Lonely Crusade (20 page)

Lee had not moved. Now he stood up and tried to talk to the Negro workers who had suddenly ganged about him. “You shouldn’t have raised that issue, men. I could have sat on the platform—it’s my prerogative. But I chose to sit with you fellows because I wanted to.”

“Well, if all that’s so, what they doin’ jim-crowin’ us over here on one side?”

Smitty appeared just in time to catch the question. “Who told you fellows to sit over here? We’ll get to the bottom of this right here and now. We’re not going to have any kind of segregation of any kind. I want you fellows to know that from the bottom of my heart.”

“No one directed us over here,” Lee explained. “It was just an unfortunate choice of seats.”

“You come over here and I followed you,” one of the women said. “I thought that’s where we was supposed to sit.”

“You people can sit where you want to. You’re members just like anyone else,” Smitty assured them, then turned to Lee. “You should have told them that, Gordon.”

Lee felt the blood rush to his face. “I didn’t see any need to tell them. They should know that.”

Smitty turned back to the workers. “Now, fellows, I want you to know, and I want you to tell all the other colored workers in the plant, that we are not having any segregation in this union. You can come here and sit where you want. You’ll vote just like everyone else. You can hold office just like everyone else.”

“Can us be president?” one wanted to know.

“If you get enough votes you can be president of the local just like anyone else.”

“If us get enough votes. I knew there was a catch.”

“We don’t want to be president. What we want are some colored leadmen out in the plant. We want some colored foremen too. And we want a square deal.”

“I’ll promise you that. You folks will get a square deal out of this union.” Smitty spoke with deep sincerity.

Satisfied, the group began breaking up. Joe Ptak, along with most of the white workers, had already gone, but several groups of whites had remained to see the outcome of the discussion. Now Benny Stone detached himself from one such group and came over to speak to Lee.

“It’ll smooth out, kid, as soon as they learn a little more about the union,” he said. “We have a lot of educating to do yet. Get Luther to tell you—”

“There’s nothing to smooth out,” Lee cut him off, resenting his sympathy and reference to Luther equally. “They understand and if they don’t, let me handle it. It’s my job.”

“Sure, pal, sure. Take it easy,” Benny murmured and scampered off.

McKinley had not taken part in the discussion, but now as he prepared to leave, he tapped Lee on the shoulder and said solemnly: “Beware.”

Lee gave a start. Then Smitty called him to one side and they sat down at the end of a bench.

“Lee, this is all your fault,” he said bluntly. “You shouldn’t have let it happen.” He was angry and disturbed.

“How was it my fault?” Lee snapped, the resentment at being jacked up riding him into a rage. “Nobody told me to sit on the platform.”

“You should have known your place was on the platform.”

“How was I to know that?”

“Because you’re an organizer.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me it was part of my job to sit on the platform?”

But Smitty was through with it. “Now this segregation business—you shouldn’t have let them bunch themselves together like that.”

“It had happened before I noticed it, and then the meeting had started.”

“But you have to notice things like that. There’s no telling how much harm was done tonight, both with the whites and the colored. You have to impress the fact upon new members that the union is democratic.”

The very fact that Smitty was right impelled Lee on to argument. “You can’t just tell them, Smitty. You have to show them.”

“Well, let’s show them then. Let’s get them in here and scatter them about among the white people and make them know it’s democratic.”

“You can’t do that, either, because they want to sit by themselves.”

“Well, by God, Lee, you’re talking in riddles now. They don’t want to be segregated and they do want to be segregated. What kind of business is that?”

Now Lee was in the position of either having to explain what was nearly unexplainable or appearing a consummate fool. It had taken him some time to realize the scope of the Negro worker’s attitude toward unionism. At once it was a curious mixture of logical antipathy and great expectation. For while their cold racial logic told them that the union also was another racial barrier, their deep yearning for democracy caused them to expect from it not only the opportunity for full-fledged participation but in addition special consideration and privileges. They did not want to be just members; they wanted to be special members with rights and privileges above all other members.

This had been hard enough for Lee to understand, and now before opening his mouth he realized the futility of hoping that Smitty could. The thought processes of Smitty would not be the same as those of any Negro; they had been planted in a different soil and cultivated differently. And Lee knew this, but he attempted the explanation because it was congesting within him and had to come out.

First, he argued that no more discrimination existed then in the plant than there would be after it had been organized; that the lack of Negro leadmen and foremen, both before and after organization, would be attributed to seniority. By seniority white workers would be promoted to higher paid jobs and Negroes employed to fill the lower paid ones. And what had the union to offer that would relieve this? Nothing! For the basis of unionism was also seniority, which seemed right and just. The union would always press for the establishment of the rigid rule that the first to be hired should be the last to be fired and that promotions to higher ratings should also be based on length of service.

But Negro workers read it the other way, Lee doggedly insisted—that the last to be hired would be the first to be fired. And they would always be the last to be hired—first, because of prejudice, and second, because of their lack of experience, for how could a man get experience at a trade without ever having had a chance to work at it?

Under the company merit system Negroes could at least hope that by application and hard work, superior acumen and Uncle-Toming, they might get a better job than they would by the process of seniority. They would accept discrimination because without unionism they would expect discrimination.

Lee Gordon struggled earnestly to explain the Negro workers’ attitude toward discrimination—the fact that discrimination had become a way of life. They had accepted it as a part of the role they lived, as a condition of existence, beginning with the ability to think—and never ending. They had resigned themselves to expect no better.

It was this acceptance of theirs that kept them living, Lee Gordon contended. This state of believing said they must stay in their place, expecting only a Negro’s due. It was this that kept them alive in a nation where equal opportunity was a hallowed legend and civil equality the law. For whenever a Negro came to believe that full equality was his just due, he would have to die for it, as would any other man.

And this was what the union meant to them, Lee Gordon painstakingly propounded. Equality! They did not expect it from the company. They did not think about it. And as long as they did not think about it they were all right. But the union made them think about it. The union preached it. The union promised it. They did expect it from the union.

“And face it, Smitty, face it!” Lee broke into a shout. “The union can’t give the Negro worker equality!”

“What’s to stop us?”

“You haven’t got equality to give. Look, man, let’s face it. The union could be very wonderful for Negroes if it first took into consideration that you can not have equality in the plant and inequality on the street. Look, you should be able to see that there can be no equality on the job unless it first exists in the employment office.”

“We know that, Gordon; that’s why political action is the first duty of the union council.”

“What political action? Where? This union’s never made a promise to see that fair employment is carried out.”

“Gordon, what are you trying to say? Do you believe in unionism?”

“Yes, I believe in it,” Lee Gordon said. “But I am trying to explain a problem you don’t seem to understand.”

“Are you trying to explain it or confuse it?”

“I am trying to explain it if you will listen.”

“I am listening. Goddamnit, that’s all I’ve been doing!”

“Well—fine. Because you’re telling me what to tell the Negro workers to get them to believe in the democratic equality offered by the union. But what you don’t understand is that equality to the Negro worker who has never known equality is more than equality. To us equality is not a chance to participate equally. To us equality is special privilege. Is that so hard to understand? A Negro must earn twenty thousand dollars to feel as secure as a white man who earns five thousand. Why? You know why! Because it’s part of a Negro’s conviction that he has to be twice as good to be considered at all. There is no way to get around it. The Negro’s confidence, or his ego, or whatever in the hell you want to call it, has to be built up to where he can feel equality without having to first achieve superiority. Therefore at the beginning of any democratic movement the Negro will always be a special problem.”

“Well, Lee, there’s one thing you ought to know. We can’t have unity and special problems at the same time. They just don’t go together. And we must have unity to have an organization.”

“Look, Smitty, you can’t have unity without having equality, either.”

“Lee, I’m tired of talking about it. You’re just trying to complicate the issue. If we make a special problem out of the Negro workers then we have to make a special problem out of the white Southern workers, the Chinese workers, or the Jewish workers. The Negro is a worker just like anyone else. Why in the hell should the goddamn Negroes always want special consideration?” In his earnestness he had forgotten he was also talking to a Negro.

“It’s not so much that they want special consideration as that they must have it,” Lee argued stubbornly.

“You folks don’t know when people like you,” Smitty said.

Now Lee had that sudden sickening sense of being crazy in a crazy world—an idiot among idiots, all speaking in an unknown tongue. No one understood anyone else—only listening to the sound of the other’s words, and then mouthing the sounds of insanities in their own meaningless tongues.

“Is it necessary that we know?” Lee Gordon asked.

Smitty looked profoundly shocked.

“If we don’t know,” Lee continued, “does that mean you will do less for us? Does what you do for us have on it the price that we recognize it and feel grateful? Is it a personal favor you are doing us?”

Now Smitty became defensive. “Hell no! I’m asking no gratitude for what I do. I believe in what I do. I don’t ask any Negro to like me because I like Negroes. That’s ridiculous. I like Negroes just as I like any other people—because I’ve been around them and grown to know them.”

Smitty then told the story of how in kindergarten he and a little Negro girl had become so enamored of each other that they cried each day when the time came for them to separate.

“Well—yes,” Lee Gordon said.

It was one of his most disheartening experiences—listening to Smitty tell of his personal regard for Negroes while having no understanding whatsoever of the issues involved. Realizing that no matter what Smitty might do to harm Negroes, destroy their objectives, or deter them from their aims, he would want them to understand that he did not do it because he hated them.

Lee had met this kind of liberal on WPA, in the post office, and during his short stay in New York City, and had always been frightened by them. They were the kind of white people who were honest and sincere in their regard for Negroes, who would eat and sleep with them, marry them and live with them on a social level, who might fight ceaselessly and valiantly to bring about a solution for their oppression, who might even become martyrs for their cause and bleed and die for them—as did “the brave men, living and dead who struggled here…” But from beginning to end they could not accept the proposition for which they died, and could never live in equality with those for whom they had fought so heroically to have considered equal—simply because deep inside of them inequality was a fact.

“Anyway, I’m glad you like us,” Lee Gordon finally said.

“I do like you,” Smitty insisted. “I have confidence in you, Lee. I believe in you.”

Lee could not find the words to say how ironical he thought this was. Because by the very statement, Smitty was insisting that he, Lee Gordon, mug, and did not even know it—in fact, would not have believed it if Lee had tried to explain. For like many other white people whom Lee had met, Smitty mistook the mugging of a Negro for integrity. And if he, Lee Gordon, had any sense, Lee said to himself, he should have learned, as had the great Negro leaders who always mugged, that white people preferred the mugging to the honesty.

“Look, Smitty,” he promised, “I’ll get this straightened out and see that it doesn’t happen again.” And then he added: “Forget all this stuff I’ve been saying. You’re right as hell, the union does offer democracy.”

And now he, Lee Gordon, was mugging, and could not help himself—because something inside of him impelled him to.

“Sure, Lee, goddamnit! We all have to blow off sometime.”

Chapter 12

N
OW HE WAS
wound up, entangled in his own confusion, chagrined by his inability to make Smitty understand what he did not quite understand himself. It was important, urgent, that someone understand him if for no more than to ensure him that he could be understood. His own thoughts had never before taken him quite this far and it was too far to be alone.

He thought of talking it over with Ruth, trying to make her understand. But that was hopeless, he told himself. She could not even understand his necessity for dominance, or anything at all about his ego—his warped ego, his sickly, dwarfed, cowardly, cringing ego that his fear had given him. An ego that made a man beat his wife just to prove that he was stronger.