At the Midway Read online

  "Jackies aren't worth shit, these days."

  This seemed a fair enough invitation to talk. "How's that, Methuselah?"

  Constant exposure to salt spray and tradewinds had etched a convoluted chart of the major and minor sea lanes in the old man's face. The ancient, singular sea had worked its magic into his very bones. Every port had its bevy of crusty salts, the tar from old hemp ropes still clinging to their fingers and innumerable sea-yarns hanging from their lips. Yet Amos had never met anyone so saturated with the sea. Just went to show that experience was the man, not the experience.

  Amos found he was unable to free himself of the ancient's mystifying influence. He took Methuselah on forays into Norfolk. Once, he managed to get him aboard the Florida for a closer look at the New Navy.

  "Humph! The Tin Navy!" he groused, unimpressed.

  Amos' mates made fun of his affection.

  "Found your long lost pappy?"

  But the time had come for separation. The Fleet was about to embark on a cruise that might take several years. The old man might not be alive when Amos returned. A mystique unique to Man, who could die with a single breath--something the ocean could never hope to do.

  So he brought Methuselah out for one last sojourn by the sea.

  More whites stared at them. They could not be locals, long accustomed to the sight of blacks in naval uniform.

  "Maybe they know something you don't."

  "I tell you, Methuselah, you're wrong."

  "Damn!" the old man made a violent gesture. "I let you get away with that long enough. My name's Daniel! Daniel! Not that it matters to you. You're the one walking into the lion's den."

  "Admiral Evans is nobody's fool. He depends on us!"

  "Oh the niggers run the navy, ahoy! You tell me this: who's going to cook for those white boys, now the Nips been kicked off? You oughtta jump ship now, while you got the chance."

  Scandalized by the thought, Amos turned away from the ancient tempest. The Government Pier and its great arch rose before them. One year ago it had not existed even as a plan. Created by the Exposition's Board of Design, it was a brief on what Americans could do when they set their chins to it. The new sea wall extended over a mile, while the two arms of the great double pier were consummated by a majestic one hundred and fifty-foot tall arch, the largest single-span bridge in the nation.

  This was the same kind of mind, the same kind of science, that had raised the Atlantic Fleet from keel to crow's nest at the Brooklyn Navy Yard--which was even now constructing the Panama Canal. There was a word for this science: the United States. It was inconceivable to Amos that his country would revert to medieval ways of thinking and acting. Yes, most blacks lived oppressed lives, but they were Negroes... not sailors. If the blacks in the Navy were not allowed to attend the grand reviews, they were at least equal to the whites where it most mattered: on ships at sea. Amos had no doubt he would soon make Seaman First Class. It was occupation, not color, that made a clan. 'Colors' was a time of day, before breakfast. Eight bells, when the Quartermaster hoisted the flag and the band played the Star Spangled Banner.

  From the Roads came the tooting and blowing of whistles and horns.

  "The president's leaving," Amos observed. "They'll be running up steaming colors on the flagship."

  "Ever wonder why you got liberty? Evans doesn't want any dark faces on deck when the big man's around."

  "What's made you so bitter, Methuselah?"

  "Ah, damn... I was born in the South."

  On board the Florida, Captain Oates shook his head morosely.

  "Something wrong, Captain?" his exec inquired.

  "Hoist blue peter," Oates ordered absently as he watched Midshipman Davis hand Dr. Singleton his straw hat. He had slung his hammock, and was here to stay.

  IV

  On the Cliffs of Time

  Two hundred and twenty-five million years ago the earliest recognizable ancestors of the Tu-nel ruled the earth. They were the therapsids. Mammal-like reptiles.

  There were also the dicynodonts, roaming in stupendous herds that stretched the horizon. The largest of these was the size of a rhinoceros.

  But the Tu-nel originated with the cynodonts that preyed upon the herds. Their precursor was Cynognathus crateronotus, a carnivore with a dog-like visage and prominent fangs. Although only seven feet long, by working in packs they could bring down a large herbivore with relative ease.

  On the early continents no other form of life challenged the mammal-like reptiles. Giant, primitive crocodiles patrolled the rivers. The long and slimy reptile Nothosaurus clambered over sun-baked rocks. But the broad vistas belonged to the creatures who were the forerunners of all mammals. For one hundred and thirty million years they unknowingly shaped the master plan of the planet. Someone from another world would have looked at their advanced metabolism, their enormous population, their variety and the sheer weight of invested evolution, and have little doubt that true mammals were on the verge of permanently conquering the land.

  Then came the archosaurs.

  The ensuing battle lasted thirty million years.

  The defeat of the therapsids, the catastrophic faunal displacement, was final--almost. The various mammal-like reptiles either died out or slipped into the holes and crevices of history. For now, a mighty triumvirate of thecodontians ruled: the sluggish crocodilians, the flying pterosaurs... and the all-powerful dinosaurs. For one hundred and forty million years the mammal-like reptiles quailed in the shadows of cold-blooded reptiles and warm-blooded dinosaurs.

  Not all of the defeated therapsids remained on land. A tiny handful took to the water. Among them were the proto-Tu-nel.

  During the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods a variety of elasmosaurs and pliosaurs swam the shallow seas in enormous reptilian schools. They now wrought havoc amongst the creatures that would one day resemble them so closely. The proto-Tu-nel were driven to the evolutionary wall. They were faced with four options: they could return to the rivers, retreat to the cold polar waters where reptiles could not follow, or fight back. They could also become extinct--extinction being an evolutionary choice.

  Many millions of years later, in the Holocene Epoch, early cartographers would compile their meager information to create the first maps of the world. Those maps showed two huge (and for the most part mysterious) continents with a sea in the middle--the Mediterranean. It was as if they had seen the planet from space one hundred and forty million years earlier, for in the Late Jurassic, there were two huge (and for the most part mysterious) super-continents. To the north was Laurasia. To the south, Gondwanaland. The sea in the center was the Tethys Sea and it was there that one species of Tu-nel fought the plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs for oceanic domination. This branch of the Tu-nel was wiped out in a brief but furious million years.

  The polar Tu-nel never had much chance of success. Most of the primitive fish of the period remained in the tropics and sub-tropics. Whenever famine struck, the Tu-nel had to enter the warmer zones to find food. More often than not, they themselves became food as they entered the domain of the aquatic reptiles.

  The riverine Tu-nel remained small, archaic--and alive. Like many of the therapsids before them, they had weaned themselves from the egg-laying habits of the amphibians and reptiles. They gave birth to live young. The newborns clung to their mothers' teats.

  Once grown, quickness, intelligence and luck remained the keys to survival. The early Tu-nel could slip into the water when predators approached on land or race to the beach when a great croc angled towards them. They remained quadrupeds with webbed toes. Their powerful diamond-shaped flippers would come later.

  Eventually, catastrophe overcame the dinosaurs. It began with a series of great ice ages. The oceans retreated from the fertile land. The food chain of the sea altered drastically. The reptilian serpents began to starve.

  On land, hot-blooded dinosaurs had no problem with the lower temperatures. But when land bridges were exposed, herds that had been kept separate for
geologic ages came into contact. The result was very much like that which would happen to the American Indians when the European explorers arrived. Sometimes entire herds were destroyed by disease. For three hundred thousand years the two dinosaur orders, Saurischia and Ornithischia, maintained a perilous hold. Many species were wiped out. But a few, such as the Stegosauria, clung tenaciously to their ancient foothold. For all their travails, it was beginning to seem dinosaurs would survive.

  Then the asteroid hit.

  The weakened structure that had supported the dinosaurs and marine reptiles collapsed.

  The mammals emerged.

  The Tu-nel emerged.

  With the giant sea reptiles gone, the Tu-nel could once again venture into the wide ocean. There was competition, of course. Encounters with giant sharks rarely ended happily. But the attrition was never on the same scale as it had been during the Mesozoic. Over tens of millions of years, the Tu-nel became more streamlined, more pelagic. One breed, descended from the Tu-nel of Gondwanaland, sported necks that took up half their body length. What made them so imposing was their strength. Having descended from bull-necked cynodonts, their long necks were far sturdier than the sinuous extensions of the plesiosaurs, whose ancestors were slender-necked reptiles. This was to be a crucial feature in the next great challenge the Tu-nel faced.

  The arrival of the first whales.

  V

  December, 1907  24°45'N, 67°59'W

  From a marine's diary:

  Reveille at five bells; beans for breakfast; color guard; bright work call 8:15; sack call 8:30; quarters 9:15; recall 10:00; morris tube gun drill 10:10; a bluejacket was knocked overboard while working the davits but was rescued by the torpedo boat Whipple; vomited; stubbed my toe while laying below to draw clean hammocks; played checkers; went on watch at 4; somebody stole my drawers.

  "Ensign Garrett has the devil up him, and I think he wants to make me his apprentice," Midshipman Beck murmured as he hunched over his meal.

  "You don't have to put up with Sand-Crab Singleton, so count your blessings," Midshipman Davis responded while fighting for elbow room on the narrow table. They were in the junior officers' mess, crammed to the corners with young men fresh from the Academy. For many this was their first voyage of any length and only now were they regaining their appetites. The air was filled with awkward, new-learned slang. 'Punk' for bread; 'sand' for salt; 'slumgullion' for any kind of soup or stew; 'salt horse' for salt beef. They bolted their meals, for there was no telling when they would be called to quarters in one of Captain Oates' infernal drills. And with the ship stewards and mess men behaving the way they were, the uncertainty of dining was increased tenfold.

  "Uh... moke. Moke! You carrying that pot or did you spill some on your head? We need some Java here." Beck eyed with distaste the murky glass of water next to his empty coffee mug. The ship's fresh water supply had been drawn from a lake in the Dismal Swamp near Norfolk. It possessed a variety of discolorations, one part due to rust from the Florida's iron water tank, another part from the juniper berries that had fallen into the lake, and a third part due, no doubt, to something that best remained a mystery. A long line of admirals from the Civil War to the present swore it prevented everything from scurvy to seasickness. And after one sip of it, a long list of ratings had switched to tea and coffee, which were at least boiled beforehand.

  "Hey, moke, don't any of you spades have ears?"

  Amos Macklin had had no intention of acknowledging Beck. A 'moke' was a colored mess boy or hall attendant and he still thought of himself as a Seaman Second Class. But the middy's last volley picked a scab. Shrugging, he brought the coffee pot over and topped the metal cup so close to the rim that Beck could not lift it without spilling some.

  "No, sir, spades don't have ears. Nor do shovels or rakes, last I heard."

  Beck leaned down to sip some of the dark liquid off the edge. The ship yawed suddenly and rode up on the beam and the table jumped into the midshipman's face. Gasping, he inhaled a nose-full of hot coffee.

  "Whoa!" Davis laughed.

  "Son of a bitch!" Beck choked.

  There were embarrassed titters from the junior officers around him. These young men had been chosen not only for their clean-cut complexions, but for their equally spotless morals. It was the rare curse that passed their lips.

  But Beck had hot coffee up his nose and he knew who to blame. All the associations ran together. From a black hand had come a black liquid which had nearly gagged him--which equaled a black insult. When he turned, however, Macklin was out of sight.

  "It was an accident," Davis said, his consolation soured by the doubt in his voice.

  Amos Macklin was pleased as hell by his little subversion. He'd never asked for this chicken-gut job and the best people to blame were the ones sitting where he had wanted to sit.

  Methuselah's nightmare premonition had come true.

  Up to a month ago, the stewards on the ships of the Atlantic Fleet had been Japanese. They were popular with the crews. And the very fact that they seemed to enjoy serving the white men did much to demythologize the victors of Tsushima. The sailors who had destroyed the Russian fleet in 1905 might be less inclined to engage the Americans if they knew a few hundred cousins were on board.

  But then it was announced that the grand cruise would include several stops on the West Coast. Anti-Japanese demonstrations had become endemic to California. The residents were certain the Japanese population of San Francisco and environs represented the vanguard of a yellow invasion. It all seemed far‑fetched to Easterners. But was it? Several newspapers reported that an army of ten thousand Japs was practicing maneuvers just south of the Mexican border. Nothing had been confirmed, but many Americans were beginning to feel that improbable did not mean impossible. Although Roosevelt had compelled the western states to rescind some of their anti-Japanese laws, to sail past the Golden Gate with a passel of Nips on board would make poor political sense. So, abruptly, they were banned.

  The black sailors drafted to replace them were finding out the hard way that joining the Navy was not like signing the articles on a merchant tramp or whaler, which assigned one a specialty--such as second mate or carpenter's mate--for the length of the voyage.

  There was plenty of cooking to be done:

  There was the captain's mess, where Oates ate alone.

  The wardroom mess, for the commissioned officers. This was the preferred lair of the reporters, who dubbed it the 'jollification mess' in the papers.

  The junior officers' mess, where Beck sat nursing his nose.

  The chief petty officers' mess.

  The warrant officers' mess.

  And the biggest of the lot, the general mess, where the ordinary seaman dined on some of the best food ever served to American jackies. Reporters with the Fleet made much of the fact that Japanese sailors had to do with bean‑curd, fish and seaweed, while the American boys could dine on veal, sausage, succotash, potatoes, pork chops, applesauce, corn bread, eggs, and thick beef stew‑‑not to mention the comfits that would be served when they sailed into distant ports. All of which was prepared and served up by the new, black stewards.

  But since anger and resentment had a way of spoiling flavor, not all of the fine food stowed aboard for the sailors arrived on their tables in the best condition. This did not affect the captains and rear admirals. They had to pay for their own food. As a consequence, a flag officer's mess was usually a miserable affair, and a captain's not much better. But those officers concerned about the morale of their men took note of the badly prepared food in the general mess. They were certain their coloreds were burning and over‑boiling and under‑cooking on purpose. They took it upon themselves to assure the blacks they would win back their rating at the conclusion of the voyage. On some ships, the cooking improved. But Amos Macklin was historically‑minded.

  "You know what Andrew Jackson told the slaves in the War of 1812?" he said to one of his black mates. "He told them they could have their f
reedom, once they beat the British. We didn't get free for half a hundred years after that, and the British were beat and long gone. You know the story. We all do. Andy Jackson was laughing all the way up his white ass. That's what this navy is doing. They're laughing at us. And they call it 'nigger heaven.'"

  The man to whom he spoke did not respond. Like Macklin, he had been present for a little speech Captain Oates had given the new stewards. "I know you boys have been given a raw deal, but I swear the Navy will make it up to you," began Captain Oates' speech to his new stewards. It was the closest thing they'd ever seen to a white man begging. But most of them were unmoved. Some of them had already been "met by the galley"--it was fast becoming a standard phrase--by bluejackets who were irate over the poor quality of the cooking, not to mention the glum manner in which it was served. The bruised stewards dared not tell the ship surgeons anything other than that they'd fallen down a hatch, leaving the surgeons bewildered as to why these once-nimble men were suddenly tripping over their own feet.

  The steward to whom Macklin spoke was certain Macklin would be met by the galley. He did not want to share his fate. Without saying a word, he shuffled away. Amos knew what was on his mind, and made a sound of disgust. The grand old navy‑‑dead and gone! As a child in Savannah, he'd heard grizzled black tars regale listeners with tales of the sea; and then, when they'd had enough to drink, amuse them with jigs and sea chanties. There had been no such thing as a majority or minority in the union navy. The sailors manning the ships were from around the world. High in the sheets, you were as likely to meet a mate from Madagascar as a whelp from Nantucket. But the day of sail was gone‑‑as well as, it was apparent to Macklin, the day of seaman equality. Just as ships still bore masts beside their funnels, the black man seemed merely a vestige of the past. Appearance was everything, and everything was white.

  The day after learning of the admiral's order, Amos had received his Clothing and Small Store Requisition: watch cap, pancake cap, cap-ribbon; two sets of heavy underwear, two white jumpers and trousers, two white hats, a heavy blue overcoat, a blue overshirt, blue trousers, six pairs of wool socks, six pairs of cotton; a pair of high shoes, bathing trunks, leggings, a silk neckerchief, two towels, two wool blankets; a scrub brush, shoe brush and whisk broom; soap, assorted buttons, needles, thread, and white clothes-stops for putting it all into a few compact rolls. The Navy made a big to-do over the fact that this was given the men gratis. But the bare truth was that this was the kit of an ordinary seaman.