Alice Kaplan - The Interpreter

A T DAWN on November 24, 1944, the day after Thanksgiving, a two-and-a-half-ton American Army truck made its way from the Disciplinary Center at Le Mans to Plumaudan, Brittany. Its destination: an abandoned chteau down the road from the village church. The Army had chosen one of Plumaudans only imposing structures for the ceremony. Chteau la Valle was a fourteenth-century manor house, deserted for years, with rickety stone walls and gaping holes where windows had been, a round tower, a lower square building facing the road into the village, and a courtyard the size of a baseball field.

There in the courtyard, a group of Military Police unloaded their kit: large pieces of wood, slats, steps, a crossbar for the rope. The sky over Plumaudan was relentlessly gray that Friday morning and it looked like it might never stop raining. There was a wet chill in the air, the kind that goes straight to your bonesa prelude to the coming winter, so bitter cold it would freeze the rivers.

The villagers awoke to the sounds of hammering. The mayor had received his instructions two weeks earlier. The citizens of Plumaudan were to be informed, but official attendance should be limited to authorities designated by the American Army. , the Americans had said, and the local press was to omit the name of the condemned man or his unit from any of its articles.

Thirty American soldiers had also received instructions. From units stationed all over Brittany and Normandy, from Caen to Morlaix, they were ordered to leave their posts for one day of temporary duty in a village located seven miles southwest of Dinan. They reported that Friday morning to the Commanding Officer, Seine Disciplinary Training Center. , designating some as official witnesses, others as authorized spectators. It was only then that they learned what their duty was.

In one hour, an American soldier was going to hang. His name was James E. Hendricks. He was a black GI from a quartermaster battalion that had camped in a field in Le Percoul, a tiny farming hamlet up the hill from Plumaudan, back in August, only days after the town was liberated from the Nazis.

The soldiers who had been brought to observe knew little about the crime except that Hendricks had killed a local peasant. A court-martial had found him guilty and sentenced him to hang by the neck until dead. But they all knew the policy: against French civilians were punished in the community where the crime occurred.

At 10:59 A . M ., a cargo truck with its white U . S . ARMY stencil and flapping canvas top arrived in the courtyard, delivering the condemned man. was escorted by a procession of two guards and four officers to the platform on the gallows.

Hendricks was twenty-one years old, with round cheeks, gentle eyes, and dark brown skin that stood out next to his guards ruddy white faces. , but his jacket had been stripped bare of the modest insignia that identified him as a private first class in the quartermaster battalion. He had killed Victor Bignon, a decorated World War I veteran and a respected farmer who sat on the Plumaudan town council. Madame Bignon and her daughter had kept to themselves since the trial, and rumors abounded in the village about what happened to them the night of the crime.

James Hendricks had been confined to the guardhouse in Saint-Vougay, in the western part of Brittany, since his sentencing. His closest contact there was with Lt. Robert Saunders, one of the Armys few black Baptist chaplains. The task of preparing James Hendricks to die was one of the most difficult of Saunderss Army career. Back in 1943, he had been attached to the same quartermaster battalion as Hendricks at Camp Van Dorn, Mississippi, a training camp for black GIs. had so appalled the forty-year-old chaplain that he tried to resign his commission. He understood, better than anyone, what Hendrickss life had been like since he was drafted into the segregated Army. At Saint-Vougay the two men had prayed together on Thanksgiving. Now, on the gallows at Plumaudan, they were still side by side.

Saunders was not the only black man at Plumaudan on November 24. Three African American enlisted men from service units other than Hendrickss had been ordered to attend the ceremony. It was lip service to the so-called separate but equal policy of Army segregation, which stipulated in the memorandum on hangings along with the whites.

Hendrickss own Army buddies were spared the gruesome privilege of seeing their comrade hang. The 3326th Quartermaster Truck Company, which had played a key role in Brittany by transporting the supplies crucial for winning the Brest campaign, had moved on to Belgium and Holland. With them was Hendrickss commanding officer, Lt. Donald Tucker, who had testified in court to the young mans fine behavior before the shooting. Hendrickss defense counsel, and two officers from the court-martial who had requested that his death sentence be commuted to life in prison, were also in Belgium, en route to Germany.

After Hendrickss feet were bound, the ceremony proper began. The commandant asked him the requisite question:

to make before the order directing your execution is carried out?

No, sir.

Chaplain Saunders began to recite the Twenty-third Psalm: The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul

The commandant interrupted the verse; it was time for Saunders to ask Hendricks his own official question, as dictated by the strict protocol of the hanging memorandum.

Do you have a statement to make to me as Chaplain?

Thank you for what youve did for me, James Hendricks answered. Tell all the boys not to do what I did.

Amidst the carnage of World War II, the spectacle at Plumaudan was a minor incident. Only a dozen men had been at James Hendrickss trial. The crowd that came to watch him hang was small. Once they were gone, who would remember what he did, what happened to him, or what it meant? Ordinary crimes such as his are not part of the story of D-Day or the legacy of the Greatest Generation. They seem destined to fade in memory, then disappear forever. Except that one man could not forget. He was a Frenchman and writer named Louis Guilloux.