You Can't Eat Here

We went over … we went on the ship. And we were eating, and an American Ranger, one of his officers came. He said, “Sorry, but you can’t eat here.” I said, “Why not? ” He said, “Because you don’t eat here with us.” I said, “Well, he’s here, he’s a Canadian. I eat where he eats.” “You see, we don’t do that in the Americans.” “Well,” I said, “we do it in Canada. We don’t go by any special place to eat, just for whites and colored.” Our colonel went and told him, he said, “I’ll take my men off this damn ship. My men eat together, they sleep together. I don’t want to hear that.” And this guy was only a major, and he said, “I am a colonel but these are my men,” he said, “They’re not going to be killing each other over there so you just leave them alone.” And the Americans said to us, the colored Americans said, “Well, you fellas are some lucky.” I said, “What do you mean? ” “You eat and do what you want, sit together and everything.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Don’t they ...” “No, they don’t say nothing, that’s our rules,” I said. “We sleep together and everything, in the same places.” So they thought that was good of our Army. But we, we never thought much of their damn army.