Southern Discomfort

In honor of the Martin Luther King Day holiday, we are publishing an excerpt from Vernon Baker’s book “Lasting Valor,” written with Spokesman-Review reporter Ken Olsen. Baker, recently awarded the Medal of Honor, here learns a lesson about segregation, Southern style.

It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head. - Sally Kempton

October 1944, Seravezza, Italy: Belk and I lay stranded on the German side of the bridge. No way we could go back over the bridge in daylight. We burrowed among the chunks of concrete and adapted to discomfort.

Belk reminded me of myself. Under that dandy figure was an angry black man ready to raise his fists at the smallest slight. Luther Hall, the company first sergeant, had joined me in pulling him aside soon after his arrival and counseling him not to follow his fists to a dishonorable discharge.

“Maybe you don’t get it,” Belk had challenged me. “Maybe a Wyoming nigger don’t know what a Chicago nigger knows.”

I got it. Maybe my introduction came later in life than his. Perhaps the sources were different. But still I was a veteran of anger and outrage, and the Army baptized me like nothing else.

I had boarded the train for basic training at Camp Wolters, Texas via Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in June 1941. A black draftee from Laramie was the only other Army-bound passenger in my car. In our four days as Kansans, we received our uniforms and other equipment, swam in the base swimming pool, and marveled at the prospect of someone feeding us three meals a day. Joining the Army was a smart move, I bragged to myself. New clothes and a swimming pool.

We boarded another train after this respite and continued to Camp Wolters. The moment we passed through Junction City, Kansas, the bounty of goodness started to spoil. I was too naive to understand it as it unfolded, and too angry to deal with it after the fact.

A porter came into our car and pointed to the draftee and me. “Come with me,” he ordered.

We shouldered our brand-new duffel bags and walked forward, through passenger car after passenger car, until we reached the compartment nearest the locomotive.

“Y’all find yourselves a seat here,” the porter said.

He watched long enough to make sure we complied, spun on the toe of his smooth leather-sole shoes, and disappeared back into the jerking maw of the train. After struggling to get my bag into the overhead rack and settling into my new seat, I began to savvy the composition of the people in our new car. We were all black. I looked at my traveling partner. He silently stared ahead. He hadn’t wanted to be in the Army to begin with.

Toward the end of that long day, we pulled into Mineral Wells, Texas. I wearily dragged my bag from the overhead rack, negotiated the three metal steps out of the end of the car and dropped onto Texas soil. My draftee friend was close behind. I raised an arm and pointed to a dusty bus idling on the other side of the station, just as the man at Fort Leavenworth had promised.

We traversed the luggage-filled platform and thought about finding friendlier, more hospitable faces. A few quick steps drew me into the bus, which was even hotter and stuffier than the railroad car. A desiccated old black man sat all the way in the back, his disinterested stare glued to the window. He alone comprised the passenger cargo.

I dropped my duffel in the seat directly behind the driver and began to slide in beside it.

“Hey, Nigger!” the bus driver roared, pivoting in his seat as he expelled hate through his lungs. “Get up and get to the back of the bus where you belong!”

I involuntarily jumped to my feet before my butt touched the cloth of the seat, not because this beluga of a bus driver had so ordered, but more as a reflexive response to the volume and intensity of his voice. My fists bunched and I moved my feet farther apart to give me the best leverage for a set of opening roundhouses to the side of his pallid jowl. My traveling companion froze on the bus steps.

Before I could swing, a hand grabbed my left sleeve and pulled me back a step. My head swiveled that direction, and I wondered if my move to challenge the bus driver had summoned more trouble. It was the shriveled old black man, his stubbled face stony, but his eyes pleading. He motioned to the back of the bus with a sideways toss of his head.

“Come on,” he said, simultaneously motioning to the black draftee.

I pawed for my duffel bag with my right hand, threw a glance over my right shoulder to make sure the bus driver didn’t have punches of his own coming via air mail, and followed. It was as if the spirit of my grandfather had materialized at my elbow.

The old man walked to the back, dropped in the seat, and patted the spaces beside him. My companion and I took up residence, one on each side of him.

“You planning to die your first day in Texas,” he said in a measured drawl, making a statement, not asking a question. The driver gunned the engine, closed the door, and started the journey for Camp Wolters.

“First day?” I said cockily, not wanting to back down from every challenge.

“You’re a black man. You tried to sit up front like’s all right for black folks to sit anywhere they pleases. Nobody who lives here would try that on a dare unless he wanna be kilt,” he said.

“You better keep those fists in your pockets,” he added. “Clenching your fists in the presence of white people’s liable to get you assault or ‘tempted murder charge. Black man’s justice in these here parts is done with a tree and a rope.”

He turned, smiled a little, and touched my arm in an attempt to reassure me. “Where you from, son?”

For the next several minutes, he tried to educate us on the rules of Southern living. I shook my head over and over. It only made the old man more intense.

“You in shock, son, you in shock. But you gotta listen. Stuff like this’ll get you kilt. You’re lucky this here driver’s too lazy to tangle with you. Be a point of pride to most any other Southern man to beat your silly. Don’t give ‘em no opportunity.”

Before the lesson was over, I asked why we’d been moved around on the train.

“You never seen that? You are strangers to these here parts,” he said, letting out an exclamatory sigh. “South of the Mason-Dixon, son, South of the Mason-Dixon. Porter’s supposed to make sure the white people all together in the back and the black people all together in the front of the train. That there’s the only place anybody’s going to move you to the front. That’s ‘cause it’s the dirtiest place, that car right next to the locomotive.”

In any other situation, we should go to the back, he warned. Greyhound buses had the bathroom clearly marked too. Pay careful attention to signs and don’t touch the door knob if the door didn’t read, “Colored.” If we ended up in any town, look for the “Colored” drinking fountain, “Colored” restroom, “Colored” cafes, you name it. If we went on leave, we should go to Dallas-Fort Worth and stick to the “Colored” section of town. A black man found no trouble and no ways of making the type of mistake I had just made. Stay in your place and people will leave you alone, he directed.

I nodded, not fully comprehending all I’d heard, shaken by my encounter with the bus driver; hot, dirty and tired, angry, confused, and thinking I should be grateful to the old man. Selecting one emotion to ponder only led to the explosion of another.

What the hell had I gotten myself into, I wondered. I was angry from that day forward. I didn’t trust anyone, especially white people.

The bus driver eventually pulled up to the gate at Camp Wolters, opened the door, and turned far enough in the seat to get our attention. He wordlessly pointed out the door.

The old man grabbed my hand. “You’re good boys. You keep yourselves alive, hear?”

MEMO: From “Lasting Valor” Copyright 1997, Vernon J. Baker with Ken Olsen.