Breakfast in Valhalla

Note: I wrote this essay several years ago. At that time a veterans group called the Vintage Squadron met twice a month for breakfast at the local VFW. The breakfasts are no longer held there, but continue at a local restaurant. 

It is 8:00 a.m. on a Wednesday morning at the VFW in Kankakee, Illinois, The chairs at the tables in the banquet room are slowly filling until within fifteen or twenty minutes 80 to 100 men have gathered. All once members of one or another branch of the military (a few currently serving in the reserve); all now sharing an hour or two of memories and fellowship. Their experiences range from World War II to Desert Storm, from the Bataan death march to combat in Iraq; from high-altitude streams of bombers over Europe to the last bombing of Japan; from the shell cratered beaches and tropical jungles of Pacific islands to the shooting gallery rice paddies of Vietnam; from the frozen Chosin reservoir in Korea and the landing at Inchon to the D-day invasion of Europe and the Battle of the Bulge; from naval battle groups and carriers steaming westward, to silent running beneath enemy flotillas; from bomber fighter escort to helicopter rescue; from jeeps to tanks, single-engine, bi-wing trainers to supersonic jets; from orderly rooms and supply depots to weather stations and control towers; from base hospitals, guard houses and mess halls to lonely foxholes on the perimeter of hell. Flight One of the Vintage Squadron is present and accounted for. It is breakfast time in Valhalla.

    One of the greatest of privileges is to be among these men. Not that they would ever characterize this breakfast or any of the other twice a month meetings as a gathering of heroic warriors, such as the title of this little essay might indicate. But in the aggregate they embody unwritten volumes of a vast collection of experience, of service and sacrifice to their country for over half a century, some of it workaday, some of it truly heroic, where humor and pathos shade the telling.

    I once sat between two veteran infantrymen of different eras. One had been a platoon sergeant, who survive the December 1944 German onslaught on Bastogne; the other a private trying to stay alive while engaged in an uphill battle on some obscure enemy outpost in Korea. Said the platoon sergeant, it was the replacements, they came in in the morning and were dead by evening, I never had a chance to even know their names. Said the private, I just ran as fast as I could, firing as fast as I could. My gun got so hot that the Cosmoline remaining where I hadn’t been able to clean it out melted and ran down across my hands and blistered them.

    Pilots and crew members of all types of military aircraft recall, sometimes humorously, sometimes with self-deprecating candor, the moments of terror and moments of exaltation during aerial combat. One B-29 pilot and crew finish a record 30 missions over Japan insuring them a ticket home, except that on this final bomb run flack and Japanese fighters knock out the B-29’s starboard engines. The pilot manages a titanic struggle to keep the bomber in the air until it reaches Iwo Jima, where it makes a crash landing on an emergency runway. The crew survives. Tragically, this incident is only a prelude to a second crash two weeks later off Kwajaline Atoll, involving the same pilot and crew, who are flying to Hawaii on another B-29. Minutes after takeoff this aircraft plummets into the water. Three crew members survive—the pilot and two of his gunners. Then there is the story of a crippled B-17 returning to England after a raid on Germany. An inflatable life raft stowed in a compartment is shaken lose and inflates inside the fuselage. It hits one of the waist guns and causes the gun to swivel and fire toward the rear of the aircraft. A round strikes the tail gunner in the butt. Undoubtedly the only aircrew member ever to be shot by a life raft.

    Some men for short periods of their lives held positions of command, made life and death decisions, were asked to lead other men to what Lincoln defined as “the last full measure of devotion.” The dark deeds of necessity on the battlefield are not easily told, very rarely. Only rows of crosses and white grave markers in distant fields remain as silent testaments.

    Occasionally into this venerable gathering comes a young man in spiffy dress class A. Close cropped hair and the ruddy flush of desert tan still garnish his cheeks. Just back, he says. And soon old men recall how they once in military duds stood tall and lean in solid ranks on parade. Memories find voice. Not forgotten the dead and gone. And so the coffee cools, the rosy blush of morning fades, and one by one the men depart. 

    Into this now quiet Valhalla the Valkyries summon members of those legions lost on bloody fields of war. Ghostly banners, flags and ensigns unfurl to mark the eternal bivouac of the dead. Not forgotten! is passed from file to file. Rest easy. Not forgotten, echoes. Not in vain we died. The price we paid to purchase liberty not too dear—was it? Youth cut short, a promise unfulfilled. An honored death. 

    And so Valhalla awaits the next Wednesday morning communion of the tried and tested, brother patriots and men at arms, and those who served behind the lines of battle. They come, as do winter birds to sunny shores, to bask in the warm glow of friendship, to share with aging comrades another breakfast in Valhalla.

“Negroes in the Servitude of our Planters”

“‘Me come say ha-do . . .’ and then they all troop off as noiselessly as they entered, like a procession of sable dreams.” 

Opposition to slavery in the American colonies began with the Quakers in Pennsylvania in the 1680s. For the next hundred years the problem of slavery was discussed in “instructions” issued at monthly meetings: “. . . we have thought proper to make our advice and judgment more public, that none may plead ignorance of our principles therein; and also again earnestly exhort all, to avoid in any manner encouraging that practice, of making slaves of our fellow creatures.”

    Malachy Postlethwayt (c.1707–1767), writer on economics and publicist) argued that the advantages of African and West India trade “are the most nationally beneficial of any we carry on. . . . that Traffic only affording our Planters a constant Supply of Negroe-Servants for the Culture of their lands . . . owing primarily to the Labour of Negroes; who, as they were the first happy Instruments of raising our Plantations; so their Labor can only support and preserve them, and render them still more and more profitable to their Mother-Kingdom. . . . But I never heard it said that the Lives of Negroes in the Servitude of our Planters were less tolerable than those of Colliers and Miners in all Christian Countries.”

   Condemnation of slavery by European and North American religious leaders and philosophers during the 1700s fueled arguments about human rights and God-given law. But as a practical matter, “The issue of slavery, as if formed in the eighteenth century, was based on fear, defense, and profit—not morality. (Great Issues in American History) As they came to recognize the problems of a large slave population, most Southern colonies tried to impose a highly restrictive import duty to discourage if not prohibit the importation of slaves. The British, over a period of fifty years, struck down these attempts, which encouraged Jefferson in the first draft of the Declaration to include in his indictment of the king the statement, ‘He [the king] has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce,’ an assertion that was eliminated in the final version because it offended New England merchants and certain Southern planters.” 

   The Revolutionary War, fought to protect the universal “natural rights of men,” caused many Americans to see slavery as a violation of those rights.

   Thomas Paine became one of the most influential voices for the abolition of slavery in colonial America. In 1775 he published an essay on African slavery.

   “. . . . Too many nations enslaved the prisoners they took in war,” wrote Paine. “But to go to nations with whom there is no war, who have no way provoked, without further design of conquest, purely to catch inoffensive people, like wild beasts, for slaves, is an height of outrage against Humanity and Justice, that seems left by Heathen nations to be practiced by pretended Christians. How shameful are all attempt to colour and excuse it!

   “As these people are not convicted of forfeiting freedom, they have still a natural, perfect right to it; and the Governments whenever they come should, in justice set them free, and punish those who hold them in slavery. . . .”

   On April 14, 1775, the first anti-slavery society in America was organized in Philadelphia. Paine became a member.

   Antislavery protests after 1817 were led by the American Colonization Society. The American Antislavery Society, founded in 1833, supported William Lloyd Garrison’s crusade against slavery. 

   Antislavery politicians founded the Liberty Party in 1840.

•   •   •

It is believed generally among historians that the idea of the abolition of slavery grew out of the philosophical sea change in Anglo-European thinking labeled the “Enlightenment.” 

   Peter Gay described the Enlightenment as “A loose, informal, wholly unorganized coalition of cultural critics, religious skeptics, and political reformers from Edinburgh to Naples, Paris to Berlin, Boston to Philadelphia . . .united on a vastly ambitious program . . . of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom, above all freedom in its many forms . . .” 

   There are scholars such as Hilary Beckles who suggest that there was an “‘indigenous anti-slavery movement’ among Africans in America. That is, abolitionism was as much a BLACK response to slavery as a European phenomenon, and hence the concentration on the abolition movement in the standard literature as a WHITE, European movement is only part of the story.” 

   Paul E. Lovejoy explains that “Institutions of servitude, including slavery, that were acceptable in Africa and to which many Africans had been exposed even before their own enslavement were no longer acceptable in the Americas.” The conditions in America “were such that the ideological framework that countenanced slavery was transformed into abolitionism.”

•   •   •

   The names of Americans who supported the abolitionist movement during the years before the Civil War—Elijah P. Lovejoy, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Wendell Phillips—have become legendary. One name, Fanny Kemble, remains in relative obscurity. She was the wife of a plantation owner on Butler’s Island, Georgia. Yet some say she had as much to do with the abolition of slavery as the celebrated Harriet Beecher Stowe.

   The condition of the slaves at Butler Place on Butler’s Island was far different from those seen by Stowe at Brentwood Plantation in Kentucky. 

   Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was inspired by stories of runaway slaves and tales of the Underground Railroad she had heard while living in Cincinnati, and by a mystical vision; Kemble experienced firsthand absolute human degradation on Butler’s Island. During the critical year of 1863, when England was on the verge of recognizing the Southern Confederacy, Kemble published in London and New York her memoir, A Residence on a Georgia Plantation. 

   Critics and historians still argue the authenticity of Kemble’s book and the influence it had in England’s decision to not recognize the Confederacy. 

   “But, fact or fiction,” wrote Margaret Armstrong in Fanny Kemble, a Passionate Victorian, “its worst enemies could not deny that the horrid story was interesting. . . . Mrs. Kemble’s account of plantation life was accepted at its face value, as the statement of an eye witness and a dreadful indictment of slavery.”

   Before her marriage to Pierce Butler, Fanny, the niece of the noted tragedienne Sarah Siddons, had been an actress who charmed audiences with her beauty and talent in England and America. Appalled by the conditions she found in the slave quarters on Butler’s Island, Fanny shocked her husband and the plantation’s overseer by entering hovels in which slaves lived and attempting to improve the intolerable conditions she found there. But her fearless ministry only antagonized her husband who resented her “northern” prejudices, and who saw himself as a wise and benevolent ruler of contented subjects. 

   In a letter Fanny wrote from Butler Place in 1840 she said: “I found an old negro named Friday lying on the floor of the damp, dark, filthy room; his glazed eyes and rattling breath told me that he was dying. . . . There he lay—the worn out slave whose life had been spent in unrequited labor for me and mine, without one physical alleviation, one Christian solace, one human sympathy—panting out his last breath like a forsaken beast of burden rotting where it falls. As I bent over him, blinded with tears of unavailing pity, there was a quivering of the eyelids and falling of the jaw—and he was free. How I rejoiced for him; and how, as I turned to the wretches who were calling to me from the inner room, I wished they were all gone with him, freed by death, from bitter, bitter bondage.”

In Search of Africa’s History

“The Africans who came to the United States as slaves started their attempts to reclaim their lost African heritage soon after they arrived in this country. They were searching for the lost identity that the slave system had destroyed. Concurrent with the Black man’s search for an identity in America has been his search for an identity in the world, which means, in essence, his identity as a human being with a history, before and after slavery, that can command respect.”

    The above passage was written by Dr. John Henrik Clarke in an “Afterward” to the 1986 republication of J. C. DeGraft-Johnson’s 1954 ground-breaking book, African Glory: The Story of Vanished Negro Civilizations (Black Classic Press, Baltimore, MD).

    “African Glory is a general history of Africa written by an indigenous African scholar,” said Dr. Clarke. “This book was published in 1954, the eve of the ‘Independence explosion’ in Africa and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Colonialism and the attitudes that went with it were being challenged by African people and people throughout the world. In demanding the right to rule their land, they were also demanding the right to interpret their history.”

    When DeGraft-Johnson sat down to write African Glory in the early 1950s he faced a dilemma: Should he write an overall history of Africa without detailing racial types; or, in his words, “regard Africa as the ‘Land of the Negroes’ and give a history of the Negro race[?]” He was aware that a whole section of South Africa’s Witwatersrand University was devoted to research into the origins and distribution of the “Negro race,” but ancient bones found in Africa were still the center of heated controversy. He knew some learned men believed there were “no Negro skulls of any antiquity—the oldest known is about 6000 B. C.” 

    “It must be noted that we have not yet succeeded in finding out the original home or the evolutionary area of the Negro,” DeGraft-Johnson concluded. He then set aside the arguments and wrote: “In this book we can only hope to touch on some of the salient landmarks in the history of this vast continent.”

    Anyone who has watched Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Wonders of the African World on PBS will find familiar ground in African Glory. Histories of lost kingdoms, of African empires, of African literati and the diaspora of the slave trade are common themes. Citing a lecture given by Professor Emil Torday in Geneva in 1931, DeGraft-Johnson wrote that the slave trade broke up or undermined the various and once peaceful “peasantry” of indigenous African cultures. Then came slave traders “and millions of de-tribalized or decentralized Africans were let loose upon each other. . . .”

•   •   •

    In Haiti the 1791 slave rebellion overthrew a French government. For eight years Toussaint L’Ouverture ruled a free black republic. Afrocentrism surfaced in Haiti during the 1820s and declared the origins of black African civilization lay in ancient Egypt. 

    In the United States Afrocentric thought and the Black Nationalism movement began at least 100 years before the publication of African Glory. William J. Moses (The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925, 1978), suggests that the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law, marked “a point at which several black leaders began to turn in the direction of the back-to-Africa movements.”

    Moses noted in the introduction to his book Africans living in a “Westernized” culture recognized “differences between African societies and the self-confident, civilized, Anglo-Saxon culture.” A movement began that advocated African civilization, “which embodied a sense of obligation to aid in the uplifting of the continent and its ‘backward’ peoples as an initial step in the elevation of black people everywhere. . . . If Africa could be uplifted, the slave trade would cease. Africans living abroad could take pride in their homeland. The humanity of the Negro would be vindicated and the link between blackness and slavery would be destroyed, once an African civilization had been established.” Out of “Pan-Africanism” evolved an authoritarian collectivist ideal, “a belief that all black people could and should act unanimously under the leadership of one powerful man or group of men, who would guide the race by virtue of superior knowledge or divine authority towards the goal of civilization.”

    Black separatism, the secular form of the Black Nationalism movement, and the religious form, Ethiopeanism (inspired by the Old Testament story of enslaved Israelites in Egypt), were practiced by Westernized Africans of the late nineteenth century. 

    Ironically, said Moses, “Black chauvinism” was a stepchild of European racial theory. “Strangely, the black nationalists of the nineteenth century tended to accept the descriptions of the various races and their innate characteristics almost exactly as they had been described by the European philosophers. . . . Racial chauvinism therefore often consisted of arguing that nature had actually been kinder to the sensitive and gentle African than the stolid, frigid European.” 

•   •   •

    What was known about the history of African people in the late 1800s? 

    During the 1400s the Portuguese had explored the west African coast and by 1488 Diaz had reached the southern Tip of the continent. Slave trade began in 1442, when 10 Africans were brought to Lisbon. For over 350 years trade along the coasts of Africa, and trade with the sub-Sahara kingdoms by Muslim states of the Near East, brought many parts of Africa under the influence of Eastern and Western countries, and Christian and Islam religions. It wasn’t until 1880 that European powers began to divide Africa into colonies. However, travelers, explorers and missionaries had collected enough information by 1875 so that a series of histories of a sort could be compiled and published in England by Rev. Dr. J. G. Wood. A two volume set of Wood’s works including the African histories was printed in the United States in 1878 under the title The Uncivilized Races of Men in All Countries of the World. 

    The author’s Preface states that because of “the extraordinary variety of the native customs which prevail in that wonderful land [Africa]. . . . It will be seen . . . how necessary it is to devote to that one continent a considerable portion of this work.” Six hundred and ninety-three pages of the first volume and 185 engravings are allotted to African cultures. 

    The American publisher’s Preface recognizes the Rev. Dr. Wood as “among the most popular and foremost writers of Great Britain,” and recommends that The Uncivilized Races of Man was worthy of a place in every household library.

    The Uncivilized Races of Man indoctrinated the general public with a view of Africa held by white Christian missionaries and judged by Victorian morality. Africa appeared to be a continent of contrasting cultures, cruel practices and pagan “fetish” religions. In Wood’s words: “We have, for example, on one side of the river, a people well clothed, well fed, well governed, and retaining but few of the old savage customs. On the other side, we find people without clothes, government, manners, or morality, and sunk as deeply as man can be in all the squalid miseries of savage life.” In a discussion of Dahome, Wood complained that the West African had not been uplifted by his association with Europeans, “men wiser and more powerful” than himself. Instead, he had “only increased his barbarity by the additional means which he obtained from the white man.”

    DeGraft-Johnson expressed a different opinion: “Tribes had to supply slaves or be sold as slaves themselves, for this was the age of the gangster. Violence, brutality, and ferocity became the necessities of survival, for generosity and good neighborliness had lost their meaning.”