Soon after this website went on line, we posted a story about Company A’s first sergeant, Ashel Honesty. Working on the site and on our book, We Fought the Road, we kept crossing Sgt. Honesty’s trail. And he fascinates us.
Enlisted soldiers live and work in platoons commanded by commissioned officers—usually second lieutenants, fresh from college ROTC or from West Point. Platoons work in companies, commanded by slightly more experienced 1st Lieutenants or Captains. Enlisted NCO’s, grizzled veterans who understand how things really work, serve alongside these young officers, saluting them but also guiding and teaching them. In a company, none of these veteran NCO’s is more important than the “Top Kick”, the Company First Sergeant.
The Top Kick runs the company. He guards the gate to the company commander. He administers discipline and rewards. He sees to it that everyone is fed and clothed. Above all he makes damned sure everyone is doing his job. A Top Kick is remote and very, very serious. A Top Kick is tough. A Top Kick is sometimes revered, but always feared. Former Lieutenant Mortimer Squires who served in Company A remembered Sgt. Honesty. “A young lieutenant, “shavetail”, might walk by and ignore Sgt. Honesty once, but he wouldn’t do it again.” Former private Leonard Larkins couldn’t remember any of the white officers in Company A, but he remembered Sgt. Honesty. “He was mean.”
Company A led the 93rd Engineers through its most difficult and dramatic work on the highway. Its Top Kick clearly knew his business. But the Ashel Honesty who had to inspire fear and awe, had to exude power and authority, had to do it as a black man in a regiment commanded by young white southern commissioned officers. Young Mortimer Squires came from New Orleans, Louisiana, one of the most viciously racist parts of the United States in 1942. But he accepted Honesty’s authority, remembered it with an almost affectionate grin!
What qualities of character, toughness and intelligence prepared Ashel Honesty to fill this role? Coming to adulthood in the first four decades of 20th century America, how did he acquire them?
And Ashel Honesty wasn’t the only one. As the army expanded rapidly in the late 30’s and early 40’s, it needed black recruits. The law required that the black recruits serve in segregated regiments, commanded by young white commissioned officers. Forming and organizing those new regiments required the services of experienced senior NCO’s like Honesty—black men, some of them veterans of WW1, who had been serving in the army, under the radar, through the inter-war years.
We began to sniff the outlines of a book to follow We Fought the Road. Our dogged researcher, Chris, found other names. She found census data and military records data. She dug up ancient books on the service of black men in WW1 and between the wars. But we need more than dry data, we need a story. And she kept coming back to Ashel Honesty.
Census records identify Ashel’s father, John Honesty, as a black man. He farmed a bit of land in Fleming, Ohio (near Zanesville), he taught in Barnett Ridge schools for 46 years, and he served as a lay preacher. The census lists his wife, Mary Collins, from Grafton, West Virginia, as a white woman. John and Mary had eight children, five boys and three girls.
Most of the family made their lives there—except for Ashel.
On 5 August 1918 Ashel responded to the call for troops to fight in WW1 by enlisting in the National Army. He landed with the black 813th Pioneer Infantry at Brest, France on September 25.
The army didn’t use the 813th as infantry. They assigned them to repair roads, sometimes under shellfire, until the Armistice on November 11. After that, they took over graves registration—digging dead soldiers from the detritus of the battlefields, trying to identify them, reburying them at the Argonne Cemetery. Mary Noble, Ashel’s niece, remembered Ashel telling her that he reburied the dead and sometimes there was only an arm or a leg.
The 813th returned to the states in July of 1919. A civilian again, young Ashel found work as a coal miner in Grafton, West Virginia; lived with his mother’s family there.
He must have liked the army, though, because the 1930 census lists him as a soldier at Ft. Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. We know from other sources that the army had tight quotas during those years. Black men had, literally, to apply for any opening that occurred. Mary Noble remembered Ashel saying that three white men had to vouch for him. The 1940 census found him a corporal in the black 24th Infantry at Ft. Benning, Georgia.
A year later the Army’s dire need for experienced black NCO’s transformed his life. In 1941 he joined the 93rd Battalion at Camp Livingston, Louisiana—and became the Top Kick of Company A.
In early 1943, the Alcan Project complete, the Army sent the 93rd, and Ashel, to the Aleutians where the unit built and maintained facilities and airfields for the defense of Alaska until June of 1944. Ashel’s father died three months before the 93rd left the Aleutians—Ashel couldn’t come home for the funeral.
Ashel stayed in the Army until he retired at Fort Benning, Georgia. And, after he retired, he worked as a civilian in the Post mail room. He married Minnie Gibson around 1950.
The Top Kick died in 1986 and is interred in the cemetery at Fort Benning.
That’s what we knew about Ashel Honesty as of a week ago. We cherished an image of an incredibly tough, stern, thoroughly competent and courageous black man who struggled through racism and unfairness to help defend his country and complete an epic project. And we had some of that right!
A few weeks ago I found “Zanesville Honesty” on Facebook, sent her a friend request and a private message to explain who Chris and I are and what we’re doing. Her response led us to a man who, in his own way, is as extraordinary as his Uncle Ashel—Wayne Honesty. And last weekend we travelled to Columbus, Ohio to meet Wayne and the present day Honestys.
What an experience!
When Chris referred to Sgt Honesty as “African American”, Wayne taught us, gently but firmly, the very first thing we needed to understand. American society—and the WW2 era military—divided the world into two groups—white and black. It just ain’t so. Wayne offers “person of color” as a better description. And this fact was obviously important in Ashel Honesty’s background. The Army may have defined him as a black man, but he almost surely did not. The census listed his mother as “white”, but Wayne explained that her background owed far more to the Indian tribes that inhabited West Virginia and Ohio than the census could record.
Today, the Honesty descendants are a close knit family—an institution in the area around Zanesville, Ohio. One of Ashel’s brothers died in infancy. Ulysses migrated to Chicago for a time, but returned home when the mill that employed him closed. Dennis, Wayne’s father, was an embalmer. Ancel, served as butler for a wealthy local family for 50 years. Everybody but Ashel married and lived their lives in the Zanesville/Columbus area.
Wayne took us to meet his cousin, Mary Noble. And a number of family members joined us at her home. We showed photos and talked to them about the highway and Uncle Ashel’s accomplishments. We left Ohio with a large group of new friends. It turns out, by the way, that “Zanesville Honesty” is a group. The lady who brought us to this adventure is actually Pamela Elder. Todd Allen turns out to be an expert on Honesty family geneology.
Wayne, Mary and Mary’s sister, Gertrude, actually remember their Uncle Ashel. They don’t remember him well, and they say that up front. But they remember him affectionately.
Uncle Ashel visited infrequently, but his visits invariably inspired a family reunion—great foods and a lot of grownups swapping stories and memories. And all three remember one really significant thing about the tough, severe, remote and reserved Top Kick—he was “a cut-up”. Always funny. Always laughing. Always teasing.
Family lore in Wayne’s family included the story of Uncle Ashel’s gift to him, an infant celebrating his first Christmas—a plug of “Old Mule” chewing tobacco. Gertrude remembers when he brought his new wife Minnie to meet the family in 1951. Gertrude tells us that Minnie was a tall and very well formed black lady. And that’s important, because when Ashel asked them to get some stockings for Minnie he told them to buy the biggest ones available! Minnie just laughed.
The contrast between the Honesty family’s Uncle Ashel and our Top Kick made our heads swim. And Wayne’s lesson about ‘persons of color” made them swim even faster. Wayne looks as white as I do. And that has been a big factor in his life and his career. Gertrude, his cousin, looks white. When we visited her in Zanesville on Sunday we also met her granddaughter and her brand new great granddaughter—both of whom appear black.
Back in September, when we posted about meeting the Larkins family in New Orleans, I wrote, awkwardly, about the experience of negotiating my white guilt and confusion and getting to know a very remarkable black man and his family. I came away from New Orleans feeling like a new and improved citizen of my world.
Now, in March, I realize that I still have a very great deal to learn.
(PHOTO ABOVE, HONESTY FAMILY. Back Row Left to Right-Elta Roseanna, Ancel William, Ada Sarah, Ulysses Carlos, Annie Priscilla, and Ashel John. Front Row Left to Right-John Sanford Honesty, father, Dennis Albird, and Mary Catherine Collins, mother.)