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.