Chester Himes (23 page)

The story surrounding Lee Gordon is altogether a grim one. Lee, presumably, is destroyed, as are six others with whom he crosses paths. Yet
Lonely Crusade
, dark as it is, “ends on a high note of pure affirmation—without parallel in the rest of Himes's fiction.”
¹²
As in Wallace Stevens:

After the final no there comes a yes

And on that yes the future world depends.
¹³

In the Harlem novels soon to come, Himes largely rejected plot, adopting the simplest gimmicks (what mystery folk call a MacGuffin)—cotton bales stuffed with money, mysterious packages passing from hand to hand, a man in a red fez moving through Harlem—as frameworks upon which to hang vivid scenes and confrontations among outlandish characters. Similarly, what plot there is to
Lonely Crusade
you could put (as guitarist Eddie Lang did the cues for the entire Whiteman Orchestra repertoire) on the back of a business card.

Lee Gordon, a college-educated Negro who has always felt himself to be special and who has consistently refused to accept the low-end work available to him, lands a “Negro first” job as union organizer in wartime industry. His once deeply romantic marriage to Ruth is failing, reeling beneath the blows of social sanction, personal failure, and Lee's ever-increasing insecurity. Going about his work, Lee becomes involved
with various others: Smitty, the union secretary, and, though white, Lee's staunchest supporter; battle-scarred organizer Joe Ptak from national headquarters; the monstrous Luther McGregor, who “knows how to be a nigger and make it pay”
¹⁴
; soft-spoken former Latin professor Lester McKinley with his white wife and lifelong compulsion to kill white men; Jackie Fork, who becomes Lee's lover, like himself used by others to their own ends; black Communist leader Bart whose puritanical rearing clashes with Party ruthlessness; Abe Rosenberg, the Communist whose pragmatic progressive philosophy provokes Lee's spiritual rebirth.

Confronted by these factions and forced to face similar divisions within himself, Lee takes up with Jackie, leaves Ruth, is swept up in Machiavellian industrialist Louis Foster's maneuverings, becomes in the company of Luther party to bribery then murder, seems defeated both personally and professionally at every turn, a scooped-out, hollowed man, then in a fleabag hotel of a Damascus undergoes conversion. Next morning he attends the union demonstration toward which the novel has been unwinding. Deputy sheriffs block the street and drive back union marchers. All but Joe Ptak are repulsed, and when Joe, carrying the union banner, himself falls, in a perfect existential moment Lee rushes in to take up the banner and advance toward the deputies.

That's about it. Though Himes provides many dramatic and melodramatic flourishes to keep us moving through the story, it's from the rich interplay of characters, the play of conflicting ideas, and the manner in which Lee's personal deficits, fears, and failures unfold into the overall concerns of the narrative, that the novel's power comes. As Gilbert Muller points out:

Lee Gordon's quest for an authentic identity is cast in several dimensions—economic, racial, sexual, existential—but it is ultimately his political identity that gives him unique substance as a character and
Lonely Crusade
its special force as a novel of ideas.
¹⁵

Central to that play of ideas is an ongoing dialogue, both express and implicit, concerning Communism. In the thirties and forties the Communist Party actively courted and seemed to offer rare hope of
true equality to Negroes. The Party had helped in defending the Scottsboro boys; through agencies such as the American Writers' Congress and the League of American Writers, through journals such as
New Masses
, it spread its influence. Richard Wright, longtime stalwart worker for the Party, explained its attraction in providing him with an intellectual framework for understanding his life as a Negro. He felt the Party's message was not that you must be one of us, and like us, but, instead, that “If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone.”
¹⁶
By the early forties, however, the Party's failure to stand against fascism and its wartime suspension of support of civil rights in favor of national unity disillusioned many Negroes, who felt themselves betrayed. Communists in turn felt threatened by the unions they ostensibly supported, the two of them vying for power even as the bosses and owners worked to play one off against the other, just as they conspired to set black against white. Against this background
Lonely Crusade
unfurls. Unionism, Communism, morality, race relations—these and other such topics are explored in set-piece, debatelike dialogues between Lee and fellow travelers: Smitty, Joe Ptak, Luther, Jackie, Foster, Abe Rosenberg.

The central character conflict, meanwhile, is that between Lee and wife Ruth, whose marriage, like all else in Lee's life, has gone from bright promise to despair.

His love for her was so intense he could feel it like a separate life throughout his body.
¹⁷

Before had been nothing but a bewildering sense of deficiency and a vague fear of momentarily being overtaken by disaster.
¹⁸

He thought that with Ruth he would never be afraid again. But it merely changed the pattern of his fear. Now it was the fear of being unable to support and protect his wife.
¹⁹

Despair, like all else in the dialectics of this book, has two sides. Battered and bruised, Lee takes “the hurt of all these things”
²⁰
home to Ruth, finding release into her through “sex and censure and rage.”
²¹
He has debased his marriage, his wife, and his own best feelings. And yet he has never told her how afraid he is of going out into the white
world in search of what he feels is rightly his—“sowing in the fields where the harvest was nothing but hurt.”
²²
Here is Ruth's despair:

She had been absorbing Lee's brutality for six long years. At first, she had been convinced of his essential need for it. Hers had been a confidence in his ability to eventually come through and in some way find the verification of manhood he seemed eternally to be seeking…

But now her faith in him was gone. Now she did not believe that anything would ever help Lee Gordon. And she herself was through trying.
²³

She sees her husband as a man who “failed, as if failure was his destiny,”
²⁴
yet when Lee leaves her, Ruth's world dissolves. In a striking scene, she stands at the mirror painting her face sickly white.

Lee's despair is just as palpable:

She did not reply, and in the silence his loneliness returned. Eight years before, when they had been married, he had thought that she would be the answer to his loneliness … It had seemed like something burnished—almost silver, almost gold. Really, it had been tin foil.

. . .

Well—yes, Lee Gordon thought. When you were a Negro, so many things could happen to keep you from fulfilling the promise of yourself. No doubt he had been some sort of promise to her that he too had never fulfilled.

Yet now he was of a mind to blame her for all of it. He had acquired the habit of blaming her for most of the things that happened to him, knowing as he did that she was not to blame.

Because he knew what was wrong with them was only what was wrong with himself.
²⁵

Fulcrum for Lee's mountebank efforts both to understand his world and to lay blame, the Ruth-Lee relationship in its mirroring of Chester's and Jean's own dissolving marriage adds considerable autobiographical
tension. Reading
Lonely Crusade
with knowledge of Himes's biography, one finds it extremely difficult to refrain from wondering to what degree in this novel, consciously or unconsciously, Chester might be preparing his farewell to Jean. Other, frank use of autobiographical elements gives some weight to such reading. Lee's remembered drunken, libertine flight to New York is Chester's own; the cabin occupied briefly by Lee and Ruth as newlyweds, with its lizards, rats gnawing away in the walls and snake beneath the porch, is clearly the desert cabin they borrowed from Hugo, to whom the novel is dedicated.

Lee's affair with Jackie Forks, on the surface as simple as the relationship with Ruth is complicated, proves, beneath that, every bit as fraught. Blatant and unguarded in her sexuality, Jackie is a naif, undeveloped mentally and emotionally, a slate others write on. Lee, who with her rediscovers his capacity for tenderness, who becomes able again to live briefly on “the ladder to the way it might have been,” is only one among many exploiting the young woman's artless good feelings: “He pitied her, and to be able to pity this white girl gave him equality in this white world.”
²⁶
Circumstances of the novel grind away at all the best that is in Jackie until finally, emptied by the needs of others, she becomes filled instead with the same pain, fear, and impotent rage as Lee, another example of Himes's identification of the Negro's and woman's plight.

In its
Bildungsroman
aspect, the novel depicts Lee's learning (even as the gulf between him and Ruth widens) to leave aside his apartness and join himself to others: to others of his race, to other workers, finally to all mankind. He has always sensed his apartness, we are told. That sense of being special, so like Chester's own by way of mother Estelle, has kept him from accepting work as a domestic following his college graduation even when nothing else was available. He is reserving himself for better things—and simultaneously excepting himself from the hell that is other people.

He did not like people that much, anyway—neither Negro people nor any people. He did not feel that much involved in humanity or in the struggle of humanity.

And to try to convince against their wills a bunch of ignorant Negro migrants of the value of a union, which he doubted as much as they, was a task he found personally repellent. He was
no medicine man, no Marcus Garvey, no Black Messiah. Let people go to hell in their own particular way was one thing America had taught him.
²⁷

He is embarrassed by Negroes who attend the first union meeting (“Lee felt a shame for them, ashamed of being one of them”
²⁸
), and at one point proclaims: “I'm not trying to solve the Negro problem, Jackie. I'm trying to solve my own problem.”
²⁹

Fear becomes the mind's native land. Fear comes up as it does in Himes's memory of the break with Jean
(I had become afraid)
, as it does in Bob Jones's dreams, Kriss Cummings's despair, Jesse Robinson's damn-the-torpedos self-destruction: images swim into being in a developing tray, step into frame in the mirror. For try as Lee might to disallow the knowledge, those other faces return a vision of his own. Words like
terror, danger, hazard
and
disaster
leave their spore across pages describing Lee's childhood.

And what Lee learned … was disheartening, discouraging, and depressing. First of all, he learned that not only did he know very little concerning the Negroes of America, but that he knew very few of them. As he gained in knowledge concerning them he also gained in fear. For the knowledge of them was like looking into a mirror and seeing his own fear, suspicion, resentments, frustrations, inadequacies, and the insidious anguish of his days reflected on the faces of other Negroes … What life held for them, it also held for him—there was no escaping.
³⁰

As Milliken points out, Lee has been unable to discriminate between his rejection of the penalties imposed upon blackness and rejection of blackness itself. So thoroughly indoctrinated that “he accepted implicitly the defamation of his own character and was more firmly convinced of his own inferiority than were those who had charged him thus,”
³¹
the American Negro is an absence, a wanting, a lack. Lee himself has come “to believe that something was lacking in Negroes that made them less than other people.”
³²

Nor does alienation from fellow Negroes bring in abreaction any identification with the white world; here, Lee is even more fully, and forever, excluded. He is a man without country, a man without brief,
people, or prospect, with only the sigh of history's unbearable weight settling on him.

He could not understand what he had done that called for so great a penalty … He came to feel that the guilt or innocence of anything he might do would be subject wholly to the whim of white people. It stained his whole existence with a sense of sudden disaster hanging just above his head, and never afterwards could he feel at ease in the company of white people.
³³

Even his speech changes in the presence of whites, as in his first meeting with Smitty: “Now, addressing a white person, there was a difference in his speech, something of a falter, a brief, open-mouthed hesitancy before sound, the painful groping, not quite a stammer, for the exact word.”
³⁴

One extended passage early in the novel (while also prefiguring
The Primitive)
pulls together many of Lee's confounded thoughts and feelings. He's been out celebrating his new job and returns to the stone steps outside his home.

He sat brooding over that crazy, depressed period he had spent in New York trying to escape from himself. In the dull, aching reality of his beginning hangover, it seemed dreamlike.

Nights end to end there of whoring around. Up and down St. Nicholas Avenue. In and out the joints of Harlem. Drunk every night. Never seeing the light of day. Unable to remember any morning the name of the one who had been his bedmate the night before.

There had been that deep fascination, that tongueless call of suicide, offering not the anodyne of death, but the decadent, rotten sense of freedom that comes from being absolved of the responsibility of trying any longer to be a man in a world that will not accept you as such.