Black Power in the Courtroom, Cont.

11.  The Break-Up

             From the beginning I had told Martha that I could only stay two weeks and that  I had to leave for Austria on the thirteenth to meet my brother.

            --In the beginning, said Mary Rose, I said I had to be back by August 11^th.

            --I said from the beginning too, I said, that I had to return to Austria by the 13^th.

            The beginning.  As if a political situation could be encompassed by what anyone said from a subjective beginning.  Encompassed is perhaps the wrong word.  Judged or developed are better.  In both our cases, family ties were taking precedence over political activity, although I would have strongly denied this;  Mary Rose was in a different situation with a small child to get back to..  At any rate, by now we considered that we were the real revolutionaries with a comprehension of revolutionary theory totally lacking in Martha and Montrice.  Despite this laudatory self-satisfaction, both of us were using family ties to get out; besides her child, Mary Rose was justified by her annoyance at Martha’s downgrading of Angela Davis as well as her digs at Mary Rose and Wiff.  I thought I was just tired of running them around and wanted to go back to Austria and relax, but I probably was also sick of being bossed by Martha, a situation I had allowed to develop and then did not know how, and now, for the last few days, did not want to bother to change.  In addition, Frankfurt was very hot, so I began to idealize my memories of the Waldhaus and its little swimming pool.

            The Darmstadt brothers second trial was scheduled for August 21st, and Martha and Montrice needed a place to stay until then.  Task Force Albertson, as Max was later to name us, was dissolving because of fatigue, family, and money, finking out just when the Darmstadt brothers were getting it together.

            Am I making a moral judgment on myself--the brave proletariat betrayed by the weak middle class?  I was the only middle class member of the lot, and, at that time, I was still almost upper-middle class.  Mary Rose probably thought of herself as proletarian, if not defiantly Lumpen, but Martha and Montrice would not describe themselves in class terms.  I do not know how the Darmstadt brothers thought of themselves, but one of the reasons they had joined the military had been to get a little ahead, as well as not to go to Vietnam.  As I have said, if you volunteered, you were supposed to end up in Germany, not ‘Nam.

            --Attack, said Martha.

            She really had a fine political instinct.  Instead of stewing in the contradictions of liberal vs. proletariat behavior, as I did, she organized a few role-playing sessions for King, Swinton, Red and Mac to prepare them for their interview with Lt. Col. Poteet, the Commander of Cambrai-Fritsch, and the one who had had the unfortunate  idea, which he might have been regretting ever since, to lock the 53 up overnight in the Crypto Compound.  I found the following, Mary Rose’s written transcript of the Darmstadt brothers meeting with Colonel Poteet, gathering dust in the archives of the case.  In her quiet way, she had been invaluable.  Here it is:

            On August 10, 1071 at 10;30 a.m. we entered Major Phillips office half an hour late because the 93rd Signal Battalion refused to give us transportation to Heidelberg after being advised that an appointment had been set up at General Headquarters for us that morning.  We had to go to another unit to obtain transportation.

            We presented the Darmstadt case to Major Phillips as it was in the report (this document, either from Mary Rose or Voice of the Lumpen, is reproduced as the first chapter of the present narrative).  Four of us were present representing the Darmstadt case, as well as the Human Relations committee that  dissolved after the new Commanding Officer, Major Phillips, came into the Command of the 93rd Signal Battalion.  The reason for its dissolution was that the forbidding of more than three people to gather in one place made it impossible for the committee to function.  This dissolution took place at the beginning of July.

            We presented Major Phillips with the list of grievances along with a Confederate battle flag (symbol of the Southern States during the Civil War and considered a provocation by Black soldiers), which is allowed to be sold right outside the gate of Cambrai-Fritsch Caserne and is allowed to be worn inside the base on coats or inside cars.  We also presented him with the Article 15 where 53 people were charged with disobeying a lawful order by Lt. Col. Poteet, along with a statement wherein Commander Bruce D. Stewart said to Dickon after Dickon wanted to go outside and speak to the people gathered in front of A Co orderly room where he was being held: “They don’t want to listen to anything, but I have something here they will listen to (showing his .45).”

            We also said that Poteet was too emotionally upset to command his battalion because every time that he was presented with a problem, he answered only with comments like Where’s he from? Shut up! Get out! We requested Major Phillips therefore to supply us with information and instead had been tricked into a kangaroo court.

            The reason for our request for information concerning the court martial was that the last time we had requested  this information we found ourselves walking into a Summary Court Martial after we had refused to accept it.  We questioned the officer in charge, and he said he could not do us justice because of the position he held in the Army.  He admitted he would not use his own judgment but had to judge us under the military code in order to keep his rank.  We cannot supply this officer’s name because when he entered the office his name was not given and he was not wearing a name tag.

            Major Phillips reaction was the statement that we were in the military, and we would have to abide by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which was depriving us of our civil rights.

            So we requested to take our case to the Supreme Court because of the fact that since we were in uniform we had no civil rights but only were ruled by military law, that is, the UCMJ.

So he insinuated that the complete case would be dropped but also informed us that he would do all in his power but could make no promises.  He also informed us that between 18 and 19 July there would be an investigation of the Darmstadt Case undertaken by himself, General Hollis, and the Inspector General, and a JAG lawyer.

            We informed him that we were not sure we could trust the JAG lawyer since we had been tricked into this kangaroo court by a JAG lawyer in the first place.  Major Phillips then replied, Give him a chance.

            After returning to Darmstadt and the 93rd Sig. Bn., we entered the S.1 section and asked to see Colonel Poteet.  We were then told that we were too late, and I (Red, Sgt. Taylor) replied, How long do we have to wait? The answer was given by Capt. Carlisle: It is at the Colonel’s convenience, not yours.  So while we were waiting, the Colonel walked in emotionally upset and ordered three of us out in the hall, telling Sp/4 MacDonald to remain in his office.  We were ordered to stand at attention until he returned.  Colonel Poteet’s tone of voice was so loud in his office that we heard him tell Sp/4 MacDonald to remain in his office.  Colonel Poteet’s tone of voice was so loud in his office that we heard him tell Sp/4 MacDonald to sign that Article 15 and using profane language.  Sp/4 MacDonald requested that Sgt. Tyler be a witness.  Col. Poteet then replied that Sgt. Tyler was waiting in the hall and that Sgt. King should fall out and march us into his office.  After we were marched into his office, he then started yelling at us as to Where is Miss Albertson?  We refused to reply because Miss Albertson is a civilian and we were not supposed to have knowledge of her whereabouts.  He then asked us what time did we leave  Darmstadt that morning for Heidelberg, and I (Sgt. Tyler) replied, Nine-thirty, sir.  He asked us who authorized us to go and then called Heidelberg to verify our statement.  Then he put the 93rd Sig. Bn. off limits to a member of the 7th Evac. Hospital who was on the committee representing the Darmstadt Case.  He did all this in a very obscene manner.

            Sgt. King replied that we could not talk to him because he was emotionally upset and could not control his voice.  Poteet then replied, Why do you keep saying I am emotionally upset?  Sgt. King said, Because you cannot control yourself.  Poteet then turned, shaking, to the window, trying to pull himself together.

            This conversation was witnessed by Lt. Mitchell, Capt. Carlisle, and a Spec/4 whose name we must get.

            This statement is by four members of the Committee for the Darmstadt Case, which includes approximately twenty-six soldiers who refused to settle for Article 15’s and demand a thorough investigation into the case.

                                                                                                (taken down on August 10th, 1971)

            Unexplained and undocumented, this document never makes it clear whether the Command asked for the above interview or whether, under Martha’s direction, Red, Mac, King, and Swinton had asked for it.  However, Martha was not likely to send her protégés off to see a bunch of racist officers.  In trying to reconstruct these old events, I assume that the Command had called the Brothers in for counseling in one last attempt to head off the trial.  This report shows that the military was aware of our presence as a support group in Frankfurt.  

            Maybe Martha’s build-up of agents running rampant in the corridors of the Sun Hotel was not as wild as I had judged it to be; not that the Command needed undercover men to check on us driving from base to base in my Peugeot with French plates, or on the Darmstadt brothers running in and out of the hotel lobby.  If the Manager had informed on us in the beginning, he would have given his information to the German Secret Service who would then have passed it on to Military Intelligence.  However, at this point, the Darmstadt brothers and their case were out in the open and far beyond counseling, as the report shows.  The Colonel’s attempt to go by the book and counsel each soldier separately had not worked at all.  The Army would not try anything else before the trial date.

            As for our group, Mary Rose left as planned.  I took her to the airport.  Under other circumstances, we might have become friends, but although by this time both of us disliked Martha, neither of us wanted to be disloyal to her.  Then I went to the bank to cash my last travelers checks--enough to pay my hotel bill and get out the next day.  I remember that afternoon very well.  Martha had come to the bank with me.  If she had suggested we start pooling my money if she took over my hotel bill, or that we share the one or two hundred dollars I had just cashed, I suppose I might have gone along with it.  Up until then, I had paid my own hotel bill and the gas, and Martha had paid for the other two women and all the food.  One hundred dollars or so was not going to solve any of her financial problems, and by that time, I think, she may not have been that sure I would agree to share.  I know that once you ask someone for money, and are refused, a bad pattern is set up that almost always blocks future funding.

             She said nothing when I got my money and paid my hotel bill, but reminded me that we were eating at Wiff’s place that night.  Max had left me the keys of his apartment in Heidelberg and I planned to spend the night there and start for Austria the next day.  So I told Martha I had to contact German comrades in Heidelberg to come and leaflet before the Trial Center on August 21st, but that I would come back for dinner.  It is very hard for me to refuse invitations.  Although I do not much like parties, even the simplest invitation makes me feel my presence is so ardently desired that I must take a firm grip on reality to refuse, telling myself that a party is exactly the sort of occasion when one body more or less is expendable and that the entire assembly does not go into mourning because I have not turned up.

            And so instead of getting out that afternoon, I said I would be back for dinner.  It was a beautiful August afternoon, and I drove down to the Neckar to the Vierbürger restaurant for lunch.  It sounds like a fancy hamburger joint, but it was a small hotel picturesquely situated along the Neckar.  The burgers were not chopped meat, but four castles that used to guard the river before gunpowder was extended from Chinese firecrackers to European canons; now three of the castles were in ruins.  From the terrace of the restaurant, all four were hidden while across the river and above the trees, the village of Dilsberg stayed sunlit on the summit of the hill, long after the river valley had fallen into shadow.  Very romantic.  There was a grape trellis over the terrace of the restaurant and deep purple home-made wine in carafes on the tables.  I ate and drank and did not think at all, as is usual with lunches for the express purpose of figuring things out.

            I had nothing against Martha except that she was getting on my nerves, and I knew she had nowhere to stay in Europe If I didn’t send her to my apartment in Paris.  I had not needed to drive the seventy-five kilometers down to Heidelberg to find this out.  The day before we had all sat in Martha’s room with a map in order to see where she and Montrice could wait out the two weeks till the August trial date.  Holland was a prime candidate because people spoke English there, and Wiff, who had brought the map up from his car, opted for Rotterdam because it was a seaport and offered getaway possibilities.

            --But I don’t know, he amended.  There are a lot of those West Indian niggers there that would pull a knife as soon as look at you.

            I took a dim view of this anti-West Indian line and wondered briefly if it had been inspired by Martha.  She had already begun to make a few disparaging--if I chose to take them that way--references to Cora, my daughter, who had promised to come over and had not.  Cora had gone to the West Indies instead of coming to Germany, so I thought it likely that Martha was considering West Indian niggers as a counterproductive pole to her own activities.

            --Anyway, I can’t drive you to Holland, I said and that turned out to be the end of the plan for the Netherlands.

            After Wiff left, the women sat back and let me take the initiative.  No one said anything about there being no more money. I thought about the Waldhaus in Igls.  In my mind it was becoming a sacred grove, and even if I had been willing to pay for them, the idea of Montrice and Martha running up phone bills to Philadelphia, rejecting the potato salad, and ruining my quiet mornings at the swimming pool said nothing to me.  Finally, my decision what to do about Martha was, as I had hoped, resolved by watching the liquid flow of the Neckar from the terrace below the four hamburgers.  Women are liquid beings. My bond with another woman was a woman’s problem--a problem I had absolutely no precedent for.  Men had been drinking Brüderschaft since the Dark Ages--back to our barbarians on the outskirts of Rome--but women had been separate entities, often enemies, each to each, although red wine was more symbolic of a bond between women than it ever could be as a bond between men.  So I sat there pouring that dark blood into me and thought about breaking my bond with Martha.  Unsymbolically, I was not menstruating.  That had already happened my second week at the Sun, causing, by the way, a big conflict with another woman, the Yugoslav cleaning woman, who had been outraged because I had bled onto the mattress.  God knows what significance menstrual blood has in Yugoslavia, but she ran down the stairs to the main desk to tell the poor Manager, and since he would not come up to see--by then we could have been having ritual sacrifices in our rooms for all he cared--she ran back up the stairs and down to Martha’s room where we were having an evaluation session; she tried to get them all to come and see my bloody mattress.  She seemed to be invoking some custom whereby my shame should be manifest to men and women alike, but since she spoke very little German, we never knew what it was.  All I could think of was the unvirgin bride who cannot bleed onto the nuptial sheets, but that was certainly not appropriate.

            Back to the Waldhaus and the swimming pool, an image, and my anxiety that I would lose the peace of the swimming pool once Martha and Montrice were gamboling around in it.  Not that they would have.  Martha had conjured up the Jersey Monster in order not to go into the water.  Robert Williams, a well known Black organizer in the U.S., had been almost killed for trying to integrate swimming pools years ago in one of the Southern states, North Carolina possibly, and they still remained a long since gone symbol of segregation.  Austria had been rid of its Nazis long enough to make racial superiority only a memory, and certainly Martha and Montrice would have had no trouble getting a room in the Waldhaus and enjoying, after their fashion, all it had to offer.

             But I myself wanted to keep them out because I wanted no responsibility for others and minimum visibility for myself.  As a middle-class, middle-aged American, I stuck out more than the other guests, but not as much as if I had gone on playing my role of ersatz Black revolutionary.  And with Martha and Montrice in the Waldhaus, that is what I would have been, just like I was in the Sun.  Of course, what I wanted to be instead was not very clear to me.  I had already rejected the role of liberal lady on vacation, but maybe there was an interior swimming pool in my head that I did not want to integrate.  Mainly, however, I did not want to be responsible for anyone, and being a mediator between Martha and Montrice and the Waldhaus was not my idea of a vacation.  If they had been nice and quiet and appreciative of an Austrian summer, it would have been all right.  But they wouldn’t have been.  That type of behavior was what whites were always demanding from blacks, quiet appreciation, and so I had not gotten rid of my racism, despite my illusions that I had.

            And so I finished my coffee on the Neckar and bartered off whatever qualms I might have had about leaving Martha and Montrice in the lurch by deciding to go back to Frankfurt with one bottle of the black wine and then give Martha the key to my apartment in Paris.  I even bought their train tickets, even--I repeat for emphasis-- first class, which I never took myself.  More conscience-assuaging.  By the time I got to Wiff’s apartment in Family Housing, by the time I found it in the dark because all the buildings in the whole housing area looked absolutely identical to me, I was very late.  For dinner, that is.  This does not mean there was no food left.  Montrice and Martha always bought too much.  Tonight for the four of us they had cooked meat loaf, chicken, chitterlings, potatoes, three vegetables and plenty left over to be thrown out the next day.  I was not hungry because of my copious lunch on the Neckar terrace, but because I intended to break with them, I felt obliged to eat some of our last supper.

            Martha was looking rather splendid that night, dressed in a long black gown with rhinestones; she was pretty quiet all the way home.  Montrice sat in the back seat and did not say a word.

            The Sun Hotel was set back in a small square with trees along the facade and an outdoor cafe next door, now dark and shut for the night.  I pulled in under the trees, and switched on the overhead light in the car.  There I gave Martha a piece of paper with my name, address, and telephone number on it, along with the addresses of people who could help her in Paris, mostly the Quaker Center where we had had our anti-Vietnam War meetings for the last five years.  I also gave her the first class train tickets.

            --How am I to know when trains leave here for Paris?  she asked.

            Montrice made a sound in the back seat.

            --You go on upstairs, said Martha.  I’ll be up in a minute.

            Montrice got out of the car and walked up the steps to the Sun Hotel without saying anything to me.  The hotel looked very pretty with the lights glowing in the lobby and reflecting up on the green leaves of the trees.  Night light, artificial or astral, is beautiful, precariously balancing on the flip of a switch or whisk of a cloud.

            --We may need an escort to get from here to the station, said Martha.

            She was staring straight ahead through the windshield, musing, like a general mapping out a difficult campaign.

            --Here is the house key, I added.

            I did not find myself very sympathetic, but for the last two days i had not found Martha sympathetic either.

            --All right, June, she said.

            She took the key in her hand and got out of the car.  I thought she was going to leave like Montrice, but when she had gotten to the top of the three steps, she turned and stood with the yellow light behind her, a beautiful woman in black, in diamonds.

            --You be sure and come, she said.

            It must have been like going to the moon for her, the white man’s world where no one spoke American.

            I drove off to Austria and left her standing there alone.

12.  The Second Trial

Press Release by Task Force Albertson

21 August 1971

            The trial of the Darmstadt brothers was still referred to as the Darmstadt 53, although about 26 were up for court martial and only four were going on trial on Monday, 21 August.  The Funari Trial Center was the same as in July, the same parking lot, but this time without McGuire and CBS television.  Small courtroom upstairs with the four Brothers, Swinton, Tyler, King, and Mac Donald wearing Class A’s and sitting in the front row near the window, and every other available seat taken by journalists, from the large press agencies to the representation of the Revolutionary Soldiers Union in the Netherlands.  Martha was there too, but not in the courtroom, in the witness room which was a sort of enlarged closet with a single window opening out on a mixed vista of Army barracks and Mannheim factories.  At first I could not think what she was supposed to have witnessed, since she had not been there when the incident had taken place, but then someone mentioned mitigation, the second part of every trial after the accused has been declared guilty but before the sentence has been passed.  Character witnesses are called whose testimony is designed to influence the sentence, literally have a mitigating effect on it.  It was actually what had brought her over here first, to be a character witness for Willie.

             I did not know what mitigating effect Martha would have upon those hard-nosed officers sitting in the jury box, but the defense lawyers must have thought she would have, or she had managed to convince them.  However, no future mitigation witness could be present in the courtroom; hence Martha in the witness room.  Since there was no law that she must be kept in isolation, she held court there and received reports from the four defendants during the breaks. It was in the witness room that she saw the CIA photo of the Darmstadt 53, all crowded into the truck that was to take them to the Crypto Compound, raising their fists in solidarity.  The defense lawyers had been very pleased with it, but Martha thought they, the soldiers, looked too happy.

            --No picture gets published without my orders, she said.

            I was in the witness room when she said this, but she did not look at me, and I suddenly realized what Martha thought about the trial was not particularly important.  The four defendants were completely in the hands of their four lawyers:  Bonson, the assigned JAG; Chip Henderson, a JAG sent specially up from Munich, and two new lawyers, Thomas Culpepper from the American Civil Liberties Union and a former JAG himself, and Mr. Sidney Howard, a Black lawyer from the NAACP.  Yellin had been fired.  I remembered Martha saying he was a bank robber, not a lawyer, and thought she had probably engineered the firing and gotten the $300 back the Darmstadt brothers had paid him.  As I said, the lawyers had been too busy to listen to Martha’s ukases about which photographs were to be given to the press.  Their plan was for all three of them to resign from the case if they were not given a continuance.

            The court convened exactly as on July 21, but Judge Snow noticed right away that the roster of lawyers at the Defense table had changed.

            --What happened to Mr. Yellin?  he asked.

            --He was taken off the case, said Chip Henderson, on his feet at once.

            --Then you and Captain Bronson here will have to go to trial without him, said Snow.  Who are the other people at your table?

            --We submitted their names according to rule, said Henderson.  Mr. Thomas Culpepper, formerly of the United States Army, now retained by the American Civil Liberties Union for this case, and Mr. Sidney Howard of the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored Peoples.

            Judge Snow looked down at his file and up again.

            --I have nothing to do with who you fire or hire, he said.  You and Capt. Bonson were both here on July 21st, and you are here today, and I consider that you have had more than enough time to prepare your case.  Your clients certainly have more than sufficient legal representation. 

            --We have not been able to interview all the witnesses in the time allotted, said Henderson.  And since we have received reinforcements from the States...

            Here he nodded at Mr. Culpepper and Mr. Howard.

            --We are requesting a continuance in order to bring the new lawyers up to date with the facts of the case.

            --Well, I’m refusing it, said Snow.  You’ll go to trial today.

            --Then, said Chip.  I resign.

            --No, said Judge Snow.  You do not resign from this case.  I am giving you a direct order to sit down and remain in this courtroom.

            Snow was a major, Chip captain, so he sat down, and Culpepper got to his feet.

            --You may be able to give Capt. Henderson a direct order,  said Culpepper.  But I am not in the Army, and I cannot go to trial under these circumstances.

            He began collecting his papers.

            --Mr....The judge paused to glance down at his file...Culpepper, I certainly cannot give you a direct order, but I can see that you are never allowed inside a military court again.

            At this critical moment, Mr. Howard of the NAACP got to his feet and called for a recess.  The judge and all the lawyers, defense and trial counsel, looked at him.

            --Granted, said Judge Snow.

            The courtroom was, as usual, ordered to rise to its feet as the Judge exited the room.

            --Culpepper should have pushed it to a confrontation, said the correspondent for the Revolutionary Dutch Soldiers Union.

            --Snow was ready to go to trial, said Max.  But I bet he is on the phone to Headquarters right now.

            Mr. Howard of the NAACP became the hero of the hour.  Years of wheeling and dealing for the NAACP had conditioned him to the advantages of well-timed appeals, strategic retreats, flanking maneuvers, and rescue work of all kinds.  The previous day, Chip had explained to him at a Wiener Wald lunch about what lawyers called the LS/MFT technique with appeals;  the appeal automatically went up the chain of command to land on the desk of the same judge who had been in charge of the case, Judge Snow in other words, who would stamp the appeal Legally Sufficient /Mighty Fine Trial, that is, refuse the appeal and classify the case (the acronym came from Lucky Strike/Makes Fine Tobacco, a well-known advertising slogan of the time).  So little Mr. Howard, Black, fat, and forty, had adapted himself like a good lawyer to this new condition, and used the recess technique, not the appeal technique. But it must have occurred to him that his colleagues had not planned very far ahead at that lunch and had no strategy beyond resigning en masse:  Henderson would try again to resign, Culpepper would resign, Howard himself would resign, and Mr. Bonson, the assigned JAG?  I guess none of them thought even Judge Snow would think Bonson could go on alone. 

            It is easy to be a Spartan mother, as Alice B. Toklas said to Gertrude Stein, and it was easy for me to criticize from the outside.  I had taken my personal distance from the case, although I was there to support the ACLU that did not particularly need my support.  Its lawyers, paid strategists, might, I thought, have foreseen that Snow might just choose one or two alternate behavior patterns to that which they optimistically assigned to him; that is, granting the continuance immediately when Henderson and Culpepper threatened to resign.  In fact, I do not think it should have been particularly hard to foresee that Snow’s reflexes as an Army officer would certainly be to get tough.

             To maintain the prestige of our lawyers, I might pretend here that the whole maneuver had been planned from start to finish, and that Mr. Howard’s timely intervention was also planned beforehand, if Snow did not give the continuance.  But, in fact, there was no alternate plan.  Henderson and Culpepper were as surprised as everyone else when their proposal was refused.  So Mr. Howard had saved the day by calling for a recess.  The action had passed directly from Chip to Howard, over Culpepper’s head.  Culpepper, of course, was certainly ready to walk out and take the chance that Snow would not be able to make good on the threat to prevent him from practicing in military courts which, due to his own tour in the military, was his specialty.  Chip, with Bonson’s dubious help, would have been left to struggle alone through an inadequately prepared defense.  And if Chip had gone all out and left the courtroom too, disobeying a direct order from Snow, then not only would he have been faced with a court martial himself, but his action would have left the Darmstadt brothers with one court-appointed lawyer, and possibly Mr. Howard who had just flown in from the States and was unfamiliar with the case.  Henderson’s offense would have been added to the cause for the trial:  first, the soldiers had disobeyed a direct order; then their lawyer had.  The whole issue of the Crypto Command and their unlawful imprisonment would never have surfaced again, even if Mr. Bonson had wanted to raise it--which is more than doubtful.  If, if, if...but Mr. Howard called for a recess and from then on the case fell into the category of NAACP cases.  Not going up against the NAACP was pretty much an Army policy, to avoid being called racist, especially in Europe.   I went back to the witness room where the four Darmstadt brothers were already explaining to Martha what had happened.

            --What are those honky lawyers doing out there?  said Martha angrily.  I don’t want to see my brothers in jail.

            She obviously packed the NAACP lawyer in with the whites; I had noticed that Howard had made no attempt to contact her, and I assumed she was as upset as I was about the backfiring of the strategy that had seemed so sure at lunch.  But outside of the Darmstadt brothers themselves, no one seemed to care what she thought.  None of the lawyers had come into the witness room to consult her, since that was forbidden, but she might have gone out into the corridor and spoken her mind; however, she had always had a sense of when she would not be listened to.

            The lawyers strategy had firmed itself up again by the time the recess was over.  Snow came back from wherever he had telephoned and said he was granting the continuance for the 30th of September, but it was absolutely the last continuance, no matter what the circumstances.

           As it turned out, none of this was necessary because within the week, General Herring had all the charges against the Darmstadt 53 dropped.  Canceled.  Because of Martha’s sticking  to Thursgood Stickney back in August?  I would say our trip to Herring’s office in early August certainly had made the General aware that the Darmstadt case was being publicized.  Martha herself had only become actively involved in the case after her visit to General Herring; but he had had a look at her and knew, as she herself had said, what she could do.   I even assume that he bracketed her with Thursday, as part of the same pressure group.  After all, they had come to his office together, and Thursday probably had not seen him since.  Despite Thursday’s efforts to shake Martha, it was also in his interest to present a united front of the Black community.

              As for Montrice, who had enabled Martha to get taken to the General’s office in the first place, she had been sent home to Philadelphia directly from Paris, probably to hit Martha’s sponsor for more funding.  Anyway, the lawyers were jubilant: Victory all along the line! they said.  All along the line was not a synonym for total victory, as the brothers found out when they got back to Cambrai-Fritsch Caserne.  Lt. Colonel Poteet had come out of the incognito he had maintained during the various trials and broke up the remaining twenty-six brothers by transferring them to separate  bases around Germany and Europe.  He had waited until the day the lawyers were flying home to do so, but he had reckoned without Martha.  She was staying in Darmstadt with Swinton or King, I forget which, and got out to the airport and up to the control tower just as the plane was reaching the end of the runway and made them stop the plane.  I don’t know what she told them, but it was the sort of thing she could do very well.  The two lawyers in Europe, Chip Hendersen and Tom Culpepper, came back, but they had no authority over what the Colonel did with his own command.  He had the right to transfer his men to different bases or units, a Standard Operating Procedure with troublemakers.  Max got some publicity out by quoting the brothers as saying that instead of the Darmstadt 53 , there would be 53 Darmstadts;  it was a good slogan and picked up by the few journalists that were still interested, but it did not mean anything.  I thought that Swinton, King, Tyler, and MacDonald would probably arrive at their new stations as heroes, but I did not see them as long-term agitators for GI rights.

            While they had agitated, however, the four of them had certainly done the right thing.  Not only had they refused to sign Article 15’s, but they had persuaded half of the men who had been imprisoned overnight not to sign them either.  Then they had formed a Committee for Human Rights, and when Poteet had illegally declared it illegal, they took the initiative of getting a civilian lawyer, the best one they knew of in Germany.  Their case had not stopped there.  In fact, it was lucky for them that Yellin was greedy and rushed off to Vietnam for more cases.  They had felt their case dying on its feet, and had gone to the Black civilian support group in Frankfurt, which turned out to be Voice of the Lumpen, which turned out to be connected with Task Force Albertson.  Martha disliked the name, and she disliked the Lumpen, but she had known a good case when she saw it.  She had also been motivated by getting it away from the VOL; after that morning when they came over to the Hotel Sun with the brothers, we never heard from them again.  Max had already interested the Establishment Press and CBS television, as well as the Dutch and German Revolutionary Youth Groups, for the first trial.  This publicity, plus the increase in outside support between and after the two trials had been instrumental in pushing the military powers that be into eventually dropping all charges.

            In fact, Poteet himself can be seen as one of the last overtly racist officers.  Racism has not stopped in the Army, or back in the World, as the soldiers call it, and when either the military or civilian establishments can get away with it, they try.  Poteet’s reaction and action are typical.  That night in the Crypto Compound he not only singled out the Black troops, and only the Black troops, for punishment, but also put their specific white enemies on guard over them.  The whole incident was supposed to be passed off as a minor riot, the kind that did not happen the night we went to Hanau.  In retrospect, a riot that night in Hanau would have played into the hands of the prosecution by taking the place of the Darmstadt affair as the latest riot, thus creating a picture of Blacks being unruly and somehow ripe for discipline.  Perhaps the fact that we had gone out to Hanau, and Thursday, pushed by Martha, had gone out there escorted by two Black MP’s in a jeep, had warned the whites not to start anything.  That whites usually provoked these riots, counting on racist support from the military was always minimized.

             Although Poteet had gotten his revenge by dispersing the twenty-six  Brothers, by Christmas he himself had been transferred quietly away from Cambrai-Fritsch Caserne, back somewhere in the States.  I wonder if he ever made full colonel.

            As for Martha, I never heard from her again.  I did hear that she stayed in Darmstadt for awhile with either Swinton or King, even possibly marrying one of them.  But she then went back to Philadelphia and was not taken up by Shirley Chisholm’s office in Washington, D.C.  I never heard of Thursgood Stickney again either and wonder if he had been dropped or had just gone back to the Republicans where he belonged.  To my knowledge, he never made congressman.

            My friendship with Martha  had ended long before the trial reopened.  I did the right thing too, as  the song says, and took the four Darmstadt brothers to see her in Paris one weekend--but the French whores wouldn’t have anything to do with them, even though they had brought four suitcases of their best clothes.  I asked Jim O’Kelly to take them to Les Halles, and he said the girls were afraid they would get beat up; not so much because the Brothers were Black but because there were four of them together.  In Paris, Montrice went on not speaking to me, but Martha was minimally polite and ran up a five hundred dollar phone bill from Paris to Philadelphia.  I had sort of guessed she might, but my guilt about dropping her had given me an all-or-nothing attitude, and since she was a guest at my apartment, I could not see limiting the phone to local calls, let alone cutting it off.  Those were the days when I was still a romantic.

            The euphoria of the summer, of course, was a thing of the past.  So was the spirit of the sixties, still hanging on in 1971 when we were carried along by the idea that with good intentions alone we could beat back prejudice, injustice, and oppression.  We did beat them back momentarily in the Darmstadt case.  Given the military framework, I agree with the lawyers that it was victory all along the line.  Max went supporting GI’s, working with the Lawyers Military Defense Committee in Heidelberg, linked to his activity as a journalist.  Eventually he left Germany for Australia where he continued his career as reporter.

            As for myself, I left Paris a year later and regressed to my Waldhaus personality; not in Austria but in Dilsberg, the village I had seen on top of the hill the day I decided to leave Martha.  I now teach college English, to supplement my dwindling income, in one of the American universities affiliated with the U.S. Forces in Germany.  It ran the usual security check on me, but my involvement with this old trial does not seem to be on the books.

                                                                               

                                                                        The End         

                                                           

             

Black Power in the Courtroom, Cont.

9. Jail           

--C’mon, June, we got to go to jail, said Martha the morning after our trip to General Herrings office.

            She still had not gotten around to hollering for me like Montrice hollered for Mary Rose, but the honeymoon was certainly over.

            Wifford was on duty, so Mary Rose was with us as well as Charlie, who squeezed himself into the luggage area at the back of the station wagon.  Like a Chinese puzzle or the Forbidden City in Peking, the Frankfurt stockade had courtyards within courtyards to which normally only the jailers and the jailed had access.  However, as a sort of glorious tail to Thursgood Stickney’s comet, we told the guards at the gate we were with the Congressman’s party and were admitted to the jail compound.

            The whole complex looked as if it dated from the last German emperor, William II, with the ghosts of Junker horses clattering across the cobblestones at night.  It must have been gay before they clattered away forever; well, gayer than it is now.  Gayer than staring out dormitory windows at jailed comrades in the opposite cubical building.  What a lousy place for a jail break:  a complete massacre--boiling oil from the high windows--unless there was solidarity between those inside and outside.  That’s why we were here--to show solidarity.                                                            

Diagonal as a bishop’s path, we rattled clear across the second courtyard to the corner where I saw Thursday’s Army Chrysler and its accompanying jeep parked to one side of a sentry box.

            --We’ll wait for him here, said Martha.

            The two black soldiers in the jeep were smoking.  The white Chrysler driver was talking to the white sentry.

            --I’m going to see what the brothers think about the segregation around here, said Mary Rose and moved over to the jeep.

           The white Chrysler driver and the white sentry looked at us and chuckled.

            --June, said Martha.  You go tell that guard to telephone in there that Miss Albertson and her party are out here.

            I was the logical one to deal with white, except I would have been better all dressed up and not wearing my ammunition belt.  My image of myself as guerrilla fighter against the Army was crazy, and my Waldhaus character of a lady on vacation would probably have been better.        There were plenty of revolutionary nuts around in the late sixties and early seventies, and Martha had probably felt any forty-two year old ready to come and drive her around all summer had to be one of them; hence her present of the ammunition belt from Philadelphia.  Mary Rose was anyway more suited for the character of revolutionary, so I went over to the sentry as a middle-class liberal and gave him what my daughters call Mommy’s sick smile.  My upper class New York accent was supposed to offset the ammunition belt.

            --You wanna go in?  asked the sentry as if it did not matter to him one way or the other.

I was thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to say, Yes, putting us in the category of people who got in, rather than confuse him by saying, Not yet.

            --There’s Thursday, said Montrice.

            Ever since she had almost thrown herself in front of  his car at the Europaische Hof, Montrice had appointed herself responsible for the control of Thursday.  He was now coming down the short stairs leading out of a blockhouse behind the sentry box.  His small figure seemed to be circled by the rows of barbed wire around the jail.  I looked for Colonel Lucas, but this time Thursday was accompanied by two white officers.  He hesitated briefly when he saw us on the other side of the barbed wire but only briefly; one does not get to be a Republican in a Democratic office by hesitating.  However, he had stopped chatting with the two officers.  Behind us, Charlie collapsed on the fender of the jeep.

            --Is that Thursday?  He gasped. Why, I believe it is.  It’s Thursday Stickney the Second.  Here comes Thursday Stickney II!

            He doubled up laughing.

            We all started smiling along with the two Black soldiers in the jeep.  Only Martha was serious.  She stood at the end of the little alley formed by the cars, the barbed wire, and the sentry box.  I looked at the white Army driver and sentry.  They had laughed at us as we got out of the car, but now that we had started laughing, they shut up.

            --We’ve come all the way here to speak to you about something very serious, said Martha.

            --You just go and stand in front of his car, Mary Rose, ordered Montrice.

            Thursday saw he was as cornered as a pinball in a machine. For a moment though, he tried to block the apparatus.

            --I have a very full schedule, he said.

            Martha did not even hear him.

            --There is going to be a riot, she said gravely.

            --What time?

            Charlie, laughing silently to himself, looked up.

            --In Hanau, said Martha.  The situation out there is critical.

            --What time’s the riot?

            --What time is the riot?  repeated Charlie.  I can’t believe what I’m hearin’.

            Thursday glanced at his watch.

            --I’m on a tight schedule, he said.  I’ll try to fit it in.

            Then he turned his back and  headed towards his car.  I thought the white driver was going to open the door for him, but instead  he just hurried around to take his place behind the wheel.  Mary Rose, who had been standing with her back against the radiator, turned around and leaned over the motor.

            --I think someone should mention we are going to visit the jail now, she said to no one in particular.

            The courtyard suddenly seemed to be full of black women.  Martha and Montrice were wearing their usual fantastic clothes, Mary Rose lay draped snakelike and menacing over the olive green hood.  Behind them stretched the desert of the courtyard.  Were a thousand eyes watching from the windows?

            One of Thursday’s accompanying officers stopped on his way to the Chrysler and said a word to the sentry.  I caught, these ladies...every consideration...

            Mary Rose slowly slid off the hood, and the white officers, one in front, one in the back seat, slammed their doors.  The Chrysler drove off, and the jeep followed, or the jeep drove first and the Chrysler followed.  I was no longer watching because we had gotten what we wanted.

            Charlie was wiping his eyes.

            --So that was Thursday, he said.  I never would of believed it.

            --You see what I’m up against, said Martha.  Having to work with people like that.

            --Why we just let him go?  asked Montrice.

            --Montrice, don’t you come on like that when I’m confronting someone, said Martha.

            --If I hadn’t of come on the other day, said Montrice, you never would of got to see General Harry.

            --Thursday wouldn’t of dared run out on me, said Martha.  He knows what I can do.

            I was not so sure and waited for Montrice to defend herself, but she didn't.

            --I’m just here to help you, Martha, she said mildly as we all started towards the jail.

            I felt a touch on my arm.

            --Would you mind giving me everyone’s names?  asked the white sentry politely.

            I followed him into his booth.

            --I’ll just call ahead so they’ll open the door, he added.

            I showed him my passport and made up a last name for Mary Rose.  Then I set off after my three sisters who had already disappeared into the jail block.  I did not feel like sitting outside the way I had in General Herring’s office.  However, the door opened right away, and the turnkey or warden or whatever he was did not seem surprised to hear I was with Miss Albertson’s party.

            --If you’ll just wait until we get your name, he said.  We’ll have someone take you through.

            --I already gave my name to the sentry.

            --Over here.  You’ll have to give it again.

            There was a little unoccupied table with a loose-leaf notebook on it, and no one sitting at it.  It was lunchtime, and all the young men were peacefully pouring into the dining area.  They sat at long tables, asleep, tired or they malingered; otherwise I did not see how they could stand being inside on such a beautiful summer day.

            I gave my name and was told, straight down the hall to the left.

            Straight down the hall to the left.  It all seemed very informal.  This was the summer before the terrorists began to be caught.  The German terrorists.  The next spring they winged a bomb into the old Nazi Headquarters down in Heidelberg where we had seen Herring, and for awhile, even the Americans were on edge.  Not for long.  We are a casual people.

            In the corridor stood a soldier, and inside the room, unwatched, were Willie, Martha, Montrice, and Mary Rose.  What had happened to Charlie?  I walked in and stood.

            --Go tell that guard out there to bring you in a chair, said Martha.

            More to annoy the guard than for my comfort, I thought, but who cared?  He did bring me a chair and then stepped back into the corridor again.  I sat down and looked at Willie for the first time.  Dark, small, and heavily built, he looked older than his nineteen years.  Bitter.  Like James Baldwin.

            I wonder if it is only in movies that there are passionate prisoner-visitor exchanges over the conference table or through the grill.   I don’t know.  I haven’t known that many prisoners, although the shadow of the jail house has been thrown across my life from time to time.  Cora was in jail a few summers later for occupying a building in Paris.  And a year or so after that in Guatemala; I never knew why.  But I learnt from Martha not to bother with guilt or innocence; she never bothered with Willie’s, outside of the single reference to it at the Darmstadt meeting.  Her job was to get him off, and the first step towards that was to get him back to Philadelphia.

            --I’m going to get you back to Philadelphia, she told him.

            --Yeah, said Willie.

            --Did you see that Congressman just came through?

            --He come through here and talk to us. Said if we had any news to send back home, he’d see it got out.

            --He’ll do it too, said Martha.  He knows I’m checking on him.

            I noticed with approval--my own--that she said nothing of her own run-in with Thursday.  He had just been turned into her errand boy.

            --They don’t keep none of us here long, said Willie.

            --Yeah, but you don’t want them to send you back to Texas or someplace, said Martha.  And that is what I’m here to control.

            --Sometimes I just as soon be in Texas as here, said Willie.

            --Don’t start talkin’ like that, said Martha.  How’s your health?

            Willie glanced over at Mary Rose.

            --I got stomach trouble, he said.

            --You ask them for a special diet then.  You know what they give you here is no good for any normal person, let alone someone with stomach trouble.

            --You gotta get a profile for that.

            --Well, you get the doctor to give you one, advised Martha.  You got nothin’ else to do ‘cept sit here.  You put in to see the doctor, and you tell him you got ulcers.

            Willie nodded.  He struck me as having a lot of contained energy.

            --Remember now, Martha told him as we left.  You’re my first political case.

            A few years earlier, I  would hardly have considered Willie a worthy case.  At that time, I considered someone almost had to be Fidel Castro to qualify as political: History will acquit me,  a lawyer, a patriot, an intellectual.  But by now I had been around the soldiers movement long enough to know that any act can have a political cast to it.  If Willie did not fall into jail because of coming out against the Vietnam War, but because of a simple murder, still that was political insofar as he was being held without any definite proof outside of the testimony of the other two who had ratted on him.  He had come before no jury but been railroaded--in the traditional sense of being pushed along well laid down lines--through his summary court martial into jail.  In a summary court martial, as I had learned from the first Darmstadt trial, one officer assumes the role of judge, jury, and both lawyers, prosecution and defense.  Willie had not turned around on his two faithless friends and accused them of the murder but, untrue to many detective stories, neither had he found the real murderer; so he sat there himself.  But he had not been proven guilty, and this was undemocratic, and so Willie as a first case was all right by me.  However, I thought Martha would have to be careful with her second and third cases. They couldn’t all be suspected murderers, and yet it is hard to top a murder case.  A fine juicy spy story might do it; a deserving Black soldier who does not get promoted, for example, falls a little flat.

             I knew by now that Martha wanted to call attention to herself, even to place herself as a political candidate for something, and she was counting on her cases to do this for her.  All our apparently aimless running around had been to unearth two appropriate counterparts to Willie.  He had been a little side-tracked by Martha’s determination to identify herself with Thursday’s mission--if only to discredit him once she got back to Shirley Chisholm’s office--and now time and money were running out, and she knew it.  I would be the next one to run out on her, and she knew that too.  I did not have an endless amount of time, and I would tire of the novelty of spending my time in her good cause.  She knew she was a rival of wherever I had come from--most recently the Waldhaus in Austria whose charms were increasing in proportion to each day I spent driving somewhere on the hot German Autobahn.

            Back at the Sun Hotel, the Lumpen were waiting for us.  They had brought four of the Darmstadt brothers.  The Manager told us as we stopped at the desk to get out keys.

            --Some ladies said you were expecting them, he explained to me as recognized interpreter.

            --What’s he jabberin’ about?  asked Martha.

            --He says there are some ladies upstairs.

            --Room number eleven, added the Manager prudently.

            --Whose room are they in?  asked Martha.

            --Eleven.

            --He knew better than to put them in my room, huh?  she said with satisfaction.  Mary Rose, you go up and see what they want.  I don’t know yet I even want them in the same hotel I’m in.

            --You want me to go with her, Martha?  asked Montrice.

            --We have to find out what their game is, said Martha.  I have to think about this.  You go up there too, June, and get their statements.

            I didn’t like this very much, being enlisted on Martha’s side against Mary Rose, Darmstadt and the Lumpen. However, Martha’s commands were, as usual, practical, and so I followed Mary Rose upstairs.

            The girls from the Lumpen were with the four Darmstadt brothers I had last seen back in July at the Funari Trial Center.  The little boy Mary Rose had offered to baby-sit had been left at home.  The Darmstadt brothers told us all about the war and what they fought each other for.  Did James Swinton, Charles ‘Red’ Tyler, Joseph H. King and Dwight MacDonald metamorphose  into Petion and Dessalines, Christophe and Toussaint l'Ouverture?  No.  The long ago Haitian kings and rulers were very unlike the democratic scene at Cambrai-Fritsch Caserne.  What was the German history of that place, and who were Cambrai and Fritsch the living sons and daughters of.     

            I did not much care.  The Darmstadt brothers were simple young Americans from simple honest American places.  I don’t trust no nigger doesn’t speak my language, said Martha when she finally got to Paris, but Baltimore, Maryland; Hampton, Arkansas; Eastman, Georgia; Los Angeles, California were names in her lexicon:  they were the home states of these four Darmstadt brothers.   Like most of the soldiers in Germany, they had volunteered for the Army because the probability was supposedly slim that soldiers would be sent from Germany to ‘Nam.  The Vietnam route was rumored to run right from the West Coast to Da Nang.                                    

 But the Darmstadt brothers had were not going on trial for refusing to go to Vietnam.  They were against the daily harassment they were subject to as black soldiers.  Not only had they organized themselves in a group, but they had organized the group on paper, showing their grievances and how, together,  they might deal with them.  Once a group of people organize themselves, they are no longer Lumpen.  Of course, the Voice of the Lumpen had always been organized, but then they were not Lumpen themselves but had constituted themselves as the voice of the voiceless, unorganized masses.  Strictly speaking, the Darmstadt brothers had passed the stage where they could be considered clientele of the VOL.  They had established a Human Rights Committee and elected representatives and a few secretaries to take minutes; male secretaries, not out of any feminist principles but because in 1971, the Army was a predominantly male army.  Grievances they had encountered at Cambrai-Fritch  were written down.  Here is a copy of the Darmstadt brothers’ minutes for their Human Rights Committee as they brought it to us:

                                                ORGANIZATION OF BLACK SOLDIERS AT

                                                DARMSTADT, KELLEY BARRACKS AND       

                                                CAMBRAI-FRITSCH KASERNE

Action list:

1. Discrimination as far as promotion opportunities is concern.  There apparent reason to believe there are discriminatory practices in use as far as gaining rank in different units.

2. Replacements for soldiers on guard duty are not considered to come from the next man on the duty roster but to the first Black G.I. he meets.

3. Article 15’s are being given for minor supposed infractions of SOPs (Standard Operating procedures--my note)

4. There are Black NCO’s who are receiving substandard accommodating compared to EM’s of some units.

5. No Day Room in HHC Sig. Discrimination against the UPO’s (Unit Police were probably more Black than white in Darmstadt at that time--my note)

Human Relations Committees

Legal Committee                                                        Secretaries

1. Bro. Tyler                                                                Bro. Rollins

2. Bro. Jackson                                                            Bro. Hunter

3. Bro. Henderson                                                       Bro. Vinson

4. Bro. Casey                                                              Bro. Peace

Information Committee                                              Committee to see Lt. Col. Poteet

1. Bro. Swinton                                                           Bro. King

2. Bro. Dickon                                                            Bro. Swinton

3. Bro. King                                                                Bro. Tyler

4. Bro. Tubbs                                                              Bro. Macdonald

5. Bro. Glover

            --This is an obvious example of one more imperialist exploitation of the Black man, said one of the VOL girls.

            --You got a lawyer?  asked Martha.

            None of us had heard her come in.

            --Yeah, we went over to see Yellin already, said Red Tyler.

            --Yellin?  I repeated.

            Yellin had a reputation.

            --You know Yellin, June?  asked Martha.

            --He’s the most successful civilian lawyer around here.

            --What about MacDonald?

            MacDonald had been Willie’s lawyer, the one responsible for introducing me to Martha that rainy afternoon outside Death in Venice.  Well, I still did not hold it against him, and so I said I thought he was honest.

            --Yellin’s dishonest?  asked Martha.

            --He gets his people off, generally--or a good average.  But he makes a lot of deals with the military.

            Martha looked at me.

            --MacDonald made a deal with Willie, she said.

            --Willie was more like the victim of a deal, I said carefully.  The JAG’s got Willie’s friends to agree he did it.  MacDonald believed Willie was innocent.

            --Well, said Martha dubiously.  Your lawyers over here look like they’re either dumb or crooked.  I gotta get Bill Ackers from Philadelphia to take the case.

            I might put in here that Bill Ackers from Philadelphia became, and remained, a legendary figure.  Lawyers did come from the States eventually, but Bill Ackers was not among them.

            --Yellin took three hundred dollars off of us, said King.  He said he’d send someone around to collect the rest on pay-day.

            --What rest?

            --He chargin’ us three hundred dollars a head, said Harper.

            --You got yourself a bank robber, not a lawyer, remarked Martha.

            Red looked over from the window seat but did not say anything.

            --Well, I think we better go up and see this Yellin, said Martha.  I think it time he learned you got friends over here and not just all alone in the white man’s world.

            --You can’t, said Red.  He’s in Vietnam.

            --When he’s comin’ back?

            --He said he’ll be back before the trial, said King.

            --When’s that?

            --They got us up for August 21st, said King.

            --Martha!  Montrice hollered from across the hall. There’s a call for you in here.

Martha left and a few minutes later came charging down the hall with Montrice after her.

            --Willie’s sick--they took him in an ambulance to the hospital, she said.  June, you gotta bring us to him.

            --To the hospital?

            --To the jail.  They took him out of the hospital and they lockin’ him up again.

            Back to the stockade?  Unlike my daughter, I was not being guided by the thought of Mao Tse Tung, and I felt I had put myself at the service of the proletariat sufficiently for this August day. Fortunately for me, Sgt. Wifford was good-humoredly pushing through the double glass doors as we reached the hall.

            --Wiff, you got your car out there?  asked Martha.

            Wiff was in a fine mood.

            --How you think I got here, Martha?  he asked.  Helicopter?

            --Then you take me right over to the stockade, she said.  They tryin’ to pull somethin’ with Willie, and I got to find out what it is.

            Although my memory of Martha is as a sort of bulldozer running me down, she was always sensitive to my breaking point.  Not out of any particular affection for me, but because she did not want me to get fed up and go away.  At the time, I considered this sensitivity only operated in terms of getting work out of me, acting as her private chauffeur, but now I realize that she took into consideration what I wanted politically as well.  Beyond June, her co-worker, stood June, white liberal (despite my own definition of myself as a revolutionary), and she had realized right away that I was interested in the Darmstadt case.  Probably my interest played a part in preventing her from shutting them out along with their VOL sponsors.  She wanted to bring good cases back to the States, and a good case was one that would also interest white people like me.                                                                                                                                                                   --You stay here too, Montrice.

            --I am not letting you go to that stockade alone, Martha, said Montrice.

            Montrice’s statement of conduct, which she stuck to all summer, was that Martha had sickle cell anaemia and was weak and might at any moment break down and need the help of a trained nurse.

            --You ain’t never gonna fit yourself in the back seat of Wiff’s sewing machine, said Martha.  Besides, I want you here to keep an eye on Mary Rose and the Lumpen girls upstairs.

She knew how to handle Montrice too.  So Montrice stayed and Mary Rose stayed and I stayed and Martha went off with Wiff.

            When she came back, she was very quiet about this second trip to the stockade and hardly spoke of Willie again for the rest of the summer.  On the way out to the Hanau riot that evening, Montrice asked her about him, and Martha got a little mad.

            --That Willie!  she exclaimed.  He just felt like taking a ride, he said, and he tole them he’s sick and they ride him over to the hospital.  Wasn’t nothin’ at all wrong with him; so they send him right back to jail.

            I laughed.  It had been a nice summer day, and I had felt sorry for him having to sit in jail.  But Martha turned around from the front seat and addressed the two women in back.

            --It’s not funny, it’s plain stupid, she said.  You gonna come over on people, then you don’t do it so they find out five minutes later.  And that’s the reason he sittin’ in jail today, and the other two goin’ free.

            And from that moment on, she pushed him under a rug on which the Darmstadt brothers were to stand for the next three months.

10.  Hanau

                        If I were well-organized, I would now plunge into the Darmstad brothers and their case and forget the chronological order of this narrative.  In fact, why bother with Thursday and Charlie and Frankenstein’s Castle and the old Frankfurt Airport when they were all preludes to the Crypto Compound and the Darmstadt brothers refusal to be railroaded?  Why bother with what went before?  Well, this is why, but only my own personal reason why.

            Years and years ago when I was at Radcliffe College, the women’s section of Harvard University, which in its own youth had been Harvard College, we all--we being those that thought of themselves as being in--took a course in the Renaissance by an old Italian professor called Gaetano Salvemini.  In 1947, Salvemini was not only old, but he was an old antifascist as well, a Trotskyist who later wrote a statement in support of the Rosenbergs, a very courageous act for an immigrant in the early 50’s, even an illustrious one.  The Rosenbergs were an American couple convicted of espionage during the Cold War (between the USA and the USSR), mainly because they would not “name names,” i.e. tell whomever else they were working with.  That was the acid test during the Cold War.  Other spies were rounded up at this same time, and they all named names without much interrogation, but the Rosenbergs did not, and therefore were the only ones executed.  They were both grilled to death in the electric chair, the preferred method at the time,  since outlawed as inhuman.  But in the days of Eisenhower’s presidency, there was no trouble condemning the Rosenbergs to this inhuman method of execution despite the fact that they had two small children.                                                                                                            

          Back to Salvemini:  I have a vague memory of a certain quality Salvemini exemplified I can only now, retrospectively, identify, having found it since, from time to time, in one or two other old people of  his generation.  Even in these people, as in Salvemini himself, this quality seemed to be an heirloom from preceding generations, something that had taken a long time to cultivate and was particularly precious because the basic substance, both of the heirloom itself and whatever factors had gone into its cultivation, seemed to have been totally finished up somewhere after World War II.  All the people I have encountered, usually not in person but in their writings, or sometimes on television interviews, were all grown up when World War II started.  Have any like them been born since?  As for the quality I admire, it is perhaps only a firm adherence to certain principles in the face of overwhelming opposition to those principles.

            Salvemini’s course, History of the Renaissance (I forget the number), began in the tenth century and ended in the thirteenth.  The time frame surprised us because we had expected to wallow in Titian, Michaelangelo, Leonardo, the Borgia popes, and Benvenuto Cellini and his salamander.  Okay, you can’t wallow in a salamander--but the fire he saw it in, perhaps?  Salvemini, however, seemed completely unaware of our expectations--and in those days students did not confront their professors with their expectations--until the last lecture.  Then he suggested that we read a series of books--Burckhardt being the only one I remember--which described the subsequent periods of the Renaissance very well.

            --There are very many books on the subject, he said in his heavy Italian accent.  But there are no books which describe exactly what I wanted to convey in this course.  This is that you understand the astonishment of the first barbarians who pushed the wilderness aside and came upon the ruins of Rome.

             Now that I think of it, we ourselves are the barbarians.  It was certainly barbarous to kill the Rosenbergs.  Up to us whether we see the ruins or add to them.  And how does it fit into Darmstadt?  Well, Darmstadt was not the ruins of Rome and, in fact, the only reason for my bringing Salvemini into this story at all is to dramatize the importance of beginnings.  This story began for me with Mary Rose and Wiff, the crumbles of Frankenstein’s castle, the presumed murderer whose case got us all in touch.  The prelude to the Darmstadt Trial was as important to my understanding of it as the barbarian reaction to Rome was important to understanding the Renaissance, dixit Salvemini.  

            Back to the Darmstadt summer of 1973. The last night of my close association with Martha, Montrice, and Mary Rose was furnished by the Hanau riot.  Appropriately enough,   there was no riot, but we did go out to Hanau.  Mary Rose even wrote a short report about it.  Martha did a lot of talking about her own report and how the FBI were sending agents to steal it, but the only thing  I ever saw on paper was written by Mary Rose, as follows:

            Situation at Hanau:

            1. The situation at this isolated base has deteriorated within the last week.

            2. As of August 10, six MP’s walking in twos can be seen patrolling a three-block strip

            where Black GI’s hang out in the evening.

            3. Black GI’s are constantly beaten up and Blacks arrested for asking a question of   an MP.  We witnessed a typical incident. When told to be at ease, the CC advised the MP of his status, but the MP ordered his arrest anyway.

            4. Several brothers have been arrested for supposedly violating a military code pertaining to dress.  When MP’s arrest them, they are put up against a wall, frisked and then    handcuffed like prisoners, put into military vehicles and taken in.  

We, as eye witnesses, observed this on August 10 in Hanau:  a young brother was walking the streets and the MPO’s hurriedly jumped and surrounded him, handcuffed him, and brought him before the main gate.  It was obvious to the onlooker that the MP’s were over-reacting.  The brother then explained as he was handcuffed to a Lt. Hightower and a Captain Croker, that he had been informed he’d violated a military dress code.  His situation was, as he explained, that he’d just come up from another base (dress codes are not uniform), and that he felt his arrest was based on the fact he was Black.  As we watched, the Captain vehemently denied any reason that the soldier might be discriminated against.  Then the brother was shoved into the MP car and taken away.  We witnessed several incidents like that throughout the evening. 

            I remembered my table mate at the Waldhaus in Austria and thought she would have been surprised to hear that Hanau was isolated.  As for Thursday, as we now all called him,  he had gone out to Hanau with his party around nine o’clock that evening, Charlie told us.  There had been no riot, and he had gone away again.  The Hanau strip was, as Mary Rose had indicated, a Black ghetto controlled by whites.  We had to cross the railroad tracks to get there, an American class division recreated in Germany; the good and bad parts of town here are not necessarily divided by railroad tracks as they are in the States.

            All Germany that summer was divided for me, not by tracks but into whites and Blacks.  Romanticizing, I liked to think of being led by the hand by the dark angel, Martha, into a realm rarely visited by those of my color.  The Army did not romanticize.  It was aware that there were Black soldiers living in Germany in a situation that it wanted to keep on top of, and the Army way of keeping on top of the situation in Hanau was to send two jeeps and three CID cars patrolling up and down the strip from nine in the evening until two in the morning, or whenever the last club closed.  And overloading the sidewalks with white MP’s.  As long as the lower white echelons of law and order were concentrating on whether or not a Black GI was wearing his fatigues--and if he was, arresting him--the Army hoped they would not start swinging their clubs out of sheer boredom and create the riot they were there to prevent.

            So much for what I saw in Hanau.  That there were white soldiers and a white Germany with its grocery stores and clothing stores and butcher shops did not come into my summer picture.  The exotic nature of the Black world to whites like me was playing in Martha’s favor insofar as I had the car, was paying for gas, and was willingly chauffeuring them around, most of the time at least.  But the drive from Frankfurt to Hanau was bad enough to try my increasingly shorter  patience.  Once we left the Autobahn, our road wound along dark roads from the outskirts of one city to the outskirts of the next.  I see badly at night, black rises up at me and white flattens out (no symbolism intended), and the Autobahn bridges become translucent.  So I worried about visibility, and I was getting sick of the road out to Hanau.  Charlie lived at Pioneer Caserne, and we always seemed to be ferrying him back from the Sun or picking him up.  The women knew I was seeing their world in still another way from the Army way or from their way.  It amazes me sometimes that all our divergent opinions succeeded in creating any objective reality at all.