The Shadow Wife - Diane Chamberlain [81]
“What was it like?” Alan asked.
Gabriel worked a clam free of its shell. “It’s not the best dinner-table topic,” he said, looking apologetic.
“I want to hear,” Lisbeth insisted. “Unless…of course, if you’re uncomfortable talking about it.”
“Do you know what happened at Port Chicago?” he asked Lisbeth.
Something bad, Carlynn would have answered, but her sister surprised her.
“An explosion of some sort?” Lisbeth asked. “Some men were loading explosives onto a ship and something went wrong?”
Gabriel nodded. “Something went very wrong.” He sipped from his drink, then continued. “I joined the navy in 1943. They’d only opened their ranks to Negroes the year before, but I felt it was my duty to volunteer. I already had a degree from Berkeley, and I was married.” He looked at Lisbeth, touching the back of her hand gently with his fingertips, and said only to her, “Which is something I’ll tell you about later.” Lisbeth nodded.
“I loved to sail, and I wanted to go to sea,” Gabriel continued. “I went through boot camp and training school and then off to Port Chicago, where I expected to ship out. But when I got there, I found out the navy wasn’t letting Negroes into combat. Instead, they put us on the loading docks, loading munitions onto ships, with no special training whatsoever. We knew it was dangerous, but I don’t think we had any idea how much so.”
“All the men doing the loading were Negroes,” Alan added as he reached for another piece of bread. “And the guys supervising them were white, if I remember correctly.”
“That’s right,” Gabriel said. “And there was some wagering going on among the white officers as to whose division could load the most munitions in the least amount of time. So, as you can imagine, safety was sacrificed for speed.”
“Were you actually on the pier when it happened?” Alan asked.
“No.” Gabriel shook his head. “I wouldn’t be sitting here if I had been. I’d been working the night shift for months, and I don’t remember why, but I got moved over to days just the week before. Someone was watching out for me, though I sure don’t know why I was spared and three hundred other fellows weren’t.” He set down his spoon. “I was in the barracks, about a mile from the pier, and we heard a huge explosion and saw a white light through the windows. We started to run out, but a second explosion hit, this one even bigger, and the next thing I knew, my buddies and I were flying all over the place, the walls tumbling down on top of us. Outside, it was like firecrackers going off, and the sky was yellow. That’s the last thing I remember—that yellow sky. I woke up in the hospital like this.” He held up his hand. “And I knew I’d been very, very lucky.”
“You weren’t one of the men in the mutiny trial, were you?” Alan asked.
“What was the mutiny trial?” Carlynn asked as she slipped a clam from its shell.
“No, no,” Gabriel said. “I received a medical discharge, so I was spared that, too.” He turned to Carlynn. “The Negro seamen were sent right back to doing the same type of work, with no extra training, no counseling to help them deal with what they’d been through, and some of them refused to do it. The white officers testified against them, and they were convicted of mutiny.”
“Would you have been one of them if you hadn’t been discharged?” Lisbeth asked. Her bowl of cioppino was still full, and Carlynn wondered if she was too nervous to eat.
“I don’t know the answer to that one, Lisbeth,” he said. “I was angry. I had a degree from Berkeley, and I wasn’t the only one of those men who had tried to make something of himself and been treated more like an animal than a human being. I think if they’d made me go back, yes, I would have fought it. At least I hope I would have had the guts to stand up to the navy.”
It was hard for Carlynn to imagine life through his eyes. She’d known men in the service. They’d moved about freely, specializing in any area they chose for the most part. How humiliating