hustling life. I'd snatch out and read my Greetings aloud, to make certain they heard who I was,
and when I'd report downtown. (This was probably the only time my real name was ever heard in
Harlem in those days.)
The day I went down there, I costumed like an actor. With my wild zoot suit I wore the yellow
knob-toe shoes, and I frizzled my hair up into a reddish bush of conk.
I went in, skipping and tipping, and I thrust my tattered Greetings at that reception desk's white
soldier-"Crazy-o, daddy-o, get me moving. I can't wait to get in that brown"-very likely that soldier
hasn't recovered from me yet.
They had their wire on me from uptown, all right. But they still put me through the line. In that big
starting room were forty or fifty other prospective inductees. The room had fallen vacuum-quiet,
with me running my mouth a mile a minute, talking nothing but slang. I was going to fight on all
fronts; I was going to be a general, man, before I got done-such talk as that.
Most of them were white, of course. The tender-looking ones appeared ready to run from me.
Some others had that vinegary "worst kind of nigger" look. And a few were amused, seeing me as
the "Harlem jigaboo" archetype.
Also amused were some of the room's ten or twelve Negroes. But the stony-faced rest of them
looked as if they were ready to sign up to go off killing somebody-they would have liked to start
with me.
The line moved along. Pretty soon, stripped to my shorts, I was making my eager-to-join
comments in the medical examination rooms-and everybody in the white coats that I saw had 4-F
in his eyes.
I stayed in the line longer than I expected, before they siphoned me off. One of the white coats
accompanied me around a turning hallway: I knew we were on the way to a head-shrinker-the
Army psychiatrist.
The receptionist there was a Negro nurse. I remember she was in her early twenties, and not bad
to look at. She was one of those Negro "firsts."
Negroes know what I'm talking about. Back then, the white man during the war was so pressed
for personnel that he began letting some Negroes put down their buckets and mops and dust
rags and use a pencil, or sit at some desk, or hold some twenty-five-cent tide. You couldn't read
the Negro press for the big pictures of smug black "firsts."
Somebody was inside with the psychiatrist. I didn't even have to put on any act for this black girl;
she was already sick of me.
When, finally, a buzz came at her desk, she didn't send me, she went in. I knew what she was
doing, she was going to make clear, in advance, what she thought of me. This is still one of the
black man's big troubles today. So many of those so-called "upper-class" Negroes are so busy
trying to impress on the white man that they are "different from those others" that they can't see
they are only helping the white man to keep his low opinion of all Negroes.
And then, with her prestige in the clear, she came out and nodded to me to go in.
I must say this for that psychiatrist. He tried to be objective and professional in his manner. He sat
there and doodled with his blue pencil on a tablet, listening to me spiel to him for three or four
minutes before he got a word in.
His tack was quiet questions, to get at why I was so anxious. I didn't rush him; I circled and
hedged, watching him closely, to let him think he was pulling what he wanted out of me. I kept
jerking around, backward, as though somebody might be listening. I knew I was going to send
him back to the books to figure what kind of a case I was.
Suddenly, I sprang up and peeped under both doors, the one I'd entered and another that
probably was a closet. And then I bent and whispered fast in his ear. "Daddy-o, now you and me,
we're from up North here, so don't you tell nobody.... I want to get sent down South. Organize
them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!"
That psychiatrist's blue pencil dropped, and his professional manner fell off in all directions. He
stared at me as if I were a snake's egg hatching, fumbling forhis red pencil. I knew I had him. I
was going back out past Miss First when he said, "That will be all."
A 4-F card came to me in the mail, and I never heard from the Army anymore, and never
darsice
(darsice)
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