Make it for All of Us

The twelve inch disc began to spin, indicating that the recording session had begun.

“I was twenty-eight at the time the ship sank. I was a janitor for the service that received telegrams.” Akron Fullington, a Negro man steadied himself in a chair in 1934 Wilmington, Delaware near his residence.

“I was in the Spanish-American War. I lied about my age so I could fight. I rose to the rank of corporal amongst the white soldiers who didn’t care about my color. I had picked up on the messages that the white officers had used in the field. By the time the Titanic had made its maiden voyage and the events turned sour, those white men started looking nervous. I could tell that the scene had to be a disaster. They reported screaming. It was blood-curdling the way the messages came over the wire.”

“Did you notice messages about the band playing in those telegrams, any word about the band playing as the ship went down?” asked Colored senior reporter for the Delaware Dispatch Thadius Cullman.

“I knew it was coming from overseas. The telegrams were all coming from New York and being spread around the country. That’s how lil’ ol’ Delaware got to know about it. I’m sure the Dispatch had their own updates as well,” Fullington explained.

“Yes, we obtained telegrams from a different source. So you had a family in London that were the house servants of one of the families that boarded the the Titanic, is that true?” Cullman queried.

“Yes. My great aunt and her family, my second cousins all worked for the Martin family. They wrote me letters saying how they couldn’t even be in the bowels of the ship. They all waved the Martins goodbye with smiles and dances just knowing they would return. Yet they had in the back of their minds, they wrote later, that they knew that something could go wrong. And….”

“What else did they say?”

“Well, I heard about the distress in the correspondence. It wasn’t nothin’ I had to figure out, you know like a puzzle or somethin’? I could tell there would be a great loss of people on that ship.”

The record continued to spin, locking in Fullington’s words. He cleared his throat and adjusted his watch. Cullman stopped the recording momentarily.

“Hey, Hollis!” Cullman yelled downstairs.

“What?”

“See if you can get some seltzer water…” he turned to Fullington and asked, “You want seltzer water, sir?”

“That’d be fine.”

“Make it for all of us!” Cullman hollered again. He started the recording once more.

“Now, we’ve covered the letters that you received. What else did your family members say?”

“This was years later after the ship sank. They had to find new jobs with other households. They would eventually cross the Atlantic. They weren’t on some big ships with all the fancy perks, but they were sturdy enough to ferry them across. The irony.”

“Why were you so adamant about the knowledge about the messages that were sent? Did you have to keep at your job?”

“I knew that the white men wanted me to keep cleaning, so I did. I just swept slowly so I could pick up everything.”

The seltzer waters arrived. The recording had stopped once again.

“This is off record,” Fullington said. “But I know in my mind that the white folk didn’t want Colored people on that vessel to save them as insurance against calamity.”

Cullman’s eyebrows raised. “You think the people on the ship wanted to keep Negroes off as a way of knowing that they would be present just in case something horrific occured?”

“Exactly. Of course it backfired,” Fullington replied. Cullman switched on the machine after they finished their seltzers.

“Now Mr. Fullington, what was the last thing you remember about the whole disaster?”

“I recall a report of sharks in the area. Messages said they had gathered to get those folks who were stranded on chifferobes and tables. But none of that was confirmed. There were even some messages that spoke about some people having enough room on the pieces of furniture for at least two people. Yet, some decided to stay in the water. I’m just wondering about my family. Had they been allowed on, it would have changed the course of history.”

“Why is that?” Cullman asked.

“There’s a misunderstanding that Negroes can’t swim. That they don’t like the cold. I'll tell you this.…If it came down to it, those Colored folk would have been ready to swim to the nearest life raft and paddle with their hands through the ice-cold water on their way to New York!”

“I think that’s all I have time for, Mr. Fullington. Thank you for your story,” Cullman replied.

“It was a story that needed telling.”