It

in those days he was just a twelve-year-old kid who wore a ricepaper sailor hat and mended biballs and had no shoes. He was the youngest, I was the second youngest. All the others were gone — two dead, two married, one in jail. That was Howard. He never was any good.
‘»You are goan join the army,» your gramma Shirley told me. «I dunno if they start paying you right away or not, but once they do, you’re goan send me a lotment every month. I hate to send you away, son, but if you don’t take care of me and Philly, I don’t know what’s going to become of us.» She gave me my birth certificate to show the recruiter and I seen she fixed the year on it somehow to make me eighteen.
‘So I went to the courthouse where the army recruiter was and asked about joining up. He showed me the papers a nd the line where I could make my mark. «I kin write my name,» I said, and he laughed like he didn’t believe me.
‘»Well then, you go on and write it, black boy,» he says.
‘»Hang on a minute,» I says back. «I want to ast you a couple of questions.»
‘»Fire away then,» he says. «I can answer anything you can ask.»
«‘Do they have meat twice a week in the army?» I asked. «My mamma says they do, but she is powerful set on me joining up.»
«‘No, they don’t have it twice a week,» he says.
‘»Well, that’s about what I thought,» I says, thinking that the man surely does seem like a booger but at least he’s an honest booger.
‘Then he says, «They got it ever night,» making me wonder how I ever could have thought he was honest.
‘»You must think I’m a pure-d fool,» I says.
«‘You got that right, nigger,» he says.
‘»Well, if I join up, I got to do something for my mamma and Philly Loubird,» I says. «Mamma says it’s a lotment.»
«That’s this here,» he says, and taps the allotment form. «Now what else is on your mind?»
‘»Well,» says I, «what about trainin to be an officer?»
‘He threw his head back when I said that and laughed until I thought he was gonna choke on his own spit. Then he says, «Son, the day they got nigger officers in this man’s army will be the day you see the bleedin Jesus Christ doing the Charleston at Birdland. Now you sign or you don’t sign. I’m out of patience. Also, you’re stinkin the place up.»
‘So I signed, and watched him staple the allotment form to my muster-sheet, and then he give me the oath, and then I was a soldier. I was thinking that they’d send me up to New Jersey, where the army was building bridges on account of there being no wars to fight. Instead, I got Derry, Maine, and Company E.’
He sighed and shifted in his chair, a big man with white hair that curled close to his skull. At that time we had one of the bigger farms in Derry, and probably the best roadside produce stand south of Bangor. The three of us worked hard, and my father had to hire on extra help during harvesting time, and we made out.
He said: ‘I came back because I’d seen the South and I’d seen the North, and there was the same hate in both places. It wasn’t Sergeant Wilson that convinced me of that. He was nothing but a Georgia cracker, and he took the South with him wherever he went. He didn’t have to be south of the Mason-Dixon line to hate niggers. He just did. No, it was the fire at the Black Spot that convinced me of that. You know, Mikey, in a way . . . ‘
He glanced over at my mother, who was knitting. She hadn’t looked up, but I knew she was listening closely, and my father knew it too, I think.
‘In a way it was the fire made me a man. There was sixty people killed in that fire, eighteen of them from Company E. There really wasn’t any company left when that fire was over. Henry Whitsun . . . Stork Anson . . . Alan Snopes . . . Everett McCaslin . . . Horton Sartoris . . . all my friends, all dead in that fire. And that fire wasn’t set by old Sarge Wilson and h is grits-and-cornpone friends. It was set by the Derry branch of the Maine Legion of White Decency. Some of the kids you go to school with, son, their fathers struck the matches that lit the Black Spot on fire. And I’m not talking about the poor kids, neither.’
‘Why, Daddy? Why did they?’
‘Well, part of it was just Derry,’ my father said, frowning. He lit his pipe slowly and shook out the wooden match. ‘I don’t know why it happened here; I can’t explain it, but at the same time I ain’t surprised by it.
‘The Legion of White Decency was the Northerners’ version of the Ku Klux Klan, you see. They marched in the same white sheets, they burned the same crosses, they wrote the same hate-notes to black folks they felt were getting above their station or taking jobs that were meant for white men. In churches where the preachers talked about black equality, they sometimes planted charges of dynamite. Most of the history books talk more about the KKK than they do about the Legion of White Decency,