Chapter 14: Kinch
Author's Note: In earlier stories (notably "Swapping Generals") I've departed from canon to make Kinch the only black American soldier in camp. I've based this chapter on the same assumption; see note at end for further explanation.
ooOoo
Some days, I feel like I am surrounded by white.
For starters, I mean that literally for the weather we've been having recently. Winter is holding on hard this year, and we got yet another snow last night. We have some film of documents with V1 rocket information and locations that we were able to photograph when one of Klink's World War I buddies came through camp for a visit yesterday; obtaining that was a tricky but neat little operation. We need to get it out to our underground contacts, but we're snowbound at the moment. Again. There's no getting out of the tunnel and through the woods without being caught: we're too visible against that white background and we'd leave footprints in the fresh snow that even the Stalag 13 guards wouldn't be able to miss. Klink isn't buying any reason for us to go into town in this weather, not even another toothache from Newkirk (I think he's getting wise to that excuse), so Colonel Hogan has been reduced to hoping Oscar Schnitzer can get it out when he changes the dogs the day after tomorrow. Getting the film to him will be risky, but if we wait much later than that the info won't get to London in time for them to use it. And it's all diagrams and maps, so not something we can radio over to them.
The only guy still happy about snow is Chapman. I refuse to believe that snow near Toronto is somehow better than it is in Detroit, given that they're less than 250 miles apart. Sure, I remember liking the first snow each year, but by March and April I was always tired of it, like I am now. But Chapman still smiles and spreads his hands out to catch the flakes as they fall and tries to organize snowball fights or building snowmen in the compound. He says that late snows are the best of the season because they're always wet and heavy enough for packing the best snowballs. Crazy Canadian . . . it's nearly April, and high time for spring, I say.
But it's not just the whiteness of snow that's getting to me this year. It's also being the only black man in a sea of white.
I don't mean that I get harassed badly here at Stalag 13. Colonel Hogan is as decent a man as has ever drawn breath, and he made it clear to everyone from the day I got here that nothing like that would happen under his command. He even put me in the bunk right by his door, so he'd hear if anyone tried to give me a hard time. Not that that turned out to be an issue in Barracks 2. LeBeau buddied up to me, and Newkirk followed suit. With the two of them on my side, everyone else fell in line too. Now I'm in my bunk by the office door so I'm handy if the Colonel needs me, and I think I keep an eye on him more than he does on me these days.
The Colonel assesses everyone who arrives at Stalag 13 for the skills they have and what they can contribute to his vision of the operation, and he did the same for me when I got here. He was impressed with my radio knowledge and put me in charge of that side of the operation immediately, but beyond that he saw a potential in me that no other officer ever bothered to look for since I got drafted. He's given me a level of trust and responsibility I know damn well I wouldn't have anywhere else in this war. He even trusts me to tell him when his ideas have problems, and not just be a yes man. The way I see it, he gives orders for the operation and I help keep order in the operation. And I like to think that by doing my job I've earned the respect of the other men here in camp, especially those in Barracks 2. I may not go out on as many missions outside the wire as they do—there's just no way I can pass for German undercover most of the time except over the phone—but I still get my share of night operations, depending on the nature of the mission. Not to mention that the Colonel trusting me to hold everything together at home base when the rest of them are out is an honor that I appreciate deeply.
So I get on fine here at Stalag 13—as well as anyone here does, anyway. But still . . . I never realized until I got here how much I took for granted being with black people like myself. Now I know that every man here in Stalag 13 misses his home town; I'm no different than anyone else that way. But still, there's a difference. It's easy to feel, but hard to explain. For instance, there's a couple of guys from Detroit here in camp. Usually guys from the same area get tight, share memories, but . . . well, let's just say those two and I are from different parts of town. Not much crossover in what we remember of home: food, bars, music, church—you name it, we know different ones. That's because while folks of different colors may work together on the assembly line in Mr. Ford's auto plants, their living neighborhoods don't overlap in the city of Detroit. When my father and uncle moved up from Georgia back in the twenties, getting away from tenant farming that wasn't much better than slavery to find industrial jobs that paid real wages, they moved into Black Bottom; that's where my papa met mama and married her, and where I grew up, though as I got a bit older I loved spending as much time as I could in Paradise Alley, the business district next to it. But there's very few whites that venture into Paradise Alley, and I can't remember ever seeing one anywhere near our house.
I can never decide what I miss most from there—aside from my family, of course. Maybe walking down St. Antoine to the corner of Adams: standing there you can hear jazz coming from half a dozen clubs up and down the two streets. My buddies and I would go to two or three in a night, taking in bands at Brown Bomber Chicken Shack, Club Paradise, or Harlem Cave. If we wanted to really impress a young lady we were taking out, we'd head to the Plantation Club in the basement of the Norwood Hotel, for its chorus line, singers, dancers, and swing band, all headed up by Detroit's own bandleader Earl Walton. I've seen Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington—all the greats come through Detroit. I even learned some bass tricks from Walter Page in the Count Basie Orchestra one night. They're all better than Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey; I know Colonel Hogan and a bunch of the other guys here like those guys, but to me they're just pale imitations, so to speak, of the real jazz masters.
Or maybe training under Eddie Futch at the Brewster Wheeler Rec Center: the boxing lessons I got from that man taught me more about fighting than I ever learned in the army's basic training. I once saw Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber himself, training there, having come back for the afternoon to the gym from which he'd first made it big. He punched the bag there for an hour, put a dent in it so big that nobody else could use it afterwards. No one minded: Joe Louis could do whatever he wanted and get nothing but admiration from all of us there. It was a privilege to watch him at work.
But probably I miss the intangibles from home the most: the odors coming from the restaurants as I walk by, hearing the choir sing at church, little everyday things like that. I guess if I have to pick, it's the voices I miss most of all, the language of my people, the cadence of speech of the preachers at church on Sundays, the bossing and teasing of all the women, from my mama to all the girls I dated, the ways they showed they cared about us boys. Yeah, that's what I miss most.
Guess I'm singing the blues to myself at the moment, feeling lonely for home. We all do that here from time to time. Blues about white right now, I suppose, from all that new snow. Chapman's always pointing out how pretty snow is, not taking into account what a problem it is for the operation—though he is right that the snow blanket can make this corner of Germany beautiful, at least when it first falls. But even if there's some beauty to silver white winter around here, I stand out too much at that season in the wrong ways, so I'm looking forward to it melting into spring when the earth is black and covered with green—those are my colors, and I wear them proudly, whether I stand out or blend in.
ooOoo
Author's Note: Kinch's presence in camp before the invasion is historically very unlikely, especially given the racial segregation enforced in all branches of the armed services throughout the war. African American soldiers were eventually (in 1944) given combat opportunities, which they and their community leaders saw as an important stepping stone on the road to true equal rights for all black Americans. But that's far too late to explain Kinch's presence in camp, let alone Baker or Broughton or the other black POWs seen in the background of various episodes. I strongly believe that the producers of "Hogan's Heroes" were consciously supporting the Civil Rights Movement's agenda by including Kinch, Baker, and the other black characters on the show: they certainly didn't have to do any such thing given the setting of the show, and the fact that "I Spy" (1965-1968) was the only other show on the air that had a major African American character on it. ("Star Trek" with Nichelle Nichols as Uhura didn't start until 1966; Snooky also reminded me that "Mission Impossible," which started that year too, had a major African American character: Barney Collier, played by Greg Morris.) I admire the stories in the HH fandom that have come up with ingenious explanations for the presence of African American soldiers in the camp; if I had a better imagination maybe I could come up with a good explanation too! But I've chosen to keep Kinch as an anomaly, which seems to me slightly more historically likely, though uncanonical in terms of the show.
I've based Kinch's memories of home on some research about Detroit in the 1920s and '30s, when he would have been a boy. I've made his father a part of the Great Migration, the movement of six million African Americans out of the rural south and into the industrial urban north between 1910 and 1970. Kinch's Detroit background as given on the show (including his expertise in boxing and playing bass in a jazz combo) fits the cultural backdrop of Detroit well: it was the city that produced Joe Louis, the world heavyweight champion from 1937 to 1949, generally regarded as the first black American to be regarded as a nationwide hero. Also, the joint Black Bottom residential neighborhood (named not for its residents but by the initial French settlers of the area for the rich soil of the river valley) and the adjoining Paradise Alley business district were a large and economically powerful African American area within the city.
Paradise Alley was home to many jazz clubs in which the great black jazz artists played. It was also a place where some adventurous and liberal-minded whites would come to hear jazz with black audiences; such places were rare in the United States of the 1930s and '40s. Jazz aficionados differ in their opinions of the role race played in the development of the genre: while many of the great originators of different jazz styles were blacks, whites played important roles too and some (like Benny Goodman) reached across racial lines to integrate jazz bands. But white bands were often preferred by white consumers of jazz and usually got the higher paying gigs in mainstream venues; moreover, some critics regarded "white jazz" as distinctly different from (and sometimes less authentic than) the jazz produced by black musicians. Kinch thus articulates a common perception of his time and culture. Hogan, by contrast, in various episodes of the show mostly mentions white jazz musicians as popular with the men in camp (Tommy Dorsey notably), and the one jazz standard we see him play drums for, "Cherokee" in "Look at the Pretty Snowflakes," is by Ray Noble, an English composer and bandleader.