Five-Carat Soul by James McBride
He sat in his car all day, heat running, ducking in and out of a nearby diner to get food, coffee, and use the bathroom, then sitting in the car again, waiting until evening. The snow came on and off all day, packing the sidewalks and streets. But at night the people came, young and old, pouring out of cabs onto the snow-packed sidewalk to hear the Count Basie Band perform their annual Christmas Eve set.
The Basie Band performance at Minton’s was a throwback to the old days, something everyone in Harlem loved, an annual Christmas Eve performance by a glorious swinging band that demanded old-style glory, dancing and fun, which still drew new fans.
Herb watched and waited, half expecting to be disappointed. Then, just before 8 p.m., to his relief, an old Lincoln Continental pulled up with “Judge” on its license plates. It unsteadily swerved into place and parked crookedly in front of a fire hydrant. Only the Judge had the nerve to park like that, in front of a hydrant—a judge in New York City could park anywhere. The driver’s door opened and the old Judge, wearing a black tuxedo, held the door open with one hand and, using his stick with the other, pulled himself out to stand on the icy, snowy street. He surveyed the terrain, then slowly made his way over the slippery snow humps to the passenger side of the car. As he did, the front passenger door opened and Carlos, his back bent from years of carrying mail, his hair slicked neatly back, also dressed in a tux, emerged. Carlos turned to the back door of the sedan and opened it. Lillian Johns, clad in a fur coat, fur hat, and high heels, emerged. Carlos helped her out of the car and the Judge shut the door. The three converged for a moment, talking together, a tiny football huddle. Herb saw Lillian throw back her head and laugh, and the two men chuckled. Then she headed inside, followed by Carlos and the Judge.
Herb cut the engine of his Plymouth, straightened his tie, quickly bought a ticket, and scrambled inside.
When he entered, he saw that the foyer led straight into the ballroom, so he cut to the right and made for the stairs to the balcony, so as not to be seen. Upstairs seats lined the bannisters where tired dancers could come and rest their feet, order a drink, and watch the ballroom from above. Herb ordered a Coke from a waitress, perched himself on a seat at the edge of the bannister, and leaned over.
The band was already in full stride, blasting the walls with hard swing. Herb watched the dancers spin in circles and waited to see if one of the three on the floor would jump to Basie’s blasting, swinging, deep-grooving big band.
The three were seated at a table talking. It was there, as Herb waited, watching them, that he ran the story over in his head, the story that Carlos had revealed to him months before in his basement living room.
• • •
WE WERE AN artillery company. Cannon company is what they call it. Me and the Judge. They called him Booker back then. Walter Booker. He was a funny, skinny motherfucker back then. Laughed all the time.
We were forward observers. Our job was to go forward, scout enemy positions, then set up artillery. See, when a company attacks, before the combat troops charge, you drop artillery. You soften ’em up with artillery for the ground troops that follow. But oftentimes you can’t know where to fire that artillery until forward observers go out and radio back to tell artillery where to fire. That’s one of your jobs as forward observer.
There were four of us: me, my buddy Clifford Johns, who was first lieutenant, Booker—that’s the Judge—and another man named Schaefer, a college man out of Oberlin, Ohio. We were the forward team. We’d get sent out on patrols. We’d go out ahead and scout the territory for the company and then come back and say if it was safe to set up. Nobody said nothing about firing. Just scouting is what we did mostly.
Well, they sent us out on a ridge called Lama di Sotto near a little town called Sommocolonia. Tiny little place. We went out there several times. We saw some movement. German troops. Guns being pulled around. It’s not hard to see if the enemy’s moving. Shit. An .88’s a big gun. You need a mule to pull it up the mountains. In Italy, we all used mules with Italian mule skinners. The Germans and us. And I knew every Italian mule skinner in the Serchio Valley. I was one of the few Americans who spoke Italian, ’cause I lived in Harlem. There were plenty of Italians in Spanish Harlem back then. But the white American commanders didn’t like the Italians, see. They treated the Italians like peasants. They told us: “Don’t trust the Italians. They could be the enemy.” Shit, if it wasn’t for the Italian partisans up there, I’d be dead. They were some brave sons of bitches. Them’s the ones who told us, when we were scouting, “There’s a bunch of Germans up on that Lama di Sotto Ridge. And more coming.”
I asked them, “How many?”
“Hundreds,” they said. “Maybe thousands. They’re building up for something big.”
We passed it on to the captain. He didn’t believe us. He was an idiot. He was out of engineering. He couldn’t read a map. Neither could the guy before him. We changed captains in the Ninety-Second like most people eat lunch. Them white captains would rather eat an elephant’s nuts than command a bunch of niggers. They didn’t like us. We didn’t like them. They felt we were second-rate soldiers, and they were mostly rejects themselves. Most transferred out as soon as they could. Southerners, most of ’em.
Well, this guy didn’t believe us, so we took it to S-2 Intelligence. Took it over the captain’s head. S-2 didn’t do nothing. They sent the shit right back to the stupid captain of our unit—with our name on it.
So Christmas Eve, about nine o’clock, the captain calls me and Johns in to see him. See, Company F, our company, was more forward in that valley than anyone else from the division. Right in front of us was a ridge going down, and on the other side of that valley, the Serchio Valley, was the town of Sommocolonia. And beyond it, going up, was the Lama di Sotto Ridge, going up higher over the town.
So the captain called me and Johns into his tent and said, “I got this report you sent to S-2 over my head. And since you know so much, I want you two to get a squad together and go down into that church in the valley down there and look out for the Germans.”
They had a tall church tower down there in Sommocolonia. It was to the left of our position, but it was on a hill and from that tower you could see straight over the Lama di Sotto ridge, where we heard the Germans were.
Johns said, “When?”
“Tonight. At 0300 hours. Under cover of night.”
Well, Johns didn’t like it. He’d scouted that position enough to know the Germans had big numbers up on that ridge. Clifford Johns was a smart man. Lt. Clifford Johns was his name. Out of Brockton, Massachusetts. A braver man I never met. He went to Wilberforce University.
He told the captain, “I don’t need to see out over that ridge to tell you what’s over there. It’s Germans. A lot of ’em. They’re moving artillery and men. The Italian partisans say the same thing.”
The captain said, “I don’t trust anybody who crushes grapes with their feet. I want y’all to climb to the top of that church tower and tell us what you see.”
This idiot was from Florida. He was a replacement captain. Far as I know, this fella didn’t even know how to fire a .124 millimeter. He didn’t even graduate from college—and he was commanding a cannon company with guys like Clifford Johns, who had college degrees and had ten times more battle experience than him.
Johns said, “If I’m in the tower, how am I gonna get back if I’m rushed?”
The captain said, “We’ll get you back.”
Johns didn’t say a word, but he didn’t trust him. When he came back to the squad, he asked for volunteers. The only two who volunteered were me and Booker. I was Johns’s second lieutenant. I had to volunteer. But Booker—the Judge—was a private. He was an enlisted man, a draftee. But he was a nervy fucker. He said, “I’ll be safer with you than here.” He was scared stiff. Everybody was. But he looked up to Cliff. We all did. We all knew the Germans were close, and Booker didn’t tr
But Johns said, “No. You and Carlos stay here.” He didn’t say why. But I knew why. Cliff was smart. He knew that if the Germans came down that ridge in big numbers, his only chance of getting out of that tower was heavy shelling from our side to delay them. He didn’t want just any old fool firing that artillery to cover his ass. He wanted somebody he could depend on. Because if our line breaks or if they shell us too hard, the captain might quit the game and pull the company out, and then who’s gonna send the artillery to help him out? He wanted us—me and Booker—firing them cannons.
So he picked seven men. I can name every one of ’em: Jefferson Jordan, Wade McCree, Sergeant Schaefer the music man from Oberlin, and four more. He told ’em, “Get ready,” then took me and the Judge outside the tent and said, “When we get up there, watch out for us. If we have to get out quick, send the mail hard as you can.”
“Send the mail” means to fire that artillery. See, when a forward observer goes out, he sights the enemy, he calls out the grid on a map where the enemy is, and you fire on that grid. He calls out the grid by radio. And you fire it at those coordinates. He wanted us to get him outta there if he was stuck. We knew he depended on us.
I said, “We will do that.”
I can’t say I was sad to be staying behind. I wasn’t happy either. I was torn. Like most people, I wanted to live. But I told him, “We’ll watch you. We got your back.”
He picked up his squad and said, “Let’s go.” They cut out at three a.m. in the snow. It was so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The rest of the division was mostly asleep in houses they’d taken over, about to have Christmas Day breakfast and all, because the white captains assumed the Germans wasn’t gonna fight on Christmas Day. Who wants to fight on Christmas Day? The Germans have Christmas just like us. But I made my gunners and my radio man sleep in tents next to their guns. I was the only one who had his men sleeping outdoors that night. The captain came by and said, “Why you making these men sleep in the snow? Put a watch outside on the radio and send the rest inside.” I said, “Okay, sir,” and the minute he left I put them right back outside in tents. I didn’t give a fuck. I had five .90 millimeter guns pointed at that valley when Cliff Johns and them went down there.
Well, I didn’t hardly move from the radio. I had the radio man right next to me. Not an hour later, about five a.m., just before light, I heard the radio crackle with Johns’s voice and a bunch of German .88s sailing over the valley towards us at the same time. I reached for the radio and by that time the Germans had knocked the entire division on its ass. It took about a half a second. The first volley blew my tent away and threw me about ten feet. It knocked out two of our five .90 millimeter artillery guns, disabled the third, killed three gunners plus the radio man, who was next to me. He was thrown with the radio several feet away clean to the edge of the ridge. We was down to two artillery guns before we even moved an inch. You gotta remember, Johns and his men were ahead of us by half a mile down in the valley. They were in the tower in front of us, positioned where they could see over the ridge on the other side. But it was full-on night when the Germans fired, and their soldiers were coming down that ridge in white snow suits at night, so we couldn’t see them—it wasn’t dawn yet—and John couldn’t have seen them, and he couldn’t ever see where the artillery fire was coming from, I guess. It didn’t matter. The Germans had noted our artillery, sighted us, fed that grid position to their gunners before daylight, and fired half blind, thinking it might be close. They scored big, ’cause they hit our artillery fire control center dead on.
I got hit so hard, it took me a minute to figure out where I was. When I sat up I was ten feet off the guns and a third of the cannon company was dead, and the first thing I saw was three guys crawling out of a tent on fire. Booker’s squad managed to get gun one pumping, and squad two got theirs going, and I looked around and managed to find the radio man, who’d been blown right near the side of the ridge. I ran to him and pulled the radio off him and glanced out on the valley before running back to the artillery guns where Booker and the other gun was. Then I looked over the ridge.
By God, there was so many Germans coming down the ridge and running up the other side towards us they looked like ants. I mean there was hundreds. They was already past that tower where John and his men were. That was at the crack of dawn. That’s the first thing I saw Christmas morning, 1944. God knows I’ll never forget it.
I had the radio to my ear by the time I got to Booker, who was firing, and the radio was still working so I yelled, “Cliff, get out.”
He didn’t. He said he was in the church tower and started calling artillery on the grid. There was nothing to do but follow his orders. I had four men left, two on each gun. Booker was sighting and firing the gun closest to me, and I called Johns’s grid numbers to him, and Booker loaded and fired, sighting and firing. He was moving fast.
I kept saying, “Cliff, you got to come out.” But he kept calling the grid. He’d call out 32/3. Then 34/3, then 35/3, like that. And I’d call that number to Booker and he was bringing it. I had both guns going. Then after a few minutes we got the third gun going again. But the Germans were dropping .88 rounds right on us, and worse, German soldiers started making their way up the ridge around to the side of our position. I heard gunfire ringing through the camp behind me. I looked over my shoulder and seen clerks and cooks dropping typewriters and pots and pans and grabbing rifles and shooting. They formed a line to our right and engaged the Germans who were working their way that way, just at the edge of the tree line to our right, about two hundred yards off. It was a fucking mess.
As for the captain, if I found that fucker today, I’d part his face with my knife. He was long gone. I ain’t seen him from that day to this. I heard he went back to Pietrasanta after he ordered Cliff down into the valley. He was nowhere to be found.
Cliff kept calling the grid to me, and I kept feeding the grid to Booker. And then it got . . . chaotic.
Booker and his man was firing that .90 millimeter fast as they could load, and I was calling the grid, but Cliff kept changing the grid, and when I called out one of those grids Booker hollered, “It’s getting awful close.”
I didn’t have time to ask what he meant, because I could hear hollering on Cliff’s end now. Every time he pressed the call button on his radio I could hear yelling and rounds landing and small-arms fire, so I knew he was in trouble. So I said to Booker, “Shut up and fire!” which he did. Cliff called another grid number—34/7—he called—and I called it to Booker and he stopped. His man had loaded the shell and Booker had the firing pin in his hand—it was a ring you pull—and he just stopped cold, with the firing pin in his hand. He wouldn’t pull it.
I thought he was crazy. I could hear Cliff yelling and the small-arms fire in the tower. I said, “Send the load!”
He said, “That’s Johns’s position.”
I radioed back. I said, “Cliff, what’s your grid position?”
Man, when Cliff Johns pressed the call button that last time, it sounded like hell on earth. Small-arms fire and screaming. But he was calm as a glass of water. And he said it clear. He said, “I know where I am. Send the mail, Carlos. Send it now. There’s a lot more of them than us,” and then I heard a burst of firing and yelling.
I yelled, “Book, fire it.”
Book wouldn’t move. He shook his head.
“Fire it, motherfucker!”
Book froze up. He had his hand on the firing pin and just stared over my head. Like he was hypnotized. He was shell-shocked, like a deer in the headlights. By now we was taking heavy, straight rounds from the German .88s, one after the other. Dropping right on our position. Our three guns was back down to one, Booker’s gun. Cannons two and three was out, and whoever had been firing ’em who wasn’t hurt or dead had grabbed rifles and was firing out towards the right-side ridge where the
I was so fucking mad I drew my .45 sidearm. Booker was about four steps from me and I was on him. I said, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I remember standing over Booker with my pistol thinking I had to shoot him and suddenly it got so quiet, I said to myself, “Why is it so quiet?” I didn’t realize till later that all those rounds hitting so close had knocked my hearing loose. There was a lot of smoke and I couldn’t see much other than Booker crouched on his knees like a coward, staring over my head like he was looking for an angel to come from the sky and save him. I wanted to kill him.
I said, “Stupid mother—” and I had the pistol in one hand and reached over to pull the firing pin myself with my free hand. I had to reach over him to do it, and as I did, he snatched the .45 out my hand and pointed it at my head and dropped the hammer on it. That thing went off right at my ear. The noise almost busted my eardrum.
And a German soldier dropped dead right at my feet. He’d been running up behind me and Booker saw him coming and shot him as he came. That’s what he was staring at out that way.
The guy fell right at my feet and then Booker cooked him again where he lay.
I turned around and it was just chaos. The Germans had broken through the tree line on the right and was overrunning them cooks and clerks who’d set up that position down there. Men was fighting all around the camp, shooting at each other using jeeps and mules as cover, spinning the mule around, trying to shoot each other that way, fighting in the tents, hand to hand, some of ’em.
I reached over Booker and pulled the firing pin. Fired it myself. Sent that last shell right into the tower where Cliff was. And in the distance, I saw the top of the church tower pop. Booker had dialed it in perfect.