12

Old Dixieland in France

OF THE HUNDREDS OF PIECES of World War I sheet music in my collection, one of the strangest—and this is saying quite a lot—is a composition titled “Indianola.” The song, with words by Frank H. Warren and music by S. R. Henry and D. Onivas, is not, as I initially imagined, about the Delta town of Indianola, Mississippi, near which I once lived; the cover illustration, of a warrior wrapped in a striped blanket and sporting a large feather headdress, tells you that much. The gentleman pictured, it turns out, is one Chief Bug-a-Boo,

a Redman who, Heard the call of war (aw-aw-aw),

Swift to the tent of his love he went,

Sighing for his little Indianola.

“Come be the bride of a chief,” he cried,

“Keep me wait no more (aw-aw-aw),

Come and help me make my war paint fit,

I do my heap big bit.”

Chief Bug-a-Boo explains his war fever to sweet Indianola:

Me hear cannon roar, Me help Yank win war,

Me much like to kill, Scalp old Kaiser Bill;

Me go to fight in France,

Me do a big war dance,

Me love a maiden so, wed Chief ’fore he go.

I told you it was strange. It clearly wasn’t written by Native Americans for Native Americans; I doubt that market ever registered in the collective mind of Tin Pan Alley. But then—who was it written for? Did white people actually play this song at parties? Did they wear a headdress while doing so, dance around in circles and whoop? How did they render the aw-aw-aw? I kind of like the image of a bunch of goofy small-town Midwesterners acting out “Indianola” in their Victorian parlors. At the same time, I kind of don’t.

Less than thirty years earlier, it had been official American policy to suppress the Redman in every meaningful way, and to exterminate him when and where suppression proved impossible, or perhaps just inconvenient. So when I listen to Chief Bug-a-Boo sing about how he would like to scalp old Kaiser Bill, I can’t help but think of what Muhammad Ali is reputed to have replied in 1966 when someone asked him why he didn’t care for the prospect of being drafted to serve in Vietnam: “No Vietcong ever called me Nigger.” And Kaiser Wilhelm, deeply flawed man though he was, never stole an acre of Native American land, or ordered the relocation, or killing, of a single American Indian. At least not until they showed up in France, wearing the uniform of the American Expeditionary Forces.

Which they did—anywhere from ten thousand to eighteen thousand of them, depending upon which estimate you believe. No small numbers, those, considering that a great many Native Americans, perhaps even a majority of them, weren’t even American citizens at the time—they were, as a class, the only group not covered by the Fourteenth Amendment’s clause granting citizenship to anyone born in the United States. Yet they served anyway, as volunteers or draftees, fighting for a country that had usurped theirs. Some attribute their participation in the AEF to a great Indian “warrior culture” or the powerful ethos of traditionally protective clans, others to the hope that going Over There might earn them better lands, more rights, a vote. Whatever their reasons for enlisting, they served in regular Army units, alongside everyone else—bringing quite a few city kids, who knew of them only from Bret Harte novels, into contact with their first real live Indian.

And so, to all the other plaudits I’ve already accorded the AEF, add this one: It was about as effective a melting pot as you could find in a country that fancied itself one great big melting pot. Indians were sequestered throughout the nation, but not in the Army. Chinese may not have been welcome at Ellis Island, but they were welcome in the Statue of Liberty Division. American cavalry may have been patrolling the border to keep Pancho Villa and his minions out, but Mexican Americans could—and did—serve in those very cavalry units. Whether the War Department did this out of a sense of fair play or merely necessity is, in the end, irrelevant; bunking, eating, and fighting beside a Native American, a Chinese American, or a Mexican American makes it harder to continue regarding him as a Redskin, a Chink, or a Wetback.

There was, however, one group of Americans that the War Department could not accommodate, no matter how acute its manpower needs. Ironically, it was a group that the United States had been able to count on in every war since it had become the United States, and a few even before that. And according to the best estimates, more than 270,000 African Americans were willing to accommodate a military that was unwilling to accommodate them.

Now, when I say “accommodate,” I’m not talking about desegregation; that was never for a moment considered. While plenty of black soldiers had served on both sides during the Revolutionary War, afterward, the Army became an entirely white institution, and remained so until the Civil War. The Marine Corps was even worse in that regard—it remained entirely white until World War II. Only the Navy enlisted black seamen for almost all of its existence, mostly because it couldn’t afford to be racist; the Navy was always short of men. So in 1917, needing to raise an army of millions in mere months, the War Department set out to recruit and draft the services of hundreds of thousands of black American men—and keep them entirely separate from everyone else. But segregation is just the prologue to the very strange tale of how the Army dealt with African Americans in World War I.

Immediately following the end of the Civil War, the government of the United States dedicated itself, at least in word, to making sure that the millions of recently emancipated slaves weren’t harmed or exploited or marginalized, but rather were treated fairly, represented, and given the same opportunities to succeed that everyone else in the country had been born with. And for twelve years, freedmen were educated, registered as voters, and even sent to Congress and the United States Senate. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments enshrined these protections in the Constitution. But in 1877 all federal troops were hurriedly withdrawn from the former Confederacy, and white resistance, somewhat stifled during Reconstruction, roared into the open and quickly rolled back all of the advances of the previous twelve years. In 1896, even the Supreme Court gave racial segregation its imprimatur, in its ruling on the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. “Legislation,” the Court decreed, “is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based on physical differences. . . . If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane.”

White Supremacists—they called themselves such, and proudly—had a higher objective than merely keeping African Americans out of their schools, parks, restaurants, libraries, museums, theaters, swimming pools, doctor’s offices, hospitals, funeral homes, and cemeteries; they didn’t want them anywhere at all, unless they were there to pick crops, carry bags, cook meals, or mop the floor. So when Theodore Roosevelt invited the renowned black educator and leader Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House in 1901, in honor of the publication of Washington’s new autobiography Up from Slavery, many whites, especially in the South, took the news rather badly. James K. Vardaman, a future governor of Mississippi, bellowed that, merely by having Washington there, Roosevelt had rendered the White House “so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stable.” Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, getting right to the point, predicted that “the action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.” Roosevelt, a man not easily cowed, never invited another black man to dine at the White House; decades would pass before another president would. In 1913, just days after he took the oath of office, President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order racially segregating all offices and agencies of the federal government. Many black government workers lost their jobs in the process.

It was a time when racial discrimination thoroughly pervaded American life from Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, when African Americans were incessantly mocked and humiliated not only privately but also on the vaudeville stage, and in Tin Pan Alley, and on every newspaper’s funny pages, and on the packaging of everything from pancake mix to toothpaste. Worse even than all that, though, it was an era of the most horrible interracial violence, all of it happening in only one direction. There were, for one thing, quite a few “race riots”—Irving Berlin might have recognized them as pogroms—in which white mobs rampaged through black neighborhoods and towns, killing and maiming residents and destroying homes and businesses; and there were lynchings. A lot of lynchings. In the twenty years between 1896 (the Plessy decision) and 1916 (Woodrow Wilson’s reelection), 1,830 people were lynched in the United States of America; 1,575 of them were black.

And it was in that time, and in that America, that 270,000 black men entered the American Expeditionary Forces.

In 1919, Emmett J. Scott, a former newspaper publisher and personal secretary to the late Booker T. Washington, published Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War, the definitive contemporary account of the subject. As Scott recalls early on, it very nearly came to pass that there was no American Negro in the World War. At the start of the conflict, the Regular Army had just four colored regiments, comprising some ten thousand men. (Two of those regiments, the 9th and 10th Cavalry—Buffalo Soldiers, as they were known—served with distinction in Cuba, charging up San Juan Hill alongside Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, although Frederic Remington chose not to include them in his famous painting of that battle.) Ten thousand more were serving with National Guard units, including the 15th New York, the 8th Illinois, the 1st Separate Battalion of the District of Columbia, the 1st Separate Company of Maryland, and so on—many of which had just recently spent time patrolling the Mexican border. That was fine for peacetime; but then, Scott tells us, “at the beginning of the war the War Department apparently was uncertain as to just exactly what attitude it should take with reference to having Negroes enlist. Eager youths of the race volunteered their services, but . . . Negro enlistment was discouraged.” Scott quotes an Associated Press dispatch a few weeks after America entered the war:

Richmond, Va., April 24—No more Negroes will be accepted for enlistment in the United States Army at present. This was the order received by Major Hardeman, officer in charge of the recruiting station here, from the War Department. “Colored organizations filled,” was the explanation.

Fortunately, the War Department soon changed its mind, in part because of protests led by some of the country’s most prominent black citizens (including W. E. B. Du Bois, who became America’s highest-profile black leader after Booker T. Washington died in 1915), and in part because military leaders understood that they needed every man they could get. In the end, actually, blacks served in greater numbers proportionate to their population than whites during that war, and were granted fewer draft exemptions.

Black leaders, for the most part, strongly urged young black men to enlist. Du Bois himself declared: “If this is our country, then this is our war.” Thousands stepped forward, which pleased the War Department, though many in it soon started asking vexing new questions: Should black doughboys serve under white officers, or black? Should they be trained in the South, where most of them were from but where, presumably, a large mass of armed black men might touch off a panic among local whites? Should they even be armed at home, like all other troops, or not issued weapons until they reached France? Or not at all? If they were to be trained at the same camps as whites, what would be an optimal “safe ratio” of white troops to blacks?

A tremendous amount of energy went into addressing these questions, most of which were never really resolved. General Tasker Bliss, the Army’s chief of staff, favored a plan that would forestall drafting black men as long as possible, give them minimal training at camps close to home once they were drafted, and then ship them right off to France.

The War Department, savvy about public relations as it was, knew it might have some issues with the black community; when General Bliss’s proposed plan started leaking out, black leaders took their concerns directly to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, who quickly appointed Emmett Scott to the newly created post of Special Assistant to the Secretary of War, even giving him a five-man staff. The official announcement, carried in a CPI newsletter, reported that Scott would serve as a “confidential advisor in matters affecting the interests of the 10,000,000 Negroes of the United States, and the part they are to play in connection with the present war.” In truth, I suspect, he was supposed to be a lightning rod to insulate Secretary Baker from the anger and dissatisfaction of black leaders. Some, like Du Bois, continued to take their grievances directly to Baker anyway; in December, 1917, Baker assured Du Bois that black troops were being treated no differently than white troops.

But of course they were. Every facet of black army life, from enlistment to discharge, was kept entirely separate from white army life, and very little of it could be called equal. Housing at black army camps often consisted of tents that lacked heat and even floors. Sometimes there was no housing at all for black troops, who were left to find their own shelter wherever they could, like under trees and in dugouts. Medical care—what there was of it—was subpar, to say the least; black soldiers who presented with serious ailments were often sent away with nothing more than a spoonful of castor oil, and sometimes with simply an admonition to work through the pain. Black soldiers never got nearly as many passes and furloughs as white soldiers did. Often, they got none at all. They rarely had access to in-camp comforts like YMCA huts. There were no accommodations in or near camps for black female visitors from home—wives and mothers—until very late in the war. Even then they were rare.

African American soldiers were undertrained and underequipped; the first batch of black stevedores sent to France was actually issued blue uniforms left over from the Civil War. They were assigned work deemed “unfit” for white soldiers, and ordered into factories as strikebreakers. They were warned, in the most menacing of terms, to stay far away from French women, not to enter French homes or eat in French cafés. (French citizens, for their part, were asked by American authorities to honor American “cultural sensitivities” by adopting a policy of racial discrimination for the duration of the war.) They were, as a class, labeled—in official reports—as lazy, or simpleminded, or devious, or all three. Contemporary accounts report that they were subjected to an extraordinary amount of verbal and even physical abuse in camp, just in the course of an ordinary day. When they left camp, they were subject to discrimination and abuse by local merchants, business owners, police officers, and, for good measure, much of the rest of the local white population—even if they were in states, like Kansas, where racial segregation was technically illegal. Their opportunities for advancement were severely limited; because it was considered unthinkable that a black man might issue orders to a white man, relatively few blacks were commissioned as officers, none of them outside combat units. As a matter of policy, none could rise above the rank of captain. In labor battalions, even sergeants had to be white. No situation where soldiers of different races might serve together as equals—never mind a black soldier holding command over a white soldier—was allowed to stand: If two soldiers of different races and identical ranks should happen to find themselves in the same outfit, one of them—almost always the black soldier—was transferred out. Black soldiers who entered the war as officers, from National Guard units, were often demoted, or transferred, or both. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Young of the 10th Cavalry Regiment, the third African American to graduate from West Point and the highest-ranking black officer in US Army history to that point, was discharged for fabricated “health issues” in the spring of 1917 to keep him from being promoted to brigadier general.

Tin Pan Alley, which had been profitably publishing “coon songs” for decades, now seized on the opportunity to churn out a whole lot of songs on the theme of “Guess Who’s Coming to France?” There was “Mammy’s Chocolate Soldier,” and “Goodbye My Chocolate Soldier Boy,” and “They’ll Be Mighty Proud in Dixie of Their Old Black Joe,” and “When I Gets Out in No Man’s Land (I Can’t Be Bother’d with No Mule),” but for bitter irony, it’s hard to beat Grant Clarke and George W. Meyer’s “You’ll Find Old Dixieland in France,” in which a white traveler, perplexed by Swanee’s sudden emptiness, queries Mammy Gray, who informs him that all the local darkies—including Dancin’ Mose (folks all called him “Tickle Toes”), Old Shimme Sam (famous boy from Alabam’), and every last member of Alexander’s Band—have already left for the trenches. She explains:

Instead of pickin’ melons off the vine,

They’re pickin’ Germans off the Rhine.

And that line actually backs into the tragic and profoundly frustrating truth about the African American in the First World War. For, despite the greatest hopes of W. E. B. Du Bois and others, the black doughboy’s khaki uniform did nothing to shield him from racist stereotyping; and because of that, he was not, for the most part, even allowed to fight the Germans.

There was one final component to General Bliss’s plan for what to do with black men in the AEF, in addition to keeping them out of it for as long as possible, before giving them minimal training and shipping them off to France at the first opportunity: Once they’re in France, he proposed, they should be used, exclusively, in what was then called Services of Supply, or SOS. Have them unload ships, dig latrines, build barracks for white troops, staff white mess halls—anything, really, but man the trenches. Unless it was to dig them, or shore them up.

At that time in America it was generally believed, among white scientists and laymen alike, that a black man’s brain was only about three-quarters the size of a white man’s; now, studies were hastily commissioned that “proved” blacks were inferior to whites in every measure of intelligence. Surely, many said, these simple souls do not, as a group, have the raw material needed for a fighting man. And the one person who might have possessed the power to single-handedly quiet all of this nonsense—General Pershing, who knew from personal experience that black men fought every bit as well as white men—remained largely silent on the question, leaving that matter to the folks back home.

Many whites, of course, used the inferiority argument as a cover for deeper fears. A man with a rifle, after all, has a certain measure of power, authority—of dignity. He also has a weapon. Even if you don’t end up sending him overseas to kill white men, they worried, he might come home with a taste for it. Or at least with a distaste for being kept in his station, which was decidedly beneath theirs. “I know of no greater menace to the South than this,” said James K. Vardaman, by this time a US senator from Mississippi. He didn’t want blacks in the Army at all.

There was, in fact, so much controversy surrounding the use of black troops in the AEF, so much disagreement about how and where to train them and what to do with them afterward, that the Army still didn’t have a set plan or policy in place by the time the war ended. The result was part chaos and part social engineering; white commanders in France often took it upon themselves to convert black infantry regiments into labor battalions. If they didn’t do so expressly to demoralize the troops in question, they probably weren’t terribly disappointed that that’s exactly what happened. Not that there was any lack of honor or utility in having your rifle taken from you and replaced with a shovel; but if you joined up in part to advance your own case for equality—the equality given to you by the Constitution but taken away from you by lawmakers and judges—then it can be hard to perceive how you are advancing that case by simply doing the same thing abroad that you were doing at home.

And that, I believe, was the real reason so many whites were opposed to having blacks fight in the trenches. Yes, a man with a rifle has power, authority, dignity; but a man who uses that rifle to fight—for you—also has pride. You owe him your gratitude. And he knows it. And when this man comes back home again after putting his life at risk to defend your freedom, perhaps he’ll be satisfied to just return to the way things were before. But perhaps not.

In the end, only 20 percent of all African American troops sent to France in World War I were used as fighting men. There were two colored combat divisions in the AEF, the 92nd and the 93rd, although the latter was not a true division in terms of strength. Every other combat division the Army sent to France in that war consisted of infantry regiments and artillery, but the 93rd had no artillery component of its own; there was a great deal of debate at the time over whether or not black men possessed the intelligence to man artillery. To this day, the 93rd bears the qualifying descriptor “provisional” in history books because it was always under normal divisional strength. It was the first of the two colored infantry divisions to head Over There, although, unlike most white divisions, its troops did not ship across, or even train, as a division. It contained one regiment, the 371st, of draftees; the other three comprised black National Guard outfits that were already in existence before the war started. The first of these to go across was the 15th New York. It had been sent to train in Spartanburg, South Carolina, but after tensions arose between the soldiers and the local white population, the Army quickly shuttled the 15th NYNG to France, where they were renamed the 369th United States Infantry Regiment. They were shipped out so quickly, in fact, that when they arrived overseas, no one knew what to do with them, and for several months they were used as a labor unit. The rest of the division came across gradually, until, in April 1918, the 93rd was deemed complete (if “provisional”). And then something really strange happened: General Pershing gave them to the French.

Pershing, you may recall, put both his reputation and his popularity at great risk—at least among his British and French counterparts—with his adamant refusal to allow his divisions to be broken up and distributed, piecemeal, to foreign armies, where they would serve under foreign commanders who might deploy them wherever and however they pleased. For some reason, though, at one point he did promise the French one division; and when the 93rd was consolidated, he recognized an opportunity to simultaneously fulfill that promise and deal with the tricky question of what to do with this lone colored outfit. He seized it.

The British, who had helped train some newly arrived white American soldiers, didn’t seem to care for the colored troops any more than the Americans did, and refused to help train them. The French, though, were happy to have them. For one thing, many of their colonial troops were sub-Saharan Africans; they knew that the Germans feared them terribly, particularly the Senegalese, who were reputed to collect German ears as souvenirs. But the French were also somewhat more color-blind, at that time, than the Americans and British. Not that the French were free of vile bigotry, mind you—a quick visit with Lieutenant Colonel Dreyfus at Chemin des Dames would disabuse you of that silly notion. But many French only halfheartedly honored the Americans’ request to enforce racial segregation in their shops, cafés, and nightclubs, and many more ignored it entirely. And their military understood, as the saying goes, that one body can stop a bullet as well as the next. It was their country, after all, that had been turned into one enormous battlefield. So the French Army welcomed them—and immediately split them up again, scattering the four regiments among three different divisions.

The French gave them French gear (including overcoats with many pockets—much more useful, if confusing at first, than the American version), French Lebel rifles (which were inferior to American Springfields and Enfields; the Americans traded them for captured German Mausers whenever they could get away with it), and distinctive French “Adrian” helmets, which quickly became the symbol of the division. They took to each other, too, especially the 369th—nicknamed the “Harlem Hellfighters”—which had a particularly distinguished rec-­ ord: 191 days at the front; approximately 1,500 casualties; some 170 men awarded the Croix de Guerre; and a regimental Croix de Guerre, awarded for the Hellfighters’ role in wresting the strategic town of Sechault from the Germans. The 369th also produced the country’s first black World War I heroes, Sergeant Henry Johnson and Private Needham Roberts, who, while out on patrol on the night of May 14, 1918, ran into a German raiding party of more than two dozen men. Roberts was badly wounded, but when the Germans tried to drag him away, he and Johnson fought them off using everything they had—rifle, bayonet, grenades, and even a bolo knife. They managed to kill four Germans and wound a number of others before the rest ran off. The French awarded Johnson the Croix de Guerre with Star and Gold Palm; he was the first American to win such an honor in that war. His own government would later award him the Distinguished Service Cross.

In 2003.

He had died in 1929.

Another soldier of the 93rd, Corporal Freddie Stowers, would be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroically leading, on September 29, 1918, a charge on a German machine-gun emplacement after all of his officers and noncoms were killed. Stowers, too, was killed that day; he was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. The president who presented the medal to Corporal Stowers’s two surviving sisters was not Woodrow Wilson, but George H. W. Bush; he made that presentation on April 24, 1991. At least it was still the twentieth century.

Stowers, a farm hand from South Carolina, served with the 371st Infantry Regiment, which, unlike the other three regiments in the 93rd, was composed of draftees. It was the second-most-decorated regiment in the division, disproving the then-common belief that the colored Regular Army units (none of which ever got sent to France) and colored National Guard units (which made up the other three regiments of the 93rd) had snapped up the cream of black American manhood, leaving only the dregs for the draft board. Nevertheless, that belief remained current throughout the war, to the great detriment of the Army’s other colored division, the 92nd, which was composed entirely of draftees.

The 92nd had other strikes against it, too, the greatest of which was a feud between its commanding general, Charles C. Ballou, and his superior, General Robert Lee Bullard. Military feuds, as the soldiers of the Yankee Division had already discovered, can prove harmful to the troops under the command of the feuding officers, especially the officer of lesser rank; in addition, Ballou, who was not without his own racial insensitivities, believed—and many historians agree—that Bullard (whose name at birth had been William Robert Bullard; he’d changed it in honor of Robert E. Lee) was an ardent racist who resented the existence of the 92nd Division and was determined to see it fail. The division was dogged by absurd rumors that it was full of rapists and other criminals; its black officers, unfairly accused of incompetence, were often transferred out and replaced by white officers, many of whom didn’t care for their assignment or the men under their command. Still, in late August, 1918, the 92nd was sent to a sector in the Vosges Mountains, near the German border, where they replaced a French unit. There, over the course of a few weeks, they fought off nearly a dozen German raids, all while being bombarded with shells containing high explosives, shrapnel, and gas. And, on at least one occasion, something else.

On the morning of September 12, part of the 367th Infantry Regiment, crouching in trenches, donned their gas masks when they heard the Germans start sending shells their way. Soon, though, it became apparent that these particular shells actually contained leaflets—in English. Scott quotes them in their entirety:

TO THE COLORED SOLDIERS OF THE AMERICAN ARMY

Hello, boys, what are you doing over here? Fighting the Germans? Why? Have they ever done you any harm? Of course some white folks and the lying English-American papers told you that the Germans ought to be wiped out for the sake of Humanity and Democracy.

What is Democracy? Personal freedom, all citizens enjoying the same rights socially and before the law. Do you enjoy the same rights as the white people do in America, the land of Freedom and Democracy, or are you rather not treated over there as second-class citizens? Can you go into a restaurant where white people dine? Can you get a seat in the theater where white people sit? Can you get a seat or a berth in the railroad car, or can you even ride, in the South, in the same street car with white people? And how about the law? Is lynching and the most horrible crimes connected therewith a lawful proceeding in a democratic country?

Now, this is all different in Germany, where they do like colored people, where they treat them as gentlemen and as white people, and quite a number of colored people have positions in business in Berlin and other German cities.

Why, then, fight the Germans only for the benefit of the Wall street [sic] robbers and to protect the millions they have loaned to the British, French, and Italians? You have been made the tool of the egotistic and rapacious rich in England and in America, and there is nothing in the whole game for you but broken bones, horrible wounds, spoiled health, or death. No satisfaction whatever will you get out of this unjust war.

You have never seen Germany. So you are fools if you allow people to make you hate us. Come over and see for yourself. Let those do the fighting who make the profit out of this war. Don’t allow them to use you as cannon fodder. To carry a gun in this war is not an honor, but a shame. Throw it away and come over into the German lines. You will find friends who will help you along.

Whoever wrote that clearly had a powerful understanding not only of the English language, but of American history and society. I don’t know how good the black people of Germany had it in 1918, or how many of them there even were, but it’s hard to argue with that second paragraph; I can’t imagine it didn’t resonate with the men of the 367th. And yet, Scott writes, “Be it said to the honor and credit of the many thousands of Negro officers and soldiers to whom this propaganda was addressed, the invitation had no effect other than to pre-­ sent an intimate view of German methods and to confirm in our men a loftier conception of duty.”

No one in the AEF thought to include the 92nd Division in the massive Meuse-Argonne Offensive until someone noticed, on a map, a gap in the lines in between a French unit and the American 77th Division, at which point it was decided that another French unit and the American 368th Infantry Regiment be used to fill it. At last, it seemed, black American troops were going to get to play a part in a major battle while serving under American command. As it happened, though, their performance was used by many to discredit both them and black troops in general. In truth, they never really had a chance to make good.

It would be too much to say that they were set up to fail; it’s hard to believe that any military commander, no matter how racist, might ever want to see an American military unit fail in a major battle, especially considering that such a failure might potentially jeopardize other troops—white troops—not to mention the battle’s resolution. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem as if much consideration was given to helping them succeed, either. They were rushed to the front without much notice or adequate supplies. Many of them rode there on open flatcars, for a hundred miles or more, in the pouring rain, arriving just two days before the attack was to commence. Their officers didn’t have time to do any scouting or familiarize themselves with the area. According to testimony some of them gave afterward, they weren’t given specific objectives, either, or even maps. Their artillery batteries were sent to support other divisions; they did not receive essential equipment, like grenade launchers and signal flares, for several days after the battle commenced. And they were given the wrong wire cutters—instead of the heavy-duty cutters they needed to slice through entanglements the Germans had been laying down for four years, they were issued light tools that weren’t up to the task—which meant that they could advance only very slowly (if at all) and in small groups, rather than with full regimental strength.

Things did not go well. Morale was low to begin with, and dropped quickly. Communications broke down between the many small units. Orders were confused or contradictory or incomplete. Artillery support was promised (from the French) but not delivered. Some units were ordered to retreat for no apparent reason, only to be sent forward again. A few managed to break through, penetrating so far beyond the German lines that they lost contact with regimental headquarters. And the commanding officer of the lead battalion, Major Max Elser, appears to have suffered some sort of mental breakdown in the midst of the battle, withdrawing from command without actually relinquishing it. In the end, the 368th failed in its overall mission, which was to achieve liaison with the 77th Division. They were pulled from the field after five days, having suffered more than 250 casualties.

Word spread quickly: The black troops were a bust. They did not hold up under fire, but fled; they could not keep order. There was no discussion of wire cutters or artillery, of jumbled orders, of the white Major Elser. The entire 92nd Division was deemed incompetent, despite the fact that three of its four regiments had been held in reserve, kept out of the battle entirely. It was pulled from the Argonne and sent to another sector, where its troops performed admirably, but it didn’t matter: They were already tainted. There was to be no redemption for them—or, in the eyes of many, any black combat troops, despite the heroic accomplishments of the Harlem Hellfighters and the rest of the 93rd Division. Detractors would cite the “failed” 92nd Division as proof that black men were unfit to serve in combat, through the next world war and right up until President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948. And even for a while after that.

Even if few cared to investigate further the charges against the 92nd Division, the successes of the 93rd were not so easily ignored. For one thing, their exploits had been covered by newspapermen during the war, including a number of white journalists who had been disinclined, beforehand, to look favorably upon black soldiers, but who were won over after seeing the 93rd in action. Irvin Cobb, a well-known southern writer who covered the war for the Saturday Evening Post, was so impressed with the 369th after visiting them in France that he wrote: “A word that has been uttered billions of times in our country, sometimes in derision, sometimes in hate, sometimes in all kindliness—but which I am sure never fell on black ears but it left behind a sting for the heart—is going to have a new meaning for us, South and North too, and that hereafter n-i-g-g-e-r will merely be another way of spelling American.” He was trying, anyway.

The 93rd got an awful lot of good press in America during the war, especially the 369th. As it happened, the Harlem Hellfighters were the first New York troops to return home, and on February 17, 1919, they were cheered by huge crowds of black and white spectators as they marched through Manhattan, a parade that could be regarded as the point of origin of the civil rights movement. There is, indeed, a case to be made that the movement had its genesis in that first World War, which not only afforded many thousands of African Americans the dignity of a uniform and service but took them to a country where, more often than not, they were treated just like everyone else, at least by those who weren’t American. “We return,” Du Bois wrote in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, in May, 1919. “We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.”

In 1993, I met a very old black man in Memphis who had served in the First World War. His memory had retreated too far for him to share very much of that experience, except for one tantalizing swatch of a story: that he and all the other black soldiers at whatever camp he’d trained at had had to wear tin cans on strings around their necks as spittoons, lest they spit on the ground. I had never heard of such a thing; certainly, no one had made white soldiers do anything like that as a matter of policy. It was as if I had pressed my eye against a pinhole in a door and beheld one tiny detail, grotesquely magnified, of the pageant going on behind it. So ten years later, when I set out to find and interview America’s few surviving doughboys, I wanted very badly to find and interview several who were also black. In the end, I managed to interview only two. And the second denied that he was actually black.

His name was George Henry Johnson; I learned about him from some brief newspaper article that Google brought to my attention in the fall of 2005. He lived in Richmond, California, near Oakland, and was then 111 years old. I did not know, from that article, that Mr. Johnson was African American. I did not know it, either, from the lengthy telephone conversation we had before I booked a flight to Oakland to go see him. He told me, in fact, that his mother had been born in Sweden, and that his father, a native of northern New England (or, he later said, Delaware), was of mixed European and Mohawk ancestry. But then he told me something else: that because his father had been part Mohawk and had passed on to George a somewhat swarthy complexion, when George was drafted, in 1918, the Army put him in a colored regiment.

Two weeks later, I was there.

Census records do confirm that he was, as he claimed, 111 years old, having been born in Philadelphia in May of 1894. But of all the things he told me, that little bit of information is one of the few that I know without reservation to be entirely accurate. George Henry Johnson’s story comprised a great many claims and anecdotes that, I have come to understand over time, may or may not have been true; and some, I am certain, were not at all.

Now, there is plenty about George Henry Johnson that was truly remarkable. He was, after all, 111 years old, and lived on for another ten and a half months after I met him. At the time of his death, at age 112, he was among the oldest men who had ever lived. He was married to the same woman for sixty-eight years. When I met him he was blind but still lived alone in a house he had built himself seventy years earlier, mostly with wood he had salvaged.

And yet, it became apparent to me very soon after I arrived at that house, on October 14, 2005, that George Johnson was a man who could, shall we say, spin a yarn.

Take the story he told me, over the course of twenty minutes, about his childhood adventures at sea, which began when he and a friend, Charlie Porter, went across the Delaware River to the shipyards at Camden, New Jersey, to poke around a huge ship that was about to be launched—only at some point Charlie disappeared, and by the time George made it back on deck, the ship was far out at sea. So young George embarked, he said, on an odyssey that took him to South America, then South Africa, then back to South America, then England—and I’m probably missing a few stops in there; it’s a hard tale to follow, even though I have a transcript of it—until finally, he said, “I arrived home on a Christmas Eve Day . . . and I got home and my mother opened the door. So now I had been gone three years. They didn’t know where I was, and to stand there and see me at the door of the home, she was just amazed.” That’s right: From that day he’d gone off to Camden with Charlie Porter, he said, his parents had had no idea where he was. “I tried to write but I couldn’t,” he explained. “Didn’t have enough papers or enough pencils to write.” And so, “when I finally got home I was about seventeen years old . . . and we had a wonderful Christmas Day that year.”

Or something like that. There were several tales of that nature; at various times, for instance, he told me that his father, or maybe his grandfather—he vacillated on this point—had been the illegitimate son of President Andrew Johnson, and that both were present on the platform at Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address (“With malice toward none, with charity for all”), although apparently he told others it was the Gettysburg Address. He was clearly proud of his father, a “very distinguished-looking man, a very uprighteous man” who “looked like the king of England” and worked for six decades for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, calling trains on the platform of Thirtieth Street Station, a position of a certain prestige. That much can be verified. I even examined a picture of his father: dark three-piece suit, watch chain, wire-rim glasses, perfect posture, impeccably trimmed Vandyke, stern expression. He did bear a passing resemblance to George V, in a way.

He did not, however, look at all like a white Vermonter (or Delawarian) with a bit of Mohawk in him; nor did his mother, in the same picture, look like a Swedish immigrant. And they weren’t, at least not according to the United States Census Bureau, which recorded in 1900 that James Edward Johnson had been born in Kentucky in November, 1861, Corona Mason Johnson in Maryland in October, 1864. Her parents had also been born in Maryland; James’s parents had, like him, been born in Kentucky. All were listed as black. And, as far as the Army was concerned, George Johnson was colored, too.

To be honest, I don’t know all that much about his military service. As I said, he never made it to France, although he told me that they were getting ready to ship out when the war ended, and that he was glad it did. He told me—and also told several other people who interviewed him on different occasions—that he was sent down to Camp Greene, North Carolina, and assigned to the “14th Company, 154th Battalion.” There was a Camp Greene near Charlotte, and some two thousand black inductees were sent there for training in the summer of 1918, exactly when Mr. Johnson was inducted into the Army; but there was no “14th Company” there (Army companies were typically lettered, not numbered), and no “154th Battalion.” He gave that unit in response to a question, and gave it quickly, reflexively. Whether he had become confused over the years or was deliberately obfuscating, I don’t know. He did not, he told me, have his discharge papers anymore. I can only say for certain that he served because I saw, in his house, a photograph of him in uniform.

Whatever his unit, he said he was eventually made “a postal agent” at the camp, assigned to sort and deliver the mail. When I asked him if he’d liked the Army, he replied: “No, of course not.” He said it “mostly was drilling, drilling, drilling, drilling.” The officers, he recalled, “treated us well.” “They were all white,” he told me when I asked him. “All white—that is, as far as I know.” He refused to acknowledge, though, that his fellow soldiers were all black. Or even that any of them were. I asked him every which way about this, yet he always avoided using the B word somehow. One of his close friends was “a brown-skinned man,” while another “was a kind of mulatto.” The rest of his unit, he said, “were different-looking nationalities . . . there was so much of a mixture . . . that is, so far as general looks were concerned—light, brown, dark, what have you.”

“Right,” I said. “But there were no white soldiers in there?”

“Not that we knew of,” he answered. “But there might have been.”

Not really, but never mind. It wasn’t just about the Army for George Johnson; he seemed unwilling or unable to comprehend the notion of blackness, or at least to acknowledge it. His father, he stated, “was a light, light brown-skinned man.” Of his mother, he said: “Of course, she was naturally Caucasian.” His brothers and sisters “all looked Caucasian.” He described himself as “a very light brown-skinned man.” (He was; in old pictures I spotted around his house he looked Caucasian, though in person, at age 111, he did, indeed, look like he was at least part Native American.) His wife’s family, the Dulaneys, were also “very light brown-skinned.” Ida, his wife, had had “very light brown skin—you could take her for a, oh, French—average French.” He seemed mystified that I was even asking him about this. “What I can’t understand now,” he said at one point, “here in America, right here, I have so many people that come in here and ask me, ‘What nationality are you?’ . . . You know, in the last couple months I’ve been asked several times . . . and I don’t know why. All my life there I was, a young man born and raised in Philadelphia, you know what I mean? The color I am—never have I . . . just like you, right here right now, you have asked me more questions about nationality than I was ever asked in my life. Back in Philadelphia, we traveled with everybody. I went to school, there were German Jews and French, and Germans and Mexicans, everything, and we never—so God have mercy on my life—I never heard a single word spoken about what nationality were they, whether they were this or that. We never thought about it!”

An unlikely story—I’ll just go ahead and say impossible—from a man who was already sixty years old when the Supreme Court handed down the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. I’m sure he thought about it, for instance, when he was inducted into the Army, which didn’t assign soldiers to colored units simply because they were swarthy. Like the rest of America, the Army determined race by blood, not appearance. Some light-skinned African Americans, I am sure, passed for white in the AEF; but George Johnson, I discovered years later when I found a copy of his draft-registration card, didn’t even try: On the blank space next to “Race,” he wrote, “African.”

At some point, though, between 1917 and 2005, he decided to change his answer; and over the course of several hours’ conversation at his house that day, he inadvertently hinted, here and there, at why. There was the story, for example, about a fellow named Clarence with whom he used to work in the 1940s and ’50s, “and he was from Mississippi somewhere, and he was with me for ten or fifteen years and used to get me down . . . the way he would act—he would always act as if he was subservient to a lot of the people that come around. I don’t care how light or how dark they were, if they were considered white, he always acted subservient to them. And I used to say to him, ‘Clarence, why do you always act submissive? You don’t have to be like that, you’re just as important as they are. I say that day and time is gone. They fought a war for it. Just stop it, don’t bring it back for Christ’s sake!’” But it could be that the most traumatic thing, the episode that really shook his equilibrium to the point where he had trouble even recognizing the notion of race, at least for non-Caucasians, was something that actually happened to his younger brother, Herbert, who also served in World War I—in the Navy.

Now, as little as you hear about the Navy in World War I, you hear even less about African Americans in the Navy in World War I. And, in some cases, nothing at all; Emmett Scott doesn’t even mention it in his 511-page Official History of the American Negro in the World War, an omission that might just lead you to believe that the American Negro did not serve in the Navy at all then. But he did. As Kelly Miller, a Howard University professor and editor of The Crisis, wrote in Kelly Miller’s History of the World War for Human Rights (embossed at the bottom of its front cover is the subtitle: “It is Fair to the Negro”) in 1919, “During the World War, there were approximately ten thousand Negroes who voluntarily enlisted in the navy of the United States.” Miller devotes an entire chapter to the Navy, in fact, most of it comprising tales of the heroism of individual black seamen. He lauds the Navy as an institution, contrasting it with the Army, “where segregation and discrimination of the rankest type force the Negro into distinct Negro units; the navy, on the other hand, has its quota of black men on every vessel carrying the starry emblem of freedom on the high seas and in every shore station.” He continues, in a passage titled “Work of Colored Seamen”:

He formed a part of the crew of nearly two thousand vessels that plied the briny deep, on submarines that feared not the under sea peril, and wherever a naval engagement was undertaken or the performance of a duty by a naval vessel, the Negro, as a part of the crew of that vessel, necessarily contributed to the successful prosecution of that duty; and, whatever credit or glory is achieved for American valor, it was made possible by the faithful execution of his duty, regardless of his character. For, on a battleship where the strictest system of co-ordination and co-operation among all who compose the crew is absolutely necessary, each man is assigned a particular and a special duty independent of the other men, and should he fail in its faithful discharge the loss of the vessel and its enterprise might possibly result.

True enough; but the Navy had its own system of segregation in place, designed to marginalize the colored seaman, and even though Miller is much more realistic in his assessment of institutionalized racism than Emmett Scott—going so far as to acknowledge that every black cadet who’d ever been admitted to the United States Naval Academy had been run out before graduating (Annapolis wouldn’t graduate an African American until 1949), that “the awarding of commissions was made to inexperienced white boys with no prior naval experience or demonstrated ability in preference to the Negro,” that in fact no black man had yet been commissioned as an officer in the history of the United States Navy—even he does not present the full story, which is this: The Navy, unwilling or unable to build and launch separate colored warships, instead created an unwritten but rigid caste system that kept the races separated onboard shared vessels by assigning them different duties. With just a handful of individual exceptions (all of them sailors who had already been in service before the war), blacks were consigned to kitchen and mess duty and, in a few cases, to engine and boiler rooms; and whites to every other station onboard. As Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels explained it in a letter to a New Jersey congressman: “As a matter of policy . . . to avoid friction between the two races, it has been customary to enlist colored men in the various ratings of the messmen branch; that is cooks, stewards, and mess attendants, and in the lower ratings of the fireroom; thus permitting colored men to sleep and eat by themselves.” In other words, no colored seaman manned any guns, swabbed any decks, or otherwise worked out in the open air on any United States naval vessel during the First World War—and of course, none worked side by side with white men. And here is where Herbert Johnson got himself into trouble.

Nearly nine decades later, George Johnson recalled that his younger brother, Herbert, born in Philadelphia in 1896, “was lighter than me. Nobody would ever question him as to whether he was . . . everyone just figured he was completely white. He looked like a Caucasian.” And so, Mr. Johnson explained, Herbert, “being of a light color, when they went and drafted him, sent him to the ship, they asked him what was he; just like you ask me. He says, ‘I don’t know exactly,’ but he looked . . .” His voice trailed off.

It’s questionable whether or not Herbert Johnson was drafted; the Navy generally relied on volunteers. And whether or not the conversation in question happened that way, on Herbert’s draft-registration card he crossed out the other three options under race—White, Indian, and Oriental—leaving just Negro standing; but the type is very small, and perhaps the Navy overlooked it. Or, more likely, Herbert didn’t wait to be drafted, but went ahead and enlisted in the Navy and, when asked his race at the recruiting station, decided on the spot that he would try to pass for white. However it happened, he was taken for white, and assigned to a battleship (his brother no longer remembered the name), which eventually set sail for France. “They had him working on the deck,” George Johnson told me that day in 2005. “Him being on the deck, he was there with most of the American soldiers.” American: i.e., white. “On the deck,” he said again, a minute or two later, “completely white sailors.” And Herbert.

So there he was on some American battleship in 1917, far out at sea, “scrubbing decks,” his brother explained, “and washing the decks, and washing clothes on the main deck,” until, at some point, a rumor started circulating onboard regarding Herbert Johnson. “They probably suspected in some way that he wasn’t completely white, you know what I mean?” is how his brother chose to articulate it. And this rumor persisted, until, finally, four officers approached Herbert Johnson and asked him about it. “I guess they asked him his different nationality insofar as country was concerned,” George Johnson put it, in that strange, tortured way of his. And, asked about it directly, Mr. Johnson recalled, Herbert “said he wasn’t white.”

“Why did he say that?” I asked Mr. Johnson.

“I don’t know why,” he replied brusquely, then proceeded to put himself in the minds of the officers: “‘Oh my God, no, you can’t put him in the kitchen,’ because most of the people in the kitchen were all black,” he declaimed. And Herbert, he reiterated, “was like a white boy.” Hence the dilemma. “You’re too dark to be down there on the deck; you’re too light to be in the kitchen, because they’re all black in the kitchen.” And so, he explained, “the best thing they could do was take him, and ‘have you as our own, and let you take care of us.’” In other words, feeling that they couldn’t very well return him to work among the white seamen, but also unwilling to have him go work among the other black seamen, those four officers sent him, alone, upstairs to their cabins, and made him their valet. “Up on the very top deck . . . He had to fix their arrangements, their meals, take care of them and wait on them,” his brother explained. “Making up the beds . . . keep their clothes and everything clean and dusted.” It was an elegant solution for everyone—except Herbert.

“Many a time,” his older brother told me, “he’d sit there and look down and see the men working on the deck, and wish he could do a little work . . . He wanted to get down there. He said they all weren’t just working like dogs—[they were] laughing and joking and having fun. He said he just felt so isolated.” He spent the better part of two years that way; became depressed. “You know, he felt kind of dreary up there by himself all the time . . . That was just like being in a prison,” George Johnson said of his brother’s “promotion.” “All the work he could do he would do in a couple of hours; and then, all day long, doing nothing but sitting up there, looking down at them.”

This tale, of the bizarre contortions four Navy officers put themselves through in the name of White Supremacy, seems even stranger when you remember that it was Navy Secretary Daniels who first opened a branch of the armed forces to women. He even admitted a few black Yeomanettes. But just as all of the Navy’s women were discharged after the armistice, so were all the black seamen who had enlisted during the war. African Americans would not be allowed to enlist in the Navy again until 1932.

As I said, George Johnson was actually the second African American World War I veteran I interviewed. Two years earlier, after months of fruitless attempts, I had found the first, one Moses Hardy of Aberdeen, Mississippi. Of the fifteen Mississippians on the French List, he was the only one still living. I had tried the other fourteen first, saving him for last because, at 110 years and eight months, he was by far the oldest in the lot. He was not listed in the phone book, so I dialed a number of other Hardys in Aberdeen until one—Frederick—answered. I told him who I was and why I was calling, and then asked, in a tone that strongly hinted that I knew the effort was futile, if he knew Moses Hardy and, more important, if there was any chance he might still be alive.

“He’s my grandfather,” Frederick told me. “And he is.”

I got down there in a hurry.

Aberdeen is near the Alabama state line in northeastern Mississippi, a few hours from where I had lived in the Delta; it’s a pretty little antebellum village on the Tombigbee River, with a quaint downtown (featuring a great old movie house) and a sprawling historic cemetery filled with big old trees. As I strolled through that old burying ground the first time, thinking about the visit I was about to make, I noticed that a lot of the graves therein belonged to veterans, men who had served in every American war going back to the Revolution. Quite a few were Civil War stones, markers for men who had fought for states’ rights and the Confederacy, but also, whether they cared for the notion or not, to keep Moses Hardy’s ancestors enslaved.

Did I say his ancestors? I meant: his parents. Morris and Nancy Hardy had been born slaves. And not just born; according to the 1900 census, Morris had been born in Texas in 1830 (or Tennessee in 1834, depending upon which census you believe), and Nancy in Mississippi in 1849, meaning they had been thirty-five (or thirty-one) and sixteen years old, respectively, when the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment officially abolished slavery. When they were married, on February 19, 1868—Frederick later sent me a copy of the marriage bond for “Mr. Morris Hardy, Freedman, and Miss Nancy Reynolds, Freedwoman”—Andrew Johnson, who had ascended to the presidency upon Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, was still in the White House, where he was doing his best to keep Reconstruction from proceeding. And now, in the age of cellular telephones and broadband Internet and HDTV and DVRs, I was about to interview their youngest son, Moses, named for that first Great Emancipator.

Moses Hardy resided in a nursing home a few blocks from the old cemetery. It was a nice enough place, and the staff were friendly and helpful in that Mississippi kind of way; and yet it troubled me for some reason that, while they all liked the man pretty well, no one seemed to think it was any great shakes that he was there. Perhaps they might have had the same feelings about, say, the fact that I walk by the Empire State Building all the time without looking up; but this was a man, one of the oldest in the world, the son of former slaves, a World War I veteran. Surely, that was more remarkable even than King Kong’s erstwhile perch. Which I do look up at, sometimes.

Frederick, who was in the process of moving to Tennessee at the time, couldn’t be there that Sunday afternoon, nor could his father, Haywood (who had served in World War II)—nor, possibly, Frederick had warned me, any other family members. I felt a bit concerned about interviewing a veteran without any relatives or friends present to help facilitate; someone or other had always been there in the past, and none of those men had been 110 years old. Worse still, soon after I arrived and set up and started talking to Moses Hardy, it became apparent to me that no one had even told the man I’d be coming to see him, much less why. He seemed a bit confused, if not wary, that first time—I would visit him twice more, the last time on the occasion of his 113th birthday—but he talked to me anyway. The second time I came by, about nine months later, he was much more comfortable; he seemed to remember me, though it’s entirely possible that I’m flattering myself. He was dark-skinned and almost entirely bald, with just a dusting of white hair on the sides of his head. I never saw him but that he was lying flat on his back, head propped on a pillow, blanket drawn up almost to his shoulders. Every once in a while, a thin hand would emerge from underneath that blanket and run its long, bent fingers across his forehead or stroke his chin. Aside from that, the only times I ever saw him move at all were when he would lift his head off the pillow in order to hear me better, an act that always made me feel slightly guilty. People at the nursing home told me they’d never seen him get out of that bed in the several years they’d been working there, and yet he never developed bedsores. Like Fred Hale, it would seem, Moses Hardy was some kind of a superman. Did I mention that he had worked his farm and held two other jobs his entire adult life? That he drove until he was 106, and stopped only because his children started hiding his car keys? That he served as the superintendent of the Mount Olivet Missionary Baptist Church’s Sunday school for seventy-five years?

Maybe there’s something to all this clean-living business. Moses Hardy was raised on the 274-acre farm outside Aberdeen that his parents had purchased in 1874 for a dollar an acre, an act that in itself made them far more fortunate than most of their fellow freedmen and -women. They worked hard, ate and had only what they grew or harvested or made themselves. When I asked him what kind of farm chores he had done most often while growing up, he said: “Picked cotton and corn.” He ate carefully—a lot of vegetables, sweet potatoes and cabbage and peas, some cornbread, some buttermilk. Never drank or smoked. His one indulgence was Dr Pepper; he liked to tell people that was the only doctor he cared for. He didn’t go in for medicine. He was devoted to his wife. He was usually the first person to show up for Sunday-morning services at Mount Olivet, which he had helped found, and where he was also a deacon. “He didn’t put up with any mess,” his son, Haywood, once told a reporter.

He was born, he told me, “January sixth, but I don’t know the year.” The 1900 census says it was 1894, while the 1920 census says 1891. The family, though, generally believes the 1910 census, which reports that he was born in 1893. “Might have been,” he himself said of that theory. “I don’t know.” He never came around on the matter; when I asked him about it during subsequent visits, he would only acknowledge, “That’s what they say.” And add, usually: “They don’t know.” (He also refused to acknowledge that he actually lived at the nursing home, insisting: “I’m just staying here for a while, until I get better.”)

I never could get him to tell me anything about his parents’ time as slaves; I got the impression that they hadn’t spoken of it all that much. But they had certainly been beneficiaries of Reconstruction while it lasted, marrying, buying that farm, and, whether or not they managed to prosper, at the very least being in command of their own lives. Moses was the youngest of nine children, born after a quarter century of marriage, when Nancy was forty-four and Morris nearly sixty, or maybe sixty-three. He may have been the baby, but he was not spoiled. He went to work on the farm at a very young age, even as he went to school, which he left, he told me, only when he was “good and grown.” He stayed there even after he was married, at the age of twenty-five, to a nineteen-year-old woman named Fannie Lou Marshall. And then, just three months later, he was in the Army. “I didn’t join,” he explained. “They just—they drafted me.” And quickly put him on a train. “Camp Funston, Kansas,” he told me. “Way up yonder.”

Someone at the draft board must have seen something in Moses Hardy, because he was put in a special kind of regiment, somewhat different from the labor battalions that caught the vast majority of black draftees. It was known as a Pioneer Infantry unit—the 805th PI, a freestanding regiment. The term “Pioneer Infantry” fell out of use long ago; these days, they’re known, at least in the United States Army, as combat engineers—soldiers who build things, like bridges and railroads, that their army needs, while destroying similar things that the enemy needs. I once came across a quote from an officer in such a unit in the AEF, who explained that Pioneer Infantry “did everything the infantry was too proud to do, and the engineers too lazy to do.” And they did it all right up at the front, often following very closely behind advancing combat troops. There were white PI regiments and colored PI regiments, and because they worked so close to the enemy, all of them were issued rifles and gas masks, just like regular infantry. Outside of the 92nd and 93rd Divisions, PI regiments contained the only armed African American troops in France; the vast majority of black soldiers in the AEF were SOS, service troops, and thus issued not so much as a slingshot. Those rifles meant a great deal to the men of the colored PI regiments—more, perhaps, than many of their white commanders understood. “Oh, it was long,” Moses Hardy recalled, fondly. “Yeah, it was a long rifle.”

“Did they teach you how to shoot?” I asked him.

“I already know how to shoot when I went to the Army,” he replied.

“How did you know?”

He looked at me quizzically. “Shoot a gun?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “How did you know how to shoot a gun?”

He stared at me for a moment, perhaps in disbelief. “I come up on a farm!” he declared. “I knowed how!” A friend who had come along for that visit laughed out loud at my urban ignorance; she was from Alabama, and knew better.

Mr. Hardy didn’t have much to say about Camp Funston—named for Pershing’s superior who had died suddenly, opening the way for Black Jack to take command of the AEF—except: “That’s where I got my clothes and everything.” I asked him how long he was there. “Oh, it wasn’t no time,” he told me. “They sent us right on.” For the record, it was a bit more than two months. They boarded trains on August 27, 1918, and made a stop at, curiously, the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, where the troops paraded through a town; and then at Camp Upton, on Long Island, where they were outfitted before moving on yet again, this time boarding a train at 2:00 a.m. Mr. Hardy did not speak of any of this, only of reaching the train’s destination, Quebec (which he pronounced “QUEE-bec”) City, and boarding a transport ship, the Saxonia (which he pronounced “Sax-OH-nee”). “We went over from Quebec, Canada, to Liverpool, England,” he told me. “We stayed there for a while, and then we crossed the English Channel, and then we got in France.”

“And what did you do over in France?” I asked him.

“They drilled us,” he said. “They drilled us.”

“Did you go into battle?”

“No, we didn’t get into battle. They just drilled us all the time, so if they needed us, we’d know.”

“What was the drilling like?” I asked him at one point. “What did they make you do?”

“We did a lot of walking,” he said. “Walking. And then they had us use our rifles and everything. That’s what training was for—we used our rifles, so when they needed us on the front, we’d know what to do.”

“Did they make you carry a heavy pack?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding.

“How heavy was it?”

“Ninety pounds,” he replied matter-of-factly.

To hear him tell it, there wasn’t much to his time in France. As he remembered it, army life was mostly “drilling. That was all we had to do.” They drilled six days a week, he said; “they let us off some Sundays, just sit around the house, around the camp, that’s all. There was nothing to do.” On another occasion, he told me, “When we was in camp, we would be in the house . . . We wouldn’t sit out. We didn’t sit out. We sat inside the camp all the time.” He seemed to recall that other men left camp at times, but he never did. He did write letters, he said, and got one from his wife nearly every day. “And if I didn’t have time to write a letter,” he said, “I just wasn’t doing nothing.”

Well, not exactly nothing. There was the work for which he and the rest of the 805th were sent to France. And yet he either didn’t remember it or chose not to speak of it. But whatever that work was, it wasn’t drill; and it didn’t happen in camp. “Did you ever get close to the front lines?” I asked him.

“Pretty close,” he said. “I was close enough to hear the guns fight.” If things had gotten to that point, he believed, they would have been sent into battle themselves; but they never did.

“Were you in danger ever?” I asked.

“No, no,” he said, dismissively. “Not too much.” The worst of it for him, he seemed to think, was that “I got sick. One time.” Just that once, and he couldn’t remember what it was exactly that ailed him, but it made quite an impression on him nevertheless, because, he told me, it was the only time he was ever sick in his life.

It’s quite unlikely I would have ever learned enough about the 805th PI to question Moses Hardy’s minimized version of his service were it not for the regiment’s adjutant, a Wisconsin-born, Harvard-educated newspaperman and poet named Paul Southworth Bliss. I own a slender volume of his verse, The Arch of Spring, a collection of poems about trees that he published in 1932; my copy is inscribed by the author, “Merry Christmas to Maj. A. V. Wortman,” a nice reminder of a time when military men both read and wrote poetry without embarrassment. After the armistice, Captain (later Major) Bliss undertook to compile and publish a record of his regiment’s experience in the war, Victory: History of the 805th Pioneer Infantry, American Expeditionary Forces; as far as I know, no other PI regiment, colored or white, produced such an account. Bliss wrote much of it himself, but handed off individual companies’ histories to officers from those companies. Lieutenant Orlie E. Ooley (not a pen name, though it would make a great one), of Spencer, Indiana, begins his history of Company E with this high-minded introduction:

When in the course of a nation’s existence it becomes necessary to take up arms in defence of rights or principles, that defence often calls into service many types and colors of citizens. This was the case when the United States declared war on the German Empire and set about getting together a cosmopolitan army to defend the rights of Democracy and Humanity.

Lieutenant Ooley, like all of the officers in the 805th PI, was white; all of the enlisted men in the regiment were black. It was, in that way, thoroughly segregated. And yet, reading Victory, you get the strong sense that the 805th PI was different, somehow, and that credit for that, in large part, belongs to the regiment’s commander, Colonel Chauncey Benton Humphrey, a West Pointer who was recalled from the Panama Canal Zone in June, 1918, at the age of forty-six, and sent to Camp Funston. “The regiment awaited his coming with interest,” Bliss writes. “He arrived July 23, tanned with three years in the tropics, a tall, powerfully built officer light on his feet as a cat, giving the impression of tremendous nervous energy.” From the beginning, his men idolized him.

And he, apparently, regarded them very highly in return. It was often the case in those days that white officers resented being assigned to black units; it was an insult, they believed, to be put in command of colored troops. C. B. Humphrey, though, appears to have taken on his command with eagerness and vigor, and no sense that his couldn’t be the finest regiment in the Army, period. Bliss tells us:

All that he asked of his officers and men was—perfection. His expression, “Why not Excellent?,” which often appeared on his memoranda to company officers, was the hammer with which he drove home his points. He asked that bricks be made—and somehow the straw was found.

In his first talk to his men he told them he wanted them to be “Bearcats.” It was a name that stuck. The regiment was known in Funston as the “Bearcat” regiment.

And the Bearcats, it would seem, met his high standards. “Personally,” he wrote shortly after the war, “I consider that I had about the best Pioneer Infantry regiment in France. I saw all of them and inspected several.” Like Private Hardy—and, presumably, every other man in the regiment—Colonel Humphrey believed that the 805th would be used in combat should casualties at the front rise sufficiently; he even went so far as to have nearly a hundred of his men trained in what he called “machine gun work.” And though they never saw the inside of a trench, they were certainly put in harm’s way, sent to the Meuse-Argonne and assigned the unenviable duty of marching into sectors and villages that the Americans and French had just recaptured from the Germans in order to secure ammunition dumps and repair roads and railheads. What made this assignment unenviable was the fact that the Germans, who had held most of these villages for four years, were known for counterattacking after they’d seemingly been driven off; they regularly sent in planes to bomb roads and tracks—and especially ammunition dumps—they’d just lost. So Lieutenant Ooley discovered when Company E—which included a twenty-five-year-old private from Aberdeen, Mississippi—was sent “to Auzeville, a small village near Clermont, to work on a railhead. The camp,” he writes, “was a poor one, and many men were sent to the hospital with dysentery or fever.” Perhaps this was where that twenty-five-year-old private, Moses Hardy, became sick for the only time in his life. “It was also at Auzeville,” Ooley reports, “that Company ‘E’ received its introduction to ‘Jerry,’ as the German airmen were called. Here also they could hear the big guns on the front, some twelve kilometers away, and see the ambulances carrying back the wounded.” Moses Hardy heard those guns, he told me; he probably saw the ambulances, too, and wondered how many more would have to pass through before the 805th would be sent up to take the place of all those lost men.

After a week in Auzeville, Company E moved on to Varennes, a picturesque town best known as the place where Louis XVI was captured in 1791 while fleeing the French Revolution. There Company E “took up the repair of the roads and railhead,” Lieutenant Ooley reports, adding, coolly: “Here we were under nightly bombardment by Hun planes seeking to destroy the railhead and hospital, also the ammunition dumps between Varennes and Cheppy. Here Sgt. Hayden made his famous assertion that, ‘It’s a hell of a war where a fellow has to work all day and run all night.’” That’s “Sgt. Hayden,” you’ll note, not “Harry,” as white folks would have invariably referred to him back home in Bedford City, Virginia.

“They’d just fly overhead, way up—you couldn’t hardly see them, so far up,” Mr. Hardy recalled, and shook his head in response when I asked if they’d frightened him. He never mentioned being bombarded—only talked, indirectly, of seeking shelter “in the house” when German planes were heard or spotted. “We never did go take a good look out,” he told me. “We was just in the house.” They ducked German planes nightly for a full month, until, on November 7, they moved on to Saint-Juvin to repair the roads there. Four days later, the war ended. That occasion he remembered well, at least during our second visit. “When the armistice was signed, we was at near thirty miles to Germany . . . We was on our way to Germany, then,” he told me that day. I asked if he was glad to get the news; “Yeah, I really was,” he replied. So, he said, were his fellow soldiers: “They all jumped up and shot their rifles. And then there was a lot of hollering and going on.” The shooting, he added, went on “in the air and in the house.” He made sure to add: “I didn’t shoot none . . . hollered, that’s all.”

“Immediately the men began to celebrate by using their rifles and proceeded to fill the roof of their quarters with holes,” Lieutenant Ooley writes, by way of confirmation. “No thought of future rains entered their heads.” Which is surprising, because they’d already seen quite a lot of rain; Ooley describes their first week in France, at the end of September, as “a most miserable period . . . the men pitched pup-tents on rain-soaked fields, and slept in them with nothing but a blanket between them and the ground.” (“It was always raining,” Moses Hardy told me the last time I saw him; he, too, remembered it as “miserable.”) Such, I suppose, was the joy of the armistice.

The Bearcats enjoyed a rather distinguished postwar career, with visits from American generals, congressmen, and other dignitaries. In the spring of 1919, still in France, they put together a baseball team (the players all enlisted men, the coach a captain from Birmingham, Alabama) that beat all comers. And on June 4, 1919, while stationed at Brest on their way home, they were inspected by General Pershing himself. Pershing, Major Bliss writes, “wanted the men sent home erect, vigorous, well-clad.” “He’d come on, check with us,” Moses Hardy remembered eighty-six years later. “Have us all in the line and check with us.” The general, Private Hardy recalled, “looked nice. He looked like a nice man.”

“Did he talk to you?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “No. It wasn’t right for him, to talk to him. He just have us all in a line and inspect us, that’s all.”

That’s all. Were it not for Lieutenant Ooley, I wouldn’t have known that Private Hardy had come under fire every day for a month; were it not for Major Bliss, I wouldn’t have known much at all about what the 805th Pioneer Infantry did in France, nor that sixty-one of them—including seven privates and one corporal from Company E—died doing it. Neither Bliss nor Ooley, though, told me what I regard as the most remarkable thing about the 805th. Mr. Hardy hinted at it while telling me about how the Bearcats sometimes staged plays; “they were good plays,” he recalled. “I enjoyed them.” There were concerts, too—“all kinds of playing, all kinds of music . . . couldn’t name them all. It was in a very big room.”

“Were they just for black soldiers?” I asked him. “Or were there black and white?”

“All mixed together in there,” he said. “All of us in there together.”

“Did you sit together, or did you sit separately?”

“Sit together. No different in there. Go in there, if you could get in there, you could sit anywhere you wanted to.”

“Is that right? So you could sit right next to a white soldier?”

“Oh, yeah. No difference there.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s just—you were in the Army. There’s no difference in the Army.” Yes, he did concede that “officers didn’t sit with us.” And since all the officers were white and all the enlisted men black, the men were segregated in any event. But when I asked him, “Did black soldiers and white soldiers get along with each other?” he said: “Oh, yeah. They got along nice. See, there was just one there. You didn’t need to separate. There was nothing, ever.”

Now, we know, of course, that that wasn’t true. And maybe it’s just a reflection of his personality, of the mindset that helped enable Moses Hardy to survive to within one month of his 114th birthday; but I don’t think so, not entirely, anyway. Maybe it was the openness of France, or the experience of ducking German planes together; maybe it was being away from home, or serving under the command of Colonel Humphrey. Maybe it was the nickname “Bearcats,” or the undefeated baseball team, or the Enfield rifles everyone was issued. Whatever it was, I can’t but imagine that something special existed within that regiment. Major Paul Southworth Bliss still had enough of it in him, several months after they were all discharged and sent home, to write that the 805th was “undoubtedly the greatest colored regiment in the history of America.” Maybe you discern paternalism in those words; I just hear pride.

Remember Corporal Howard Ramsey of the 302nd Water Tank Train, the fellow who was given a lock of hair by a little blond girl in Luxembourg in exchange for a penny right after the armistice? I started to tell you a story about him a couple of chapters ago, then stopped and said I’d finish it at the appropriate time.

Well, this is it.

Very shortly after the armistice, the 302nd Water Tank Train was, you may recall, assigned to help build the new Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, which would eventually contain the graves of more than twenty-three thousand Americans killed in that last great battle of the war. Corporal Ramsey and the rest of the 302nd shuttled bodies—some two hundred to three hundred a day—from the battlefield, where they had just been disinterred, to the cemetery, where they would be reinterred. And that, Mr. Ramsey pointed out to me when I visited him in 2003, was all they did. “We didn’t have to handle the bodies or anything like that,” he’d said. “They’d put them on a canvas, put the canvas in the box, and take the box and bury that.” By “they” he meant “the colored people,” and by “the colored people,” he meant black troops in the AEF. Six thousand of them.

“The colored people did all the work,” Howard Ramsey had readily admitted. And it was unpleasant work, to say the least: What they were digging up was not pine boxes. The war dead, he recalled, “had been buried, you know, not in coffins or anything like that, just in the ground.” Many had decomposed considerably; and some had not, which was, perhaps, even worse. One civilian witness—a nurse, no less—called it “a gruesome, repulsive and unhealthful task.” (Howard Ramsey, you may recall, wrote his mother at one point: “I won’t . . . go into detail about this work as it’s something a woman wouldn’t enjoy.”) It would have been bad enough to have to do it in open, unhindered fields with no other hazards about; but the colored troops assigned to it didn’t have that luxury, since they were working on ground that had very recently hosted a fierce seven-week battle. In his account of the 805th PI’s Company L, First Sergeant Joseph A. Thornton (who had been given the honor of chronicling his company’s war even though he was an enlisted man—not to mention black) reports that, starting November 21—just ten days after the armistice—he and his men spent four months in the vicinity of Romagne and Cunel:

This area was to be cleared of the debris of the war. Clothing, rifles, machine guns, shells, cannon, and in fact all of the implements of warfare were to be found in this area.

The men were cautious, but it was inevitable that some of them should be injured. Pvt. Fred D. Lytle had his hand mutilated by explosion. The cause will never be known, as the explosive was hidden in firewood used in Lytle’s quarters. Pvt. Robert Anderson and Pvt. Frank Sartin were severely burned by mustard gas from a leaky shell.

Getting gassed after the cessation of hostilities is bad enough; but imagine retiring in your bunk after a long, cold day of clearing live ordnance and dead bodies from a shell-shattered and barbed-wire-strewn forest—only to have your fire explode. You can understand why morale might be low.

And it was. The men assigned to “mortuary affairs” felt ostracized, reviled because they had been given such a detail. It wasn’t all in their heads, either; some white American soldiers told French townsfolk that the black men had been assigned this wretched work because they were already diseased. Resentment grew; bad things were in the air, a mood as poisonous, in its way, as the gas in those leaky shells. At one point, the Army, eager to calm tempers, even allowed the YMCA, for the first time, to bring in black women workers. It didn’t want six thousand angry colored troops on its hands. No one wanted to find out what that might look like—especially, I imagine, the 302nd Water Tank Train, including Corporal Howard Ramsey. Yet, to hear him tell it eighty-five years later, they very nearly did. The trouble, he said, started with one particular class of black soldier. “They had labor battalions and they had Pioneer Infantrymen,” he explained. “And they were the same group of people, except the Pioneer Infantrymen carried a rifle.”

It isn’t clear which PI regiment he meant. Most records seem to indicate that the 813th, 815th, and 816th PI regiments all worked on the cemetery at one time or another; a contemporary magazine account also mentions the 806th and—yes—the 805th. (That account calls the work “a task which seemed too sacred to leave to German prisoners”; I’m sure the men actually doing it would have gladly passed the honor on to the Germans.) Curiously, there’s almost nothing in the Bearcats’ history about it; Bliss writes only that “two of the 805th Pioneer Infantry companies had the honor of helping build” the cemetery, and never gets any more specific about it. So I don’t know who, exactly, was involved in what Howard Ramsey witnessed there. I wish I did.

“So, they decided that, after the war and all, these guys don’t need any guns,” Mr. Ramsey told me that day in October, 2003, sitting at his daughter’s kitchen table in Oregon. “So the major they had took their guns away from them. Said, ‘You don’t need guns.’ . . . They had two big units, with two, three thousand colored troops . . . So when they took the Pioneer Infantrymen’s guns away, that made them a labor battalion.” Those rifles meant a great deal to Pioneer Infantrymen. As Colonel C. B. Humphrey, commander of the 805th PI, explained in a report he wrote in 1920: “The fact of their being equipped with arms did not impede their work in the slightest, and, at the same time, vastly increased their Morale, as it made them feel that they were soldiers and not slaves.” These were men who were but one or two generations removed from slavery to begin with; it was not an abstraction to them.

“Well,” Howard Ramsey continued, “these colored guys didn’t want to be called a labor battalion; they were Pioneer Infantrymen. So they mutinied. And I mean mutinied! They all had rifles. Of course, they’d taken our rifles away from us. So we were going to fight a war, a race war. So we went all over the battlefield, and we got any kind of a gun that we could find that had matching ammunition. So we’d take back this gun, take it back, clean up the gun, and get ready for this war that we were going to have. And the ammunition. After everything was settled, we were supposed to throw these guns away, or get rid of them. I never did. I brought mine home . . . It was a German Mauser or something like that.” He said his son-in-law still had it.

He smiled from time to time as he told the story—not because he thought it was amusing, I believe, but rather by way of saying: Look what I barely got out of. “I was there when a colored sergeant was cussing out a colonel,” he said. “White colonel, you know. And the colonel wasn’t doing anything about it. And another guy and I, we walked down, we just wanted to give the colonel some support.” He laughed. “And he told us, he said, ‘You get back.’ He says, ‘I’m fine. If I need your help, I’ll call on you.’ And that was as close as we got. But there could have been a real race [war], because these guys were shouldering their rifles.”

I asked Howard Ramsey if he had been surprised to see all of this transpire. “Oh, you better believe it,” he said. What he didn’t say, but which became obvious in hearing him tell of it, was that he’d also been terrified. “We went out on the battlefield, we got any kind of gun we could find—Springfield, Enfield, Mauser, one of these English guns,” he said. “There were only, I think, about two hundred of us, or something like that. They’d win in a walkaway.” Maybe so; but should black troops draw any white blood in a “race war,” there could have been no “winning” for them beyond that. Retribution would have been swift, irresistible, merciless. In the end, other black troops would have been called in to bury them.

Howard Ramsey was no Southerner—in fact, he had grown up in the West and Pacific Northwest—and yet his attitudes on race were not, let us say, terribly enlightened. For one thing, in witnessing what he did that day, he perceived not unrest among fellow soldiers, but the advent of an all-out “race war”—and scrambled to arm himself and his fellow white men. For another, in his letters home from France, he refers four times to African American soldiers simply as “the niggers”; a fifth time he calls them “colored fellows,” which just shows you that he knew better. The second time I saw him, two years after our first visit, I asked him what had been his impression of the black soldiers he’d worked with. He was 107 at that point, and a great deal more frail than he had been at 105; his memory was failing. But this much he remembered: “We didn’t like them.” He said it twice, actually.

“Why not?” I asked.

He laughed. “We was white troops.”

Even so, however unknowingly, Mr. Ramsey told me a story—otherwise lost to history—about the birth of the modern civil rights movement, a tale of black men standing up for themselves, speaking out against an order that consigned them to the grimmest work one can imagine while white troops were kept at a safe and sanitary remove, responsible only for driving the trucks. (He himself told me, during our second visit: “The black troops, they decided they weren’t going to handle the bodies anymore.”) Even just to say no to a white man—much less cuss one out—would, back home, have meant a certain beating, and perhaps even a lynching, for any or all of them. And, in the years after the war—when terrible “race riots” would sweep through Chicago, and Tulsa, and Omaha, and Rosewood, Florida, and dozens of other American towns and cities, a reaction against the new confidence and assertiveness whites perceived in black men home from the war—it did. But not that day, in Romagne, France, for those Pioneer Infantrymen who’d finally had enough. I wish I knew who, exactly, they were—them, and that white colonel who just stood there and let a black sergeant cuss him out, jeopardizing his reputation in order to defuse the situation.

The black narrative of that war, like the white narrative, is strongly biased in favor of combat, the Harlem Hellfighters and Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts and, now, Freddie Stowers. In his history, Emmett Scott devotes more than 150 pages to the exploits of the two colored fighting divisions, and only 13 pages to SOS troops, even though the latter comprised 80 percent of all the African Americans who served in France then. If that page count alone doesn’t illustrate Scott’s own prejudice on the matter, he starts the slender chapter about SOS thus:

War is not all “death and glory.” For every soldier who gets even a glimpse of the enemy or risks his life within range of shell-fire, there must, in all modern warfare, be from twenty to thirty men working at such commonplace and routine tasks as loading and unloading ships, building piers, laying railroad tracks, making roads, in a thousand other ways making it possible for the fighting men to get to the front, and for the necessary food, ammunition and other supplies to reach them. But what man would want to render such service?

The overwhelming majority of African American men drafted into the AEF were never given that choice. They were, however, given a uniform, and a passage to France, and an essential, if not always dangerous, job to do. And whether or not, like Pioneer Infantrymen, they also got rifles and gas masks and, like a few now-forgotten Pioneer Infantrymen in the town of Romagne, a chance to step forward and demand they be treated with dignity—many came home with a taste for it. Just as James K. Vardaman had feared they would.

Even so, I am obliged to tell you that this particular story does not have a happy ending. Another thirty-five years would have to pass before the United States Supreme Court would even begin the process of undoing what it had done in Plessy. In that time, there would be those “race riots,” in which hundreds of African Americans would perish. Hundreds more would be lynched (seventy-six in 1919 alone). Henry Johnson would descend into alcoholism and possibly drug addiction, grow estranged from his family, and die, broke and alone, in a VA hospital at the age of thirty-two. Needham Roberts would hang himself. George Johnson, traumatized by his brother’s mistreatment in the Navy and who knows what else, would decide he couldn’t even stand to think of himself as a black man anymore.

Despair, though, isn’t racist; many white veterans succumbed to it, too, among them Major Paul Southworth Bliss of the 805th Pioneer Infantry. In “The Arch of Spring,” he had written:

Life comes prancing,

Shot with glee,

Head flung back,

And high of knee;

Death goes down side

Lanes, back stairs,

Life comes up wide

Thoroughfares.

Eight years later, on New Year’s Eve, 1940, sitting alone in his room at Kansas City’s YMCA, he picked up his army sidearm and shot himself. “I greatly regret doing this,” he wrote in the note he left, “but my nerves have snapped and it is impossible for me to go on.” Some thoroughfares, it seems, get shelled to the point where no one can repair them, not even a Bearcat.

Fortunately, Private Moses Hardy’s road remained passable, and led him back to Aberdeen, Mississippi, where he reunited with his wife, started a family and a church Sunday school, worked his farm and drove a school bus and sold health and beauty products door-to-door, and lived on another eighty-seven years. The first time I met him, in 2003, I couldn’t help but run the numbers in my head: The man was already seventy-one years old when Freedom Summer came to the Hospitality State.

“A lot has changed in Mississippi for black people since you were young,” I said to him. “Did you ever think you’d live to see that?”

“No,” he said.

“Do you think things are better now than they were when you were young?” I asked—worried, as the words were departing my lips, that it sounded like a stupid question.

But Moses Hardy, at least, didn’t seem to think so. “I can’t tell,” he replied. “Might be, and might not be.”