Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [43]
“His daddy was a big landlord,” said Lawes. “When the communists came, they made his daddy kneel down in front of all his tenants in the village, and then they chopped off his head with a sword.”
“But the son could still be a communist—after that?” I said.
“He said his daddy really had been a very bad landlord,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “that’s Harvard for you, I guess.”
This Harvard Chinese befriended Cleveland Lawes and persuaded him to come to China instead of going back home to Georgia when the war was over. When he was a boy, a cousin of Lawes had been burned alive by a mob, and his father had been dragged out of his house one night and horsewhipped by the Ku Klux Klan, and he himself had been beat up twice for trying to register to vote, right before the Army got him. So he was easy prey for a smooth-talking communist. And he worked for two years, as I say, as a deckhand on the Yellow Sea. He said that he fell in love several times, but that nobody would fall in love with him.
“So that was what brought you back?” I asked.
He said it was the church music more than anything else. “There wasn’t anybody to sing with over there,” he said. “And the food,” he said.
“The food wasn’t any good?” I said.
“Oh, it was good,” he said. “It just wasn’t the kind of food I like to talk about.”
“Um,” I said.
“You can’t just eat food,” he said. “You’ve got to talk about it, too. And you’ve got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.”
I congratulated him on having learned Chinese, and he replied that he could never do such a thing now. “I know too much now,” he said. “I was too ignorant then to know how hard it was to learn Chinese. I thought it was like imitating birds. You know: You hear a bird make a sound, then you try to make a sound just like that, and see if you can’t fool the bird.”
The Chinese were nice about it when he decided that he wanted to go home. They liked him, and they went to some trouble for him, asking through circuitous diplomatic channels what would be done to him if he went home. America had no representatives in China then, and neither did any of its allies. The messages went through Moscow, which was still friendly with China then.
Yes, and this black, former private first class, whose military specialty had been to carry the base-plate of a heavy mortar, turned out to be worth negotiations at the highest diplomatic levels. The Americans wanted him back in order to punish him. The Chinese said that the punishment had to be brief and almost entirely symbolic, and that he had to be returned nearly at once to ordinary civilian life—or they would not let him go. The Americans said that Lawes would of course be expected to make some sort of public explanation of why he had come home. After that, he would be court-martialed, given a prison sentence of under three years and a dishonorable discharge, with forfeiture of all pay and benefits. The Chinese replied that Lawes had given his promise that he would never speak against the People’s Republic of China, which had treated him well. If he was to be forced to break that promise, they would not let him go. They also insisted that he serve no prison time whatsoever, and that he be paid for the time he spent as a prisoner of war. The Americans replied that he would have to be jailed at some point, since no army could allow the crime of desertion to go unpunished. They would like to jail him prior to his trial. They would sentence him to a term equal to the time he had spent as a prisoner of war, and deduct the time he had spent as a prisoner of war, and send him home. Back pay was out of the question.
And that was the deal.
“They wanted me back, you know,” he told me, “because they were so embarrassed. They couldn’t stand it that even one American, even a black one, would think for even a minute that maybe America wasn’t the best country in the world.”
I asked him if he had ever heard of Dr. Robert Fender, who was