“The United States is my mother and I love my mother, but as far as France is concerned, she is my mistress and you love your mistress more than you love your mother.”

Eugene Jacques Bullard was without a doubt, the most interesting man in the world. His story is the poster child for the triumph of spirit and his history does not fit neatly into any other precedents of historical personages.

I can’t really tell Bullard’s story here because it is too big. It is a story about a life lived so large, so bravely, so creatively that one would be hard put to find a more interesting one. So I want to introduce you a story not so much about a warrior, but of a man who lived a life uniquely, was so successful at so many things that he fit in with one historic crowd after another, and had skills from combat pilot, to jazz drummer, to boxer, to spy. The precise history of Eugene Bullard is still a mystery as the precise facts are in dispute. Did he shoot down five enemy aircraft or two? Was his father a French speaking slave from Martinique and was his mother a Creek Indian? Did he really travel with an English band of troubadores doing pickaninnie performances? Was he a professional boxer and a professional and influential jazz drummer? The answers are generally “yes” but also depend on whom you ask; but no matter the degree to which he participated in these activities, it is a testament to this Renaissance man.

Born in 1894 in Columbus Georgia, his father barely escaped a lynching that Bullard witnessed, and the rednecks of south Georgia inundated him with enough fear that he fled home at 8, lived on the streets and moved around the country doing odd jobs. He lived with people who took him in and offered him a place to stay but the peripatetic wanderer was looking for a place his father called France. Bullard was a chameleon, becoming whatever he needed to at the time, he even took to horses and rode a horse for a famous handler. When he had just turned 11 he stowed away aboard a German cargo vessel the Maltheus, at Newport News and made his way to Scotland. The captain, rather than throw him overboard, worked him in the coal room of the ship’s engine.

And endless river of sweat rolls down Gene’s body, starting from the top of his head. There is no reprieve from the heat in the engine room of this old steam freighter. He has run out of food, and is so hungry he is light headed. That morning, he went up to the galley and everyone stopped eating and looked at him. “I’m hungry,” he says simply. “I’m sorry. I am looking for France.” The galley crew explodes into laughter. “You ass!” yells the commander. “I ought to throw you over board…” A chorus of voices sang out. “Put him to work….I’ll throw him over myself… come on he’s a kid…” The First Officer grabs him be the collar and yanks him into a closet in the boiler room. A naked mattress sits on the floor next to an oil lamp. The entire ship is iron and steel and wood, all of it too worn, too dank, too rusty. “You can stay here. I’ll come by later and show you how to coal the furnace.” A half hour later, the boson’s mate makes his way down the stairs and carries a plate of food to Gene. It’s broiled chicken and potatoes. Gene wolfs it down. “All right there, boy, there’s plenty more.” After his shift, the Captain took him to the bridge, and pulled out a map, and pointed to a place on the large dog-eared sheet. “This is France.”

But a dark, dank environment like a cargo ship’s coal room would never hold a free spirit like Bullard. Back on the street, effusive with charismatic charm, traveling troubadors invited him to do a pickaninnies performance in Paris and off he went. In Paris, he stood on ground his father talked about- a place on the Earth where black men and white men live and work together and there is freedom for all. But he had work to do as an entertainer and he sang and he danced and rode horses.

Bullard made it to the streets and my guess is that he was so charismatic he could fall in with any crowd long enough to find employment and room and board. At one point he was running errands for bookies and even later took up boxing. He boxed for a while and found the money “wasn’t worth the aggravation.” But he worked in a boxing gym and at one point owned one and ran it for a few years and sold it for profit.

Bullard spoke French and I suppose it is a guess whether he took it up and learned it quickly as he did everything else in his life or he spoke French because his father was a Martinique native and spoke French as a matter of course. He spent a long time in Paris, and as history tells us, a gunshot in Sarajevo thrust all of Europe into a massive bloody war. Austria invaded the Balkans, and the French, allied with Serbia, went to their aid. Bullard signed up for the French Foreign Legion and made it to the ranks of this august and feared expeditionary force. How he did it I can find no reference but he talked his way into the main French force and found himself at one of the turning point battles on the bank of the Meuse River at Verdun. There 250,000 died in five days in December 1914. Another half a million were wounded, among them Eugene Jacques Bullard. He received the Croix de Guerre, and a military retirement commission.

It’s barely daylight and Gene is in a trench near the left flank on the front in Champagne. He is not sure if this is an Allied trench that was captured or a Hun trench just overrun. Smoke and dust drift motionlessly through the air. Gunfire cracks off overhead, bullets fly too close to his ear. Gene kneels in muck and blood and shit, and tries to catch his breath. All around him are corpses or the wounded. Men call out their mother’s name. In an odd sudden moment an infantryman trips through the impenetrable smoke and falls into the trench. Gene goes to help him up and realizes it’s a German. They stare at each other and then suddenly lunge for their weapons. Gene grabs a bayonet sitting on the ground and plunges it through the German’s collarbone. A sickening cough spews blood over his leggings. Now, there is one more nameless faceless carcass in the trench.

That wasn’t enough fighting for Bullard. He talked his way into the Lafayette Flying Corps in the French Aéronautique Militaire as a gunner/observer that sat in the backseat — and once he won that position he talked himself into the pilot seat. Bullard graduated flight school and was assigned to 93 Spad Squadron late in 1917. Over 20 missions he earned the nickname the Black Swallow of Death and apparently for his daring in the air. He shot down at least one, probably two and maybe up to five planes, for certain a Fokker Dreidecker and mostly likely a Pfalze scout plane [ “probably a D.III. “ says Bill T in comment thread- Ed] The Pfalze tried an Immelman turn and Bullard escaped into a cloud bank and returned out of it to surprise the German airman looking for him out of his turn. His SPAD had an image of a dagger through a heart and the saying: “Tout Sang Qui Est Rouge…” All Blood Runs Red. He was oft reprimanded for taking chances and derring-do.

Bullard During His years As A Jazz Musican

Bullard had an argument with an officer and was demoted and transferred to the 170th French Infantry.

The exact injury was to one of his legs and I am still looking for the details. Apparently an American captain in Paris bet him he could not learn to fly with the injury. Sometime thereafter Bullard returned, found the man and collected his winnings.