“Yeah, but more importantly”—Uncle Millard took a drag—“it was the best knife I ever owned. A Fairbairn-Sykes commando knife. Won it off some dude in a game of poker. She was a beauty too. Double-edged stiletto, and I used to wear it strapped to my left ankle.” His face lit up like he was talking about his woman. “Anyway, I was on the nextthing smokin’. Got up here and changed my name. Been on the run for damn near twenty years. Always watching my back.”
They had reached the Philadelphia & Reading Terminal Railroad Station, and Uncle Millard pulled to the curb at the corner of Eleventh and Market. The front of the station was noisy with pedestrians.
“I never knew that.” Ozzie turned in his seat.
“You don’t want that life, youngblood. You gon’ over to Germany to make something out of yourself. Don’t let that temper of yourn get the best of you, like it did last night.”
There it was again. Everyone was worried about his temper. “I hear you.”
Uncle Millard got out of the car and unlocked the trunk. He rounded Ozzie’s side of the car with his B4 U.S. Army–issued garment bag. “Osbourne Philips” was stamped in black with his serial number. When the bag had arrived, Ozzie could tell that it had been used previously, because he could see the traces of the name Luke under his, and one of the inside zippers was jammed.
“Do you? ’Cause I ain’t trying to lose you to no bullshit. Promise me you’ll keep your head.”
“I will, don’t worry about me,” Ozzie offered, and then they clapped hands before Uncle Millard pulled him into a tight hug.
Ozzie started for the train station. When he reached the gold-framed doors, he turned. “Uncle Millard? What’s your real name?”
“Awwww, nephew, if I told you, then I’d have to kill you.” He winked and then slid back behind the wheel of his car, tooted his horn twice, and pulled off.
Ozzie spent the next several weeks in basic training at Fort Dix near Trenton, New Jersey. When he completed his training, he was put on a bus and driven to the New York Port of Embarkation. When he arrived at the ship, it teemed with hundreds of troops reporting toduty. Everyone looked young, most barely out of high school. Ozzie noticed that some of the men’s faces were flushed with excitement and adventure, while others looked worried and homesick, even though they were still on American soil. Ozzie felt somewhere in between. He knew that he wasn’t going to Germany to fight; World War II had ended nearly three years prior, so he wasn’t overly concerned with dying. But it was the first time in his life that he’d be all alone, no family, no friends, no Rita, living abroad, so far from everything that was familiar to him.
Despite his best efforts at studying the German-language book that his favorite English teacher had secured for him, he was worried about the language barrier, the taste of food, and what his living conditions would be as a Negro man stationed in the U.S. Army abroad. Ozzie understood Uncle Millard’s warning, and though he was going to Germany with the intention of behaving, he also had the expectation of being treated civilly.
“Step up,” called out a thin-nosed sailor. “Keep moving.”
There were two lines, one for the white troops and a separate one for the Negroes. The fishy fragrance of the Hudson River was amplified by the heat of the day. The troops were all dressed in their khaki cotton summer uniform and low-quarter shoes. Ozzie could feel sweat trickling from his head to the collar of his shirt as he walked up the gangplank with his B4 bag in one hand and his M1 olive helmet in the other. The boxed lunch he had wolfed down on the ride made him feel queasy, and Ozzie knew that it was more nerves than indigestion.
As the troops filed onto the massive ship, they were met with navy personnel who checked off their names and called out their enlisted berth information. The ship was confusing, with compartments and passageways going in every direction. As Ozzie moved with a group of men, he could hear the hissing sound of steam, pipes rattling, and machinery grinding then halting, grinding thenhalting. After getting turned around, Ozzie found the narrow hall and then took the ladder down to the mess hall, as instructed. There the men were met by a Negro man wearing oval glasses.
“Welcome home, soldiers,” he said.
Ozzie looked around the tight mess hall, which had tables and chairs and very little walking space.
“I’m Sergeant First Class Marshall, your platoon sergeant. I know it isn’t ideal, but because the ship is over capacity, this will be your home for the next two and a half weeks.”
“?’Scuse me, Sergeant Marshall, but where we supposed to sleep?” asked the string-bean-shaped man standing next to Ozzie.
Sergeant Marshall pointed to the racks above the table. “Let me show you how this works,” he said, then motioned to the ten men who had gathered to help with pushing the tables back and folding the benches. He then pulled on a chain that dropped down racks along the wall, each stacked three bunks high, with very little space in between. The sleeping racks were held up by white posts and metal chains. The cots were metal frames with stretched canvas.
Sergeant Marshall pointed to a pile in the corner and instructed each man to pick up a white sheet and a coarse blanket. “There are twenty bosun’s lockers. You have six cubic feet of storage for everything that you own. When we run out, which we will, the remaining men can use seabags as storage.”
The mess deck, converted into a berth for the Negro soldiers, was cramped and far smaller than the images Ozzie had seen in the recruitment office. He couldn’t help but wonder how much more spacious the white soldiers’ quarters were. He counted the racks. There were eleven suspended on metal chains with three bunks each. He’d be sharing the mess hall with thirty-three other men. The space was long but not very wide. Men started claiming their racks, and Ozzie moved through to the closest rack and claimed the top bunk. He could see that the bottom bunks hung right above the foldedtables and would feel like sleeping in a coffin. Ozzie had slept in a two-bedroom house with his family of six, seven on the rare occasions when his father made it home. But no matter how tight it got, they were family. Already, he could smell the ripeness of men who had traveled on crowded buses and trains with no air-conditioning.
“First meal is at zero six hundred, so that means you need to be up and your racks stowed by zero five,” Sergeant Marshall said. “Once you are settled, you may go to the weather deck. The colored section is marked.” Marshall turned and made his way back up the ladder.
After Ozzie stowed his belongings in his locker, he then moved his body sideways and squirmed past the men to the ladder. On the deck above the mess hall, he found the head. Two wash basins, two shower stalls, one urinal, and one seated toilet for all thirty-three Negro men. They had just boarded, and already he could smell that the latrines needed ammonia and bleach.
Up on the weather deck, Ozzie found the rows of wooden benches marked “Coloreds Only” and dutifully took a seat. The clouds streaked through the open sky, and fresh air gave him a small sense of peace. As he pulled a canteen of water from his waist, his thoughts drifted back to Rita. He wondered what she was doing and if she’d be true to her word and write him a letter. Ozzie was so preoccupied, he had not noticed the three leggy women until they were blocking the setting sun.
“These seats taken?”
Ozzie inhaled a whiff of talcum powder and wondered how the women had managed to smell so good on a ship that already smelled funky. “No, help yourself,” he said, gesturing.
The three women chattered on, but Ozzie could feel their eyes darting back and forth between one another and him.
“Where you from, soldier?” asked one of the women, leaning forward. She wore an Army Nurse Corps cap over big curls.
“South Philly.”
