Autumn in Oxford: A Novel Read online

  The twenty-fourth of August 1939 must have been a weekday, because I remember getting up to go to work early. I was trying to get in as many hours as possible at the New Masses before classes started in the fall. At the subway newsstand I was about to grab my copy of the Daily Worker when I saw a very rare banner headline on the New York Times: “Germany and Russia sign ten-year nonaggression pact/Bind each other not to aid opponents in war acts/Hitler rebuffs London, Britain France mobilize.”

  By that afternoon, the most stalwart party members at the New Masses office had already adapted themselves to the new reality, denouncing the British, the French, even the poor Polish as warmongers. It got worse later. Within weeks the party started organizing strikes on the docks to prevent ships loading war materiel for England and France.

  I didn’t wait. That afternoon I went down to the party office at the Daily Worker building on Union Square and handed in my party card. Turns out I was the first member to come in that day to do so. That’s what they told me.

  A week later I was sitting in the Shepard Hall cafeteria as far away from the Communist Party alcove as I could get when someone sat down next to me. I recognized the face from party meetings. It was a senior electrical engineering student, Julius Rosenberg. He was owl-faced, nearsighted, with prematurely thinning hair. Thick glasses in a clear frame made his face even more featureless. There was still some adolescent acne on his chin. Like most of the engineering students, he wore white shirts and a tie, with a six-inch slide rule bouncing at the belt of his pleated pants.

  “Party sent me,” he began. “They want you to stay.”

  “Convince me.” I was sincere, I think.

  “You mean with reasons? Reasons are for idealists, not materialists.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is that Communism is on the right side of history; it’s the wave of the future; it’s going to happen whether we know the reasons or not. A little bend in the river is no reason to give it all up. Remember what Lenin said: two steps forward, one step back.”

  “So, Julie, after fighting against the Nazis inside Germany for twenty years, Communists should think of this rotten deal with Hitler as just a little stratagem?”

  “Exactly. Stalin knows what he’s doing.”

  “I’ll bet he does. He’s known all along, putting all those nice old Jewish guys up against a wall for being loyal party hacks. I was able to swallow that. Starving the Ukraine to get rid of the rich peasants—I stood still for that too. Killing Kirov, that didn’t bother me. But this is treachery I can’t take, Julie.”

  “The party has plans for you. Big plans.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just a foot soldier. But you’re smart, and you’re a WASP. You fit in places we don’t.” I knew what Julie Rosenberg meant by “we.”

  “Sorry. No sale.” I didn’t mean it the way it sounded, but he took offense.

  “Look, Tom. It’s not just carrots. The party has some sticks it can use too.”

  I stood up and glared at him for a moment. “Are you threatening me, Julie?”

  He reached up and pulled me back down. “No, not me. Party bullyboys. You’ve seen them with billy clubs at protests. Well, they don’t just protect people on picket lines.”

  “Alright, I know you’re only trying to warn me. But I won’t change my mind.”

  The next time I saw Julie Rosenberg, back in New York several years after the war, he was a Soviet agent, but I never knew.

  I graduated in 1941. But I figured I’d be drafted before I could actually settle down in any job. This was the peacetime draft before Pearl Harbor, when men were still being inducted for just one year. So in September I volunteered for the draft and was sent to Fort Dix, in New Jersey, outside of Philadelphia, for basic training. Eight weeks of physical fitness, unit marching, riflery with the M1, obstacle courses carrying sixty-pound packs, and endless boredom. I kept my head down, never revealed that I had graduated from university, still less my previous political affiliation.

  I looked pretty much like all the other recruits—crew cut; no glasses; average height, weight, and strength. So the noncoms—sergeants and corporals—who trained us never learned my name, let alone found the need to abuse me. In a company of 120 guys, I managed not to screw up badly enough to come to anyone’s attention.

  After the last march-past in basic training, the company first sergeant called my name and those of three others and told us to fall out and report to him.

  “Men, the army has established an Officer Candidate School, and each basic training company is required to identify four privates for training as second lieutenants. It’s voluntary, twelve weeks in North Carolina. If you pass through the course, you get to order noncoms like me around, even get saluted.” He smiled ruefully. “Questions?”

  One of the others spoke up. “Why us, Sarge?”

  “You kept your noses clean, and you can shoot straight. But mainly, it was your scores on the exams. Should have cheated.”

  Two of the men turned down the offer. Two of us accepted.

  Ten days later, wearing my private’s uniform and carrying a large duffel bag, I came off a train in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The duty corporal pointed me toward a bus. A half hour later I had started to become a “ninety-day wonder.” In fact, I had been fed into only the second OCS—Officer Candidate School—course the army had run. What’s more, though we were being trained in the pines of North Carolina, the training company was “integrated.” There was a handful of Negroes in the platoon of forty. They were easy to find in the long unheated barrack, bunked together in a corner cordoned off on two sides by empty bunks. I headed right toward them, dropped my duffel, and offered my hand.

  “Tom Wrought. Glad to meet you.”

  The three men before me were obviously surprised, first a bit hesitant. They couldn’t stop the smiles that had broken out on their faces. Each thrust his hand forward, and I quickly had three new friends. They were college boys from Washington, Chicago, and Boston.

  “I’m Richard Wilson,” said the first. “That’s Richard; don’t call me ‘Dick.’ You a Jew boy from New York?” he asked with no belligerence.

  “Not guilty. But I am from New York. How’d you know?”

  “’Cause you came over and chose a bunk next to us. They gonna make you pay.” Then he introduced me to his friends.

  The US Army had always been segregated. With thousands of colored men to be drafted and no white officers willing to command them, there was no immediate alternative to integrating the newly established Officer Candidate Schools. But the army hadn’t contended with its own deeply Southern roots.

  The master sergeant was from Mississippi. He was not going to be part of an army in which a colored officer would take his salute. Right from the start, all four black candidates were assigned to police the area—pick up litter, especially cigarette butts, for a hundred yards around the barrack area. No other soldiers were assigned to that job. And no one was ordered to “GI his butts”—that is, to break open the cigarette butt and let the remaining tobacco flutter to the ground and the bit of paper disappear among the blades of grass. Neatness was an army obsession, and litter round a barrack resulted in collective punishment. The four black candidates knew that the whole platoon would suffer loss of privileges and blame them. Collecting butts was demeaning. It was also time consuming. They never had a chance to study the field manuals. Within a couple of weeks, two of these men had fallen so hopelessly behind, they were washed out.

  The last two, Richard Wilson and his friend Cullen, would march and eat and wait on lines with me, and I’d go over enough of what I was studying to keep them up. It wasn’t doing me any good with the other candidates, but they couldn’t really tell what we were always talking about.

  I remember perfectly the weekend of the sixth and seventh of December that year, 1941. And not because of the attack on Pearl Harbor that Sunday afternoon.

  We were
four weeks into the school. Passes were being handed out for the weekend. But not to the Negroes and not to me.

  That Friday evening I presented myself at the company first sergeant’s office. I stood at attention. “Permission to speak, Sergeant?”

  “Go ahead, Wrought.”

  “Why didn’t I or the colored candidates receive a pass this weekend, Sergeant?”

  “No recreational facilities in Fayetteville for Negro officer candidates, Wrought.” I was about to interrupt, but the sergeant’s message was obvious. “You can take it up with the chain of command if you want.” He nodded in the direction of the captain’s office.

  It was going to be a lonesome weekend in an empty barrack. So the three of us pooled our money. Then I made my way to the camp entrance with dough for a couple of bottles of gin, found a willing soldier, and offered him a big enough bounty when he came back with the liquor to feel sure he’d do it.

  On Saturday Richard Wilson brought out a rack of poker chips and two decks of cards. We began playing five-card stud while nursing the two bottles. The stakes were serious, since we’d all come to camp with money and were accumulating private first-class pay with nothing to spend it on. Wilson and Cullen were careful and experienced players. By lights out I was behind. The next morning my two friends went to Sunday service. Maybe they were Christians, or maybe they just wanted to spend some time with other Negro soldiers. There were many on the base, all engaged in menial tasks, none in combat training.

  Wilson and Cullen returned from “divine service” as we called it and broke out their poker chips and cards. Cullen looked toward my bunk. “Wanna play, Mister Charlie?”—it was what they called me.

  “Nope, cleaned out,” I replied.

  Once they began to play, a few others gathered round, and then one of the other white men asked to join. This breach of the protocol that required silent treatment of the Negroes was welcomed by looks of surprise and pleasure on their faces. Immediately space was made on the cots, and chips were bought by two white guys and then a third. It was the first time members of our platoon found themselves treating one another on terms of humanity.

  By two o’clock news of the Japanese attack had spread throughout the town, and even before orders were given to return to base, almost everyone was back in the barrack. The shared recognition that we were now really at war, in it together—that we, the very men in this barrack, would be in the vanguard of the American counterattack—seemed for a moment to change the chemistry in the barrack. It had even broken through the color barrier. But that feeling didn’t last more than a few hours.

  With nothing to do, many had begun watching the poker game, including more than one Southern white boy already seething because he had been forced to sleep, eat, and share a toilet with a colored man for a month or more. Trouble was inevitable. One of the white players had begun to win consistently, and a few of the observers were sniggering. More than once Wilson and Cullen found themselves with straights or three of a kind beaten by a full house. Finally, Cullen looked up at the white soldier standing behind Wilson. “Hey, buddy, would you mind moving a little? You’re in my light.”

  He replied with contempt, “Yes, I would mind, and don’t you be callin’ me ‘buddy,’ nigger.”

  Cullen turned to the others. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to fold this game, gentlemen.” He knew that watchers were colluding with players and there was nothing he could do about it. Wilson and he both rose.

  “Hey, can’t quit now, boy. I’m way behind.” It was the fifth player, at the narrow end of the cot, a burly man from Indiana.

  Wilson turned to him and made the mistake of being frank. “I’m sorry, but I won’t play when folks are cheatin’.”

  From a cot about ten feet away, I watched the next scene unfold in what seemed like slow motion. The white player and his confederate turned on the two Negroes, shouting as they began to assault them. Cullen and Wilson both moved away from the cot, and a ring of men opened around two fights. Wilson was soon on the ground being kicked, but Cullen was holding his own. It was then that his assailant drew out a switchblade and made a weak lunge. Cullen pulled him into an armlock, and when the man tried to pull back, his blade went clean into his own midsection and out again. It clattered away as he fell to the floor. The quick ooze of blood on his shirtfront silenced the circle of watchers. Wilson’s assailant turned and crouched at the wounded soldier’s side. Slowly the man rose, not critically wounded, it turned out. A moment later the platoon sergeant arrived.

  He surveyed the situation and then said, “Wilson, Cullen, under arrest.” He looked at the man closest to him. “You, get the MPs.”

  I stood up. “Sarge, you’ve got the wrong men.”

  “Shut up, soldier. Or you’ll join them.”

  As the crowd dissipated, I realized no one had sought the knife. Surreptitiously I began to look round for it. Finally I saw it, in the shadows beneath one of the cots left empty as a cordon between the rest of the unit and the Negroes (including me). Casually I ambled over to it and bent down. The handle had been broken on impact, and its two halves lay near the blade. I pulled out a handkerchief and picked them up with it. Surely the fingerprints on the Bakelite would clear Wilson, I thought.

  On Monday morning I asked permission to report to company headquarters. I was surprised at the complete lassitude of the headquarters staff that morning after the Japanese attack. I asked a desk corporal about it.

  “Everyone is just waiting for orders from the War Department. President is going to talk to Congress. It’ll be on the radio this afternoon.”

  I walked into the company headquarters office. “Permission to speak to officer commanding?” That was a Major Barker, thin and worn from twenty-five years’ service, and ready to retire. Now he knew that suddenly his career had many years and several promotions ahead if he played his cards right. That Monday morning, with nothing much to do while he waited to learn something of his future, Major Barker was prepared to see me.

  “Officer Candidate Wrought.” I came to attention and saluted.

  Barker looked up, took my salute, and said nothing but, “Well?”

  “Sir, I have come about the fight in barrack seven yesterday.” With no response from the major I continued, “I witnessed the fight. The two soldiers accused were innocent of—”

  Here Barker interrupted. “The colored officer candidates?”

  I was relieved not to hear them called something worse. “Yes, sir.”

  His reply, however, surprised me. “Dismissed!” He ostentatiously turned back to the paperwork he had been ignoring when I entered.

  Disobeying was a risk I was prepared to run. “I have proof, sir. And if you don’t want it, perhaps a Negro newspaper up North will.”

  The major’s look was sharp. “Proof? What are you talking about? It would be your word against everyone else in the platoon.”

  “Sir, the knife has only the fingerprints of the white soldier who was stabbed. That proves it was his knife, that only he held it, and that he attacked Private Wilson with it.” Of course I couldn’t be sure of all this, but I said it with supreme confidence.

  “Hand it over, private.” He put out his hand.

  “Sorry, sir. I didn’t bring it with me.” Before he could say anything else, I went on, warming to my insubordination, toying with my superior officer. “I sent it registered mail to the Pittsburgh Courier. Or was it the Chicago Defender? Maybe it was the Amsterdam News in New York. I can’t remember which now, sir. I sent letters to all three.” These were the three largest Negro newspapers in the country. If they all published, it wouldn’t be a local story. The brass in DC were sure to hear about it.

  Now through his fury, Major Barker understood my threat plainly. He could put me in the stockade with Cullen and Wilson. But he was going to face a public relations nightmare just as General Marshall in the War Department was beginning to think about where to assign its career regular army officers.

  If
I was going to get them out of the stockade, I needed to convince him the threat was real. “I do have the registration ticket and number, sir.” I fished the slip out of my breast pocket. Meanwhile I had remained rigidly at attention.

  The major sat staring at me for a long time. He was obviously overmastering himself. I thought I could see the train of thought passing across his forehead. General Marshall had given him a coveted assignment in the Officer Candidate School experiment. The spotlight was on Barker, and he was not going to lay an egg in full view. Marshall was famous for not giving people a second chance.

  “Thank you, Private Wrought. Dismissed.” As I left I could hear the clerk in the outer office called in. I smiled. I laughed. I relished my victory over the system. I hadn’t thought the matter through far enough to realize I might as well have signed Cullen’s and Wilson’s death warrants.

  The two men came back to the company that evening. Things didn’t change for them of course. If anything, matters were worse. They knew that now they were marked not only as blacks, but as uppity ones. They’d raised a fist, knifed a white man, and gotten away with it. Nothing was said about why they had returned to the barrack, and no one would ask. I also noticed that all authority, including the top sergeant, had become wary of me.

  The Germans declared war on the United States three days after we went to war against Japan. By this point in the course, classroom work had given way to field exercises, map reading, camouflage, machine-gun and mortar tactics, and small group leadership. And everyone began to take it much more seriously. But whenever anyone else was under an order to do something, the two Negro soldiers were simply left to stand, as though they were observers. No one told them off for doing nothing, and no one assigned them anything to do. No one demanded they wake in the morning or even be present at roll call.