Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (4 page)
She turned to my daddy and gave him her famous hard gaze. “You are
not
gonna join the service,” she said. “You’re gonna stay right here and help your daddy.”
“But the war’s going to be
over
,” he complained, the way a teenager today might whine about not getting to go see a movie. “I want you to sign for me.”
“Well, I’m not gonna do it,” Ma Boykin said. And that was that.
Except that Daddy walked into the local recruiter’s office in downtown Wilson that very week, lied about his age, and walked out a Navy radarman. Back at home in the kitchen, he broke the news to Ma Boykin, who was washing pinto beans in the sink.
“Mama, I know you told me not to, but I went on and enlisted,” he said. “I ship out next week.”
Ma Boykin pulled her hands from the bean water, turned slowly, and eyed Daddy with that stern face. He braced himself.
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “You better not come home with no tattoos.”
That’s how five of the Boykin boys came to be serving in World War II at the same time. The whole time I was growing up, Ma Boykin kept a photograph of them all on the farmhouse mantel. In the old black-and-white, all five of them sat side-by-side on a bench, decked out in uniform. Three brothers—Ed, Mickey, and Martin—wore Army dress greens and rakish grins, their garrison caps pulled low over their eyes the way invincible young men wore them in those days. Dad and Wilton wore Navy crackerjacks, their Dixie cup caps tilted to the side like those of the sailors in
South Pacific
. No longer boys, but men: a tobacco farmer’s sons, raised on biscuits and pole-fishing, farm chores and baseball, guided with a firm hand, but cutting up when nobody was looking. Plain country men proud to fight and die for a nation that blessed them with a plain country life.
I wanted to be just like them. I felt
an obligation
to be like them. Not in the way an obligation feels like a burden, but the way an obligation can become an honorable duty that, left undone, feels like a puzzle with the middle missing. It was the family tradition, an expectation that a Boykin man would serve his country.
GROWING UP, I SPENT A LOT OF TIME on Ma and Pa Boykin’s tobacco farm, working in their tobacco fields. Summertime was high season and I wanted to be a part of what everyone else was doing. I pitched in as a “hander,” the job reserved for the most unskilled people in the fields. Pa had a whole fleet of tobacco “trucks,” which were really just little mule-drawn wagons, skinny enough to roll down between the rows in the fields. After workers stripped the leaves from the plants, they drove the wagons back to the barn.
All day long, I would pick up a handful of freshly harvested tobacco leaves and
hand
it to the elderly black women who worked as “tiers.” (That’s why they called us “handers.”) Fresh from the field, the grass-green leaves oozed tobacco gum, a thick, fragrant liquid that dripped from the stems in great, sticky drops. The older black women danced the leaves onto four-foot-long tobacco sticks, their hands quick as fireflies: Loop, knot, done.
My favorite tier was Miss Cora. She was a round, motherly lady with a great big lap and the gentlest smile I’d ever seen. Miss Cora always took time out to chat with me, and when the sun got high during the harvest, we’d sit down together under a shade tree for a meal of saltines, sardines, and Moon Pies, all washed down with RC Cola.
When I wasn’t working in the fields, I was hanging around with my best friend, Junior, whose family lived on the farm. Junior was just my size, with high cheekbones, big doe eyes, and mahogany skin. We had the run of the farm, which was a couple hundred acres. We loved to climb high in the oak trees or play hide and seek, darting in and out of the cool shade. But our most important job by far was building forts and defending them from the Indians. At least once a week, we expected a huge attack by the local Indians, and we spent a lot of time reinforcing our walls and ramparts. When foul weather kept us indoors, I was as happy as a duck in a puddle to hang around at Junior’s house with his mama and daddy, Miss Mildred and Mr. Sam. I don’t know exactly how many brothers and sisters Junior had, but when we gathered around Miss Mildred’s table for lunch, I was like a pinto dropped into a handful of coffee beans. I didn’t think anything of it. Junior and I were tighter than bark on a tree.
The older I got, the more I found myself drawn to that old photo of Daddy and my uncles on the farmhouse mantel. My dad, Gerald Cecil Boykin, was what they used to call a “man’s man”—a hunter, a fisherman, a lover of all sports. The best thing about my dad was that while I was growing up, I knew every weekend he and I were going to go do something—hunt quail, fish for bass, or go watch a baseball game. I just knew that. It’s given me a heart for boys who grow up without a dad, as so many do today.
But Daddy would never talk to me about what happened to him during the war. Men in those days held things in. One measure of a man was that he had the inner strength to bear his own burdens. But the more Dad clammed up, the more I clamored for information.
To fill out the details, I began to imagine for myself a wartime back-story, in which my dad ran daring small-boat operations up the Rhine River with Glenn Ford, Henry Fonda, and John Wayne. I knew he didn’t, really, but I had fun thinking about it. On Saturdays, I handed over my fifteen cents at the picture show and another quarter for a box of popcorn and a Coke. Then I’d hunker in the flickering dark watching
The Guns of Navarone
or
The Great Escape
with Daddy or my friend Bobby.
One television show,
Run Silent, Run Deep
, a show about submarines, also fired my imagination. The American Navy sank a German U-boat just about every week, and I added these scenes to my romantic ideas about war and fighting men.
So what I knew about what really happened to my dad on D-Day, how he became a Purple Heart winner and my hero, I set against the backdrop of wartime newsreels and movie scenes.
It was June 6, 1944. My dad was a radarman aboard a destroyer, and the ship had taken up its position off Omaha Beach at Normandy, France. From their inland artillery positions, the Nazis pounded the beach and surf. Dad, only eighteen years old, volunteered to drive a personnel landing craft vehicle, one of those defenseless small boats that carried heroes to death and victory. I was ten years old when Dad finally sketched the scene for me. I filled in the details, imagining he could feel the concussion of artillery blasts and hear the rattle of German guns from their beachside bunkers. I could see American soldiers streaming off other landing craft and onto the beach, some falling immediately, others charging up the sand, crouched low and firing. I knew from the movies that blood splashed the beach and bloomed in the water. And in the middle of it all, I could see my daddy, just a teenager, piloting his boat into the smoke and thunder.
When Dad told me the story of how he was wounded, all he remembered is something exploded in his face and the world went dark. The Howitzers’ roar, the pounding shells, the bloody surf—all of it simply disappeared. The next time Daddy was fully aware, he was stretched out in a bed at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. A thick cotton pad covered his left eye, held there by a belt of gauze circling his head. The blast at Normandy destroyed his optic nerve and for the rest of his life, he would see out of only one eye. My father did not complain and as a consequence, I did not know until I was twelve years old that he was technically half blind.
GROWING UP, I WAS ALWAYS THE “BIG KID.” By the seventh grade, I was already six feet tall and 180 pounds. You’d think that might scare people off, but instead my size acted more like a trouble magnet. Seemed as if everybody who wanted to make a name for himself thought whipping the Big Kid was just the ticket. So I got in a lot more fights than I wanted and spent a good deal of time in the principal’s office. I never got whipped, but in the fifth grade, I did get some teeth knocked out in a school bus fight.
One fight I got into had a silver lining.
In seventh grade, I played on the school basketball team with this kid named Jimmy Ferebee. I didn’t know him very well. One day at practice, we collided under the basket a few too many times and our tempers began to heat up. We pushed and shoved a little, exchanged the required macho threats and insults. It came to a head in the locker room after practice.
“Hey, Boykin!” Jimmy Ferebee said. “Wanna take this outside?”
“I got no beef with you,” I said, picking up my gym bag. “I’m going home.”
But when I turned to walk out of the locker room, Jimmy shoved me in the back. In one motion, I whirled, dropped my bag, and grabbed him around the neck. Then we fell to the ground and began flailing away. He was tough and held his own. I got the upper hand only because I was bigger.
After a few minutes, though, I got tired of fighting. “If you’ve had enough, I’m going to let you up,” I said.
Jimmy could’ve gone either way. “Okay,” he said simply. I was glad since Jimmy was strong and quick, and I didn’t know how much longer I could hold him down.
So I unfolded myself from the floor, picked up my bag, and walked out of the locker room. Don’t ask me to explain the mysteries of male bonding, but from that moment on, Jimmy and I were inseparable. We did
everything
together including our two great passions: sports and music. We both lettered in baseball, basketball, and football, but liked football best. I was pretty good at linebacker and loved to mow down anyone who had the bad taste to still be in possession of the ball behind the line of scrimmage. Because of my size, I also played fullback, blocking for—guess who?—Jimmy.
Jimmy was outgoing and gregarious, and the older we got, the better looking he got. (I just got taller.) Besides being the school’s star running back, all the girls thought he looked like the teen heartthrob Bobby Darin, and he could sing like him, too. One day when we were sophomores, Jimmy said, “Let’s get us some ukuleles and learn to play.”
So we did, then we moved up to guitars. After that, Jimmy bought a banjo, and a girl named Anita Johnson joined us to form a trio. It was the era of folk music: Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul, and Mary. The three of us sang “Puff the Magic Dragon” at every country fair and talent contest in a tri-county area. (I wanted to sing country music, but Jimmy and Anita hated it and wouldn’t let me.) In 1965, our little group traveled all the way to New York City and sang at the World’s Fair. We sang together until we graduated. Jimmy went on to a twenty-year professional music career. Anita went on to become Miss North Carolina.
By then, I’d fallen in love with Lynne Cameron, a beautiful blonde who’d transferred into our country school from New Haven, Connecticut. During my junior year, her father took over management of the Stanley Power Tools plant in New Berne. Lynne was a year behind me in school and thought I talked funny. But since she was from New Haven, everybody thought
she
talked funny. That was okay by me, because she was shy and sweet. I asked her out after the first football game of my senior year and after that, didn’t date anyone else.
During my senior year, our high school integrated. But it was still the South and it was still the 1960s, and we were as steeped in racism as frogs in a swamp. There were only a few black students and only one was a boy. John was a likeable guy, and I felt for him as he struggled to fit in. At the end of the school year, one of the other seniors—a kid named Tim who, ironically, had moved to our town from up north—decided to challenge the “black kid” to a fight. Word got around quickly. By afternoon, it seemed as though everybody in the school was buzzing about it. The time was set for three-thirty in the afternoon by the gym.
The whole thing disgusted me. All day long, I pondered the situation and tried to decide what to do. I thought about the fact that the whole time I was growing up on the farm, my best friend was a black kid. I thought about Indians and forts and Miss Mildred’s collard greens. And when the hour for the fight came, so had my decision.
When the last bell rang, I walked around to the side of the gym where a crowd had already gathered in a loose circle. Girls holding their school books whispered to each other. Boys crowded their way to the front for a ringside seat. The gladiators arrived almost simultaneously, working their way to the center of the crowd. John was outnumbered a hundred to one, but he had too much pride not to show.
I couldn’t wait any longer. Stepping into the center of the crowd, I confronted Tim. “This isn’t right,” I told him. “He hasn’t done anything to you.”
Tim looked at me, puzzled, but said nothing. A low murmur rippled through the crowd.
“There isn’t going to be a fight,” I said, looking around. “So just break this up and go home.”
Now Tim got angry. He twisted his face into a sneer. “What’s your problem, Boykin?” he spat. “You don’t want to see this nigger get his ass beat?”
I hated that word. My face flushed red. “I’ll tell you what, Tim, you better start by trying to whip my ass first, because you’re going to have to get by me before you get to him.”
We were just about nose to nose by then, and we stared each other down. Tim was furious, but I could see the calculation in his eyes: he’d signed up to fight someone smaller than him, not someone bigger. After a long moment, he backed down.
I turned to the crowd. “Go home. No fight today.”
Then, for the first time, I looked at John. “Let’s go. It’s over,” I said. He followed me out to the parking lot and without a word, we parted ways.
I knew I was risking scorn and accusations of being a “nigger lover.” But I also knew that the whole time I was growing up on the farm, Junior’s parents treated me like one of their own. And besides all that, I just couldn’t abide a bully.
AFTER GRADUATION, I went on to Virginia Tech on a football scholarship and was accepted into the Corps of Cadets, a military program that led to an army commission. My dad and uncles had laid down the pattern for Boykin family military service and I wanted to do them proud. Since the Spanish American war, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University has trained officers to lead the nation’s forces, and I knew VT cadets had earned a truckload of decorations for valor.
