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Miracle Buffalo Soldiers Buffalo soldiers Miracle at Sant Anna by James McBride 277 pp, Sceptre The United States fought the second world war in Europe with two armies. One, as James McBride hints, has been lionized in countless novels and films; the other all but obliterated from American lore. In tracking the buffalo soldiers of the segregated US army, McBride, author of a bestselling memoir, The Color of Water, has uncovered rich terrain for an absorbing novel. Miracle at Sant Anna, fiction inspired by real events, is set during the final months of the war in Tuscany, as four soldiers, separated from the US 92 nd Buffalo division, blunder into the path of German troops massing in the Alps for the Christmas Day 1944 attack on Serchio valley.
Train, or Diesel to the other GIs, is a tender, slow-witted mountain of a man reminiscent of Steinbecks Lennie in Of Mice and Men. He has rescued an injured six-year-old Italian boy, sole survivor of a German reprisal massacre, to whom he appears as a chocolate giant. Also in his powerful grasp is the priceless head of a marble statue from the destroyed Santa Trinity bridge in Florence, which he believes can make him go invisible. With Train are the Howard University-trained Lieutenant Stamps; the shiftless, cynical Bishop; and a Puerto Rican, Hector Negro. Through these vividly drawn characters and their white commanding officers, the novel reveals the army as a microcosm of an America at war with itself. Owing to an unwritten law that no colored should ever be able to tell a white man what to do, black lieutenants are kept in check by incompetent superiors.
Reformist generals who promote men on merit battle with die-hard segregationists. The division alarms Americans frightened at the thought of 15, 000 armed Negroes in their midst, while a captain avers that, since in Europe, Negroes were screwing white women theyd have to be re-educated once they got home. A north-south chasm also opens up. For Stamps, the Louisiana-born Bishop is a shiftless, shuffling Negro preacher &# 91; who&# 93; held niggers back a hundred years, while Bishop despises Stamps as a yellow Washington, DC high-breed, an educated nigger know-it-all. German propaganda asks, What are you Negroes fighting for? , while blasting out jazz to the buffalo ranks. Stamps believes the war is about progress for the Negro, proving he can fight.
For Bishop, The Negro dont have dooley squat to do with this war-to-free-the-world shit Theyre running out of white boys to die. So now the great white father sends you out here to shoot Germans so he can hang you back in America for looking at his woman wrong. McBride shows the historical irony of the victorious army having to wait 20 more years for even the beginnings of freedom. As Stamps reflects bitterly, Who was the enemy? When the war was over and all the people made up, a German could go to America and live well, start a factory, work in a business, run a bank, while Stamps would still be a nigger.
The soldiers encounter with Europe is a liberation. For Stamps, the Italian peasants are like coloreds without the jook joints. But they too are split, between fascists, partisans, spies and mercenaries; between men and the women they seek with diminishing effect to control. As they wonder whom to trust, Stamps and Bishop become rivals for the young widow Renata. While the action has a compelling, cinematic quality, the miracles threaten to become cloying, as the novel strains for universal significance by freighting the child rescued by Train with symbolism. He is a miracle boy who represented everything that every Italian held dear, the power to love, unconditionally, for ever, to forgive, to live after the worst of atrocities, and, most of all, the power to believe in Gods miracles.
Fortunately, the novel is propelled by a tougher language than this, which skilfully captures the soldiers voices and their thwarted dreams.
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