CW: This story contains themes of discrimination and racism, including the use of racial slurs and derogatory language reflective of the period in which the story takes place.



Truce

“Hello. Ronnie Burns, please.”

The awkward silence on the other end of the line spoke to the misgivings Henry felt as he dialed the lone “Burns, R.” in the Cleveland White Pages directory. He pictured the gruff-voiced man who answered his call with a snorted “Yo,” holding the receiver at arm’s length, wary of the unidentified white guy’s voice.

“My name is Henry Horowitz,” he hastened to explain. “I was in Korea with Ronnie Burns. We were in the same unit, he was my friend…”

The response was abrupt, “You got da wrong number, bro. Nobody here ever been to Koo Ree Ah.” With that, the phone went dead.

Henry had last seen Ronnie Burns in September 1953, when the two soldiers were at Fort Dix, New Jersey, waiting to be mustered out of the army after enduring the final two years of the Korean War stand-off, the truce negotiations still in progress when they left. A corporal in the 60^th Explosives Ordinance Disposal Squad, Burnsie, as he was called, had tramped the shell-torn countryside hunting for unexploded, still-lethal grenades and mortar shells that he blew up with butter-bar sized sticks of Comp-4 explosive, an accelerant so unstable a half dozen of his sapper comrades were killed or maimed while using it.

Private Henry Horowitz was the detachment’s bespectacled clerk typist. His time was spent typing the daily morning report and reading loaners from the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list, making it to number 87, “The Old Wives’ Tale” by Arnold Bennett, before his tour of duty expired. An apathetic draftee, he had exchanged his master’s degree from the University of Chicago for the monumentally boring desk job that kept him far from harm’s way.

The two conscripts were oddities in a squad of good ole boys who had enlisted in the army for God and country. Burnsie the Negra and Horowitz the Jew boy, as their bunkmates from the tobacco and cotton farms of the Deep South dubbed them, sought support and sanity each from the other and endured their contemptible nicknames with a nod to prudence and survival. Belying their disparate backgrounds, the grandsons of rabbis and sharecroppers had more in common than generally thought. They became close friends, battling boredom as the truce slowly gelled into permanence along the 38^th parallel and Samsung added its brand name to the list of global monoliths. By the time they were eligible for discharge and transferred to Fort Dix for their final days as warriors in Uncle Sam’s brigades they had become inseparable. 

It took one night in Wrightstown, however, to remind the men that the U.S. of A. was more Kansas than Oz. Although too many Negro soldiers had died in Korea to permit the bars and dancehalls straddling the entrance to the base to advertise their prejudices publicly, it was clear that Ronnie and Henry were not a welcomed twosome in the predominately all-black or all-white joints that served shots of Lord Calvert with beer chasers from a half hour before reveille until 4am.   If not for the fortunate appearance of a pair of brawny MPs an encounter with a group of heavy boozing peckerwoods was a slur away from turning violent. The following evening, Ronnie offered up a tentative suggestion.

“Hey, Henry, watta ya say, shall we hit the post canteen tonight rather than go into town? It’s up to you. I’ll go if you wanna.” 

If Ronnie was waiting for an answer that went something like, “Bet yer ass we’re going, we got as much right to hang out in those local joints as any goddamn cracker,” it was not forthcoming. Henry immediately echoed the idea. “Why put up with shit from a bunch of bigoted assholes?” was his response, the relief in his voice evident.

That night the friends drank insipid 2-point-2 beer at the post canteen and continued their long-running gin game at the sparsely attended USO club. They continued to trade war stories and punch lines, but both knew something in their relationship was not quite the same. Unable or unwilling to define their discomfort, they simply didn’t talk about it. At their discharge ceremony, they hugged, promised to stay in touch, and vowed they would be friends forever. Fifty years passed before Henry picked up the phone to call his army buddy.

 The letter from the local Elks Club had taken Henry by surprise. He guessed they had found his name on an archived list of Korean War veterans. He was invited to take part in a ceremony to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of “the forgotten conflict,” a description that Henry had done nothing to refute since his discharge (neither his grandchildren nor his former colleagues knew he was a veteran). After brushing off the dusty box of mementos retrieved from the basement of the condo’s storage area, Henry was pleased to find his old dress khakis still fit, but he couldn’t avoid the wave of guilt that engulfed him as he pored through the black and white photographs from half a lifetime earlier. On the back of the snap of him and Ronnie holding their discharge papers, he had written “Burnsie the Negra and Henry the Jew boy.”  

Why hadn’t he kept in touch with his friend? When compared to most of his acquaintances and associates, Henry was well in front when tallying his relationships with people of color. During his bachelor days, there were forays deep into the pre-dawn hours with the tawny-skinned actress who lived down the hall, hopping a taxi to East 64^th and Cottage Grove to hear Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing Club, the smoky room comfortably colorblind, dozens of interracial couples grooving on the jazz. He enrolled his kids in a multi-racial magnet school, watching his nimble-witted daughter move easily among the cliques and shifting factions of the bused-in Black kids even as his less-gifted son survived on foot speed and a stiff right hand Henry taught him to throw. Risking his reputation, Henry had taken on the formidable task of resurrecting the city’s lone minority-owned ice cream company, accepting the assignment out of a combination of perversity and altruism, working with a bare bones staff in a shabby office across the street from a dilapidated crack house. In a matter of weeks, he had corrected horrendous discrepancies between invoices and inventories, raised quality standards, and convinced Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition to petition the supermarket chains to provide shelf space for the local brand. Awarded a plaque at the company’s annual dinner “For Meritorious and Outstanding Service to the African American community,” Henry joked he “felt like a scoop of vanilla in a tub of chocolate.”      

Henry’s impressive list of “liberal credentials” did nothing to ease the discomfort he felt as he stared at the faded photographs. Had he been disloyal to his friend when he took the reasonable stance rather than risking a face-off with the stewpot non-coms talking shit from the corner of their mouths: “Homo nigger lover,” “Why you hangin’ out with that coon, soldier? This ain’t Korea,” and of course, the inevitable, hate-spewed blood libel bullshit, “Hiding behind that nigger ain’t going to save you Jew boy.” Surely it was good sense, not cowardice that led him to his decision. And surely Burnsie had seen a similar malevolence in the narrowed eyes of the Black soldiers firing their boom boxes like howitzers, blasting 140-decibel blues riffs as they sought to drown out the twanging country music being lobbed their way in a deadly artillery battle of cultures and contempt. 

Henry drifted back in time to the barren outpost of Panmunjom, where he and Burnsie were hunkered together, freezing their asses in a pup tent so frigging cold a layer of ice coated the rubberized ponchos. It was easy to be Burnsie’s pal when they were in Korea. Life was stripped to its essentials: survive as best as one could and do not piss into the wind. The enemy were the slant-eyed zipperheads, slopes, yobos, dinks, and gooks; the good guys were the grunts sucking it up in the DMZ. He and Ronnie were in the shit together, drawn even tighter when the Bubbas stumbled in from a night of booze and paid sex, sucking fumes from a dope bowl that could turn a Southern Baptist into a White Knight of the Confederacy faster than shit off a shovel.

It was different stateside. Back home, they would still be subject to bigotry and hateful slurs, but Henry, if he dressed right and said the right things and was smart enough to make the quota that kept the Anglo Saxon Protestants sufficiently mollified, he could pass through the gate of the white picket fence on Main Street, America. That was not the case for Ronnie Burns. When he and Henry were mustered out of the army, only twenty percent of America’s Negro population was registered to vote. Henry felt deeply for his disadvantaged friend. But he and Ronnie lived in dissimilar ecosystems.  The races mixed at their peril. Even his liberal parents had been surprised to learn that Henry had a Negro friend. Why risk the censure, they asked, when your own future could be so bright? 

 The sweeping changes in attitudes that gained traction with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and culminated with the Obama presidency created a societal movement that Henry embraced wholeheartedly. He made it a point to live in an integrated condominium with a mail list that read like a United Nations directory. Perhaps he was being too harsh on himself. But Henry could not let himself off the hook.   He wished he had been able to find Ronnie. There was so much he wanted to say to his friend.

Ronnie recognized the voice instantly. It was as if time had suddenly reeled backwards to the tremulous goodbye at the Fort Dix bus station. Why hadn’t he responded the way his thumping heart had cried out? “Henry, how great to hear from you! It’s been way too long, my friend. I missed you!” Instead, he couldn’t believe the sound of his own voice, talking ghetto street jive that made him sound like some illiterate gangsta punk: “Yo, you got da wrong number, bro.” 

What the hell was that all about, Ronnie asked himself. You would think after more than fifty years of dealing with the pain of a thousand snubs he would have forgiven his friend for a slight that may have taken place only in his imagination. Wasn’t it his suggestion to skip the bar crawl, considering they were close to getting their asses kicked the night before? Still, Henry should have known he was doing his Negro passive-aggressive bit, putting things in a way that made sure he wouldn’t be taken for some uppity nigger. “It’s up to you. I’ll go if you wanna.” Henry should have known. Henry should have squared his shoulders and looked him in the eye and said, “Burnsie, we’re best buds, and we got each other’s back, and we’ll kick ass if anybody even so much as looks at us cross-eyed.”  But he didn’t.  

 What would have been gained from acknowledging his friend’s call? (Ronnie felt the stares drilling into the back of his head as he and Henry walked past the neon lit joints lining both sides of the strip that vacuumed the soldiers from the main gate of the cheerless post.) Would it be any different if they met in Chicago, with their wives and kids in tow, the ebonies and the ivories seated in some restaurant pretending not to notice a hundred pair of eyes marking their presence. What would be different? Had anything really changed? 

When Ronnie arrived home in the fall of 1953, his view of the world beyond the Cuyahoga River had not expanded despite his tour in Korea and brief stay at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he made the rite of passage from disinclined draftee to reluctant soldier. It had taken one Saturday night in Columbus and a weekend pass to Montgomery, Alabama, to recognize that the seven Army core values (loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage) was bullshit stuffed in an Eisenhower jacket. Inside the post with a couple of stripes on your arm, you might be giving a white boy an order, but outside the fence, you were back on the takin’ side, and don’t you forget it. 

Still, Cleveland offered a glimmer of the good life for its Black residents. The Cleveland Browns ruled professional football, the population had grown to just under a million, and the city was advertising itself as “the best location in the nation.” Ronnie enrolled in the Academy of Court Reporting & Technology but wasn’t much good at it, and after several months of growing a substantial butt, he decided to sit on it behind the wheel of a Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority bus. 

He stayed out of trouble, married his high school girlfriend, had two daughters, and when the city’s white population took flight, he took advantage of the GI Bill and got an FHA mortgage for a tidy house in the Collinwood neighborhood down the block from the former home of Grammy-winning accordion player Frankie Yankovic. In all that time, he couldn’t recall a single interaction with a white person other than small talk while making change for passengers boarding his bus as it circled the downtown business area at the end of his run.

Ronnie’s life was detached but comfortable, until six nights of hell in July 1966 wrenched him abruptly from his complacency. The race riots that erupted in Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood reflected the conditions in big cities all across America. The nation’s heavy industries had lost tens of thousands of jobs, shrinking tax bases to the point where cities were unable to respond to social needs, primarily in poor Black communities. Police departments had resisted integration – only 165 of Cleveland's 2,200 police officers were Black – and reports of police brutality were frequent. The result was a reeking potion of poverty, unemployment, and crime, a mix more volatile than the explosives Ronnie once detonated. And the Black folks were not having it. Whitey was going to bleed.

For Ronnie, the concept of civil rights equal to those for whites was an idealist’s dream. He had walked down the streets of Wrightstown and had his nose rubbed into the facts of life that were inherent to his survival. Now the dream was echoing across America and Johnson’s Affirmative Action was being affirmed all right, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Black Power was proving to be more than rhetoric from the pulpit. History was being written as a fast-moving adventure novel, with King’s death and the forced integration of schools forming a wave of reform that scourged the American landscape. Ronnie Burns couldn’t anticipate the personal impact of the 1968 Supreme Court ruling that “prohibiting interracial marriage is unconstitutional” but he might have thought about it when his older daughter married a fair-haired mathematics teacher who was both color-blind and very much in love.

The years passed. After twenty-five years driving a city bus, Ronnie took his pension, a vacation lasting all of two weeks and a part-time job driving a school bus for the Cleveland Municipal School District. With his kids grown and out of the house, Ronnie and his wife had taken the trips they talked about for years. Wherever they traveled, they stayed at the Holiday Inn, feeling that African Americans were welcomed there. Not infrequently, in the lobby or seated at the continental breakfast, white guests acknowledged them with a friendly hello, or “lovely day, isn’t it” and on one occasion, a kindly older man stepped aside to let his wife exit the elevator ahead of him. But for the most part, they stayed by themselves, careful to appear congenial, careful to avoid doing anything that might get them in any kind of trouble. 

They liked Washington, DC, where Ronnie spent half a day at the Korean War Memorial, the granite statues depicting a squad of soldiers on patrol, the figures so lifelike that Ronnie was overrun with memories he had kept buried for decades. Henry was very much on his mind. Serving in Korea, they were more than friends, more like brothers, really, each carrying one half of the pup tent they would button together and share, embraced in sleep like a spooning couple to keep out the bitter cold. “We are in the shit together, brother, Burnsie the Negra and Henry the Jew boy.” And then they were back home, and it was Ronnie Burns and Henry Horowitz, on different sides of the town, never mind sharing the same tent. He had never admitted to anyone – not to himself as well – how much it hurt when that reality became clear.

Perhaps that’s why he answered the phone the way he did. The world had changed, but he was the same man, softened by time to an extent, but wary of the pain… so very tired of the pain. There was too much he could not say to his friend.