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  1

  THE SEVENTH CHILD

  Eugene Bullard, the future nightclub-owning spy, boxer, fighter pilot, musician, and decorated soldier, was born to William Octave Bullard and Josephine Yokalee Thomas Bullard on October 9, 1895, in the sleepy town of Columbus, Georgia, just east of the Georgia-Alabama border, right on the banks of the Chattahoochee River. William was jovially dubbed “Big Ox” by an employer because he was six foot five and at least two hundred fifty pounds. The nickname stuck. William was the son of a slave of Haitian ancestry and Josephine was a full-blooded Creek Indian.

  The Bullards had ten children in all, but three died in infancy. The entire family lived crammed in a three-room house at 2601 Talbotton Avenue, which was then part of the African American community on the west side of town. Big Ox, from the moment Gene was born, felt this seventh of his children would be the “lucky one” with seven being somehow mysterious and considered charmed. History ultimately might say he was correct, but Gene’s actual beginnings were far from auspicious.

  The records do not contain any physical description of Gene’s mother, so we do not know if she was short or tall, small or large. We do know that Gene did not achieve the same height and physical stature of his impressively built father. Ultimately, he stood just under six feet and never weighed much more than one hundred sixty pounds. Then again, with the family always on the thin edge of poverty and many hungry mouths to feed, it is entirely possible that Gene’s height and weight suffered early on from a diminished availability of nutrition.

  William eked out a living as a general laborer, mostly among the warehouses and docks strung along the Chattahoochee River, separating Columbus from Phenix City, Alabama. By the early 1890s, William Bullard was working full-time for cotton broker William C. Bradley. Born at the height of the Civil War in 1863, Bradley was an ambitious and clever merchant who eventually owned several textile mills, a bank and a robust share of the early Coca-Cola Company. Coke, in fact, owes its ultimate corporate survival to Bradley and his partners who saved the firm from collapse during the sugar crisis that occurred in America after World War I; but that, as they say, is another story.

  What matters for the Bullards is that Bradley proved to be a benevolent employer, especially for a white man in the racially charged postbellum south. Blacks, like Bullard, were not always welcome in the workplace alongside white workers. Bradley was reported to have been fond of his “black giant” and his willingness to work hard. That, too, did not sit well with some of the white Georgians toiling along the river, men who were not similarly inclined, and less appreciated. Any hardworking black man with a good work ethic and positive attitude was a magnet for trouble in the Jim Crow Era, and so it would be for William Bullard.

  At the age of six, Gene was enrolled in the 28th Street School in Columbus. The school was rough-hewn, the supplies minimal and the education standards were low, but during Gene’s time there—until 1906—he learned to factor, read and write. He later calculated that he had accumulated the equivalent of a second-grade education before he left, which was still more than many poor black children ever received in the segregated South of the early twentieth century.

  On a sweltering Sunday in August 1902, when Gene was two months shy of his seventh birthday, his mother died unexpectedly. It was a horrendous blow to the family. The cause was not known, beyond a general malaise that weakened Josephine until she simply expired. The hard work and stresses of poverty along with bearing and raising ten children—and burying three of them—undoubtedly had something to do with her death at only thirty-seven years old.

  Gene’s older siblings were pressed into service to take care of the younger children and complete all the household chores. They were required to take any opportunity that might come along to pick up spare income by doing odd jobs or tasks for others. It was a hardscrabble existence on the very cusp of survival, but there was usually food on the table and plenty of self-reliance.

  The best records available, combined with Eugene Bullard’s own oral history, indicate that his father’s side of the family had its origins in the sugarcane plantations of Haiti. During the mid-1800s Haiti went through a series of upheavals and revolutions that rocked the island and roiled its French white aristocracy. As the island encouraged immigration, thousands of freed and escaped slaves from the United States poured in, especially in the 1840s. Many white families began an opposite migration, most taking their slaves with them, which is apparently what occurred with William Octave Bullard’s forebears.

  William had been born into slavery on the Georgia plantation of Wiley Bullard, of Stewart County, Georgia. Wiley’s property bordered the Chattahoochee River (in the next county south of Columbus) and was considered good bottom land for the production of cotton. Wiley had come to Georgia from the Carolinas, migrating with his parents, who first settled on the Georgia land Wiley eventually inherited. As was the custom in those days, William took the surname of the family headed by the man he called “old Massa”—which was both a signal of ownership as well as important census data.

  It should be noted that Gene often told a different story of his father’s birth saga, one that does not square with the actual records. He stated in his autobiography—and in his oral history, which he recited to many over the years—that his grandparents’ owners were a certain “Strawmaker” family, who had come to Georgia from Mississippi and before that from Haiti. Eugene even invented a Moses-like “creation myth” for his father: as the Strawmaker family was torn apart by the Civil War, they were forced to disband and flee the marauding Union forces. Gene offers up that his infant father was placed in a straw basket (they were, after all, straw makers) and set adrift in the meandering Chattahoochee. Somewhere farther down the river, the Bullards pulled up the basket, and took in the black baby “for good luck.” Gene also believed that the Bullard family spoke French, but there is no solid evidence for that.

  William Bullard was also likely to have been part Creek Indian himself. The Creek Nation was strongly rooted in Georgia before their lands were taken from them by the belligerent Andrew Jackson administration in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Some Creek families even owned African American slaves, and the races intermarried with some frequency during those times. William Bullard would likely have grown up in proximity to, and even possibly among, Creeks and it would not have been anything unusual for him to take a Creek bride, which he did in 1882, when he was nineteen and Josephine was seventeen.

  The Strawmaker family was a myth with vague French underpinnings. The Bullard family and their holdings were the true foundations of Gene’s ancestry; but, they, too, had a strong streak of French history somewhere in their background, pre-Georgia and pre-Carolinas. The “French connection” was so persistent that it led William to imbue his children with an ideal that centered on the French culture being one where the color of a man’s skin made no difference. France was, in William’s belief system, a land where racial prejudice did not exist. This conviction had the strongest of all possible influences on Gene. It shaped his whole frame of reference and, ultimately, his entire life.

  As Gene told it, he had no real understanding of the divide between whites and “coloreds” until he was five or six years old. He played with children of both races as a young boy; but, as children grow, they often assimilate their parents’ views. Gene’s childhood friends soon became aware that there were real differences between blacks and whites. One day a playmate explained that “you was borned brown and that what makes white folks despise you.”

  The racial taunts began, which Gene admits he did not understand, at first. His mother, just before her death, and Gene’s father began to school him on life’s harsh realities. His parents finally forbade him the freedom to play with his former white chums. The dual tragedy of Josephine’s death and William’s fear of white retribution made the divide clear and absolute.

  The white foreman in Bradley’s compan
y, a man named Billy Stevens, took a strong personal dislike to Gene’s father. Day after day, Stevens taunted Bullard, foisting the worst, the most difficult, the most demeaning jobs upon him. Nothing, apparently, got to “Big Ox,” which infuriated Stevens even further. Bradley was aware of the harassment, but did nothing, ignoring behavior that was often par for the course in these racially biased times. He was unaware of what William had told his children, a statement Gene remembered the rest of his life: “If I have to hit Stevens, I want you all to be good children. Always show respect to each and every one, white and black, and make them respect you. Go to school as long as you can. Never look for a fight. I mean never. But if you are attacked, or your honor is attacked unjustly, fight, fight, keep on fighting even if you die for your rights. It will be a glorious death.”

  One day, most likely in 1904, the situation finally escalated to a point where a single verbal spark set off a spectacular interpersonal conflagration. Stevens suspected that Bullard had talked to Bradley about Stevens’s behavior once again. Bradley, it was rumored, had promised to do something about it, but of course, he never did. Stevens confronted Bullard, wanting to know what he had complained of to Bradley. Bullard shrugged and turned his back, walking away without responding. Incensed at this disrespect, Stevens snagged a large iron hook, the type used to grab and carry the big bales of cotton, and swung it as hard as he could against the side of Big Ox’s head. The blow opened a deep, blood-bubbling wound and staggered the big black man, but he did not go down.

  Bullard had finally taken all he could. He turned, lurched toward Stevens, who stumbled back in fear, dropping the hook. Bullard grabbed the man with his powerful hands, lifted him, screaming, over his head, and threw him down into the cargo hold of a large barge tied up to the loading dock. Stevens hit the steel hold at the bottom of the boat with a sickening thud. The shocked workers nearby figured Stevens was surely dead.

  Clutching his bleeding head, Bullard managed to walk to Bradley’s office and told him the story. Shocked, and flummoxed, Bradley told Bullard to go home and lie low, promising to “take care of things.” The injured man staggered off.

  Bradley told one of his men to fetch the doctor, who, ironically, was a Dr. William L. Bullard, a nephew of Wiley Bullard. The young doctor had received his medical degree from Emory University and set up practice in Columbus. Dr. Bullard found Stevens severely injured, but still alive. As treatment was being administered, Bradley told Stevens that if he ever wanted to work again, he’d shut up and keep this incident quiet.

  Too late. Some of the other white workers had begun to spread the story across the docks. It wound its way into a nearby saloon and soon enough, a group of liquored-up hooligans determined they would ride out to Bullard’s house and lynch him.

  William, in the meantime, made it home. Gene recalled being very frightened by his father’s ugly-looking head wound and even more frightened when his father loaded up the family shotgun and sat down with it behind the front door. William told his quivering brood what had happened and directed them all to go into the back room and hide under the beds or anywhere they could, out of sight. The single kerosene lamp was extinguished.

  Soon after dark, a group of thoroughly drunken white men came riding and shouting right up to the Bullard front door. Everyone inside stayed deathly quiet as the men pounded on the barricaded entrance. William cocked the shotgun. The men outside could not gain entrance and the lack of any lights or sounds finally convinced them that Bullard must have already fled the area. The men remounted and went off to drink some more. It was a close call for William and his children.

  The near-lynching was a seminal event in young Gene’s life. It was at this time that he formulated the idea to leave, to escape the awful Southern prejudice and flee to that magical, mystical nirvana his father had called “France.” He had no idea, yet, how he was going to make it happen, but his resolve was firm.

  Bullard did not go back to Mr. Bradley’s warehouse for a month. Bradley apparently arranged for William to work elsewhere until the furor over a black laborer assaulting a white supervisor died down. Bradley himself came out to the Bullard house several times bringing food, small gifts and treats for the children. He also had several of his own servants look after the frightened youngsters.

  Gene loved his father, but as time passed and Columbus’s racism chafed even more, his resolve to escape only deepened. According to cousins who were close to the Bullard children, Gene made several attempts to run away from home when he was ten and eleven years old. William always tracked down and found his seventh child. One time, William even put Gene in the Columbus pillory and whipped him for his “crime.” The extent of the whipping was not recorded, but since it left no permanent scars it was probably more of a stern deterrent than a true thrashing.

  Gene finally did make it out of Columbus. By his account, he was eight years old, but a more reliable timeline has him on the cusp of twelve. He was leaving his native city and its blatant racism, or so he hoped. He may well have felt sorry for leaving his family and the adoration of his father behind, but as would be true throughout Eugene Bullard’s life, he always looked forward, never back.

  2

  THE WANDERER

  Gene’s final, successful escape from Columbus—in early 1907—was financed by the sale of his beloved goat and cart, a rig that he had traveled in all over town. He sold it to another local boy and it put $1.50 in his pocket, enough to inspire the confidence to make the break he desired. With that money and a small sack of food and clothes, he started walking down the railroad tracks leading out of Columbus.

  It did not take his father long to notice that Gene was gone—again. Like every time before, William took off after his errant son, determined to haul him back, infuriated by the boy’s persistent disobedience and his lack of desire to stay put and help take care of his siblings. This time, however, Gene got farther, faster than he ever had before, and he outpaced his father’s ability to pursue him. This was due to a fortuitous meeting Gene had with a black sharecropping family he came across several miles up the tracks. The family was staying in a camp alongside the railroad and gathering in the cotton from the adjoining fields.

  Gene spent his first night away from the Bullard brood with Tom and Emma, as they introduced themselves, and their large menagerie of children. He impressed the itinerant cotton pickers with his story and his ambitions. When they all arose the next morning, Gene was given a single dollar to help him pursue those dreams. It was enough to get him on the next train to Atlanta. With this kind of head start, he was soon too far away from his father’s hard-charging but on-foot pursuit.

  Exactly what Gene did when and where and with whom from mid-1907 until March 1912 is not neatly chronicled. Almost all of what we know about this period in his life comes from his own recollections, written down decades later, and a few scraps of letters, journals, local newspapers, and official documents, like the 1910 Census. During these five years, Gene spent most of his time among the poorly educated, subsisting on the ragged edge of poverty. Fellow blacks, purposely kept down by harsh restrictions on education and upward mobility, didn’t have much time or energy to concern themselves with posterity. We have to take Gene at his word wherever it is backed up by someone else’s recollections or that elusive piece of evidence, like a notice in a local paper of a horse race with Gene listed as one of the jockeys. Gene did a lot of wandering during this time but we know for certain that the journey was still focused on finding his way to France.

  He was helped greatly by being a bright young man who smiled readily, made friends easily and worked hard and well. He endeared himself to nearly everyone he met. That he achieved his goals gives the most credence to what he remembered about his adventures along the way.

  * * *

  Gene rode the train all the way to the last stop on the line: Atlanta. For a poor kid from a rural riverfront village, Atlanta must have seeme
d like Dorothy arriving at the Great City of Oz. One can only imagine the bewildered, barefoot, threadbare, rural black youth transported to the bustling, populous, noisy, big-city environment of downtown Atlanta, long recovered from its post–Civil War devastation. Gene was a quick study, however, and he immediately fell in with a group of Gypsies he happened to come across who were encamped near the stockyards close to the Atlanta railroad station.

  Perhaps Gene gravitated to the Gypsies because they were a culture with which he had some familiarity: a small band had taken up residence in Phenix City, Alabama, across the river from Columbus, and he had actually tried to hide out with this group during one of his unsuccessful attempts at running away. The Gypsies outside Atlanta belonged to the Stanley Tribe, originally from England, and they were on an extended foray in America. The Stanleys were expert horse traders (some said thieves) and trafficked mostly in racehorses and thoroughbreds. They held periodic competitions and participated in local horse racing events whenever they were held, mostly at county fairs.

  Being outcasts nearly everywhere they went, Gypsies had no trouble at all welcoming another wanderer into their midst, especially if he was willing to work hard, learn the horse business and help around the stables and wagons. It made no difference to anyone in the Gypsy camp that Gene was black. The Stanleys also told him that England was very close to France, and when the tribe went back to England he would be more than welcome to go with them. He decided to stay awhile.

  Over the course of the next several months, Gene learned a great deal about horseflesh, and he worked his way up from mucking out the stables to racing as a jockey. He was light, agile and an excellent rider. He went by “Jamesy,” which was a bastardization of his middle name (James). This was also an attempt to avoid detection by his father, who may not have given up the search for his son.