Solace Wales is the author of the new book Braided in Fire: Black GIs and Tuscan Villagers on the Gothic Line. It focuses on a small town in Italy during World War II. Wales is the former director of the International Child Art Center in San Francisco, and she lives in Sommocolonia, Italy, and Marin County, California.
Q: How did you first learn
of the history you write about in Braided in Fire?
A: In 1958, when I was age 19
and a Junior Year Abroad student, our Smith College group stayed initially for
six weeks in a villa outside Siena where we had introductory courses —one dealt
with the Italian Resistance movement during World War II.
Even with my then limited
Italian, I was captivated by the slim, limited edition of La Storia della mia
Morte (The Story of My Death), written by the brother of the Signora of the
villa.
Lauro de Bosis, who had been
the Italian cultural attaché to New York, wrote the book just before he learned
to pilot an airplane in order to fly a suicidal mission to drop anti-fascist
flyers over Rome. I was very moved by this act and by the strong moral stance
of other resistance fighters we read about.
Several times, a Sienese
woman, who had been a partisan, came to speak to us. I don’t remember what she
said except that her partisan fiancé was killed in the effort. But still today,
I can vividly picture the strong features of her face. I was in tears at the
end of each of her talks.
Then my interest in World War
II Italy lay dormant for many years. I was a printmaker but spent my time
primarily as an art educator. But my artist husband and I spent two yearlong
periods living in Italy and eventually bought a stone farmhouse in a
mountaintop village in the foothills of the Apennines of northern Tuscany.
Shortly after we moved into
Sommocolonia in 1975 (our house hadn’t been lived in since the war), a neighbor
told me that ours was the only house occupied when the village was bombed in
December 1944. All the other villagers had fled, but the three old timers in
our place couldn’t walk far and stayed put.
There was no food left, but
the demi-johns of wine were full and all three elders were tipplers. When their
relatives returned after the bombing —in which many village houses were
destroyed— they found all three fine, but completely sloshed, wandering around
in circles with their goat and chickens.
The old folk explained that
there had been a terrible storm with a “whore’s wind!” that had broken their
windows and cracked their chimney. They complained that no one had come by to
fix these things.
There was only one house
between theirs and the village’s 12th century church, which had been completely
leveled in the bombing. The elders were totally oblivious of what they had
lived through.
I later heard many stories
from my village neighbors about their daunting wartime experiences, but none
with the levity of that first one.
I was always interested in
the stories, but it wasn’t until 1987, that I realized I had a role —someone
had to capture these experiences before it was too late. I began doing
tape-recorded interviews with my Sommocolonian friends during our summertime
visits to the village.
The more I heard in detail,
the more I understood that I must locate and interview African American
veterans with a connection to the horrific Sommocolonia battle of the day after
Christmas 1944. But I dragged my feet in attempting this.
Q: The book describes the
events on the Gothic Line in World War II, but also your own experiences as a
researcher. How did you choose the book's structure?
A: I didn’t really choose the
book’s structure. I just started writing about the material —a long time ago.
Much of what I wrote I threw out along the way. Or more accurately, I filed
them away in “Old Braided in Fire” files that I’ve never looked at again. (I
have difficulty with the finality of truly throwing things away.)
I was accustomed to journal
writing so it was natural for me to include my experience in investigating.
Actually there was much more of me in the book at the start and as I went along
I peeled a lot of it away.
Even so, immediately before
publication, I realized there was still too much of me. I wanted my
protagonists to take central stage, so I contacted an editor I had worked with
briefly 10 years before and she came to the last-minute rescue. She helped me
to extricate the “me” in a few key places and that seemed to be enough. Or at
least I hope it was enough.
Still, I’m glad that I did
include bits about my interviewing because it allowed me to speak about the
character of my interviewees in a more direct way than if I had kept everything
in the past.
For example. when I went to
Irma Biondi’s house to conduct an interview I wrote that after I banged the
knocker on the tall chestnut door:
“I stepped back from the
doorway, concerned about the ferocious sounding dog inside. Irma opened the
door with a broad smile, one hand firmly on the collar of a large German
Shepherd, seated quietly at her side. When I expressed my surprise that she had
a dog, she explained that it was her grown son’s dog. “He’s really a one master
dog,” she added. I nearly objected, having just observed how well the dog
obeyed her. But I keep my thoughts to myself, reflecting on how this was just
another example of Irma’s natural authority.”
It might not have been so
easy to convey that quality when writing about Irma as a 22-year-old, though I
have no doubt that she possessed that natural authority then too.
In terms of the basic
structure of the book, I had quite a struggle in the beginning because many
people, far more experienced writers than I, told me that I simply could not
write a book about both the villagers and the black GIs. I had to choose one or
the other. People who were interested in one of these groups would not be
interested in the other.
I could write about Black GIs
and the villagers would be in the background, but just as a backdrop. Or I
could write about the villagers with the GIs just on the periphery of their
experience. Several people suggested, “Why don’t you write two books?”
What these friends didn’t
realize was that what motivated me was to write about what happened in this one
tiny mountain village in a complete way. I wanted to capture the experience
of Sommocolonia. At one time I
considered calling the book One Village, One War.
I thought to convey the idea
that if this much tragedy and destruction happened in this tiny unknown place,
then multiply the experience and just imagine the scale of war! In Europe alone
there were thousands upon thousands of villages, not to mention thousands of
large cities which met unfathomable horror in World War II. And that was only
one of the wars that the continent has seen.
Q: What surprised you most in
the course of your work on this book?
A: As I said, after I had
interviewed all the 21 Sommocolonian villagers old enough to remember World War
II, I knew that I should try to contact African American veterans with a
connection to the village. The villagers had spoken of these men with real
fondness — they regarded them as their liberators. But I dragged my feet on
doing this stateside interviewing.
The task seemed daunting. How
would I locate men who had been stationed in the Serchio Valley decades before?
(The Serchio Valley is the general region where Sommocolonia is located.) I
knew I couldn't just phone the U.S. Army and ask for their addresses.
And I wondered if I would be
capable of prompting honest, heartfelt answers from people I’d never met. (I’d
known the villagers intimately before I began interviewing.)
Even more to the point, why
would these veterans want to tell their war experiences to me? I’m a woman who
does not share their military background and, as a white person, I do not share
with direct experience the pain of racial prejudice in our society.
I figured that these men
would feel they had little in common with me and would not be forthcoming. I
kept postponing doing what I knew was the next step.
Finally in the summer of 1994
I came upon a very brief account of Lt. John Fox’s action in the Sommocolonia
battle in an American military history, Buffalo Soldiers (Sunflower University
Press 1990).
The book informed me that Lt.
Fox was a black American who had sacrificed himself heroically in Sommocolonia.
This discovery finally galvanized me to engage in making the attempt —however
difficult, I had to try to find Fox’s fellow soldiers.
I wrote to the author of the
history, Maj. Thomas St. John Arnold, who suggested that I contact Jehu Hunter,
then president of the 92nd Division's World War II Veterans’ Association. To my
amazement, as a communications officer, Hunter had been billeted in the villa
of friends of mine in the valley, so we could talk about the very room he’d
filled with communication equipment.
Hunter gave me the phone
numbers of a few friends, who’d been in the Serchio Valley in December 1944.
They in turn gave me the names of others.
I couldn’t travel all over
the country to do the interviewing, but I later realized that the telephone was
the best media for my mission. It was the way these vets stayed in touch with
one another so it was natural.
Of course from the moment I
said hello, they knew I was a white woman, but as we weren’t looking at one
another, our difference in race wasn’t highlighted. I found it surprisingly
easy to talk, even with new interviewees, about their encounters with
prejudice. The vets seemed to immediately intuit that I wouldn’t be calling if
I weren’t a sympathetic listener.
Apart from the media, another
fortuitous thing about my interviewing was its timing. Many World War II
veterans, black or white, were reluctant to talk about their experiences, but I
approached my subjects when they’d reached an advanced age.
By then some were clearly
relieved to finally talk about it. I often discovered that the vet’s own
children hadn’t heard the stories I was told. I always sent my interviewee a
copy tape of our interview so that he could share it with his family if he
wished.
The response I received
telephoning these men out of the blue, eliciting often upsetting memories, was
an experience I shall never forget. Of the many calls I made from my California
home, 21 developed into in-depth interviews (coincidentally the same number as
with the villagers). I was greeted with extraordinary warmth, candor, and
patience.
Just as I’d learned major
facts of Italian World War II history from the villagers, I now learned about
military organization and World War II equipment from the veterans.
I’m now certain it was an
advantage that I was female and that I was not savvy about the military. My
interviewees were the experts. (I later consulted every military book I could
find in both English and Italian with information about Sommocolonia and its
environs.)
I had worried about
interviewing people I didn’t know; it had never occurred to me how well I would
get to know them over the telephone. I spoke with several of my main
protagonists over a period of years and met them in person on various occasions.
We became close friends.
Q: What do you hope readers
take away from the book?
A: People who read Braided in
Fire will learn about an amazing bit of American/Italian history.
The story reveals truths
about the suffering of two groups little is known about in regard to World War II:
black GIs and Italian peasants. At the time, both groups had strong oral
traditions, but not written ones. As a result, their experiences have, with a
few exceptions, gone unrecorded.
The political danger, the
terror, and the hunger experienced by the Italian population during the period
is known by older generations in Italy, but little known elsewhere. Not much
has been written, including in Italian, about the peasant experience in the
countryside.
Even villages as small as
Sommocolonia were torn between armed resistance to fascism by joining local
partisans or collaborating with the Fascists (and later the Nazis) with their
sinister ideologies. Neutrality was not a possibility.
The book also reveals the
astounding multitude of ways in which African American soldiers suffered
prejudice in the U.S. Army of World War II. A black soldier gazing in a shop
window who did not see the approach of a white officer would be arrested for
not saluting.
Far more lethal were
situations where the soldiers were used as cannon fodder by officers who sent
them on suicidal missions, apparently not caring about their fate. (Edward
Brooke, who later became a Massachusetts senator, is quoted in the book
describing one such situation encountered by his unit.)
Why is it important to know
about this history? It gives the reader a vivid background in the indignities
and dangers suffered by blacks who were trying to serve their country and help
liberate Europe.
In Italy these men were
fighting two battles, one against the Nazis with their convictions about the
superior Aryan race, the other against their own white superior officers, who
generally treated them with contempt.
Though American black
soldiers no longer suffer as many inequities in the U.S. Army, prejudice
continues to be expressed in myriad ways in American society today. With the
Black Lives Matter movement, white people are finally learning to become
attuned to some of the nuances of prejudice. This book will further that
understanding.
It is my hope that revealing
the heroism of these black soldiers who, despite the appalling treatment they
received, gave their all in the cause of liberty, will help Americans to fully
recognize the value of our black citizens.
Q: What are you working on
now?
A: It’s only a month since
Braided in Fire was published, so I’ve been busy responding to people like you
who are interested in the book for blogs and articles. Others have written me
personal comments and I like to respond.
Plus I have 30 years’ worth
of contact information on people who are interested in the subject and I’ve
informed only about a fourth of them of the book’s publication.
What are my next writing
projects? I’ve written a portion of a different story to do with Sommocolonia
and I think I will tackle finishing that first. It will not be a long book like
Braided in Fire—perhaps just over 100 pages. Its focus? I would rather not
talk about it at this juncture while I‘m just flushing out its direction in my
mind.
I taught art to children for 40
years and have long had in mind a book on how to further creative thinking in
children. Will I get to writing about this topic? I hope so, but I am 81 years
old, so who knows.
Then there is my journal
writing. I may use some of it in an autobiographical way.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment