But the clown had one final antic to put across before he left the stage. “There’s something I haven’t told you, honey,” he said, keeping his face straight and solemn, though I could feel that there was mischief just below the surface. “Your boss Mr. Gaither called before you got home. I think he started to get nervous about you spilling the beans to me. He said he called to tell you that he’d decided to give you the raise you asked for. No mention of his having thought about firing you, by the way. Seeing that I had lost my job and we needed the dough, the raise was something he was glad to do. Besides, you were a good secretary. Of course, he conveniently left out the real reason.”
“And what was the real reason?” I asked, tenderly wiping the chocolate smudges from my husband’s reddened cheek with my moistened index finger.
“That he didn’t want me to come down to his office and gut him like a fish.”
I leaned back in my chair in a state of joyous awe and wonder. My husband has the most darling smile. He’s the best husband. To think that he’d even kill for me!
1932 FASCISTIC IN D.C
They brought the troops over from Fort Myer in trucks, and the ones from Fort Washington, why, they came up the Potomac in a steamer. I suppose that was an improvement over what had happened on July 14. That was the day, you see, that Vice President Curtis got tired of watching all of us unemployed veterans marching back and forth outside his office window on Capitol Hill, and called out the Marines. Curtis’s successor John Nance Garner once called the job of vice president “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Well, Vice President Curtis, he must’ve felt a little different, because that Kansas Big Chief used the leverage of his office on the fourteenth to summon a whole contingent of Marines all the way from the Navy Yard just to help improve his view of the Capitol Grounds.
They came in streetcars. For true. In full gear, bayonets fixed. And a lot of good they did. Police Chief Glassford was fit to be tied. He called the vice president a “hysterical meddler.” And some of the veterans knew some of the Marines besides and it ended up being like Old Home Week at the U.S. Capitol.
July 28 was different. Nobody was smiling. Tar-paper shacks in all the little rag-and-tin-can villages throughout D.C. were going up in flames. The tanks were rolling and the tear gas grenades were flying. People who didn’t have nothing to do with anything were coughing and tearing up in the eyes and cussing the president and cussing his chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur, who was leading the charge. And I was hightailing it back to Anacostia Flats, where the largest of all the encampments had been set up. (The biggest Hooverville in the country, it was said.) Trying to get myself back by my own cardboard and packing-crate cottage (the one with the egg-carton roof) to snatch up what few belongings I had in the world before the troops put a match to them, the way they was doing over by Camp Glassford.
We gave our camp the name of Camp Marks — named for the commander of the city’s Eleventh Police Precinct, Sidney J. Marks, who was with us from the beginning. See, it was Marks and Glassford who saw us all coming and did right by us — giving us a place to bivouac and finding food for us when the federal government would have turned us all away at gunpoint on Day One. Some of those sons of bitches who said we was all Communists, why, they used the camp name to prove their case. They spelled it Camp Marx. For true.
I came from New Orleans with my colored pal Odell. We been friends since we was kids together in the bayou, me and him. And I only mention he was colored to make a couple of points here: that we both served in Uncle Sam’s army. I was in the Battle of Belleau Wood, where I took shrapnel into my hindquarters, and Odell, not being among them coloreds who got to serve with the French Africans, got hisself put on kitchen and ditch-digging duty until the signing of the Armistice.
But there was no Jim Crow here in Camp Marks. You find this hard to believe? Believe it: black men and white men — all veteran soldiers of the United States of America, eating and sleeping (making dodo, me and Odell calls it) and rising together at reveille and parading side by side and visiting the Sallies together at the Salvation Army hut (what a collection of little cuties they were, in their doughnut girl bonnets!) — puts a fellow in mind of being at liberty in France back in the day, except there was no Red Cross here in Anacostia. The Red Cross wanted nothing to do with the Bonus Expeditionary Force.
But white and black, it made no never mind, and that’s probably one of the reasons that the government thought we was all Communists. These caps would come into the camps and you could tell they was spies and snitches because of the way they’d give a closer eye to the Negroes and the Jews. But it wasn’t nothing like the Soviet brotherhood of man that put us all so warm and friendly with each other; it was just plain old-fashioned American brotherhood. You see, we had a lot in common. We’d all served under the American flag and now our country had turned its back on us — every one of us. And it was time to demand our due, all in one loud voice.
Me and my soap box. I would’ve voted for Roosevelt if I’d been able when the election come up later that year — wanted more than anything to see this country taken out of the hands of the damned plutocrat Republicans and Mellon-aires who got us into this fix. But I was back to riding the rails by then. Me and Odell. Wondering if we was ever going to see that bonus for service in the Great War that was promised to us in 1924 and then deferred for twenty-one more years out of pure political meanness.
Me and Odell was over on the north banquette of Pennsylvania Avenue when that Little Caesar sends in his Cossacks with the tanks and the guns and the gas masks, and we was watching the men scatter and listening to the frightened screams of the mothers and their boos. (You’d be surprised how many of us former doughboys brought our wives and babies along. Sometimes they just had no other place to go.) And I walk up to this one fuzz-faced soldier boy who’s fixing to put on his gas mask and do his dirty business with the tear gas, and I say, “I used to wear one of dose, too, chief. Of course I was fighting the Huns, not my fellow Yanks.”
And the boy—’cause I grant you he was nothing more than a boy, no more than the age I was when I went off to fight the Kaiser — he gives me such a sad-ass look, and he says with hardly any volume to his voice at alclass="underline" “I’m just doing what I’ve been ordered to do.”
“Uh huh,” I say. “And dat man over dere, the one on the ground—” says I, as me and Odell are looking over at Shorty, who came with us to see if there was any truth to the rumors about sending in the cavalry against us. Shorty’s on the ground from where one of the cavalrymen swung his saber and sent him tumbling. His banged-up face and arms were K&B purple. “Dat man dere was three times decorated.”
The soldier boy said he had to throw his tear gas grenade now and we’d best be moving on down Pennsylvania Avenue if we knew what was good for us, and then he put on his gas mask, and Odell and me, we shot off running.
All the way to Camp Marks.
Here was our crime: We came to Washington, D.C., to ask for help from our government. It wasn’t like what some of them politicians was saying — that we was asking for special treatment just because we’d been soldiers. But we came back from a war that had filled the pockets of our civilian brothers and was an especially good thing for their bosses on account of all the profiteering. And a hell of a lot of us veterans had a hard time finding work. The jobs we had when we went “Over There” weren’t waiting for us “Back Here.” And there wasn’t a lot of hiring going on elsewheres neither. Some of us eventually landed on our feet, but then the Depression hit and we lost our footing all over again. Millions of us. And the country was supposed to do right by us and compensate us for putting ourselves in the trenches in service to the American flag. But they reneged.