Growing up my father told us many stories of accts of successful resistance. Some serious, some sad but the Navy man in basic training who peed his way out of the Navy and out of World War II was definitely one of my favorites. Peeing the bed as an act of resistance?
I know the judge told you so into the service or jail, but why the Navy?
I was seventeen. The only service that would take you at 17 was the Navy. So I survived.
We went through hard training. We went through very hard training, but I could get through that. I wasn’t but seventeen. I was at Camp Robert Smalls.
Congressman Robert Smalls
Robert Smalls stole a submarine or something. He was one of my heroes.
Boot camp was boot camp. It was terrible it was also racist.
Was Robert Smalls a training camp for Black soldiers?
Yes, ma’am. They ain’t putting no white man in a place to train with black people. We had all white officers. Now understand I’m there in September, which means I was there in the winter, they came up with the first Black commissioned officers in the Navy and they made them Warrant Officers. Warrant is a weird rank between the enlisted soldiers which the top would be Chief Petty Officer and the Commissioned the bottom was an Ensign. In-between was something called a Warrant Officer and they made them Warrant Officers. And oh baby they just wore our asses out. They were overseers.
When I came in I came in with a dude and he loved the Navy. He enlisted. He enlisted on his seventeenth birthday. He loved the Navy! He knew everything about the Navy. He had all kinds of esoteric lore that’s all he wanted to be a Navy man. He got in there and it wasn’t like he thought it would be and he flipped out. He said he wanted to leave and they explained to him that wasn’t happening.
We’re in boot camp and so he started wetting the bed. They had him wash the sheets out every morning. We had another dude there, an immense brother. He was the biggest man that I had ever seen up to that point and I would estimate him to have been 6’5” or 6’6”. So big the Navy couldn’t fit him in shoes so they had to send back to New Brunswick to make shoes for him. To white people he looked like the roughest thing in the world. He wasn’t anything but a backwoods Alabama farm boy. He was as gentle as could be. So they took this guy who was pissing and they put him on top of this brother figuring when he pissed the brother would…
Go animal on him…
Oh yeah! But when it happened the big dude would be like, “Oh man, come on.” And he’d help him wash his sheets. And Wence* kept devising these (mean) things and it wouldn’t happen. Wence was the Chief Petty Officer who rode me from the time I came out. I subsequently found out that they were supposed to ride Negroes from New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. I still have hatred for Wence. Whites hated me, Wence hated me and I hated Wence. I was smarter than Wence, he was just older. Wence was terrible.
So we’re on the drill field one day and we’re lined up in ranks. When you’re at attention and when you’re at attention you do nothing. We’re at attention and the guy says he has to pee and takes it out and Wence cussed him out says put it back or he’ll break his arm. Then Wence is lecturing about something and this brother was in the back and there’s this little dribbling. Piss coming down. That did it. Broke Wence. We got a call from the guy about a month later and he was home.
The main problem that I had was that I was in the military. I was just genuinely to the core unmilitary. I could learn to make hospital corners but I can’t make hospital corners a part of my makeup. I was always a little rumpled. Now that was weird, that was seriously weird because I was a clothes horse to my heart. (I remember my uncles arguing with my grandmother about my father’s mode of dress. My uncles were asserting how Reggie always was the best dressed of the three sons. He didn’t relax with dress until he was in Cali for years. Even then he paid plenty of attention, he was just more relaxed.) And so it wasn’t all the Navy I was just non-military. I was resistant to the military and in a Jim Crow outfit, and that gets you in trouble. I really had a whole bunch of trouble with superiors and orders, but that wasn’t a problem for me because I also understood power. I really understood power. My father had got that into me. He kicked my ass enough. The only reason he got away with it was he was in a better position to kick my ass then I was to resist it. He had the power.
*Wence is how the name sounded. I do not know if this is the correct spelling. It is a (rare) surname used in the United States.
Next week Reggie’s in the brig.