The Green Pastures

The Negro troops sang as they drove their tanks down the dusty roads of mid-Tennessee. Never had they been entrusted with so much expensive and noisy machinery.

A Negro tenant farmer named Walter Bailey and his hands were up before the mist cleared from the valleys, but they had not turned to in the fields. They stood on the porch watching the procession. "Must be fun," Bailey sighed, admiring the clanking machines.

Then he saw the white infantry. The foot soldiers were coming up through the long grass toward the road. Bailey waved his arms at the tank column and shouted, pointing to the infantrymen. A tank commander turned, saw the danger. He slammed down the cover of his turret. The tank spun around on its treads and a section of Bailey's fence went out. Half a dozen other tanks followed, charging through the grass with bursts of blank cartridges. It was over in a minute. An umpire pointed to the infantry: "They finished you off and you're all dead, you understand."

The men on Walter Bailey's porch looked skeptical, but watched more closely. The column clanked off. Then the watchers saw a second wave of infantry worming up to the road. An armored car rolled by full of singing Negroes. This time the infantry fired before Bailey could signal. The car wheeled and bolted over the roadside through the infantry, but was flagged down by the umpire. The Negroes had been so surprised that they forgot to fire. The infantry claimed not only gunfire but two well-landed grenades. "Did you throw any real object to simulate a grenade?" the umpire asked.

"Yep," said a sergeant. "I throw'd a couple of rocks at 'em."

The umpire had just adjudged it a capture when the tank column rolled up and captured the infantry, freeing the Negroes. While the tanks were halted, one of Bailey's hands moseyed up to a small opening in the nearest tank. "If I git in the Army, kin I git put in one like this?" he asked.

"Could be," replied the driver.

The hand walked back to the porch. "I ain't workin' here no more," he announced.

"We'll make out," said Bailey.

The umpire told Bailey to put in his bill for the fence. "It's all right," the farmer said, "I'm satisfied."

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