Not many people knew he was named Berlin. A roly-poly, soft-spoken man with a scruff of white hair and a big belly, Berrell Long lived quietly in a rundown house in Fries, Virginia. Thin, patchy wallpaper held the place together. There was no insulation, so he had to pile logs in a dirty old woodstove to keep warm in the winter. His life revolved around church and his garden. He watched a lot of National Geographic shows.
Berrell wasn’t the crazy uncle in the attic, but no one seemed to really know anything about him. I didn’t discover his real name until nine years ago, when he made one of his rare appearances for my grandfather’s funeral. It was James Emory Berlin Long in full. The disclosure of this name, exotic in a land of Johns and Bills, opened the floodgates. He began unfurling tales of travel and excitement, the saga of a life that stretched back into the heart of the Depression.
The first surprise was the languages. In his slow drawl, he spoke Spanish and Korean, with a smattering of Japanese and German thrown in for good measure. He had spent a lot of time in the military, from Korea to Europe.
His stories were a series of vivid images from foreign lands and long-past days. Sleeping four to a bed during the Depression; GIs smoking “hemp” in Korea; the slaughter of the 65th Puerto Rican regiment at White Horse Hill (“those poor old boys . . . falling like stalks of corn”); the blackened earth of Hiroshima; Christmas in Gifu, Japan; old women harvesting the fields in Neuhausen, Germany.
In 1951, he narrowly avoided a knife fight in Kokura. He’d picked up a girl, and they were riding along in a rickshaw when Berrell saw a tall, kimono-clad man running behind, his arms in his sleeves, watching the pair intently. Berrell sensed something was wrong, and his instinct was confirmed when the man pulled a long knife from his sleeve.
Berrell said, “We knowed what he was up to. He would have got me if he could have.”
Thinking quickly, he instructed the rickshaw driver to make a detour, cutting off their would-be attacker and leaving him in the dust. He attributed the man’s malice to anti-Americanism, but he wasn’t bitter. “It’d be the same in America if some country was to take over.”
In the ’60s, he was stationed in Stuttgart as a driver, and on the weekends he traveled. He and a buddy once crossed the Alps in a rickety Volkswagen and found themselves stranded in Switzerland. Taking shelter in a hotel, they realized that neither of them spoke French and the hotel owners “couldn’t find a soul, not a soul” who spoke English. “Well, there we was, stuck.” Still, they managed to convey that they wanted supper, and Berrell pointed to the only thing he understood on the menu. Fried chicken: It brings the world together.
Berrell never told a lie, but he told a lot of tales he’d heard secondhand. He held that some of his friends had found Dracula’s castle in Germany, and that a distant relative named Rose had murdered a salesman and buried him under her house (it was common knowledge she’d sold her soul to the devil). But his stories never sprang out of nothing: He told me Erwin Rommel had dug a tunnel underneath the university where Berrell stayed in Germany. It’s an urban legend, but one that was passed around just at the time Berrell had been there.
After his traveling days were done, he lived quietly. He worked at a factory. When he retired, he disappeared into a quiet, slightly shabby life. When he spoke about the old days, there was no wistfulness. He rejected any idea of the glory of war and talked matter-of-factly about the deaths in his unit. It was a thing that happened. He remembered the way the Susa Valley shone in the sunlight but didn’t pine for it. Appalachia, Virginia, his old house, his garden: They were good enough.
In fact, they were better. He wasn’t modern enough to pretend otherwise. Mark Steyn once observed that disciples of multiculturalism respect all cultures but know nothing about them. By contrast, the old colonialists may have lacked the progressive sensibilities of their descendants, but they could recite the minutiae of foreign cultures and distant tribes.
That was Uncle Berrell, with his store of languages and tales, his empathy and candor. The old soldier from Appalachia—he died two years ago this week—never had a COEXIST bumper sticker. But he was a man of the world in the old sense, a true cosmopolitan hidden away in a Virginia hollow.
