'"Where the government sends the black boys is your problem, not mine," Mueller tells Major Fuller. "My problem is where you're letting them go on Friday and Saturday nights. If

they go on whooping it up downt own, there's going to be trouble. We've got the Legion in this town, you know."

'"Well, but I am in a bit of a tight here, Mr Mueller," he says. "I can't let them drink over at the NCO Club. Not only is it against the regulations for the Negroes to drink with the whites, they couldn't anyway. It's an NCO club, don't you see? Every one of those black boys is a bucky-tail private.

'"That's not my problem either. I simply trust you will take care of the matter. Responsibility accompanies rank." And off he goes.

'Well, Fuller solved the problem. The Derry Army Base was a damn big patch of land in those days, although there wasn't a hell of a lot on it. Better than a hundred acres, all told. Going north, it ended right behind West Broadway, where a sort of greenbelt was planted. Where Memorial Park is now, that was where the Black Spot stood.

'It was just an old requisition shed in early 1930, when all of this happened, but Major Fuller mustered in Company E and told us it was going to be "our" club. Acted like he was Daddy Warbucks or something, and maybe he even felt that way, giving a bunch of black privates their own place, even if it was nothing but a shed. Then he added, like it was nothing, that the pigs downtown were off-limits to us.

'There was a lot of bitterness about it, but what could we do? We had no real power. It was this young fellow, a Pfc. named Dick Hallorann who was a mess-cook, who suggested that maybe we could fix it up pretty nice if we really tried.

'So we did. We really tried. And we made out pretty well, all things considered. The first time a bunch of us went in there to look it over, we were pretty depressed. It was dark and smelly, full of old tools and boxes of papers that had gone moldy. There was only two little windows and no lectricity. The floor was dirt. Carl Roone laughed in a kind of bitter way, I remember that, and said, "The ole Maje, he a real prince, ain't he? Give us our own club. Sho!"

'And George Brannock, who was also killed in the fire that fall, he said: "Yeah, it's a hell of a black spot, all right." And the name just stuck.

'Hallorann got us going, though . . . Hallorann and Carl and me. I guess God will forgive us for what we did, though — cause He knows we had no idea how it would turn out.

'After awhile the rest of the fellows pitched in. With most of Derry off-limits, there wasn't much else we could do. We hammered and nailed and cleaned. Trev Dawson was a pretty good jackleg carpenter, and he showed us how to cut some more windows along the side, and damned if Alan Snopes didn't come up with panes of glass for them that were different colors — sort of a cross between carnival glass and the sort you see in church windows.

'"Where'd you get this?" I asked him. Alan was the oldest of us; he was about forty-two, old enough so that most of us called him Pop Snopes.

'He stuck a Camel in his mouth and tipped me a wink. "Midnight Requisitions," he says, and would say no more.

'So the place come along pretty good, and by the middle of the summer we was using it. Trev Dawson and some of the others had partitioned off the back quarter of the building and got a little kitchen set up in there, not much more than a grill and a couple of deep-fryers, so that you could get a hamburg a nd some french fries, if you wanted. There was a bar down one side, but it was just meant for sodas and drinks like Virgin Marys — shit, we knew our place. Hadn't we been taught it? If we wanted to drink hard, we'd do it in the dark.

'The floor was still dirt, but we kept it oiled down nice. Trev and Pop Snopes ran in a lectric line — more Midnight Requisitions, I imagine. By July, you could go in there any Saturday night and sit down and have a cola and a hamburger — or a slaw-dog. It was nice. It never really got finished — we was still working on it when the fire burned it down. It got to be a kind of hobby . . . or a way of thumbing our noses at Fuller and Mueller and the Town

Council. But I guess we knew it was ours when Ev McCaslin and I put up a sign one Friday night that said THE BLACK SPOT, and just below that, COMPANY E AND GUESTS. Like we were exclusive, you know!

'It got looking nice enough that the white boys started to grumble about it, and next thing you know, the white boys' NCO was looking finer than ever. They was adding on a special lounge and a little cafeteria. It was like they wanted to race. But that was one race that we didn't want to run.'

My dad smiled at me from his hospital bed.

'We were young, except for Snopesy, but we weren't entirely foolish. We knew that the white boys let you race against them, but if it starts to look like you are getting ahead, why, somebody just breaks your legs so you can't run as fast. We had what we wanted, and that was enough. But then . . . something happened.' He fell silent, frowning.

'What was that, Daddy?'

'We found out that we had a pretty decent jazz-band among us,' he said slowly. 'Martin Devereaux, who was a corporal, played drums. Ace Stevenson played cornet. Pop Snopes played a pretty decent barrelhouse piano. He wasn't great, but he wasn't no slouch, either. There was another fellow who played clarinet, and George Brannock played the saxophone. There were others of us who sat in from time to time, playing guitar or harmonica or juiceharp or even just a comb with waxed paper over it.

'This didn't all happen at once, you understand, but by the end of that August, there was a pretty hot little Dixieland combo playing Friday and Saturday nights at the Black Spot. They got better and better as the fall drew on, and while they were never great — I don't want to give you that idea — they played in a way that was different . . . hotter somehow . . . it . . . ' He waved his skinny hand above the bedclothes.

'They played bodacious,' I suggested, grinning.

'That's right!' he exclaimed, grinning back. 'You got it! They played bodacious Dixieland. And the next thing you know, people from town started to show up at our club. Even some of the white soldiers from the base. It got so the place was getting crowded a right smart every weekend. That didn't happen all at once, either. At first those white faces looked like sprinkles of salt in a pepper-pot, but more and more of them turned up as time went on.

'When those white people showed up, that's when we forgot to be careful. They were bringin in their own booze in brown bags, most of it the finest high-tension stuff there is — made the stuff you could get in the pigs downtown look like soda pop. Country-club booze is what I mean, Mikey. Rich people's booze. Chivas. Glenfiddich. The kind of champagne they served to first-class passengers on ocean liners. "Champers," some of em called it, same as we used to call ugly-minded mules back home. We should have found a way to stop it, but we didn't know how. They was town! Hell, they was white!

'And, like I said, we were young and proud of what we'd done. And we underestimated how bad things might get. We all knew that Mueller and his friends must have known what was going on, but I don't think any of us realized that it was drivin em crazy — and I mean what I say: crazy. There they were in their grand old Victorian houses on West Broadway not a quarter of a mile away from where we were, listening to things like "Aunt Hagar's Blues" and "Diggin My Potatoes." That was bad. Knowing that their young people were there too, whooping it up right cheek by jowl with the blacks, that must have been ever so much worse. Because it wasn't just the lumberjacks and the barbags that were turning up as September came into October. It got to be kind of a thing in town. Young folks would come to drink and to dance to that no-name jazz-band until one in the morning came and shut us down. They didn't just come from Derry, either. They come from Bangor a nd Newport and Haven and Cleaves Mills and Old Town and all the little burgs around these parts. You could see fraternity boys from the University of Maine at Orono cutting capers with their sorority