin.
There was nothing easy about picking cotton, either. When referring to other unpleasant jobs, sharecroppers had an expression, “It ain’t easy, but it sure ’nuf beats pickin’ cotton.” The work, as the heat pressed down on the land, numbed the mind, blistered the hands, and exhausted the body, and would one day leave Hicks and other farmers stooped with arthritis, looking like old, bent-over fruit trees.
At harvesttime, as the cotton plants leaned over with the weight of the fat, erupting bolls that had ripened in the summer heat, Hicks moved down the clean rows with a canvas or burlap sack strapped over his shoulders, ignoring the cuts and slashes from the barbs of thousands of bolls, picking them as clean as he could so he would not get downgraded at the gin. If the weather was dry and the air did not smell of rain, Hicks drove himself each day, not stopping until he had picked an entire bale, 480 pounds of cotton. Afterward, more often than not, he fell asleep at the kitchen table before his wife could serve him supper. The following morning he woke early, as the fog lifted slowly from the fields and the crickets clamored and the nighthawks hunted. Then, after milking, and a breakfast of leftovers—butter beans and cornbread or boiled grits and a pot of chicory—he would be at it again, praying away the clouds, and lugging one heaving sack after another to the waiting wagon.
At the end of the year, when settling up accounts, he could virtually count on the white landowner to withhold additional money for any number of reasons. The man who ran the gin would keep his seed and he would be forced to buy it back the following year. So, in the end, if he was lucky, and bad weather and misfortune did not strike, he would take home a bale or two of profit, enough to make it through the year.
The only break in the summer schedule was during lay-by, the time just before harvest when the farm was idle, and Boykin and his younger brother and occasionally one or two of the other sharecroppers’ kids or grandkids headed for the spring-fed creek that ran into the Alabama River. With cane poles they fished for catfish in the deep, cool holes along the bank and lolled in the shallows to escape the rank August heat. Johnny Hicks’s only demand was that Boykin and his brother get home by the time the lightning bugs started to flit and flicker across the fields.
After three months of hard work, Boykin returned home in time for the start of school. He loved the farm, but there life was slow and backward and poorer than poor. Some of the kids he knew wore flour-sack clothes, slept on dirt floors, and had pellagra scales on their hands, wrists, and ankles, and hookworm rashes on their feet. By comparison, Bessemer was a modern city, where Boykin could do something they could only imagine—he could go to the picture show.
Boykin loved the movies and sometimes, ignoring his mother’s warnings about getting home while it was still light, he would sit, oblivious of time, through two showings of the same film. One day the sun was setting when he left the theater, via the separate black exit door, to make the eight-mile trip back home. Leaving this late meant that he would have to walk home in the dark, and in Bessemer in the 1930s, black boys were not allowed to be out at night, especially if they were walking in white neighborhoods. Boykin heard his mother’s warning dozens of times: “The only place colored folks go walking after dark is to and from the outhouse.” He had also heard stories about boys, barely older than he, whose only infraction was to be found in the white section of town after sunset. If a sheriff wanted to, he could pick them up and put them on chain gangs or lease them out to mining, timber, and turpentine camps throughout the South.
His plan was to dive behind a building or into the woods if he saw or sensed trouble. By the light of the rising moon, he walked, careful not to slip in the gravel or stumble on a timber tie. The sound might wake the area dogs and their barking would attract attention. The image that haunted young Boykin was that of a black man who had been lynched. He had not witnessed the hanging or watched as they cut the hanged man down, but he did see the corpse being dragged behind a truck, bouncing over the dirt road, his clothes and skin shredded, his mouth open as if screaming, his hand dangling, held to his wrist by a frayed tendon. Back and forth the truck went through “nigger town,” the driver gunning the engine for effect. Every man knew what the warning meant. The next time he could be the one strung up and bouncing behind the truck.
When he reached a white neighborhood, Boykin had a choice: to slip in and out as fast as he could and risk getting picked up by the sheriff, or make a beeline for the steep hills and go overland. He hated walking through the hills at night, trudging through the shadowed ravines and the twisted ridges. He knew that mining pits and gaping, abandoned shafts scarred the sides of the rises, and he feared falling in and never being found again. Still, he chose the latter. A black boy rambling through the woods at night had a chance. A black boy running through a white neighborhood after dark would immediately be suspected of doing no good.
He was deep in the mountains, wading through the forest, when he heard a screech. The sound took his breath away and made his muscles seize up. Locals who hunted possum, rabbits, and squirrels claimed that big cats, living in limestone caves, still roamed the deep hollows and forested peaks. Boykin stood
as still as he could and waited for the sound. He never heard it again, and ten minutes later he summoned the courage to continue, forcing his reluctant legs to carry him across the mountains. By the time he made it home, he doubted whether he had even heard the cry of the big cat.
When Boykin walked through the door, he got a tongue-lashing from his mother. On that day he resolved that when the time came he would leave the South behind and follow his father’s path north. He could not know that, despite all his hopes, the United States Navy would lead him to a place not much different from the Alabama he had left behind.
CHAPTER 9
Port Chicago
After twelve weeks of boot camp, Sammie Boykin waited for his next assignment. After pulling a long day of guard duty at Camp Robert Smalls, he was resting back at the barracks when a messenger entered and announced that he should get ready to ship out. Into his seabag Boykin stuffed his Bible, his books and letters, and his Bluejackets’ Manual, which contained everything a seaman needed to know about the Navy, including its rules and regulations, and how to tie knots and use a compass, and assembled with a group of others outside the hall. It was a cold late-November night. Icy raindrops fell as if the skies could not decide whether or not to snow.
After boarding the train, Boykin allowed himself to hope, as he had on the day he left Alabama. He could hardly wait to see what the future had in store for him. His only regret was that he was forced to leave in such a hurry that he did not even have a chance to say good-bye to his childhood friend, Elester Cunningham.
The Color of War Page 6
