His size and strength got him accepted at once. And, along with the good head on his shoulders, they got him promoted not once but twice. Officers in the Sixth U.S. Heavy Artillery were all white. Most of the sergeants were white, too. For a colored man to get his third stripe was no mean feat.

Ben Robinson had heard that there actually were a handful of Negro officers in the U.S. Army. There was even a major, a man named Martin Delany. But he'd been born in the U.S.A. and educated like a white man. For somebody who'd started out a field hand and who still couldn't write his name, sergeant was a long, long climb.

A soldier in Robinson's company tossed a well – gnawed hambone on the ground. “Is you a pig, Nate?” the sergeant called. “Way you leaves your rubbish all over, I reckon mebbe you is. Take it back to the kitchen an' throw it out there.”

Nathan Hunter scowled at him. “Is you happy you gits to play the white man over me?”

A lot of Negro soldiers preferred to take orders from whites, not from their own kind. It was as if they'd been taking orders from white men for so many generations, that seemed natural to them. But if another black man told them what to do, they saw him as a cheap imitation of the real thing.

“Don't want to be no white man.” Robinson meant that from the bottom of his soul. All the same, he tapped his chevrons with his right hand. “Don't got to be no white man, neither. All I gots to be is a sergeant, an' I am. This here place bad enough if we do try an' keep it halfway clean. If'n we don't, we might as well be pigs fo' true.”

Still scowling, Hunter picked up the bone and carried it away. Ben Robinson nodded to himself. Military punishments weren't so harsh as the lashes a master or an overseer could deal out – quite a few of the men in the Sixth U.S. Heavy Artillery joined the Army with stripes on their backs. But marching back and forth with a heavy plank on your shoulder or sitting out in the open gagged and with your hands tied behind you and your knees drawn up to your chest, while they weren't painful, were humiliating. For men whose sense of self often was still fragile, stripes could be easier to bear than embarrassment.