CHAPTER SIX GI BENEFITS
CHAPTER
SIX
GI Benefits
The GI bill was a godsend for Benny, with opportunities for war vets there for the taking.
The country owed a debt of gratitude to the men who risked all to fight tyranny and fascism and uphold democracy, and the grateful nation meant to pay.
Not only did the VA find him a place to stay and set him up with unemployment money until a job came through, they paid for his classes in automotive engineering.
He figured, if he could fix cars, why not learn to make them?
Benny chose to take evening classes since he could sign up for them without providing his high-school records from his Negro high school, like he’d have to do for a college degree. Even though his army papers declared him white, it was a chance he couldn’t take.
He was on his way, which should have felt good, but he missed his life.
He missed cook-outs at Aunt Teen’s and arguing with Cora and belly-laughing with Roscoe and dinners with Momma.
In the army, they all felt homesick together, but here it was a lonely, isolating experience, especially when home was just down the road.
After a few weeks in his new place, Benny met his next-door neighbor, Will, a navy man who’d survived Pearl Harbor and fought in the Pacific.
He and Will went from speaking on the doorstep to having beers after work sometimes, until one day when Benny knocked, beers in hand, and found his neighbor in a sea of boxes.
‘I’m moving,’ Will explained, out of the blue and just like that. ‘I was going to come by this weekend to say goodbye.’
Benny felt a stab of sadness. Will wasn’t exactly a friend, but he was the closest thing to it he had. Now he’d have no one. The fingers of his loneliness gripped tighter.
Will said he was headed to that new Levittown development north of the bay. There had to be at least four hundred homes going up over there.
‘The best part is,’ Will said, taking a beer, ‘my GI mortgage works out to be less than what I’m paying in rent. You should look into it.’
In Benny’s experience, when something sounded too good to be true, it usually was, but he checked on the GI mortgage situation and, it turned out, Will was right. He didn’t even need a down-payment. Benny couldn’t sign up fast enough, and a few weeks later, he was packing up for his own move.
In Levittown, Benny had room for friends and family to visit and a back garden for cook-outs, but he couldn’t invite the people he longed to see.
Dark faces visiting a whites-only neighborhood might bring rocks through his windows, or worse, shotguns at midnight, so he moped about his new home feeling restless and alone.
His new neighbors liked to greet each other with friendly waves and sidewalk chats about lawn care.
The family to his left brought him cookies when he moved in, and the couple to his right brought a casserole.
About two weeks after the casserole, the husband, Ed, asked Benny’s help to carry a brand-new television set into the house.
They set it up with Benny bending the antenna this way and that until the picture came through.
Then he and Ed sat on the sofa watching first a commercial for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and then one for washing powder.
‘They’re showing the fight tonight,’ Ed said, which Benny already knew. The 19 June Joe Louis v. Billy Conn rematch would be the first ever televised World Heavyweight Championship. Hell, even Benny had considered buying himself a television set to see it.
‘You want to stay and watch?’ Ed asked when they’d flicked through each network channel twice.
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Heck, no,’ he said. ‘Alice’s brothers are coming over and my sister and a couple from the old neighborhood. You should stay. Alice has hot dogs and everything.’
By the time the others arrived, Benny had helped Alice make popcorn and lemonade to go with her hot dogs, and had helped Ed drag chairs in from the dining room so everyone could sit.
Ed and Alice’s friends and family seemed nice enough. Most of them backed Conn, the Pittsburgh Kid who’d almost beat Louis five years ago back in ’41.
‘You gotta root for the underdog,’ Ed said.
‘Not me,’ said Benny. ‘Joe Louis, all the way.’
Ed’s sister, Gloria, joined Benny on Team Joe and they hooted and high-fived when the Brown Bomber delivered his knockout punch in the eighth round.
‘So, are you a boxing fan?’ Benny asked her when they’d calmed down from their victory high.
‘Absolutely not,’ she laughed, a tinkling sound, like crystal leaves in a breeze. ‘I came to see the television set.’
She reminded him of Cora, and he forced a smile as a fresh pang of homesickness jolted him.
They got hot dogs and lemonade and stepped outside. With the start of summer, the humidity was rising faster than the heat, and they fanned themselves uselessly, stirring up the sticky air.
She asked about his time in the war, and he told her sanitized stories of adventure and travel, glossing over the actual fighting. When she asked about his family, he hesitated, trying to gauge if there was anything he could safely share.
‘Truth is, I haven’t seen them since I’ve been back.’
‘What? Why ever not? Nobody’s that busy.’
The shame he’d been ignoring came rushing back and he could tell it showed on his face because her expression softened from playful to serious as she touched his arm. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by that. Just ignore me. I talk sometimes before I think.’
He tried to brush it off, but the homesickness and the guilt gripped him. He felt lost. ‘I’d like to see them but … it’s complicated.’
‘Well,’ she said slowly, this time choosing her words with care, ‘I don’t know what happened, but family is family. I bet if you reached out, they’d be glad to hear from you.’
When he went home that night, her words played on his mind, keeping him awake, staring at his ceiling. In the small hours of the morning, he finally rose from his bed and found pen and paper. He sat down at his kitchen table and wrote a long overdue letter.