1. PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
On June 22, 1944, two weeks after Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy to liberate France from the Nazis, Hamaas Abdul Khaalis reported to the psychiatric ward of the Station Hospital at Fort Huachuca in Arizona for an evaluation. The twenty-one-year-old, known at the time by his birth name, Ernest Timothy McGhee, was almost six feet tall and broadly built, weighing close to 170 pounds. His brown face had striking features, including a strong angular jaw that was frequently clenched. He was a good-looking man, but he bore a stern expression. Within weeks of his August 1943 arrival at the base, people were talking about his strange behavior. He always seemed bothered around others. He chewed his nails and muttered under his breath. Other soldiers heard strange noises at all times of the day and night. Sometimes he would weep; other times he cackled loudly.
Khaalis was a Buffalo soldier, a private training to become a reconnaissance scout by learning to read maps and study terrain, in a field artillery battalion with the 92nd Infantry Division, one of two all-Black American infantry units in the Second World War. It was a decisive moment in the war, and the 92nd was months away from deployment in Europe. The only other all-Black American division in the war, the 93rd, also trained at Huachuca and had been deployed months earlier to battle the Japanese for control of remote island outposts in the Pacific.
The dry, oppressive Arizona heat was sapping the morale of many soldiers in Khaalis’s 92nd. Close to one thousand men from the division, dismissively termed “the Casuals,” were being camped separately at the time, watched over by superior officers while being treated for ailments that frequently proved to be completely imaginary. The army doctors might have suspected that Khaalis, like many others in his division, was looking for an easy way out of a war he did not want to fight.
The incentive to leave the army was greater that morning than ever before. More than two thousand miles away at the White House, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 into law. Commonly known as the GI Bill, it offered veterans unprecedented benefits like tuition and living expenses for college or vocational training, low-cost mortgages, low-interest business loans, and unemployment compensation. All that was required to qualify was active-duty status, which Khaalis held, and a discharge that was anything but dishonorable. If Khaalis was deemed unfit for service and ejected from the military on medical grounds, he would be toward the front of the line to receive the new benefits instituted that morning.
Khaalis’s path into the army was an unusual one, especially for a young Black man. America formally entered the war after the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base in December 1941. As tens of thousands of Black men enlisted in the military over that Christmas, Khaalis was preparing to go off to college at Purdue University. Khaalis grew up not far from Purdue, in Gary, Indiana, on the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Khaalis’s father, Sylvester, was born in Alabama, and his mother, Cecile, in Mississippi. They had both journeyed north before the earliest wave of the Great Migration and were married in Gary in 1913. Khaalis, the couple’s seventh child, was born on August 30, 1922.
Gary was named for the chairman of the board of the United States Steel Corporation and built to serve the giant steel plant that opened its gates in the city in 1908. It was the largest steel plant in the world at the time, employing almost seven thousand people, who produced hundreds of thousands of tons of steel each year. Khaalis’s father was one of those factory workers. Gary was a planned city, built on a grid and advertised to developers and laborers as the “City of the Century.” At first, it attracted mainly immigrants from Greece, Poland, Russia, the Balkans, and other parts of southern and Eastern Europe. African Americans fleeing Jim Crow and Ku Klux Klan terror in the South soon followed.
Gary, like many northern cities where African Americans settled, was starkly segregated. It was fraught with tension between people of European ancestry, both native-born and immigrant, and new Black residents. At the steel mill, they all worked together. Among them were also some of the earliest Muslims to arrive in America from the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire. They were fair skinned, so they lived in white neighborhoods, but many buried their dead in a cemetery less than a mile from the McGhees’ residence. The family might even have seen the traditional Muslim funeral processions go by. The Muslims also established a “Benevolent Society” mutual aid group with an attached coffeehouse and mosque not far from the McGhees’ house.
Khaalis spent his early childhood in a house a mile from the plant, in a part of the city that would be labeled “hazardous” on the earliest redlined municipal maps. He was still a young boy when the family moved to a new house on the much broader 25th Avenue, right across the street from the newly built all-Black Theodore Roosevelt High School, which Khaalis began attending as a teenager, along with a few of his siblings who were in grades above him.
The McGhees were not a friendly bunch. They kept mostly to themselves. Sylvester, a thin man of medium build, was an authoritarian with a deep religious streak. He appeared to hold the large family in his tight grip. They were Seventh-day Adventists who attended the nearby Mizpah SDA Church and observed a strict Sabbath on Saturdays. Neighbors who lived alongside them for years felt like they hardly knew the family.
At school, Khaalis was a quiet, serious, and introverted loner. He did not swear, he did not drink, he did not smoke, and he drew little attention to himself. He rarely smiled. The only time anyone recalled him getting animated or angry was when things were not done precisely according to the rules, and especially his rules. He also had little tolerance for filth or messiness. What most people remembered him for, however, was his natural gift as a musician. Khaalis would mesmerize on the vibraphone. He and his brother Julius, who was a year ahead of him, also played the drums in the school band.
Khaalis graduated in 1940, ranked 27th in his class of 135. Thanks to a global hunger for steel during the Second World War, Gary was being swiftly pulled out of the Great Depression. Khaalis began working at the steel mill alongside his father while taking music courses at Gary Junior College and playing in a sixteen-piece brass band with kids from his former high school. Later in life, Khaalis would tell a psychiatrist that he was admitted with music scholarships to both Tuskegee University, in his father’s native Alabama, and to Wilberforce University in Ohio. Where he did end up was Purdue, fewer than one hundred miles away from home. Before he left for university, in what must have been the strongest rebuke to his father, Khaalis walked into St. Monica’s Catholic Church, right by the newly constructed rail tracks, and was baptized as a Catholic.
Khaalis enrolled mostly in science and math courses at college and studied German, English, and government in his first year. Purdue was not a welcoming place in the 1940s for a serious young Black man like Khaalis. He was one of only a handful of African Americans among the six thousand students. Even finding a place to live was a challenge. Decades after Purdue had admitted its first Black student, the university still did not allow African Americans to live anywhere on its West Lafayette campus with the white students. The only place that would house Khaalis was the International House, which was home to students from places like Korea, China, Czechoslovakia, and Peru. He could live among the foreigners in his own land. At the end of his first semester, Khaalis began boarding in a house across the tracks in the town of Lafayette. There, ten months before he would have been eligible for the draft, Khaalis decided to volunteer for the military, registering with the U.S. Army’s Enlisted Reserve Corps in October 1942.
In November 1942, American troops began fighting in the first major Allied operation of the Second World War. Operation Torch, a joint effort with the British, was an amphibious assault on the coast of North Africa meant to seize control of the mostly Arabic-speaking and Muslim region from Vichy France. It was a fitting place for American soldiers to enter the western theater of the war. In many ways, colonial America’s history had begun in these waters. In the fifteenth century, European expeditions encountered the New World while seeking routes to India that bypassed the coasts of Africa and the Middle East, which were dominated by Muslim empires and kingdoms. Then, centuries later, under the presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, a newly independent United States of America fought its first overseas war in these same waters to protect American merchant ships from Muslim Barbary pirates.
America returned in World War II posing as a liberator. Under the leadership of Dwight Eisenhower, the commander of Allied forces in the region, thousands of American and British soldiers landed at several spots along the North African coast. In advance of these landings, aircraft had dropped five million French and Arabic leaflets created by the Psychological Warfare Branch of the Allied forces. The leaflets, bearing the image of President Roosevelt and the scrawled signature of General Eisenhower, made America, rather than Britain, the friendly face of the invasion. “We come to you to liberate you from your conquerors, whose only desire is to deprive you of your sovereign right to worship freely and your right to live your way of life in peace,” the message read. The leaflet ended with a promise that America would never be able to and never meant to keep: “We will leave as soon as the threat from Germany and Italy will have been dispelled.”
Khaalis was called up a few months after Torch ended. He left Purdue for processing at nearby Fort Benjamin Harrison in August 1943 and was shipped off to Fort Huachuca in Arizona, near the Mexican border. Life at the base followed the same basic patterns of segregation and humiliation that Khaalis had come to expect everywhere. Huachuca had an especially bad reputation in the military for its strained race relations. Black and white soldiers were housed separately, and the base even had two separate hospitals, one exclusively for Blacks, which was staffed almost entirely by Black nurses and Black doctors, when available. With 946 beds, Station Hospital was the largest African American hospital in the United States at the time.
At his evaluation, Khaalis described psychiatric symptoms to the doctor. He reported having visions of white horses on the walls. He said he heard voices that told him to harm himself or, sometimes, others. When he was muttering, apparently to himself, he was actually in conversation with Fred, Jerusha, and Gary Richardson, Khaalis explained, the three stocky white dwarves who visited him in his mind. The doctor noted in the records that Khaalis had no recorded history of psychiatric illness. Khaalis insisted that he had started feeling this way years before, when he was still a high school student in Gary.
The doctor was unconvinced and decided to administer sodium amytal to induce narcosynthesis, a hypnotic state that doctors believed encouraged truth telling. Khaalis held steady under the influence of the “truth serum.” He expressed no extreme emotions and repeated the details of the visual and auditory hallucinations he had been experiencing. This time he said that these visions had been there for as long as he could remember. Other than that, he deviated from his original story very little. Khaalis was ordered hospitalized while a panel of doctors decided to meet at a later date to discuss his fate. He underwent a battery of tests. They checked his urine and blood. They tested him for syphilis. They X-rayed his lungs. The physical examinations found no symptoms of any organic disease, nor did they detect dementia. Khaalis appeared to be completely fine. His fits, meanwhile, became more severe and violent.
Finally, on July 7, 1944, a few months before his battalion would be deployed to Italy, a sanity board ruled that Khaalis suffered from “psychosis dementia praecox paranoid type.” It was a mental disorder that had been recognized relatively recently, commonly known as schizophrenia. It did not allow him to serve his function in the army. The board recommended a Section 2 discharge—a “separation because of personality disorder.” The panel directed that he be placed in a psychiatric facility immediately, where he would presumably be lobotomized. Less than a month later, however, Khaalis was released into the custody of his mother. She told the army that she wanted Khaalis cared for in a facility of her own choice in Gary.
Khaalis never went to a hospital. He filed for unemployment compensation and disability that he was now entitled to under the GI Bill. He waited. Had he successfully manipulated the system, fooling the military medical bureaucracy into cutting him loose and paying him benefits? Or was he truly a mentally disturbed man who simply slipped through the cracks in a country that cared little for him beyond his ability to serve as cannon fodder? Many people would wonder about this in the years to come. During the long, tense hours when Khaalis held hostages in Washington, the negotiators would study Khaalis’s military record and wonder if they really were dealing with a psychotic man. A check for $127.25 finally arrived at his home address in August. That summer, with the money in his pocket, Khaalis left his hometown, hoping never to return. He had dreams of greatness—or maybe they were delusions of grandeur.
2.BLACK IS GREEN
Khaalis arrived in teeming Harlem, New York City, in the summer of 1946. In the two years since leaving the army, he had trained as a drummer at a music conservatory in Chicago and played at jazz venues around that city. He joined Chicago’s Local 208, a segregated Black musicians’ union whose membership read like a who’s who of Chicago blues and jazz at the time. The Midwest—Chicago in particular—had dominated the jazz scene in America for decades, but the Harlem Renaissance had paved the way to a dynamic new stage in New York. There, in small clubs, younger artists were experimenting with an exciting new sound called bebop. Harlem, the new mecca of jazz, called out to a whole generation of musicians like Khaalis.
He quickly found success, playing with big bands on 52nd Street as well as with some smaller West Indian and Spanish ensembles. He had formal training, so he could read music, and he had polished his skills on the timpani, all of which made him a desirable commodity. His monthly disability checks, 70 percent of his army pay, were enough to keep him afloat. There was money to be made in jazz, too. Black is green—that was the word among the promoters, managers, and booking agents in New York City at the time. Black artists were cheap for them, and they had the potential to make them a lot of money.
While playing a musical engagement at Harlem’s Salvation Army one day a few months after arriving, Khaalis spotted a young woman serving coffee and refreshments to the guests. Slender and five foot seven and a half inches tall, she was a regal-looking Black woman. Her name was Ruby Copeland, and she was a couple of years younger than Khaalis. She, too, had converted to Catholicism a few years earlier. Her family had moved to New York City at the end of the first wave of the Great Migration when she was a toddler. Ruby’s father, the sole breadwinner for the family of eight, worked at a chemical and dye factory right across the Hudson in New Jersey while they lived in the squalid tenements on Old Broadway, a forgotten alley east of Broadway close to 125th Street. Khaalis and Ruby fell in love, and on New Year’s Eve, 1946, they walked into the Church of the Annunciation on 135th Street in Harlem and got married.
Khaalis got his big break soon after, while playing gigs with the scorching Texan trumpet soloist Oran “Hot Lips” Page. The Music Attractions Agency, a small New York City promoter, approached him with an opportunity to travel. Europeans had not seen American jazz performed live since Duke Ellington toured parts of the Continent in the 1930s. With the war over, Europe had once again opened its doors to American talent. The agency’s plan was to assemble a band of lesser-known artists who had played with famous big bands whose names could be used to draw large audiences in Europe. They had booked several members. Austin Cole, the leader of the band, had played with Duke Ellington; a singer named Maxine Johnson had performed with Count Basie, Franz Johnson, and Cootie Williams; Shad Collins, the trumpeter, had backed Cab Calloway; the bassist Jimmie Wood and guitarist Willie Houston were from Sy Oliver’s big band. Khaalis fit the bill perfectly as a drummer and signed on for the tour.
The Harlem Madcaps, as they called themselves, took off from the New York airport in April 1947. They landed in London and began blazing a trail through Europe that Count Bassie, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, and many other more famous artists would travel in the months and years that followed. The Madcaps had dates scheduled in London, Antwerp, and Stockholm when they started, but they kept adding more as the buzz around them grew. Soon, they were being billed as “America’s most popular negro orchestra.” They hopped from one European city to the next, playing for almost entirely white audiences. Khaalis appeared comfortable and assured sitting atop a platform at the back of the stage with his name, “Ernie McGhee,” printed in big, neat, bold letters on the kick drum facing the audience.
A couple of months into the tour, Khaalis received news from Ruby announcing that she was pregnant. The Madcaps were on a hot streak, and some of his bandmates were already landing gigs—or European girlfriends and wives—that would keep them on the Continent for much longer. The letter forced Khaalis to consider the option of returning. He had left his own family behind for good in Gary. Ruby, and any children he might bring into this world with her, were his real family now. In August of 1947, he made his way back, first to London, and from there to New York. In November, Ruby gave birth to their first child, a boy they named Ernest McGhee Jr. Khaalis, now twenty-five years old, would begin shaping the child in his own mold, something that would cost the boy his life when he reached that age himself.
Copyright © 2022 by Shahan Mufti
