Ghost of a Flea

Chapter Seven

Back in basic, over near Mobile, they put me in a barracks full of white men not altogether reconciled to their new living arrangements. Working beside us was one thing. These weren’t, after all, your educated, privileged young white gentlemen-most of those one way or another got out of serving-so it’s not like they weren’t used to working on farms or in factories or loading trucks alongside Negroes. They’d even got used to using the same bathrooms. But this, sleeping beside us, eating every meal with us, this was something else again.

I’d lie in bed at night after lights-out watching the play of shadows from palm trees on the wall and listening to the wind. It seemed to me that summer that the wind was coming in off the beach always, rushing breathless towards us from somewhere else, washing up in great waves like the tides themselves.

A few days before my own wave peaked, I had watched them grab one of the other blacks, a slow, slightly backward, ever-friendly boy from Texas, out behind the latrine. He’d been lipping off to them, they said-and beat him badly. I had seen it happening, then gone on by, and hadn’t stepped up to them on it. I was still worrying over that, trying to find a place inside myself I could put it. But if I did step up to them, I kept telling myself, they’d only come for me next. At that point I hadn’t learned that it didn’t matter, they’d most likely come for me anyway.

They did, maybe two weeks later, about two in the morning. I heard the springs on one of their beds, then the other, and could follow their progress towards me by the creaking of floorboards. I lay unmoving, one arm hanging off the side of my bunk. Outside, a sudden gust of wind caught in the trees and bounced like a thrown ball from branch to branch.

Moments before they reached me, I jumped to my feet. The radio my mother had just sent me came along; I swung it on its cord in two quick circles above my head before crashing it against that of the nearest of my attackers. I heard the crunch of something internal, radio, head, giving way. The man went down and didn’t move.

Turning to the other, I pulled out the antenna I’d taken off the radio earlier and with a flick of my wrist extended it. I went at him with it as though it were whip and foil in one, slashing, slashing again. Deep cuts opened on the hands he held up to try and protect himself, on his face, on neck and arms. When he began backing away, I went with him, never letting up, slashing, tearing. He tripped, tripped again and this time couldn’t catch himself, falling backwards against the wall.

Thanks, Mom.

During all this, no one else in the barracks had moved or spoken. Now a voice from the far end said: “Those boys through?”

“They be done with, all right,” another said.

Then the first again: “You okay, Griffin?”

I said I was.

“That’s good.”

A pause. I could hear my heart thudding. “Right shame those boys had to tear into each other that way. Who’d have thought there was bad blood between them? Always looked to be close. Just goes to show.… Guess we’d best get the sergeant in here, tell him what happened. Reckon they’ll be in stir awhile.”