Lonely Crusade (19 page)

Soldiers for democracy, for an eighty-dollar check or death on some distant isle; the home front and the battle-front; relief clients of yesterday and of tomorrow too—who knows? Lee Gordon asked himself as he shouldered down the aisle. But soldiers today—important, necessary, expendable.

That they felt their importance was a tangible thing that could not be overlooked. Lee observed it in their stances, in their loud, positive voices, their hard, unhesitating steps, their bold, challenging stares, in their high-shouldered arrogance.

From one point of view—say, from Jackie’s point of view—it was inspiring, he thought. Great things could be accomplished by this mass consciousness of self-importance, great progress could be made, great change could be brought about. With the guidance of the union—He stopped it there, aware that he was thinking in terms of union propaganda, not because he disputed the logic of his thoughts, but because he rebelled at their regimentation.

Now his mood became sardonic—Ah, the great unwashed masses of the world. The people and their stink—But underneath there was still a defensiveness in his attitude, and he cursed himself for a fool. Why couldn’t he ever think straight? Yes, important people; they were important people, because people were important. They were born with importance. Negroes—yes, Negroes—From some forgotten poem the stanza trickled back:

“Nigger, white man, gentile, Jew,

“Stepping in a smart review…”

The streetcar stopped at Forty-Second Street to let off four Negro girls who were hostesses for the Avalon USO. Not a segregated center, Lee Gordon thought cynically, just a center in a Negro community, staffed by Negroes, served by Negroes, and serving Negroes. But not segregated, no. Across the street the gaunt outline of the Wrigley baseball field loomed ghostly in the dark. The rain fell with a soft, sobbing sound. Now the car began to move again, past Vernon through the half-black and half-white neighborhood.

The line kept going over and over in Lee Gordon’s mind, like a broken record:

“Nigger, white man, gentile, Jew…”

Mexicans, Europeans, Orientals, South Americans—and Filipinos, he added to the quartet. Southerners, Northerners, Easterners, Westerners—and Indians—this was manpower.

With the curious blend of native and migrant, racial and religious, current and traditional hatreds—this was culture.

Living in overcrowded houses and dilapidated shacks, deserted stores and trailer camps, four beds in the bedroom and two beds in the hallway—this was housing.

Sugar shortages and black-market meat, double prices for half values—this was food.

Overcrowded hospitals and brutal police, idle streetcars and hustling criminals, and bewildered administration and prejudiced lawmakers—this was welfare.

Twelve-year-old prostitutes and seventy-year-old degenerates, lesbianism supplanting conjugation, adultery for pleasure and perversion for relief—this was sex.

The cultists and the faddists, the Christian Jews and the Great I Am’s, the holy rollers and Aimee Semple McPherson—this was religion.

Niggers alongside nigger-haters. Jews bucking rivets for Jew-baiters. Native daughters lunching with Orientals. Lumped together in the war plants. Soldiers on the home-front now. For this was a war-production city. The birthplace of the P-48. Womb of the Liberty Ship. Week end of the armed forces. The bloated, hysterical, frantic, rushing city that was Los Angeles in the spring of 1943. And these were the people who made it go, Lee Gordon thought.

Now into the pattern of his roving reflections came thought of all the pretenders of the world who had asked him, as a Negro, to be reasonable and understand that the thing could not be done; the “friends of the Negro” who always had some mush-mouthed theory of patience for him to take instead. “My friends! My friends!” Lee Gordon thought. “While I am ducking my enemies you are cutting my throat. At least please be honest for just this one time and do not tell me what can not be done. Do not tell me whose feelings might be hurt and who won’t stand for this and who won’t put up with that and who will start another civil war. Because I am seeing it done, here with these people, and now at this time. So please do not tell me all that stuff again because I am tired of hearing it,” Lee Gordon thought. “Say aloud for this one time that you do not do it because you do not want to do it. Give me a choice, if nothing more.”

The streetcar arrived at his stop just as he was beginning to enjoy the eloquence of his thoughts, and he had to cut it short. Immediately upon entering the union hall he was approached by five Negro workers, four men and one woman, who appeared to be lost.

“There he is now,” the woman said.

“Hey, man, this the union hall, ain’t it?” one of the men asked.

It required an effort to adjust his thoughts, but he said heartily: “You bet it is, and I’m glad to see you people out.”

“Ain’t they gonna be no meeting?”

“Sure, the meeting’s upstairs in the assembly hall.”

“We was up there.”

“Why didn’t you stay?”

“Warn’t nobody there.”

“That doesn’t make any difference. You could have sat down and waited. Others will be coming in.”

“We warn’t sure we was in the right place.”

“You’re always in the right place,” Lee assured them with a forced smile.

The woman laughed. “Hey-hey-hey, we just didn’t wanna be the fust. Ain’t no need of rushin’ these white folks.”

They were dressed differently. The woman wore a rose-beige slack suit that fitted tightly across her bucket-shaped hips, one of the men wore a striped, brown suit, two wore draped slacks and sport shirts, and the fourth wore starched overall trousers and a white shirt. And they looked differently. They were of different color, different physiognomy, different build. One of the men wore a mustache, another’s hair was conked, a third had two prominent gold crowns that Lee suspected had been placed over sound teeth for decorative purposes, while the woman was pungent with rare and expensive perfume. But all were wearing their Sunday best, and in the faces of them all was a look of apprehension, and in their attitudes the sameness of Negro migrant laborers.

Lee had been afraid that the others wouldn’t come—the educated ones, the slick ones, and the ones who felt that industrial employment was only temporary anyway. But if enough of these came the others would have to come, he thought, and he gave his attention to putting these at ease.

Several white workers upon entering had heard the woman’s last remark and looked at the group derisively.

“Now are all of you members?” Lee asked loudly to avoid a scene.

“How come you think we’s here?” one answered for them all.

But the white workers passed without comment. Instead of following them upstairs, the Negro workers turned from the hallway into the ground-floor bar.

“Better come on up, it’s about time for the meeting to start,” Lee called after them as he turned away.

“Hey, wait, man, you with us, ain’t you?” one of the fellows halted him again.

“Why, sure.”

“You for us, ain’t you?”

“Sure, I’m for you.”

“You our buddy, ain’t you?”

Lee was becoming annoyed. “Say, look—”

“Then have a drink with us,” the man interrupted with a wide, sudden grin.

Lee had to laugh. “Okay.”

They went into the taproom and lined against the bar. Seeing them there, three other Negroes, two women and a man, came immediately to join them. Now in the bar the eight Negroes posed a problem. The white workers who had been there before them resented their presence. One Negro in a bar seating fifty could be ignored, but eight Negroes in a bar seating twenty comprised a black uprising.

The bartender remained studiously impersonal. “What’ll you folks have?”

“Whatcha got?”

“Lucky Lager, Acme, Pabst—”

“Just beer?”

“Wine also. Port, Muscatel—”

“I’ll take some wine,” the woman ordered. “Beer makes me go too much.”

“Mus-I-tell for me, too,” a man said, and the others said the same. Lee ordered beer.

After her second glass of wine the woman remarked: “I see ri’ now I’se gonna like this here union.”

“You ain’t even been to no meeting yet.”

“What I care ‘bout the meetings?”

Soon the sound of their voices drowned out all else. Their speech was in dialect sprinkled with casual, unthinking vulgarisms, and their manners were uncouth. In a few short minutes they had taken over the bar and changed it into a rowdy gin mill. They had become objects of scorn, derision, and resentment, yet they had done nothing they would not have done at home.

Patting Lee on the shoulder, nudging him in the ribs, they accepted him as their leader.

“Now don’t you be scared,” one expressed the general sentiment, “You git ri’ up and tell ‘em what we wants.”

“Tell ‘em we wants some colored leadmens an’ some colored foremens.”

Try as he would to overcome it, Lee felt a shame for them, ashamed of being one of them. But he met the derisive stares of the whites with a level challenge and did not look away. When Joe Ptak put his head through the doorway and shouted: “Time for the meeting!” it came as a relief.

“Hey, Joe!” he called and caught up with him. “How’s it going?”

“I don’t see any colored workers upstairs.”

“They haven’t gone up yet.”

Joe looked about at the group that trailed along behind them. “Are these all?”

“The rain’s keeping many away,” Lee began to alibi.

“It shouldn’t. If they won’t come to union meeting in the rain, they don’t give a damn about their union.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

When they entered the assembly hall Lee noticed that it was less than half filled, and started to remark to Joe that this was a poor showing for the whites too. But Joe had continued forward to the platform where Smitty and the local’s officials were already seated. As he was about to follow, Lee noticed Lester McKinley beckoning to him from where he sat at one side with several other Negroes. For an instant he hesitated, debating the importance of his sitting on the platform too, then turned in McKinley’s direction.

The Negro workers who had followed him upstairs stood grouped about the doorway, as if trying to decide where to sit among the scores of empty seats. When they saw Lee turned in the direction of McKinley’s seat, they followed and filled the empty bench behind. Too late Lee noticed that no white workers sat beyond the aisle and realized that they had segregated themselves. But there was nothing to be done about it now.

He put it from his mind and turned to McKinley. “Hello, Lester, what’s new?”

“I have been working assiduously distributing leaflets to one and all in my department,” McKinley reported in his pleasant voice. “But there is underhanded opposition being raised against me.”

“In what way?” Lee wanted to know.

“Foster.”

Lee frowned involuntarily, experiencing his first doubt about McKinley’s judgment. “How so?”

“If I know Foster correctly, and I think I do, I am certain he has bought out one of our leaders.”

Lee looked around to see if any of the others had heard. No one appeared to have been listening but Lee was not convinced for he had known Negroes who were past masters in the art of expressing disinterest. But when he replied to McKinley he pointedly lowered his voice. “Do you know this for certain?”

“I can not prove it,” McKinley said. “But I am as certain of it,” he added, “as I am of sitting here.”

“Well—” Lee did not believe it. But his concern at the moment was that some of the others might overhear and would believe it and start some sort of groundless rumor to the effect. “Keep it under your hat,” he finally advised. “We’ll get to work on it and find out who it is.”

“I am already at work on it,” McKinley informed him.

Lee was relieved when Marvin Todd called the meeting to order. Todd outlined the structure of the local and informed them that when the membership was large enough there would be a general election of officers. Then Smitty spoke on the history of the union and the importance of unionism. Joe Ptak defined in detail the organizational procedure, peppering his talk with anecdotes of his organizational activities elsewhere. Then Benny Stone reported that there were five hundred and sixty-five paid members to date.

In the lull that followed one of the Negro workers on the bench behind touched Lee on the shoulder. “Why ain’t you up there with them other organizers, man?”

In turning around to reply, Lee noticed that all the Negroes within earshot had leaned forward to hear his answer. “Well, it’s not really necessary,” he said. “It doesn’t make much difference where I sit.”

“You just as big as they is, ain’t you? You got as much to say ‘bout all this as they is, ain’t you?” another persisted.

“I suppose so, yes.”

They let it drop and Lee thought that it was over with. But later when the meeting was opened for questions, the man who had first questioned him immediately gained the floor.

“What I wanna know is why-come our organizer ain’t sitting up there on the pulpit with the rest of y’all?”

A sudden laugh arose from the white side.

“Aw, man, hush yo’ mouth an’ set down!” came a shamed outcry from another of the Negro workers.

“He has the right to ask the question,” McKinley stated quietly.

Todd ruled the question out of order. A din arose as many tried to speak at once. But heard above the din was a white Southern voice. “Well now, by God, that’s a fair question.”

“What’s fair about it?” a similar voice demanded.

Lester McKinley was suddenly on the floor. “I’ll have a word to say to that.”

Both Joe and Smitty had sprung to their feet but Smitty was the first to speak. “Lee, come on up here where you belong.”

“Damnit, the man can sit where he pleases,” Joe said in rebuttal. “This is a democratic union. Everybody can sit where they please. That ain’t no problem. As an organizer Gordon can sit on the platform, sit in the audience, or stand on his feet.”

“The meeting’s adjourned!” Smitty shouted. “Everybody come back next Saturday night at the same time and bring two new members each!”