Old Fort, North Carolina. Thad Bryson grew up there, but in the run up to WWII, the Army reached out for him. He wound up with the 97th Engineering Regiment at Eglin Field in Florida where he met the Tuskegee Airmen. Black men had more choices than he had dreamed.
Thad Bryson meets the Tuskegee Airmen
The Army sent him north to Alaska with his regiment where he cooked for the men in his company through their summer and fall on the Alaska Highway Project and then through the misery of the coldest winter on record in the Tanana Valley. When a white gas stove blew up in his face in early 1943, his white company commander saved his vision by insisting the medics ship him to Walter Reed Army Hospital.
Discharged from Water Reed, Thad returned to Old Fort, but he lived a very different life than the one destined for him.
Thad married, had kids, worked two and even three jobs to make ends meet. In Old Fort the War and the Army had changed nothing except Thad. Jim Crow, alive and well through the forties and fifties and well into the sixties dominated his life and the life of his family. Thad cooked in the kitchen at white Marion High School just a couple of miles from his house. His son Fred rode a rickety bus 13 miles over rough roads to the black school.
Thad’s boss, the white school principle, noted and regretted the stupidity of that rule. He did nothing to change it, but at least he recognized absurdity when he saw it.
Old Fort didn’t change, but Thad Bryson and millions of black men like him had changed, and nothing could change them back. Thad raised Fred and his siblings with aspirations. Taught them to survive, but to accept no limits.
Fred assured us that some white people reached through the barrier between the races. In 1950 the Sears store in Asheville had two water fountains. Fred, a thirsty little boy, stepped to the fountain reserved for blacks and found it broken. He wanted a drink, and the fountain reserved for whites stood right there. Thad regretfully told his son he’d have to wait.
A white man standing nearby heard the exchange; looked at little Fred and asked him if he wanted a drink. Fred nodded. The man picked him up, carried him to the white fountain and helped him to a drink of water.
It really doesn’t have to be so damned complicated.
Near the end of Thad’s life, Fred asked him if he could go back and live it over, would he change anything. The old man grinned at his son. “I might want to go to college and then learn to fly airplanes.”