Nobody Said Amen. Tracy Sugarman
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each other. Not us. Same thing here. These white college kids are new troops, too shiny-new, maybe. But I can read the questions in the black kids’ eyes.”
“Like?”
“Like can these scrubbed kids make it through a summer in the Delta? Like can they really connect us to power in Washington? Can they find us bail money? Can we trust these strangers?”
Max cut in, irritated. “They don’t trust the students? Why the fuck not? They’ve come to help. What’s the problem?”
Ted hesitated. “It may not be a problem. The SNCC kids aren’t hostile, they want to trust them. But for a lot of them hope has been something that melts in your black hand. It’s going to take a lot of doing, in not much time. And it may be our story, Max.” He looked at the phone that connected him with the commonplace world he’d lived in, a world that was somehow receding. “It doesn’t feel like an Ohio campus, it feels like an arena in the middle of nowhere. It’s a scary space filled with images painted by black field workers who’ve been shot at for trying to register blacks so they can vote in America. They’re conjuring up a Mississippi the volunteers can’t even imagine, that I can’t imagine. The time’s hanging suspended, five days, four days, three days, two till we head for Mississippi. Christ, it feels like our countdown on the ship before D-Day, Max. We both sweated our balls off. I’m twenty years older than these kids and I’ve seen a hell of a lot more than they have, but I find I’m just one more white guy staring at a Mississippi that the blacks insist that I see.”
“You keep calling them kids,” Max said. “They’re not kids.”
“They look like my son, Richard. And they look like my daughter, Laurie. They’re kids to me.”
“That’s fine, Teddy’. Just don’t write it that way. Keep some distance. You’re working for Newsweek, not bucking for father of the year.”
Ted hung up the phone slowly, lingering on the time he’d conjured up of him and Max together—’43? ’44?—in England, and before that, at the midshipman school at Notre Dame. The sailor had told the new arrivals, “Follow me topside to the sixth deck,” and Ted had hoisted his duffle bag and followed the other new midshipmen to their quarters. At the end of the long corridor the sailor began to read the list of their new billets.
“McElroy, Frederick—billet 6A
McElwain, Jack—billet 6A
McKendrick, Alan—billet 6B
Mendelsohn, Theodore—billet 6B
Miller, Max—billet 6C
McCarthy. Brian—billet 6C.”
Before opening his door Ted looked at the short, wiry midshipman-behind him in the hall. He looked like a young Jimmy Cagney. “Are you Alan McKendrick, my new bunkmate?”
“I’m Max Miller. And you’re not Brian McCarthy, I’ll bet.”
“You’re right.” He held out his hand, laughing. “Ted Mendelsohn.”
So Miller, a reporter-on-leave “for the duration” from Newsweek, and Mendelsohn, the school newspaper editor at Chapel Hill, nurtured a special friendship. In the four months at midshipman school, they discovered a mutual appreciation for good writing, Chicago stride piano, South Bend girls on Saturday leaves, Robert Benchley, and good jazz. On the long bus ride back to South Bend from Chicago, where they had heard the Benny Goodman band on a Saturday leave, Ted lamented, “It took a Jew to hire Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson for a big band. But Goodman will never get a booking in my hometown of Atlanta.”
Max disagreed. “Nonsense. I’m Catholic, and I would have hired those guys. They’re the best in the business.”
“You’re a mixed breed, Miller. Doesn’t count. Only your old man was Jewish.”
Max grimaced. “He was also a prick who ran out on my mother and me. That’s why I got raised in the church.” He tapped Ted’s knee and looked quizzical. “Were you serious about Atlanta? Goodman’s the hottest swing band in the country. They could play anywhere.”
“Not with Teddy Wilson on piano and Lionel Hampton on vibes. There’d be a riot. If you were born and raised there, you’d know it. And it’s not just Atlanta, Max. It’s the South. My family’s been there since Sherman burned the place. Believe me, I know.” He’d felt edgy and sad. “Being in that audience today, blacks, whites, it didn’t matter. We were just folks who wanted to hear great music.”
“How did your people get to Atlanta? Why Atlanta?”
“My great grandfather, Elijah Mendelsohnn, was a farmer, piss-poor, in Austria. He had a cousin who’d immigrated to Georgia and opened a pawnshop in Atlanta during Reconstruction. The cousin made money pawning rifles from the Union soldiers who were going home, and he told Elijah to come. And he came, with Grandma Sarah and two Guernsey breeding stock. He dropped the second “n” in Mendelsohnn to be more like a Yankee, and bought a small piece of land outside Atlanta. He started a tiny dairy that grew into Eli Dairy, a name that fit better on a milk wagon than Elijah. So for a hundred years there’s been an Eli Dairy.” He looked at Max. “The family expects me to run it after the war.”
“What are the odds of your doing it?”
Ted shook his head. “Same odds as you have for making Admiral.”
When they received their commissions as ensigns, USNR, Mendelsohn and Miller were assigned to train naval amphibious crews for the coming invasion of Europe. In the long, anxious days and nights preparing for D-Day in the English Channel they shared a longing for sleep, a desire to get the damn war behind them, and unsettling fears about what was waiting for them in Fortress Europe.
On D-Day they hit the invasion beaches together but saw each other only one more time before Ted was assigned to the Normandy beachhead and Miller got orders to return to his ship and proceed to New York to prepare for the invasion of Japan. From that point on, the friendship was nurtured by V-mails and letters.
One letter from Max caught up with Ted when he returned to England after the beachhead had been secured.
Teddy,
If you get to London again, look up Alex Hanson, an old buddy who’s working for Yank Magazine. I’m seeing his sister, Maggie, while my ship is in dry-dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Terrific girl, Maggie. You’d like her. You ever coming home? It’ll be lonesome in the Pacific without you, pal.
Max
After VJ-Day, Max was discharged and was eagerly embraced again by Newsweek magazine. When Ted’s discharge papers came through, he found himself adrift in London, hungry to see beyond the beachheads and liberated ports of Fortress Europe that had been his truncated world since D-Day. He wanted to explore Rome, visit Vienna, cross the Alps, and, after the ennui of his goddam beachhead, enjoy Paree! And he wanted to write about this new world, not the one of marketing milk in Atlanta. When he met with Alex Hanson at Yank magazine, his stars started to come into alignment.
Yank was beginning its final months of publication, and was trying desperately to find the reporters needed to tell the liberation story. Hanson enthusiastically introduced him to the managing editor, and Mendelsohn was taken aboard. For six months he wrote a column for Yank that he called “Kilroy Was Here,” vivid recollections from the sailors and soldiers who had liberated the beaches and braved the killing thickets and hedgerows of France. When Hanson sent the reportage to his new brother-in-law, Max, in New York, Ted received his first American assignment as a reporter.
Teddy,
When you’re done with Fleet Street, Newsweek can use you to tell our readers what our kids are leaving behind. Your word pictures are as graphic as Bill Mauldin’s drawings in Stars and Stripes. We’ll pay you a hundred bucks a column, once a month. Tell us what you find in what’s left of Hitler’s Europe. Your press card will be in the next mail.
Max
With the first paycheck from New York,