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  Then Louis suddenly turned to Sugar Ray. “No use standin’ round here,” he said. “I’m goin’ to call us a cab.”

  Sugar Ray nodded as Joe turned away, walking off toward a knot of white soldiers and in the direction of the phone booth, which was near them but in a whites-only area. Yards from the phone booth stood an MP. He had a billy club in his hand. Louis dialed for a cab while Sugar Ray waited. The MP fixed his eyes on Sugar Ray, then on the phone booth, claimed by Joe Louis. That visible and invisible line—of demarcation, of Negro soldier and white soldier—had been crossed. Outside the phone booth, in the open air, soldiers stood smoking and chatting. The strong Southern accents were running together like the voices of a posse of men idling at an Alabama card table. But the relaxed air began to tighten. The MP came over to Louis as he stepped out of the booth. The MP was unsmiling and ordered Louis back over to the Negro side. Louis’s expression darkened; he asked the MP exactly what he meant. “Soldier,” the MP began—not “Sgt.” Joe Louis, as his rank would have demanded—“your color belongs in the other bus station.”

  Louis launched into a spiel that took on a tone of morality and military togetherness: “What’s my color got to do with it? I’m wearing a uniform like you.”

  Other soldiers were now turning around, their attention caught by the rising voices, the white MP and the Negro soldier going toe to toe.

  “Down here you do as you’re told,” the MP sharply offered, and in one of those half-conscious motions, laid his billy club against Louis’s rib cage in a threatening manner.

  “Don’t touch me with that stick,” the Alabama-born Louis shouted at the MP.

  Now everyone was watching. Sugar Ray’s eyes widened as he inched closer. The MP drew himself up, a man suddenly becoming taller.

  “I’ll do more than touch you,” the MP said.

  And then came the reflexive raising of his billy club. At that moment—and before it touched any piece of Joe Louis’s flesh—Sugar Ray leaped upon the MP, his arms around the MP’s neck. Both fell—this was fortunate for the MP, since it prevented Sugar Ray from unleashing a left hook—and they tumbled onto the grass. Other MPs came running. Sugar Ray and the MP were wrapped around each other, clawing and scratching, the MP’s eyes gone red with fury. And before the other MPs had a chance to swing their billy clubs at Louis and Robinson, a cacophony of shouting rose from other Negro soldiers nearby: “That’s Joe Louis, that’s Joe Louis.” With the champ’s name coursing through the air, with Sugar Ray and his opponent staring hard, with Sugar Ray’s hands twitchy and ready to be balled up, turned into fists—the way they’d be in the dressing room with manager George Gainford standing by him—the MP stepped back. He and his fellow MPs needed to digest this bizarre and heated scene. Chests were heaving in and out.

  “Call the lieutenant,” one of the MPs ordered.

  It didn’t take long before Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis found themselves riding in a jeep, headed to jail. Sugar Ray had struck a military policeman! Sgt. Joe Louis certainly knew how serious this could be. George Nicholson and Jackie Wilson had rushed to telephones. They had to get help. Joe was figuring out how he’d get permission to call Washington; he’d have to explain this to the War Department, to his contacts. He had contacts in the black press; he was particularly close to Billy Rowe of The Pittsburgh Courier. And he’d call upon those contacts if need be.

  But by the time they reached the jail, Army officials on the base had decided that neither Robinson nor Louis would be locked up. They realized the publicity would be awful: two Negro fighters sent to promote racial solidarity behind bars in the state of Alabama. War was on everyone’s mind, but race had jumped into the headlines as well. The sporadic rioting and protests by blacks that had erupted in parts of the country over the issue of jobs and equality was not something the U.S. government wanted to supplant the issue of patriotism. Not now; not in Alabama, which had already experienced the eruptions in Mobile. A decision was quickly made at the jailhouse that both Robinson and Louis would be free to go; that no charges of any kind would be filed. It all had come down on orders from the provost marshal himself. Dropping the case did not, however, quell murmurs and rumors amongst the Negro troops about the duo and their fate. Ominously, one of the Army officials had heard that Negro soldiers were saying Louis and Robinson had been beaten and bloodied by MPs. Sugar Ray was asked to tell the troops it wasn’t so, that he and Louis were fine.

  Outside, in the free air, Sugar Ray gave Joe a smile; Joe gave Sugar Ray a smile. Then the two fighters went to tell fellow Negro soldiers they were all right. And the Negro troops, after looking them over, smiled too.

  Louis had been reminded yet again of the limits of his diplomacy when in the company of the feral Sugar Ray. He was simply no match for Sugar Ray’s edge and spontaneity. Robinson had never learned the patience it took to survive in a segregated society. He hailed from Harlem, a revolutionary place. His fists had become his politics. The event served to mark the beginning of Robinson’s changed attitude toward the war. He wanted no part of it anymore. He complained to female acquaintances by telephone about the unfair treatment. He worried about injury, imagining that a physical attack could derail his boxing dreams and his goal of a championship belt. Sugar Ray Robinson had come into the military watching the way Louis moved and operated around white officers; now Louis watched the way Robinson moved around them.

  That evening on base, some of the Negro GIs pulled out paper and pencil. Letters would be written home about Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis, about the lightning-quick battle they had fought in the state of Alabama; how the military jeep had raced them to lockup and how they had emerged from inside the jail headquarters with such an easy and beguiling countenance about them. “If I was just an average G.I., I would have wound up in the stockades,” Louis would later remark of the Alabama affair. But Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis were men who had been battling and winning all their lives. There was nothing—nothing at all—average about either one of them. (When news broke of the fracas in the Northern press, military officials were quick to play it down. The affair was just the kind of uneven press the military did not need in its effort to promote a unified home front.)

  The cross-country tour continued.

  Soon they were in Jacksonville, Florida, where more soldiers gently slapped their backsides, where they sparred with one another. Where, come nightfall, they only had to turn on their heels and walk a few steps for good music and fine drink: In Jacksonville, they were allowed again to take roomier accommodations off base, lodging above a Negro nightclub called the Two Spot. And this was suddenly young Sugar Ray Robinson’s idea of the Army: Ellington and trumpeter Cootie Williams on a jukebox; women in his line of vision wearing silk skirts; an environment where his grin carried currency, the way it did in Harlem. He and Louis cavorting about the Two Spot were a sight to behold. They were the Negro answer to Hollywood, the home-front equivalent of cinematic stars at war.

  In Jacksonville, old men who spotted them did double takes, squinting, wondering if that was the champ, Joe Louis himself. And then there’d be Louis and Sugar Ray—the latter far less well known than Louis, though many recognized his name—sidling up to them. Women smiled as they glided by, smiled more flamboyantly when the fighters gave them their undivided attention: “Joe and I had a few laughs in the South, too” is how Sugar Ray would remember Jacksonville.

  But Sugar Ray would eventually be slowed in his activities. He threw his elbow out of joint. Then, during some horseplay with Louis, he cut his foot on a piece of broken glass. Comedian Bob Hope had certainly been right: A guy could get hurt in the war! (Throughout Robinson’s military service, he was constantly coming down with an assortment of ailments—colds, sore throat. They were the type of ailments other soldiers might have kept quiet about and plowed through, but he was quick to get himself to infirmaries. It gave him the air of a hypochondriac—all of it was a prelude to a larger plot he had in his mind.)

  Ar
my officials decided to send Robinson back East to heal, to a base in New York State.

  But the tour had been so successful, had impressed Army brass so much—despite the incidents in Mississippi and Alabama—that the War Department proceeded with the plan to send the troupe to Europe to continue spreading the gospel of patriotism and racial tolerance.

  The second year of World War II was a good year for the lovely Lena Horne. Music critics at national publications began to gush over her. She had arrived like a phoenix. Marshall Field, a smooth and big-hearted philanthropist, was also publisher of PM, an evening newspaper. The publication featured Horne on the cover of its magazine: “How a girl from Brooklyn became this season’s biggest nightclub hit,” it said, heralding her rising popularity. “And how she’s quietly using her unrehearsed success to win respect for her people.” Time magazine weighed in with rapture: “Unlike most Negro chanteuses, Lena Horne eschews the barrel house manner … conducts herself with the seductive reserve of a Hildegarde. But when Lena sings at dinner and supper, forks are halted in mid-career. Flashing one of the most magnificent sets of teeth outside a store she seethes her songs with the air of a bashful volcano. As she reaches the end of ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ … her audience is gasping.”

  She appeared in another movie, Stormy Weather, released in 1943. She got major billing in the musical extravaganza that featured Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Fats Waller, and Cab Calloway among others. The costumes were wicked and the feline dancers exotic. Calloway’s creamy zoot suit was offset with an extravagantly brimmed hat. Horne wore silky dresses and a flower-bedecked headdress. She looked like an Egyptian beauty queen. The film was a romance that revolved around Horne and Robinson. The Robinson character had been drawn from the life of musical sensation James Reese Europe. (Europe was born in Mobile, Alabama, to musically gifted parents. He became a conductor and composer. In the summer of 1912 he staged an event at Carnegie Hall, a “Symphony of Negro Music”—the first large-scale Negro musical event ever to take place there. Europe volunteered for World War I, enlisting with the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard. The black regiment found little but hostility while training in South Carolina, and the U.S. government wisely dispatched them directly to France. Overseas, the regiment won medals and adulation. They were mentioned in the French press. James Reese Europe fought at the front, a machine gun in hand. Away from the battlefield he picked up a baton, conducted orchestral musicians. After the war, back in the states, the Negro regiment to which James Reese Europe belonged was honored in a parade down New York’s Fifth Avenue. Europe died tragically in 1919 in Boston, where he had taken his celebrated orchestra; during intermission one night, a mentally disturbed band member stabbed him.)

  In 1943 Lena Horne stood on the deck of the liberty ship, George Washington Carver, and christened it. Dignitaries behind her whooped and hollered and celebrated in the sunshine. At the Hollywood Canteen—it was integrated; actress Bette Davis kept the place jumping—Horne wore a red, white, and blue apron. She went to Tuskegee, arriving on a Jim Crow train, and posed with the Negro combat pilots there. Someone had helped her into a brown leather bomber jacket. She looked divine. But the mood changed on those military bases when she was asked to sing before segregated groups of soldiers. She’d glide down from the stage toward the Negro troops in the back, her Hollywood-borrowed costumes dazzling and causing necks to crane, and sing directly to them. The Negro soldiers were astonished—and delighted. The USO was not happy; in fact, her disobedience angered them. The organization suggested she stop performing; then they censured her. The Army didn’t want drama on the home front; but Lena—like Sugar Ray, like Joe Louis—couldn’t help herself.

  Before the war, before those Japanese planes came floating over Pearl Harbor and doing their bloody damage, a kid in East St. Louis had been down in a basement practicing his trumpet. He borrowed what he could from those whom he idolized: bandleader Harry James wore velvet collars, so young Miles Davis started wearing them. Young Miles liked the way Clark Terry played trumpet—especially his speed—so he began playing fast. (Terry, who lived in the city, would take young Miles to local nightspots; they’d play beyond moonlight into the next morning.) Young Miles stood under trees in city parks, watching older musicians give concerts. He tapped his feet, nodded his head, and dreamed. Son of a dentist—and raised on good manners—he was shy. In 1943 he tried out for Eddie Randle’s Blue Devils band in St. Louis and was jubilant when he won a spot. The Randle band was the house band at Rhumboogie, a local club. They called the kid Little Davis. Eddie Randle himself would recall of Miles’s St. Louis beginnings: “He was growing out of this world. He was good and he didn’t know it. He had a beautiful sound.” Older musicians would chat with Little Davis, complimenting him. (Ellington himself came through one night—tall, sturdy, smiling, famous. Noise hummed around him like bees, but he heard, clearer than anything, the bass player, Jimmy Blanton. Like that—a snap of the finger—Ellington hired Blanton. Miles saw it all and was stunned at the sheer electricity of it: Ellington hearing someone, hiring the musicians, then leaving town. Like a ghost. Miles told other kids; those kids told other kids; between them all, it added up to a wonderful pocketful of dreams.)

  Little Davis wore suits, kept late hours, had the keys to his daddy’s car. When his parents split up, he lived with his mother. There were arguments. He wanted to be a musician, which, to her, sounded like someone—her child!—paving the way to becoming nothing more than a bohemian. He heard only himself, his dream within, and the music wailing from other musicians. He became musical director of Randle’s band: It was by default, inasmuch as the other band members worked during the day, but it gave him the chance to arrange rehearsals and oversee them as well. He met musicians coming through St. Louis, the same musicians whose records he listened to at home—Sonny Stitt, Fats Navarro, Benny Carter—and he heard them perform at the speakeasies he slipped into. He met an Oklahoman by the name of Alonzo Pettiford: “Man, could that motherfucker play fast—his fingers were a blur. He played that real fast, hip, slick Oklahoma style.”

  Even though he sat in with Billy Eckstine’s band in St. Louis, he wanted things to happen faster. He thought of joining the Navy. What fascinated him was that so many musicians were in the Navy, and were playing in a band in the Great Lakes. He’d heard about some members of Lionel Hampton’s band being there; his friend Clark Terry was there. But finally, young Davis decided on another route. His idols, Charlie “Bird” Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, were in New York City. When the leaves began to fall, when the air began to grow crisp, when Hitler was on the run in Germany, he boarded a train for Manhattan. He had the kind of confidence that a young New York City boxer had to have; that a young Brooklyn chanteuse had to have. “I thought I could play the trumpet with anybody” is how Miles Davis would put it.

  The poet was flat broke during the war. Langston Hughes was complaining to friends in 1943 about a $126 IRS bill. Money from Hughes’s 1935 Broadway play, Mulatto, had all but vanished. Some acquaintances—fellow playwrights, lyricists, bar-stool poets—also worried that the poet Hughes might have to go off to war himself. Hughes hardly had the aura of a war-starved personality, though he certainly looked both fit and debonair as he gallivanted around Harlem. He was a darling of high society; he was an artist. He was brave in words—if a bit effete in reality. Langston at war? His friends started to fret. His longtime ally, Carl Van Vechten—their friendship stretched back to the Harlem Renaissance, Van Vechten the white patron saint, Hughes the young surveyor of that 1920s milieu—cautioned Hughes that if he should be hauled off to the military, he should first offer Yale University the honor of having his papers and other important personal items. A shawl that had been worn by Sheridan Leary, the first husband of Hughes’s grandmother, was especially prized by Van Vechten: Leary had accompanied John Brown on his messianic Harpers Ferry raid with that shawl draped around his shoulders. It may have been a rather grim dose of reality for Hughes,
the poet, but Van Vechten was thinking of posterity, which required sober decision making. Alas, Hughes was never drafted into the military. But when the Selective Service board sent him a questionnaire, he sat down and dutifully answered: “I wish to register herewith … my complete disapproval of the segregating of the armed forces of the United States into White and Negro units, thus making the colored citizens the only American group so singled out for Jim Crow treatment, which seems to me contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and damaging to the morale and well-being of not only the colored citizens of this country but millions of our darker allies as well.”

  Hughes was living the life of an American writer—penury and all—during the war. He was desperately trying to line up lecture invitations. He was working on a second volume of autobiography, which he had titled I Wonder as I Wander. The book might be published, he confided to a friend, “if I did not wander even more than I wonder.” (His first autobiography was titled The Big Sea and spoke of his youth, his cold father, his busboy poet days in the nation’s capital, and his first lunge at prose and poetry as he swam with the artistic tide of the Harlem Renaissance.) In 1943 he was working with the Writers’ War Board; he wrote a song about equality for a Negro Freedom Rally and a dramatic presentation—“For This We Fight.” Then luck struck for the writer: He got a return invitation to Yaddo, the artists colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, which he had first visited in 1942, at a time when his fame was rapidly spreading beyond just Negro admiration.