In October of 1964, I lived in Beirut, Lebanon. That was when Beirut was glorious, when its tiered apartment houses and office buildings stood unharmed beyond the white sands of the beaches; when the sky, and the mountains in the distance, and the Mediterranean close up formed peaceful layers of blue. It was Beirut when carefree families strolled on Sunday afternoons along the Corniche.
In 1964 I lived in the junior-senior girls’ dorm at the American University—Bustani Hall, a pebbled-concrete building cradled halfway up the bluffs of the campus, hidden from the beach road by the thick trees and bushes that tumbled down the hillsides to meet the seashore. I lived in a sunny room on the third floor, with Rowda, a cheerful, young Sudanese woman of medium height with happy eyes, who mothered me unrelentingly and called me “Sukr” instead of my name—Sukr, Arabic for “sugar,” because I was white.
I was one of the few Americans on campus, and one of the very few there alone, that is, under no auspices—at AUB because lucky family circumstances made it possible for me, the daughter of teachers and former sharecroppers, to be in what was then a peaceful, beautiful, bewitching place. The three thousand students on campus were predominantly Arab, and most of these were Lebanese, a charming dark-eyed, dark-haired people.
One warm morning, one of my Lebanese friends, a leader of the Muslim Student Organization and member of the student council, beckoned me into her room, which was just down the hall from mine. Her name was Azizah, and she was popular and beautiful. Azizah shut the door behind us and smiled at me. Clasping her hands together in front of her breast in a quietly excited way, she said, “I want you to come to the airport with me this morning. To meet our brother.”
I frowned, puzzled. “Brother?” I said.
“Yes,” Azizah said. “Brother. Our brother. Mine because he’s Muslim, and yours because he’s American.” She put her hand on my shoulder, still smiling. “Say ‘Yes.’ That you’ll come with me. I think you should know this man.”
At the airport, Azizah and I waited behind a glass partition and watched a tall black man go through customs. The jacket of his light-blue summer suit was crisscrossed by the dark leather straps of two camera-equipment cases. As he stood in front of the wooden table which held his luggage, he was a study in dignity and patience, a contrast to the impatient, overuniformed agent who jerked random fistfuls of clothes from one side of an open suitcase to the other.
Out in the corridor the black man smiled when he saw Azizah, and he set his suitcase on the floor beside him and grabbed the hand she reached toward him. Azizah nodded at me. “I’ve brought my friend,” she said. “Your fellow American.” And she introduced us then. “Meet Malcolm X,” she told me proudly.
“How do you do, Mr. X,” I said.
“No,” he corrected me. “It’s Malcolm.” He had stopped smiling, and behind his dark-framed glasses his deep eyes were somber and distant, only grazing my face as he looked past me beyond my shoulder.
On the way back to town, I sat in the back seat of the taxi with Malcolm X. Azizah sat in front with the driver, but she had twisted herself so that she faced backward toward us. “We expect a very big turnout for your speech tonight, Malcolm,” she said. “Everybody’s excited you’re here. People want to know about the Black Muslims, about the movement in America, and about your hajj.” I had been away from my country all told less than three years, but it had been too long. What Azizah talked about and the man she talked to were foreign to me.
The taxi stopped on a street of tall apartment buildings near the campus. Azizah turned a charming smile on us. “We’re invited to lunch at Mrs. Brown’s,” she said.
Mrs. Brown was a black American expatriate in her middle years. Sara, a fellow student from the university, was there, too, another young white American like me, but, unlike me, a political science major fresh from an exclusive New England college who knew what was what. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Malcolm,” she said. “A rare privilege.” He shook her hand and nodded, at the same time lifting his camera from his shoulder by its strap and handing it to Azizah.
Mrs. Brown’s Beirut apartment was one of those light, airy, marble-floored places well-to-do Americans lived in without fear in those days. Azizah, Sara, and Mrs. Brown sat on blue-cushioned chairs in front of the windows, while I sat on the matching couch with Malcolm X. His camera and a flash attachment lay on the empty cushion between us.
For a few minutes, we sipped iced juice from silver glasses and spoke of ordinary small things—the weather, good restaurants in Beirut, reliable cameras. Then Sara asked Malcolm X a question, and suddenly they were talking about white people and black people, and Sara was saying that she and I, because we were white, were responsible for most of the sins of the world, specifically the problems of black people. “I think you were absolutely right, Malcolm,” she said, “when you accused the white man of having the devil in him.”
I said quietly, “I didn’t choose this skin, but it’s the only one I have.” Malcolm X looked steadily back at me.
And leaning forward to look in his face she apologized, not just for herself and her own particular ancestors, but for me and mine, too, while Malcolm X nodded and smiled.
Uncomfortable and awkward, I had wanted only to listen. But with Sara’s general apology, I began to feel words rising in my throat. Perhaps it had something to do with my Cherokee great-grandmother—her grandparents survivors of the Trail of Tears—or with my own parents’ struggle to get out of the cotton field of Oklahoma—it’s hard to say now, but when Sara finished, I said, “I’m sorry for what happened to you, Mr. X, but Sara doesn’t speak for me. I really do not think I’m any more responsible for your troubles as a black man than you’re at fault for mine as a white woman.” And pointing at my freckled arm I said quietly, “I didn’t choose this skin, but it’s the only one I have and I’m afraid we’ll both have to make do with it.”
Malcolm X looked steadily back at me for a long moment while I wished I were any place else on earth. And then I saw his mouth twitch, a quick pulling at the corners, less than a smile, but more—much more—than a smirk, and his eyes softened before they turned away.
Then the moment was gone. Azizah poured words like oil onto the awkwardness in the room, and soon the conversation was about Malcolm X’s pilgrimage to Mecca and his upcoming appearance at the university that night.
Later, I said good-bye and walked slowly and alone back to Bustani Hall through the campus, past the library and the chapel and the School of Pharmacy with the huge Chinese rose bushes in front.
Rowda was out; she had left a note on my desk telling me she would be out the rest of the day. It was only the middle of the afternoon, but I changed from my street clothes and boiled tea on the hot plate, and turned the radio on to the BBC in time to hear Big Ben’s deep chimes. After I listened to the news from London, I moved the dials until I heard Arabic music, and I stood with my glass of tea at the large window at the end of the room and watched the quiet sky over Beirut turn dusky to the tune of minor notes, wondering exactly what that oddly likeable man who did not like the color of my skin was all about.
—Marian Faye Novak is a part-time writer and lives in Rockbridge Baths, Virginia.
THE PROMISE
It is now more than half a century since a group of us Morehouse College students traveled to Hartford, Connecticut, from Atlanta, Georgia, in 1942 to spend the summer working on the Cullman Brothers Tobacco Farms. I was the student leader for this chartered bus trip, which took us through eastern Georgia, South and North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and finally into Connecticut.
I was born and reared in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The summers of 1938 and 1939 I worked with my uncles Harden and Hampton Carter in their small trucking business in St. Louis, Missouri. After finishing high school in 1940, I had gone to Los Angeles for seven months and across the country to Buffalo, New York, for another four months before entering Morehouse in September 1941. The trip to Connecticut was for some reason very different for me. I had never seen or realized the depth of racial discrimination in our land as I did on this trip.
Except for our stop at the colored teachers college in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, we were unable to get a decent meal anywhere. We had near physical confrontations in a small Delaware town and in Washington, D.C., where we were ordered out of the bus station’s restaurant and threatened with arrest when I protested. Despite my troubles with Jim Crow all of my young life, I had not expected that kind of discrimination in our nation’s capital.
Though Chattanooga was and still is a small town, I was basically a city boy, and I left the Connecticut tobacco farm after a week and moved to Hartford, where I got a job with a large construction company, making more money than I would have on the farm. I rented a room with a nice couple, cooked for myself, and had plenty of time to read, study, and consider the plight colored people faced in our country. The trip through Washington had made me more intense.
I decided that I would not register for the draft and would use this tool to protest military discrimination.
During those summer nights I considered what I might do to help change civil rights conditions, and I decided that I would not register for the draft and would use this tool to make a national protest. On my written document I clearly established that I was not a conscientious objector and that my objection to the draft was the discrimination in the military and colored people’s second-class status in our everyday life.
When I returned to the Morehouse campus in September 1942, the college president, Benjamin E. Mays, heard about my decision and asked me to come to his office and discuss the matter with him. Our meeting was cordial, but toward the end of our discussion Dr. Mays explained to me that I was legally obligated to register for the draft and that if I persisted in violating the law, he would require me to withdraw from the college.
Shortly after this meeting Dr. Mays asked me to his office again and explained that he had contacted a government official, Dr. Channing H. Tobias, well known as an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on “Negro Affairs” and Dr. Mays’s longtime friend. He said that Dr. Tobias was coming to Atlanta and would talk to me about my draft status.
Dr. Tobias was a heavyset light-skinned man who could have been the Secretary of State if he had not been colored. He was very cordial and very professional as we discussed my decision about the draft. He agreed that my position was ethically correct but pointed out that legally and technically I was not on solid ground.
He impressed me when he stated that he had discussed the matter with President Roosevelt and that FDR was sympathetic to my position. He said that it was unlikely the President could do anything about the problem immediately but that Mr. Roosevelt wanted me to sign for the draft and enter the service, and after the war FDR would make changes in the military for integration and ending discrimination.
I will never know if Dr. Tobias really did talk to Franklin Roosevelt about me, but I was given time to make a decision, and when I agreed to register, somebody at the White House arranged for me to do it in the office of the general in charge of the Georgia draft board. Dr. Mays drove me to the general’s office at Fort McPherson. I signed the necessary papers and received my draft card signed by Gen. G. Goodman. I had made my point.
In 1951, when I was hired as an instructor to teach operational intelligence for the United States Air Force, I discovered that President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order of 1948 seemed to fulfill his predecessor’s promise. The changes were unbelievable compared with my Army days. Maybe Dr. Tobias did discuss the matter with the President.
—Frederick Douglass Carter now lives and writes in Denver, Colorado.
TORNADO
I was a pupil in Miss Henley’s sixth-grade class in the Gorham Elementary School when history touched me. Gorham is and was a village located on the Missouri Pacific Railroad about fifty miles northwest of Cairo, Illinois. A substantial share of its five hundred residents were employees of that railroad.
The place hasn’t changed much since March 18, 1925—the day the most lethal tornado in recorded history came roaring across the Mississippi River from Missouri and devastated Gorham, the first town it hit in Illinois.
The school was a two-story brick building. A wide hall separated the grade school from the high school. We were into the afternoon schedule when, between two and three o’clock, the wind started blowing and Miss Henley asked me and some other boys to close the windows. As I looked out I saw the backboards tearing off the posts of an outdoor basketball court and the outside toilets tossing about. Most of the children ran out the door at the back of the room into a side hall where coats and hats were hung on a partition. The partition blew against the wall and became a partial shelter for some of them.
I remember seeing the high school wall crumble, the plaster turning to dust, before I was knocked unconscious.
Along with some of the larger boys, I ran out the side door into the wide hall that separated us from the high school. I remember seeing the high school wall crumble, the plaster turning to dust, before I was knocked unconscious. When I came to, I was a patient in the Catholic hospital in Cairo.
The wife and daughter of Mr. Brown, the principal, were killed, yet he, realizing that he could do nothing for them, went with his injured students to the hospital. The railroad donated a passenger train that was in the area to take the injured and their families there. There were hospitals closer by in Murphysboro and Carbondale, but those cities were in the tornado’s path and had to take care of their own injured.
Eight or nine of my fellow pupils and upward of forty townspeople were killed. My skull and jawbone were fractured. Two of my classmates were dug out from the same area of debris. One, whose last name was Murray (I forget his first name) was dead, and the other, Lee Casey, was crippled for life.
—John M. Schofield lives in Sarasota, Florida, and manages his own small publishing company.
TORNADO
On March 18, 1925, at 3:35 P.M., I was in the thirdfloor classroom of the Crossville, Illinois, Community High School. As I opened the front door to leave for school that morning my mother called from the kitchen, “Wear your sweater.” When I protested that it was too hot for a sweater, she called back, “This is March. Anything can happen on a March day. Wear your sweater.”
By the time I got to school, the air was still and heavy, and my sweater felt uncomfortable. In the afternoon Ol Reiling, the school custodian, burst into our classroom and, ignoring the teacher, said, “Boys, if you’ve never seen a tornado, you’re going to see one now.” In seconds we were crowded at the east windows, looking southward. The teacher was there too. So was Ol.
That morning it would have meant nothing to me if someone had told me that a maritime polar air mass had rolled across the Sierras and the Rockies and invaded the Great Plains, or that a Bermuda high was fighting every foot of its advance with strong moisture-laden winds from the Gulf of Mexico. I would have been interested had I been told that along a line stretching from Texas to Canada cumulonimbus clouds were pushing their anvils fifty to sixty thousand feet above the surface of the earth. Along that line continual flashes of lightning, the screaming of the wind, and the reverberating explosions of thunder reminded people of the artillery duels of the Great War, which had ended nearly seven years earlier. No wonder the scientists of that day had labeled the line between contending air masses a front.
In Arkansas one of those clouds thrust a dark tentacle earthward, withdrew, touched again, and began a mad dance across Arkansas, Missouri, and southern Illinois, leapt the Wabash River, and gave one final vicious kick at Griffin, Indiana, almost demolishing that small community. In the path of that tornado 695 people lay dead, hundreds were maimed or crippled, and thousands were left homeless.
Ol Reiling muttered into my ear, “I’m afraid that Bramlet boy is going to find some damage when he gets home.” The Bramlet home was about a mile away and was clearly visible from my vantage point. That is, part of the house was visible. A section of the roof was flying through the air. There was a dark mass surrounding the house. Had there been a fire? The blackness resembled the smoke from the stack of a locomotive laboring under a heavy load. It couldn’t be a train; the Big Four tracks were a hundred yards to the west. All of a sudden it struck me. That black cloud was a tornado!
Then I saw the funnel—no, the two funnels. As I watched, the tornado split into twin demons of darkness that danced for more than half a mile across the open fields, until they met and merged directly in front of a tall farmhouse less than four hundred yards away. The whirling cloud stopped, stared at the farmhouse. The farmhouse stared back; then slowly, almost gracefully, it rose until its underpinnings were as high above the ground as the roof had been. Segments of the roof and weatherboarding fell to the ground while other segments joined the circling mass of debris. The tornado was now moving northeast along a road with which I am quite familiar.
The farmhouse slowly, almost gracefully, rose until its underpinnings were as high off the ground as its roof had been.
Many times each summer my sister and I had trudged barefoot along that road, watching the geysers of dust squirt between our toes. We had been going to our grandparents’ home, where I would sleep on a fat featherbed. In every house along that road there lived a relative. Yet now I felt no fear, no sadness, no feeling of any kind. It was as if part of my brain had been switched off. I had no realistic concept of the terrible tragedy I had witnessed. Every house was either partially or totally destroyed. Only the log-cabin sections of the two oldest houses escaped damage, and one of them had shifted on its foundation.
In the cellar of that house two of my cousins were sprouting potatoes for spring planting. Annoyed by the noise above, the eldest said, “I’m going up and find out what’s making all that racket.” When he reached the top of the ladder, the cabin shifted on its foundation and his head was severed from his body. The younger brother huddled in the darkness of the cellar, a white leghorn chicken roosting on his shoulder.
Down in the river bottoms, neighbors hunted frantically for a missing woman whose house had been completely destroyed. There was no sign of her body in the wreckage, but they felt certain she had been at home when the storm struck. Eventually one of them saw something white and glistening high up in a tree. As they grew closer, they realized it was the naked body of their neighbor, wedged into the fork of the sycamore.
For the next few days, students picked shingles, pieces of weatherboarding, strips of tin roofing, anything that could smother the tender plants of winter wheat, and carted it all away. We piled debris into two different piles—one from which wood might be salvaged, the other to be burned. We buried dead animals. The most gruesome sight I recall was the body of a Jersey cow that had been run through by a two-by-four.
There were the usual phenomena that accompany such storms—straws driven into oak trees, a pitchfork with the handle pointing skyward, impaled by a single tine on the top of a fence post. On one farm a wire fence had been ripped from its post and rolled into a crude ball in the center of which sat a live chicken, plucked as clean as if the wind had been preparing it for the pot.
The days of the cleanup were hard days, tiring days, but they were good days, and I feel certain that everybody who worked in the field matured considerably.
That was seventy years ago, but I can still close my eyes and see that farmhouse rising slowly into the air. For years a barren strip a half-mile wide marked the path of the tornado. Along the edge an occasional oak or elm or sycamore held out a bone-white stump of an amputated limb in mute testimony of the savagery of the tornado.
—Howard E. Rawlinson has lived in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, since 1931 and has survived two later tornadoes.
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