Miracle at St. Anna

At various points in the novel, different Black characters think of how they dislike their companions’ “type” of Blackness, divisions that exist primarily according to regional lines and that always pertain to that “type’s” way of associating with white people. Train, born in the South, finds Northern Black people (like Stamps) unnecessarily combative; he feels that Northern Black people engage in pointless rebellion against white people, which only results in trouble for themselves and for the Black people that surround them. Stamps, by contrast, dislikes what he sees as excessive obsequiousness from Southern Black people, whom he portrays as kowtowing to white authority when they should stand up for themselves and for their race; he sees this as not only a matter of pride, but a matter of politics and potential progress. Though Stamps sees Train as fitting into this category of behavior, he does not overtly blame Train for this, viewing Train as too unintelligent to understand why rebellion against white authority may yield political progress.

The more overt conflict over how to behave as a racialized subject under white supremacist rule emerges between Bishop and Stamps. Stamps believes Bishop’s mysticism and self-interested trickery fulfill racist white stereotypes about Black people: “Bishop represented the kind of Negro that Stamps despised; his type set the race back a hundred years with his silly grinning and shining in front of whites and hustling his Negroes with God talk and playing cards” (86). Bishop, by contrast, finds appalling Stamps’s willingness to operate within structures of authority set forth by white men for white men (as well as his demand that others recognize his rank within those structures). He accuses Stamps of being an “Uncle Tom” and tells him, “You just like the white man. Keep changing the law so it fits you” (256). Both Bishop and Stamps will turn from these ways of being in the final scenes of the novel; Stamps stands up to Nokes to defend Train, despite Nokes’ higher rank in the Army, while Bishop selflessly sacrifices himself to help Train and Angelo, despite lacking hope of personal gain for doing so.

These intra-racial conflicts cause divisions within a group of men all of whom face the violence of being Black under white supremacy, divisions that are caused and encouraged by this same system of white supremacy. What each of the soldiers views as a “type” of Black person actually refers to that person’s way of being when faced with the violent authority of white people. Under white supremacy, the novel thus asserts, Black people are forced to characterize themselves as if under constant view of whiteness and its accompanying perils. The danger of racism is so present that ways of reacting to that peril become viewed as a part of one’s very personhood (even by other Black people who can recognize racist hatred as an external force). The movement away from these ways of being in the final scenes of the novel thus signifies that the totalizing eye of white supremacy is shed when the characters face death—and, less optimistically, suggests that death may be the only way for these characters to escape the oppressive system under which they have lived their lives.

Throughout the novel, the three Black American soldiers reflect on the difference in the treatment they have faced in Europe and in America. Stamps, particularly, finds himself feeling at home in Italy and wishing for a life in Italy after the war ends; regularly, the characters consider the cruelty they will face in their own country, despite their service in the war spent defending that country at great personal risk. The Germans use their knowledge of the intense, violent hatred that Black Americans face from their white countrymen as a tactic to urge defection: “Welcome to the war, Ninety-second Division. What are you Negroes fighting for? America doesn’t want you. We want you. Come to us” (79). Bishop finds himself thinking that even when they are locked in battle against the Germans, he finds their aggression preferable to that of the Americans, finding enemies on a battlefield more straightforward and less frightening than the constant threat of danger from white people in his home country.

Many Black intellectuals and artists moved to Europe from America in the 19th and 20th centuries, finding the reception they found there significantly warmer than the hate they faced in the United States. McBride’s representation of Europe’s experience with Black people does not, however, paint an entirely idyllic picture. Many Italians in the text have never met a Black person, and their reaction to the four soldiers often underscores this ignorance. Angelo frequently thinks of Train as being made of chocolate, for example, and Renata blithely asks Stamps, “You Negroes seem different from other Americans […]. Why?” (223). McBride thus characterizes Italians as not being entirely immune to the anti-Black attitudes that pervade Europe and America but as possessing racist attitudes that stem more from ignorance than active malice, unlike Americans.

Notably, all three Black soldiers in Bornacchi find themselves thinking that conditions in America are worse than those they have faced in Italy, despite the war that is destroying the area where they hide. (Only Hector, who is Puerto Rican, feels any real nostalgia for America as “home,” suggesting a difference in the racist violence that is experienced by Black people and other non-white people in mid-century America.) McBride thus suggests that, if wartime in Europe is preferable, for a Black person, to peacetime in America, then there truly is no such thing as peacetime in America under white supremacy. Black people in America, he posits, face war their whole lives—a war that nefariously insists it does not exist.