As James Baldwin had written in 1955: "This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again." This was the great truth for the coming ages.
And so it was for us, or perhaps something like this, on a long-ago, black-and-white evening in Alabama. An evening that we all might have danced with a black woman, perhaps named Louise.
CODA
I cannot speak for those southern ladies who rose with such abandon and deserted us--and Fred--that hot Alabama evening so long ago. But I can speak of Fred. He graduated from West Point as he came, unhindered by being the lone African-American in his class. A career military officer, he rose steadily in rank through a variety of command positions serving two combat tours in Vietnam. He earned a master's degree in Spanish and taught that language at West Point. Promoted to Brigadier General in 1984, he was appointed Commandant of Cadets at West Point in 1987. He was the first African-American to hold this prestigious position. While commandant, he was instrumental in appointing the first female cadet as Brigade Commander, also called "First Captain." He retired from the military as a Major General. In every aspect of his professional life he proved an inherent truth. He was the apotheosis of a modern major general.
THE END
[1] Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale (San Diego: Canterbury Classics, 2016), 445.
[2] Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in The Portable Karl Marx(New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 287.
[3] Melville, 68.
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