Miracle at St. Anna Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - INVISIBLE

  Chapter 2 - CHOCOLATE GIANT

  Chapter 3 - THE CHOICE

  Chapter 4 - THE MOUNTAIN OF THE SLEEPING MAN

  Chapter 5 - THE STATUE HEAD

  Chapter 6 - THE POWER

  Chapter 7 - THE CHURCH

  Chapter 8 - A SIGN

  Chapter 9 - THE BLACK BUTTERFLY

  Chapter 10 - PEPPI

  Chapter 11 - INVISIBLE CASTLE

  Chapter 12 - HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN

  Chapter 13 - THE TOWN

  Chapter 14 - THE GERMAN

  Chapter 15 - RUN

  Chapter 16 - SENDING NOKES

  Chapter 17 - HECTOR

  Chapter 18 - BETRAYAL

  Chapter 19 - THE MASSACRE REVEALED

  Chapter 20 - NOKES ARRIVES

  Chapter 21 - THE STAND

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Praise for James McBride’s Miracle at St. Anna

  “McBride’s descriptions of the almost unnavigable, myth-infested Apuane Alps—terrain as beautiful as it is unbearable—are seething poetry. His reconstruction of history—from Florentine politics and tribalism to marble quarrying and sculpture—are masterful. McBride’s empathy for his fellow human is as affecting as the poetry of his prose. He makes his reader . . . feel the pain, terror, anguish, self-doubt of his characters. The book’s central theme, its essence, is a celebration of the human capacity for love. Even in the course of virtually unbearable warfare and deprivation . . . people are able to touch each other, to care. That, McBride insists, is the enduring, immortal miracle of the human race, for all its imperfections.” —The Baltimore Sun

  “An outstanding novel about World War II inspired by the famous Buffalo Soldiers . . . so descriptive that I feel as though I’m an eyewitness to everything that happens emotionally on the frontline. The work provides us with a lesson not only about history but also about humanity and heroism.” —The Dallas Morning News

  “A miracle in its own right…McBride’s prose is stunning. His ability to bring to life an actual historical event (the massacre at St. Anna and the famed Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Division) is a gift. . . . McBride is able to make it work, with the understanding that true miracles happen within ourselves.” —Rocky Mountain News

  “Great-hearted, hopeful, and deeply imaginative.” —Elle

  “McBride has taken a bold leap into fiction. [He] goes deep into each character and takes you with him. His rich description of the landscape . . . transports you into this world. It’s a great piece of storytelling. I cried. I laughed. I hated finishing the book.” —The Albuquerque Tribune

  “A compelling novel. McBride combines elements of history, mythology and magical realism to make this a story about the little things like life and forgiveness and shared experience.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “McBride has the enviable capacity to enlarge and complicate his readers’ understanding of what it means to be human. McBride, who delivered a beautifully nuanced portrait of racial relations in his memoir, The Color of Water, brings the same humanity and understanding to his exploration of the complicated relationships between black soldiers and their white commanders in this novel.” —BookPage

  “Miracle at St. Anna powerfully examines the horrors of history and finds an unexpected wealth of goodness and compassion in the human soul.”

  —The Star-Ledger

  “The miracles of survival, of love born in extremity, and of inexplicable ‘luck’ are the subjects of this first novel. [Miracle at St. Anna] is true to the stark realities of racial politics yet has an eye to justice and hope.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Riveting.” —Newsday

  “Roars ahead kicking and screaming to the finish, lightning-lit with rage and tenderness.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A powerful and emotional novel of black American soldiers fighting the German army in the mountains of Italy. This is a refreshingly ambitious story of men facing the enemy in front and racial prejudice behind. . . . Through his sharply drawn characters, McBride exposes racism, guilt, courage, revenge and forgiveness, with the soldiers confronting their own fear and rage in surprisingly personal ways at the decisive moment in their lives.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A tale of hardship and horror as well as nobility and—yes—miracles, during the Italian campaign in World War II.” —Philadelphia Daily News

  “World War II provides a dazzling backdrop for James McBride’s first novel.” —Savoy

  “A brutal and moving first novel…McBride’s heart is on his sleeve, but these days it looks just right.” —Kirkus Reviews

  Praise for James McBride’s

  The Color of Water

  A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother

  Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

  “The Color of Water [will] make you proud to be a member of the human race.” —Mirabella

  “Complex and moving . . . suffused with issues of race, religion and identity. Yet those issues, so much a part of their lives and stories, are not central. The triumph of the book—and their lives—is that race and religion are transcended in these interwoven histories by family love, the sheer force of a mother’s will and her unshakable insistence that only two things really mattered: school and church. . . . It is her voice—unique, incisive, at once unsparing and ironic—that is dominant in this paired history, and its richest contribution. . . . The two stories, son’s and mother’s, beautifully juxtaposed, strike a graceful note at a time of racial polarization.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “As lively as a novel, a well-written, thoughtful contribution to the literature on race.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “James McBride evokes his childhood trek across the great racial divide with the kind of power and grace that touches and uplifts all hearts.”

  —Bebe Moore Campbell

  “It’s a story about keeping on and about not being a victim. It’s a love story. . . . Much hilarity is mixed in with much sadness. As McBride describes the chaotic life in a family of fourteen, you can almost feel the teasing, the yelling, and the love. . . . The book is a delight, a goading, and an inspiration, worth your time and a few tears.” —The Sunday Denver Post

  “Incredibly moving . . . The author, his mother, and his siblings come across as utterly unique, heroic, fascinating people.”—Jonathon Kozol

  “Inspiring.” —Glamour

  “Told with humor and clear-eyed grace . . . a terrific story. . . . The sheer strength of spirit, pain and humor of McBride and his mother as they wrestled with different aspects of race and identity is vividly told. . . . I laughed and thrilled to her brood of twelve kids . . . I wish I’d known them. I’m glad James McBride wrote it all down so I can.” —The Nation

  “Poignant . . . a uniquely American coming-of-age.” —The Miami Herald

  “A refreshing portrait of family self-discovery…brilliantly intertwine[s] passages of the family’s lives . . . Mr. McBride’s search is less about racial turmoil than about how he realizes how blessed he is to have had a support system in the face of what could have been insurmountable obstacles.” —The Dallas Morning News

  “James McBride has combined the techniques of memoirist and the oral historian to illuminate a hidden corner of race relations. The author and his mother are two American originals.”—Susan Brownmiller

  “Eye- and mind-opening about the eternal convolutions and paradoxes of race in America.” —Chicago Tribune

  “Remarkable . . . a page-t
urner, full of compassion, tremendous hardship and triumph . . . McBride’s story is ultimately a celebration delivered with humor and pride.” —Emerge

  “A wonderful story that goes beyond race . . . richly detailed . . . earthy, honest.” —The Baltimore Sun

  “Deeply moving.” —The Detroit News

  “Engrossing.” —The Cincinnati Enquirer

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  This is a work of fiction inspired by historical events. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2002 by James McBride

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

  Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s

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  eISBN : 978-1-594-48360-8

  1. World War, 1939-1945—Italy—Fiction. 2. African American soldiers—Fiction. 3. Americans—Italy—

  Fiction. 4. Soldiers—Fiction. 5. Italy—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.C28M

  813’.54—dc21

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Dedicated to

  the men of the 92nd Infantry Division,

  the people of Italy,

  and the late Honorable James L. Watson

  of Harlem, New York,

  who epitomizes the best of both.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction inspired by real events and real people. It draws upon the individual and collective experiences of black soldiers who served in the Serchio Valley and Apuane Alps of Italy during World War II. I have taken certain liberties with names, places, and geography, but what follows is real. It happens a thousand times in a thousand places to a thousand people. Yet we still manage to love one another, despite our best efforts to the contrary.

  PROLOGUE

  THE POST OFFICE

  All the guy wanted was a twenty-cent stamp. That’s all he wanted, but when he slid his dollar bill across the post office counter at Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan, the diamond in the gold ring on his finger was so huge that postal clerk Hector Negron wanted to see whom the finger was connected to. Hector normally never looked at the faces of customers. In thirty years of working behind the window at the post office, he could think of maybe three customers whose faces he could actually remember, and two of them were relatives. One was his sister, whom he hadn’t talked to in fourteen years. The other was his cousin from San Juan, who had been his first-grade teacher. Besides those two, the rest didn’t count. They melded into the millions of New York schmucks who staggered to his window with a smile, hoping he would smile back, which he never did. People did not interest him anymore. He had lost his interest in them long ago, even before his wife died. But Hector loved rocks, especially the valuable ones. He’d played the numbers every single day for the past thirty years, and he often fantasized about the kind of diamonds he would buy if he won. So when the man slid his dollar bill across the counter and asked for a stamp, Hector saw the huge rock on his finger and looked up, and when he did, his heart began to pound and he felt faint; he remembered the naked terror of the dark black mountain towns of Tuscany, the old walls, the pitch-black streets as tiny as alleyways, the stair-cases that appeared out of nowhere, the freezing, rainy nights when every stirring leaf sounded like a bomb dropping and the hooting of an owl made him piss in his pants. He saw beyond the man’s face, but he saw the man’s face, too. It was a face he would never forget.

  Hector always carried a pistol to work, and the next day, when the newspapers ran the story of how Hector pulled the pistol out of his front pocket and blew the man’s face off, they talked about how Hector always carried a gun to work because he lived in Harlem and Harlem was dangerous. Hector was old. He lived alone. He’d been robbed before. He was afraid. The New York Times and the Post carried the requisite interviews of fellow postal employees gathered around a taped-up doorway saying he’d seemed about to snap and that he was ready for retirement and how they couldn’t understand it all, but only one person, a rookie reporter from the Daily News named Tim Boyle, wrote anything about the statue head. It was Boyle’s first day on the job, and he got lost going to the post office, and by the time he got there, the other reporters had left and all of Hector’s coworkers had gone. Boyle panicked, thinking he was going to get fired—which if you’re a reporter for the Daily News and you can’t find the main post office in midtown Manhattan is about right—so he talked the cops into letting him ride with them up to Hector’s ramshackle apartment on 145th Street. They went through Hector’s things and found the head of a statue, which looked expensive. Boyle rode with the cops to Forensics, who checked it out and found nothing. But one of the cop’s wives was an art lover, and the cop said, This thing don’t look normal, so they took it to the Museum of Natural History, who sent them to the Museum of Modern Art, who sent for a man out of NYU’s art department, who came over and said, Shit, this is the missing head of the Primavera from the Santa Trinità.

  The cops laughed and said, Is that the Niña, the Pinta, or the Santa María?

  The guy said, Hell, no. It’s a bridge in Florence.

  And that’s how Tim Boyle saved his job and Hector Negron made the front page of the International Herald Tribune, which on that December morning in 1983 was tossed from a tenth-story window of the Aldo Manuzio office building in Rome by a tired janitor named Franco Curzi, who wanted to get home early because it was almost Christmas. It floated down and pirouetted in the air a few times and finally landed on a table at the sidewalk café below, as if God had placed it there, which He, in fact, had.

  A tall, well-dressed Italian man with a well-trimmed beard was sitting at a table having his morning coffee when the paper landed on the table next to his. He noticed the headline and grabbed the paper.

  He read holding the coffee cup in his hand, and when he was done, he dropped the cup and stood so abruptly his chair skidded out behind him and the table slid forward three feet. He turned and began to walk, then trot, then run down the street. Passersby on the sidewalk gawked as the tall man in the Caraceni suit and Bruno Magli shoes tore past them at full tilt, his jacket flying behind him, his arms pumping, running down the crowded tiny streets as fast as he could go, as if by running he could leave it all behind, which was of course impossible.

  1

  INVISIBLE

  On Dec
ember 12, 1944, Sam Train became invisible for the first time. He remembered it exactly.

  He was standing on the bank of the Cinquale Canal, just north of Forte dei Marmi, in Italy. It was dawn. The order was to go. One hundred and twenty black soldiers from the 92nd Division bunched behind five tanks and watched them roll toward the water, then clumsily waded in behind them, rifles held high. On the other side, just beyond the river plains and mostly hidden in the heavy mountain forest of the Apuane Alps, five companies of Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring’s 148th Brigade Division, seasoned, hardened German troops, watched and waited. They sat silently. Hardened, seasoned, exhausted, they sat burrowed into the sides of the heavily wooded mountain, peering into their scopes, watching every move. They’d been there on the Gothic Line six months, a thick line of defense that stretched across the Italian peninsula, from La Spezia all the way to the Adriatic Sea, planting mines, building concrete bunkers, laying booby traps and trip-wires. Exhausted, starving, knowing the war was lost, most wanted to run but could not. There were reports that many were found dead, chained to their machine guns. The orders were straight from the Führer himself. Any man who deserted, any man who gave an inch would be shot without ceremony or trial. Their orders were to stand firm. There was no backing away.

  Train watched as the first of the tanks hit a mine on the other side of the bank and the Germans opened up with everything—mortars, eighty-eights, and machine-gun fire. He heard a frightened voice behind him screaming, “Kill me now! Kill me now!” and he wondered who it was. The smell of cordite and gunpowder drifted into his lungs. He felt his heart seize and stop. Then he heard someone yell, “Go, soldier!” and felt a shove, and he ran, splashing, to his own death.