At noon on December 8, 1942, the Port Chicago’s first ship, the SS Brewer, moored at the depot’s Pier No. 1, which reached out into the Sacramento River’s swirling tidal current. The following day, Sammie Boykin and the rest of the black seamen reported for their first assignment: loading the Brewer with ordnance. A biting wind blew in off the bay, and gray clouds, spitting rain, crawled up the river. Clad only in cotton jumpsuits, the men could feel the cold creep into their bones. It was not as chilly as November on the shores of Lake Michigan, but at least at Great Lakes the men had been issued proper gear. Here they had neither rain gear nor gloves.
Boykin had been looking forward to seeing sunny California skies and a big oceangoing ship, but the Brewer, like the weather, was a disappointment. It was a Liberty ship, plain and unimpressive looking. The Brewer’s captain was equally astonished to see an all-black work crew. Standing on the pier, Boykin could tell what he was thinking: Hell if I’m gonna let these niggers onto my ship. When informed by an officer that they would not be allowed to board the ship, Boykin and the rest of the men returned to the barracks.
Had Boykin, Ellington, and the others known the first thing about ordnance, they might never have left the barracks again. The Navy considered antiaircraft ammunition to be especially hazardous. Ballistite, which antiaircraft ammunition contained, was a smokeless propellant made from two high explosives—nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine. Both were known to deteriorate over time, sometimes igniting spontaneously. The men would be handling sensitive fuzes too. A manual that the Navy published late in the war declared that fuzes not only needed to be stored separately, far from high explosives, but they were never to be handled by unskilled personnel. Detonators, which formed another part of the Brewer’s load, were not to be treated lightly, either. This same manual advised that they be shipped and loaded in protective boxes, “carried aboard by hand and placed in their assigned stowage space prior to removal of the balance of the ammunition,” and surrounded by bags of sand. Never were they to be “placed in a cargo net or sling.” What’s more, detonators and high-explosive material were never to be moved on the same ship.
The day after the Brewer pulled up to the Port Chicago pier, its captain relented and allowed the black seamen aboard his ship. Despite a small contingent of officers and civilian ordnancemen and the presence of a handful of Great Lakes graduates who had some loading experience, pandemonium reigned.
Spencer Sikes worked in the hold with the new arrivals, sharing with them what little he knew about loading ordnance. Sikes was part of the first contingent of black seamen from Great Lakes and arrived in Vallejo, California, twenty miles north of San Francisco, in the late fall of 1942. A sixteen-wheeler showed up to meet the train, and an officer loaded the Great Lakes men into the back of a trailer. Minutes later the main gate at Mare Island opened to allow the truck to enter. On the island’s far end, the men peered out of the trailer, admiring the large ships and submarines that sat in various stages of construction. Many still harbored the hope of going to sea. At the very least they hoped that they might be trained as welders, plumbers, and electricians, and used right there in the bustling yard to help with the building and repair of submarines and ships.
Reality set in when Captain Goss separated the Great Lakes men from the rest of the base, banishing them to an old, rusty ferryboat that they soon learned would be tied permanently to the dock. Aware of the irony of sailors being confined to a ship that would never go anywhere, the men dubbed it the “USS Never Sail.”
As soon as DeWhitt Jamison laid his eyes on the USS Never Sail, he knew that his dream was fantasy. Jamison started working at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in South Carolina at the age of fourteen. After Pearl Harbor, when the government discharged the CCC men needed for the war effort, he joined the Navy, hoping to see the world and to get an education. At Great Lakes he discovered that the Navy was as segregated as South Carolina.
It did not take long, either, for Spencer Sikes to realize that all the high ideals and inspiring speeches at Great Lakes were empty words. At Mare Island, blacks were not even allowed to use the heads aboard the ships. In case there was any doubt in the minds of the Great Lakes men about how they would be treated, they only had to read the signs: NO BLACKS ALLOWED. To go to the bathroom they had to walk a half-mile and use the restroom set aside for “their kind.” One day, while loading a ship, and disgusted with the situation, they simply stopped working. Befuddled, the officers did not know how to respond. Eventually, Captain Goss intervened. His solution was to divide the ship’s head, roping off a small section for the black loaders, and a larger section for the ship’s white crew members and the white loading officers. Sikes laughed at the absurdity of it. The head was nothing more than a long, unwalled trough with water running through it. On one side of the rope, the black loaders were allowed to relieve themselves within whispering distance of the whites assigned to the other side.
The first time Sikes saw a net of bombs hanging above his hold, it scared him half to death. “I’ll never make it back home,” he thought. “I’ll never see my mom again, or my brother and sisters.” The winch driver, working with loud, grinding steam winches that puffed and coughed, tried to steady the load, lowering it as slowly as he could. When it picked up speed, he rode the foot brake, struggling to keep the net from tumbling two stories into the hold of the ship. Sikes looked up and saw the net pitch back and forth. He said a prayer that the winchman knew what he was doing and that the boom could stand up to the weight of the bombs. When the load hit the deck with a thud, he was sure he was a dead man.
The sight of torpedoes and bombs still scared him, but on the Brewer he tried to stay calm and put on a brave face for the new seamen. The key, he told them, was to handle the weapons as gently as possible.
Despite the inexperience of the Port Chicago men, five days after arriving, the Brewer had her entire load, and at three in the afternoon on December 13, 1942, she sailed for Noumea, New Caledonia, which was 6,200 miles away. Boykin, for one, was relieved to see her go. If good fortune smiled on her and she could avoid prowling Japanese submarines and the high-seas storms that could break her in half, she would arrive in Noumea twenty days later with 3,800 tons of munitions bound for Admiral “Bull” Halsey’s forces in the Solomon Islands.
By the summer of 1943, Naval Ammunition Depots (NADs) were becoming hotbeds of discontent. The single biggest reason stemmed from the Navy’s policy of concentrating large populations of blacks at depots, where the ability to strike for new ratings (even openings in the unpopular cooks’ and bakers’ positions were severely restricted) and black leadership opportunities were almost nonexistent. The Navy’s rationale for confining blacks to NADs was to maintain harmony. At the depots, it said, “the issue of social mixture would not be acute.”
No place was more troubled than Port Chicago. Lieutenant Raymond Robert “Bob” White, who was one of the few officers at the depot who had managed to establish a rapport with the black seamen, was alarmed by the developments. In a letter to her in-laws, dated July 14, 1943, Bob White’s wife, Inez, tells of a recent disaster. “I don’t know how much of this I’m supposed to be telling,” she writes, uncertain of whether or not her husband would approve of her sharing what he had told her in confidence, “but I know it won’t go any farther than your house—it certainly wouldn’t make good publicity for the U.S. Navy.… They’ve been having a lot of excitement over at the base in the last week. The first thing that happened was that a colored boy drowned while they were loading a ship.” The depot’s War Diary for July 5 confirms the details of Inez’s story, stating, “At 2150, Spriggs, John Walter (Negro), S2c, 644 79 77, V6, USNR, accidentally fell from the dock into Suisun Bay, while on duty and was drowned,” and adding that the USS Sangay was “loaded and discharged” on the same day.
Inez White continues, “That night, the colored boys mutinied—they wouldn’t work because they said one of the officers could have saved the boy.” Then she
adds, “You know, that the extreme punishment for mutiny is death—and that according to Navy Law they should have been court martialed.” Although “mutiny” might have been an exaggeration, this was not the first time Port Chicago’s black seamen refused to work. They often grumbled about conditions, racist officers, a lack of promotional opportunity, and inedible food, and most often their complaints fell on deaf ears. So occasionally, as a group, they staged slowdowns or work stoppages. Individuals could and did go AWOL, but as a group they resorted to what Mrs. White refers to as “mutiny” as their only real form of protest. Whether her thoughts reflect her husband’s feelings, Inez White does not say. What she does write about is what happened the next morning.
According to her, Lieutenant Lee Cordiner apparently decided that he was going to teach the “colored boys” a lesson. Cordiner had been at the depot longer than any of the other lieutenants. He was a Naval Reserve officer who in civilian life had been a newspaper accountant. When the black loaders made their way to the mess hall the following morning, Cordiner yelled, “Halt!” and then told them that if they were not going to work, they sure as hell were not going to eat. Unintimidated by his ultimatum, the men pushed past him and entered the mess hall anyway. Later, according to Inez White, “some of the colored fellows threatened his life.”
When Captain Goss got wind of the turmoil, he called for an investigation. Although Inez White uses the loaded word “mutiny,” it is likely that Captain Goss wanted to spare the Navy an onerous court case and also wanted to avoid the notoriety that a mutiny charge would have brought him and Port Chicago. Perhaps, too, he understood the seriousness of the accusation. According to Colonel William Winthrop, who in 1886 wrote an authoritative treatise on military law that the Navy still used as its legal standard, mutiny was “the gravest and most criminal of the offenses known to the military code.” Goss would be obliged to show that the black seamen had “a deliberate purpose to usurp, subvert or override superior military authority.”
What Goss did instead was to order a deck court. According to the Navy’s Bluejackets’ Manual, a deck court could be ordered for the trial of enlisted men by the commandant of a navy yard, and should be initiated “for offenses not warranting punishment” severe enough to be handled by a summary court-martial. Goss sentenced eighteen of the men to an unprecedented twenty days in the brig on a bread-and-water diet, informing them that if they refused they would be subject to summary courts-martial. (Mrs. White adds in her letter that Goss should have been tougher.)
Perhaps after sentencing them, the captain returned to his quarters and read Article 24 of the Articles for the Government of the U.S. Navy (Rocks and Shoals) and realized that legally he was allowed to give them “solitary confinement, on bread and water, not exceeding five days.” So, after only a few days, he released them. His alleged leniency angered Port Chicago’s white enlisted men and officers, who may not have understood Goss’s legal restrictions. “The whole place,” Inez informs her in-laws, “is an awful mess with the black enlisted men accusing the officers of discrimination and the officers carrying side arms for protection.”
And things got worse. Just one week later a white officer locked the door to his room and shot himself in the head. His suicide rattled everyone, but no one more than Lieutenant Cordiner. According to Inez White, the agitated lieutenant kept saying, “That’s what this place does to you.”
CHAPTER 11
Like a Dog on a Bone
When the train pulled into Jacksonville, North Carolina, Edgar Lee Huff, along with four other black recruits he had been traveling with, got off. At the Jacksonville station, a white corporal waited in an idling truck with his arm resting on the window. When Huff walked up and gave his name, the corporal flicked his cigarette onto the ground. “All right,” he said, “Let’s go, then.”
Huff and the other four walked around to the back of the truck, stepped on the bumper, and climbed under the canvas flap. The corporal stuck his head out the window and looked back. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get out.” When Huff and the others jumped out, he gunned the engine, spattering dirt and stones in their direction. “Follow me!” he yelled.
Choking on the dust stirred up by the truck, Huff tried to keep pace. Eventually tall pine trees flanked a narrow road. After a mile, the road ended at a large clearing—what would eventually be called the intersection of Montford Landing Road and Harlem Drive—that looked as if it had been hacked out of the jungle. Soaked in sweat, with the sun beating down on him, Huff shaded his eyes. So this is home, he thought.
Home was Montford Point (originally Mumford Point), located on the western end of Marine Barracks, New River. Montford Point was the Marines’ lone boot-camp training facility for African Americans, the equivalent of Great Lakes’ Camp Robert Smalls. Not long after it opened in late August 1942, Edgar Huff was the only black recruit from the state of Alabama, the product of Marine Corps Commandant Thomas Holcomb’s reluctant decision to accept “colored male citizens of the United States between the ages of 17 and 29.” Holcomb had his orders straight from the president of the United States and the secretary of the navy, and by fall 1942, he was expected to have the 1,200 recruits needed to man a black defense battalion, which would be in charge of protecting the bases that made up America’s supply line in the Pacific.
Late that afternoon, a heavily muscled corporal started to yell. “All right, you black maggots. Fall out here on the road. Now move, move, move.” When he screamed “Tenshun,” Huff knew enough to stand ramrod straight. The corporal checked the muster roll and then walked up to Huff, the cords of his bull neck straining against his khaki shirt, the blood rushing to his eyes in anger. At six feet four inches, and well over two hundred pounds, Huff was hard to intimidate. But the corporal had worked himself into a state. Just inches from Huff’s face—Huff had never been that close to a white man before—he spat, “Boy, I just know you know how to say ‘yes, sir.’ You been saying it all your life. Can you teach the rest of these assholes how y’all say it back down in Alabama?” Then the corporal marched the recruits to the edge of a nearby woods. There he told them they could stand and shout “yes, sir,” until hell froze over.
The big trees hid it, but the recruits knew it was there, just a few feet into the woods, a bug- and snake-infested bayou. As near as Huff could tell, the camp was nothing but dark sloughs and thick woods. In fact, it was little more than five and a half acres of swamp and flooded timber, bound by Scales Creek on the east and the New River on the west. Most of the white Marines, on the other side of the river, did not even know that Montford Point existed. The two worlds could not have been more different. On one side of the river, young white Marines worshiped Betty Grable and participated in a tradition that was almost two centuries old. On the other, young men dreamed of Lena Horne and of becoming the first black Marines ever.
As the sun fell, and the sticky day turned into night, the air hummed and buzzed with the sounds of millions of insects. The air was so wet that Huff felt as though he needed gills to breathe. While mosquitoes preyed on them, and frogs piped incessantly, he and his fellow black recruits yelled “yes, sir” until they were hoarse, until their voiceboxes ached and their legs grew wobbly. Hours later the corporal returned. “You turds ain’t gonna make it. I’ll see to it personally.” Then he added, “I will see to it there will never be a black-ass Marine.”
On his second night of boot camp, the white drill instructors rousted Huff and the other black recruits from their beds at 1:00 a.m., and ushered them outside. The men stood, arms stiff, chests thrown out, legs spread slightly, stomachs in. “You may as well go over the hill,” one of the DIs snickered. Another drill instructor chimed in, “The best thing you people can do is sneak out of here after the lights go out. Nobody’ll miss you. Hell, no one even knows you’re here. Why try to play ball on a team that doesn’t want you? Just leave quietly and shove the hell off for home. You may as well pack up your shit and git. You shitbirds ain�
��t gonna make it.”
The NCOs sent the recruits back to their huts. Scared and disillusioned, many of them started packing. The college boys and the Army Reserve officers who had resigned commissions to become Marines were really pissed off. They didn’t have to take this shit! Who in the hell did these uneducated, rednecked, moonshine-drinkin’ motherfuckers think they were?
Huff had always relied on his size and physical strength to prove his worth. He had never been an outspoken man, but now he cleared his throat and searched for the courage to say what he felt.
The day he entered camp, the DI had tried to intimidate him and chase him back to Alabama, but Huff was not going anywhere. He had arrived at Montford Point with holes in his shoes, nothing more than a quarter in pocket change, and in clothes he had worn for five days straight. In Gadsden he had grown up without running water, using an outhouse with seed books as toilet paper. And now the DI was telling him that things were going to get worse? How much worse could they get?
So Huff spoke up. “They want us to fail. Don’t let anybody push you out of the Marines. I’ve found a chance to be a man and I am going to hold to it like a dog on a bone.” Two other men joined Huff. Then Huff added, “You want to leave, you’ll have to go through us.”
The next morning, when the drill sergeant blew his whistle and screamed, “Hit the deck, you black bastards,” men came pouring out of the green, prefab huts. He had them line up and counted them in formation. All the black recruits were present. Not a single one—not the college boys or the reserve officers—had left in the middle of the night.
Angered by their impudence, the sergeant stared coldly. “I’m going to make sure you wish you had never joined the Marine Corps.”
Raised in northern Alabama, in the heart of the Jim Crow South, Edgar Huff could count on poverty and racism the way white folks counted on the sun to rise every day. Blacks joked that the Great Depression was a white misfortune. In or out of the Depression, blacks in the South lived the same—poor—and the Huffs were no exception. A pall of coal dust often hung over the area hills and trees. The Huffs’ house rested at the foot of one of those steep hills. When it rained hard the water came pouring down, pooling around the foundation and in the yard like thick gumbo, nearly sweeping the structure away. Emily Lee Huff, Edgar’s mother, would say to her young boy, “God never gives us a task or a burden without giving us the means to see it through. It’s gonna change some day, Edgar. Don’t you worry. It’s gonna change.” Only it never did.
The Color of War Page 8
