The First Strange Place by Beth Bailey & David Farber

Author:Beth Bailey & David Farber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

If some whites were appalled by the Army-style integration of Burbank, California, many others welcomed their defenders. White stars like Humphrey Bogart and Rosalind Russell befriended the troopers. Bogart told a group of the men that they were welcome to make use of his house and gave them the keys to show he meant it. Black celebrities like Leigh Whipper, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Lena Horne, and Hattie McDaniel came and visited the troops and provided them with generous hospitality. The 369th tried to repay these attentions with some generosity of their own. Every Sunday, they played a concert for their neighbors, featuring the finest big-band jazz sounds that Burbank had probably ever heard.

For almost a year, the 369th had trained in Oswego for cold-weather duty. They’d been issued snow boots and huge woolen union suits. Now, in another fine display of Army logic, after a few weeks in sunny California the 369th were loaded into a troop ship in San Francisco and zigzagged their way to Honolulu Harbor. The 369th was to be in charge of defending Hawaii from air attack. They came with their morale still strong, their commitment to a double victory unchanged by a year in the Army.

Sam Phillips, when told they were bound for Hawaii, could only think, “What the hell is it?” No one that anybody knew from Harlem had been to Hawaii. Of course, Phillips and the others knew Pearl Harbor and, like many other mainlanders, he had listened at one time or another to the popular radio show, “Hawaii Calls.” But that was about it. That Hawaii was a multiracial society, involving complex relations between the white elite and the Asian and Pacific peoples who made up the bulk of the population, was totally unknown to Phillips and most of the other men. The main thing Phillips thought about as they steamed into harbor was, “I hope the Japanese don’t come back.”

Ironically, as the 369th chugged their way to their initial base camp on the little sugarcane railroad, a noticeable number of people reacted to them as if they were some kind of invading force. In the fields the train cut through, inexplicably, people seemed to be running from them.

It didn’t take long to figure out what had happened. Local people had been warned by southern white soldiers and sailors that blacks were, literally, dangerous animals.

De Fossett could scarcely believe the rumors that were circulating on the island about the black troops: “These people have tails. They’re this far from monkeys,” the rumor went. If a black man and a local woman had a child, “the baby would be a monkey.” It was almost funny, but De Fossett and others couldn’t help but notice that in their first few weeks on the island, people were actually looking for their tails.

A story quickly made the rounds among the men that verified the power of this calumny. A small group of the men were invited to a social gathering with some local people. It was

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