Close your eyes and imagine a scene from World War II. What do you see? US troops storming the beaches of Normandy? A Russian soldier placing the red flag of victory atop the German Reichstag in Berlin? The mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The grim gray dawns of the years long siege of Stalingrad? Search the awful war-torn terrain. Among the scorched steel and rubble, the twisted trees and cratered earth, between the near ruined armies arrayed against each other in that titanic struggle, do you discern any faces of color?
Sadly, the image of the war shaped in people’s minds by such great works of fiction and film as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead or Steven Spielberg’s more recent Saving Private Ryan is largely an image cast in grays and white, marked by a glaring absence of color. Works depicting the 20th century war stories of the US’s darker citizens never received the prominence accorded those depicting their white counterparts. John Oliver Killens’ And Then We Heard the Thunder (the title drawn from Harriet Tubman’s famous Civil War battlefield lines), written in the same era as The Naked and the Dead, depicted the tensions and ambiguities faced by Black soldiers fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific. Segregated by the white officer corps and harried day and night by Japanese infantry, they often found themselves between the devil and the deep blue sea. Exasperated and perhaps drawn at times to contemplate mutiny, these soldiers advanced the “double V for victory”: to defeat the racists and fascists at home and abroad.
This tragic tale rarely told and often forgotten has been told again, masterfully, by James McBride, author of the bestseller, The Color of Water. Inspired by the experiences of the all-Black 92nd Infantry division, his Miracle at St Anna, tells the story of a group of Black soldiers caught behind enemy lines while fighting Hitler’s armies in Italy. Drawn across the no-man’s land separating the engaging armies by a mission of mercy to save an orphan caught in the cross fire, the soldiers embark on a journey from which few will return but through which some find deliverance. Writing in the tradition of, and at times with the grace of, García Márquez, McBride uses magical realism to tell a fantastic tale that is as radical and mysterious as reality itself. In the forests of the Italian mountains, belief, faith, loyalty, trust, hate and unbounding love are tested in the fierce match between democracy and fascism, a match where friends at times seem enemies and enemies become unwitting friends.
And yet across and through this dialectical dance a great divide exists and choices have to be made, from which there can be no return and upon which there is no middle ground. As the journey unfolds, Sam Train, a sleepy giant of man, is cut down by machine-gun fire from an opposing bank. Miraculously reborn on the breath of another soldier he rises to find a young boy in the middle of a fierce firefight. Gripping a magical statue head from a bridge in one hand and the boy in another, Train uses the power of invisibility to avoid enemy fire and heads off into the mountains. Pursued by soldiers from his company who attempt a rescue, Train and the near-fatally-wounded boy come across a church and village where an atrocity has recently occurred. The soldiers are befriended by the villagers and there all meet their fate: partisans, Communists, fascists, Italians, Germans and Americans Black, Latino and white.
The African American characters of Miracle at St. Anna, like those of its predecessor, And Then We Heard the Thunder, confront what W.E.B. Du Bois called “double consciousness,” the dilemma of being of two minds, two cultures, two societies, one a victim of the racist discrimination of the other. Jim Crowed, forced into near-suicidal campaigns by stupid racist officers and under constant enemy fire, the soldiers fight for their lives, dignity and desperately for the future of humanity. And while the stakes are clear, racism disfigures the fight, not only obscuring the enemy but also assisting it.
Through the trusting eyes of a child and the gentle touch of a giant, McBride manages in this lyrical story to uncover the uniting power of love. It is a love born in battle, nurtured in pain, fed by magic and powered by an abiding faith. It is a love supreme.
Miracle at St. Anna: A Novel of World War II by James McBride New York, Riverhead Books, 2002.
