Everett Harold Black

Everett Harold Black, known aboard the Caine as Horrible, is a water tender third class whose death in the kamikaze attack becomes a decisive moment in Willie Keith’s development. Black is characterized chiefly through the consequences of his recent promotion, his gift of a cigar, and the difficult work of recovering him after the attack. Though his presence in the narrative is brief, his death turns the ship’s casualty accounting into a personal reckoning with the fragility and unpredictability of life.

Identity and Place Aboard the Caine

Black serves as a water tender third class in the Caine’s engineering spaces. The narrative identifies him by his service rating and by the nickname Horrible; it gives little further personal history. This limited characterization places emphasis not on a separate biography but on the ordinary shipboard ties and duties through which his loss becomes meaningful to the people around him.

Two days before the attack, Black had been promoted and transferred from the after engine room to a watch in the fireroom. The after engine room was left undamaged, while Black died at his new post. The contrast makes the promotion a bitter, contingent turning point: an advancement that would ordinarily mark progress instead coincides with a reassignment that places him in the danger that takes his life. The account presents that connection as a consequence of timing, not as evidence that Black’s promotion itself was a mistake or that anyone could have foreseen what would follow.

The Search and Recovery

After the Caine is struck, the list of missing sailors gradually shortens as survivors are found. Black is the last name remaining without confirmation, and a search party from the black gang enters the flooded fireroom to look for him. The search makes his absence a concrete problem for the ship’s crew: until he is found, the roll of the missing is not complete.

Willie joins the search party and wades through the damaged compartment. The scene confronts him with a kind of death unlike the sheltered funerals he has known. When the water recedes briefly and a lantern illuminates Black, Willie understands with new force that human beings are physically vulnerable. His reaction is not merely private grief. He tells the sailors that anyone unable to continue may leave, then proposes a method for lifting Black clear of the wreckage: rigging a block and tackle to a crossbeam, bringing canvas down, and raising him through an opening in the deck rather than carrying him up the ladders.

The search party consists of the black gang, and the men share a visible mixture of fear, bitterness, sorrow, and embarrassment as they stand together before the dead. Their response briefly makes rank and individual difference less prominent than their common encounter with death. They agree to Willie’s plan. Black’s recovery therefore becomes both a practical act of shipboard care and a moment in which Willie assumes responsibility for the people performing it, making room for anyone who cannot bear to continue while organizing the work for those who can.

The Cigar and Willie’s Recognition

Black’s connection to Willie continues through a small object he had given away while alive. After being promoted, he passed a box of cigars around the wardroom; Willie received one from him two days before the attack. Later, alone at his desk, Willie hesitates before smoking it because its owner is dead, then does so. The cigar carries Black’s earlier presence into the aftermath, linking a routine gesture of celebration to the loss that follows so soon afterward.

The timing of the gift sharpens Willie’s thoughts about the promotion and transfer. He realizes that Black’s new rating had been followed by a move from a safe, undamaged part of the ship to the fireroom where he died. That recognition does not explain the accident or undo it; it exposes how little control the crew has over the consequences of ordinary changes in assignment. The cigar becomes a material reminder of both Black’s recent good fortune and the abruptness with which that fortune was overtaken.

Narrative Significance

Black’s death changes Willie. Before the recovery, Willie has known death principally through relatives in funeral chapels, where ceremony and distance mediate the experience. The sight of a fellow sailor killed aboard the Caine removes that distance. The narrative follows his encounter with the body, his effort to direct the recovery, and his later thoughts about life, luck, death, and God. It presents the episode as a rupture in his former outlook: the Willie who smokes Black’s cigar is no longer quite the same person who received it.

The effect is registered in action as well as reflection. Willie helps find Black, offers the search party the choice to withdraw, and arranges a way to lift him out. Later, he begins drafting a letter to Black’s parents. These responses give the loss a human reach beyond the ship’s missing-person list: Black must be recovered and accounted for, and news of his death must be conveyed to his family. The narrative does not supply the letter’s contents or describe the family’s response, leaving the act of writing as the supported indication of Willie’s continuing responsibility.

Black remains a sparsely drawn character, but that sparseness gives his few recorded ties particular weight. His rating locates him in the ship’s laboring spaces; his promotion and transfer establish the cruel timing of his death; and his cigar preserves a recent, personal connection to Willie. Through those details, Black’s brief presence marks a threshold in Willie’s understanding: mortality is no longer an abstraction or a story at a safe remove, but a loss among the crew that demands practical care and stays with the living afterward.