Lonely Crusade (37 page)

“I just don’t want to see anybody get framed like that. And I won’t!”

Now her resentment grew because she doubted that he would do as much for her.

“I think you are being very foolish,” she said. “Why should you stick your neck out because of what happens to a Communist spy? Anyone who would spy for the Communists would sell them out just as quickly.”

“Jackie wouldn’t!” he cried. “I know she wouldn’t!”

It was no longer the voice of intuition, for in the sudden revelation of emotion she knew that he had gone to bed with this woman. At first she experienced that sick, lost, completely frightening sense of shock. For now all the strangeness she had noticed in their sex life for weeks past exposed itself as an emotional involvement. And she would rather he had murdered Luther, or had been murdered by him, than for this to happen.

“Are you having an affair with the girl?” she asked, masking her emotional chaos with a deadly casualness.

“Ruth, don’t always be so crazy,” he denied. “Do I have to be having an affair with the girl because I object to her being framed?”

“Then why should you be so upset about what happens to some white tramp when worse things happen to Negro women every day?”

“Aw, Ruth, I can’t even talk to you anymore without having you accuse me of the worse things you can think of.”

“I’m not accusing you. I asked you.”

“You accuse when you ask.”

“You haven’t answered.”

“Are you having an affair with the manager of the plant?” he countered.

“No.”

“Well, no, then.”

“Why couldn’t you say that in the first place?”

“Because it’s such a foolish question.”

“If you could hear the tone of your voice you wouldn’t think it was so foolish.”

“What has the tone of my voice got to do with it?”

“If you could hear yourself you would know.”

“Aw, go to hell! Here I come in here trying to talk over a simple problem on my job and you’ve turned it into an emotional storm.”

Now the instinctive protective coloration, as maddening in a woman as her intuition, came to her aid, and she submerged her first blind wave of terror by reviling him.

“You are the lowest person I know,” she said carefully with intent to hurt. “You are willing to destroy your whole future for some dirty white whore, and for your own wife who slaves for you, you haven’t a decent word.”

“Slaves for me!” he shouted as the anger grew within him. “What the hell you mean, slave for me! You’re working for your own damn self and always have!”

“If it was for myself, I would not even have my job. I would have a husband who supported me—”

“Well, get one then! Go get him now!”

“You probably wish I would go out and get some man to add to your support,” she said, employing her sex to the full to hurt him where his inherent chivalry would not allow him to strike back.

“That is a rotten lie!”

“Why do you object to that? I couldn’t be any more of a prostitute for you if I did go out and sell my body.” And now it was his honor she sought to despoil: “You couldn’t be any more of a pimp.”

“Aw, Ruth, damn! Other women work too—”

“And you admire them for it!”

“I didn’t say I admired them. I just said they worked too. You aren’t the only woman who ever worked.”

“Lee, do you have some uncontrollable desire for white women?” she asked conversationally. “If you do, just tell me and I will go out of your life and let you have all the cheap white women you want.”

“Aw, Ruth—”

“If you want a white woman, go get one. Try to get one to support you like I have done—”

“I haven’t asked you to support me. If you haven’t wanted to work why didn’t you quit?”

“I would have if you could have kept any of your jobs. If you thought about me as much as you do about every little white tramp who comes along, you’d have accepted the job that Mr. Foster offered you—”

“All I said was that other women work,” he said, cutting her off. “And that started all this argument? Does that make their men pimps too?”

“If you were just one half as much a man as the lowest white bum—” and now it was his manhood she defiled—“you wouldn’t put a white prostitute above your wife. That’s why white men rule the world today.”

His tight, thin face resigned itself to torment as he turned his eyes away. And now he groped for the words to tell her how it should be, or how it might have been, if she had ever considered her job in the light of a partnership instead of an individual enterprise. But he did not have any words that he had not already used in vain. So he said: “I’m going to bed.”

She arose and began taking bedding from the linen closet. “I’m going to sleep on the davenport,” she said.

He began undressing, cursing to himself.

At first she simply hated him, but finally the awful terror came again. For now that it had finally happened, she did not see how she could live without him. But God knows she could live with no man unfaithful to her for some white bitch.

Chapter 23

W
HEN JACKIE FORKS
was informed of her expulsion from the union by an anonymous telephone call shortly after the meeting had adjourned, her first reaction was utter shock. She had known that a victim would be offered, both to acquit Luther and quell the ugly talk of treachery, and from the first she had supported the necessity of such a move. Though her heart had been opposed to Bart’s suggestion that she persuade Lee Gordon to denounce Lester McKinley as the traitor, as a good party member she had readily consented.

But that they would dare offer her as the victim had been unthinkable. For not only had she thought herself inviolable within the party, but sacrosanct within the world. Unlike the others who sought to escape racial and religious persecutions, she did not have to be a Communist. She was the kind of American whom even Hitler would have welcomed—fair, Aryan, and a pure-blooded gentile—and certainly she had nothing to fear in America. Even people as fanatical as the Communists could not believe they had anything special to offer her.

But it was not so much gratitude she had demanded from them as recognition, and her white gentile soul was utterly outraged that they would sacrifice her to save a nigger’s reputation. She was outraged above her loudest claim to Marxist ideology, beyond her greatest sympathy for the oppressed, stronger than her most honest hatred of the oppressors.

In white anger she called Communist Party headquarters, and receiving no reply, called Bart at his home. Receiving her call shortly before Lee’s arrival, Bart disclaimed all knowledge of her expulsion and refused to discuss it with her.

“You will regret this!” she said threateningly as she hung up.

Then she began calling acquaintances high up in the Communist hierarchy. But they were either out, engaged, or knew nothing. Even the subtle warning contained in this did not lessen her blazing urge for vengeance. Nor did the later warning contained in her roommate’s failure to call, which broke a rigid rule between them.

Alone with her unendurable outrage, she was mocked by the picture of Bart and Luther framing her just because she was white and they hated white people. She even entertained the idea of Lee’s being involved with them. Was that why he had called, breaking off with her? The nigger! The goddamned nigger!

And as the seconds flowed like sand, her hatred for Negroes climbed like a blazing pyre. At first she hated three individual Negroes because of race, and then she hated the Negro race because of three individual Negroes. She hated their color, their souls, their minds, their character, their lips, teeth, eyes, and hair—hated them with an attention to physiological detail she could not have ascertained had she made love to all the adult Negroes, male and female, in the world. In this pathological hatred, the Negro became the bugaboo of Southern legend, the beast of Klanist propaganda, a distorted, monstrous, despicable object of her rage. And as her hatred rose, burning up all that was good within her, she became just so much rife white flesh, of common value on the prostitution market, good only in America for getting some Negro lynched.

And now when she recalled that she had gone to bed with one, and let him hold her white naked body in his black naked arms, her tautly strung, screaming nerves presented a threat to sanity. She felt as if she had consummated some self-pollution and imagined her body filthy, odorous, and contaminated by his touch. She arose and showered, scrubbed her teeth, brushed her hair, manicured and polished her nails, lotioned her body, and cold-creamed her face, as if to destroy by physical cleanliness not only the signs, but the fact of her debasement.

Now she was able to analyze with a degree of sanity what had happened to her. She had simply been sacrificed to the ultimate aim, which was pure and simple Marxism as she had learned it from the first. As a consequence she had no right to object since the logic of any other position would have been untenable. But even now her Marxist schooling could not lessen her sense of racial violation. She would not have minded being sacrificed to any other cause than the preservation of a Negro’s reputation, she attempted to convince herself. But this she could not accept.

She went into the kitchen and made coffee; and drinking it, began to plan. Until then she had not realized how involved her life had become with the activity of the Communist Party. She had lived with Communists, talked their language, and thought their thoughts for almost three years. She had grown to be dependent on the party for all the decisions of her private life. And she had enjoyed it; she could not imagine life away from it. But now she found it difficult to think alone.

She did not want to be expelled from the party also, which she knew was inexorable unless she acted swiftly. Thinking it possible to force a retraction of the charges by mobilizing the support of the white gentile membership in a purely racial stand, she remained home the next day, telephoning white persons whom she thought important in party circles—motion-picture executives, producers, directors, city officeholders, business men, local politicians. And afterward she visited a number of them. But none would discuss the incident with her. Most denied membership in the party. Others denied knowledge of all party tactics. But many of them were willing to have an affair with her.

Before that day was over she had learned that though there were definite racial caste lines within the Communist Party, above them was Communism, the essence of which was fear. It was not so much a lack of sympathy which she met in the blank, rejecting stares at the first mention of the party, as fear of reprisal should they take her part. They had too much to lose to become objects of Communist attack, the first salvo of which they feared might be the sly accusation that they also were Communists.

Discovering on her return home that her roommate had moved, Jackie knew that all hope of retraction was gone. Now the only course open to her, she thought, would be to make a full confession involving Foster and perhaps Lee and throw herself on the mercy of the committee. But she would have to enlist some executive of the party to introduce the idea and convince the committee of its political expediency or it would do no good.

For this she chose a Jew, not so much with a cold-blooded deliberation, as with an inherent conviction that a Jew would always take the part of a gentile against Negroes. So she called Maud Himmelstein at party headquarters, catching her as she was about to leave.

“Maud, this is Jackie Forks.”

“Yes, Jackie,” Maud replied with a sympathetic cordiality in her usually rasping voice.

“Maud, I’d like an interview with you. It’s terribly important.”

“Is it about your—” the stub of her missing arm jerked spasmodically as she sought for the unobjectionable word—“trouble?”

“Yes, it is,” Jackie admitted, not defensively, but inclusively, since in her thoughts all Jews, like Negroes, were guilty from the start.

But Maud experienced a sense of gratification over Jackie’s coming to her, for she had bitterly opposed Jackie’s sacrifice for Luther and wanted her to know at least one white woman was on her side. So she asked Jackie to call at her home that evening, giving the address in Boyle’s Heights.

It was Maud’s intention to befriend Jackie, perhaps offer to carry her case to the national committee over Bart’s head. Secretly she hated Bart, as she did all Negroes, and it galled her to be in a position subordinate to his.

But Jackie’s first words cut her to the quick, alienated her sympathy, and dispelled her good will. And this was the one thing Jackie intended to avoid, but the words poured from her involuntarily: “From the point of pure political expediency, Maud, you should not sacrifice a white woman to save a Negro. I’m not just thinking of myself; I’m thinking of the future of the party. You can’t just have a party of Negroes and Jews.” This was the way she thought.

Maud shriveled up inside, struck by a terrible hurt, for all the things she envied and desired and wanted to be were embodied in this young, personable, gentile girl whom she wanted to befriend, but who scorned her with these words. However she gave no sign of it as she asked with composure: “But do you think we could have a Communist Party without the Negroes and the Jews?”

“Oh, I didn’t mean Jews—” Jackie hastened to amend, realizing too late her mistake.

But already she had bared her real emotions, and Maud accepted their reality with a blunt stoicism, forcing herself to say: “If you mean Negroes, you mean Jews also—and that includes myself,” which was not an easy thing for her to do.

For out of all the many hatreds growing from her infirm body and oppressed spirit, the hatred of her own Jewishness was the most intense. She hated all Jews and all things Jewish with an uncontrollable passion, as an escape from which she had become a Communist. And yet she was as Jewish in appearance as the Jewish stereotype.

“But, Maud, you know yourself,” Jackie argued earnestly, “with Bart at the head of the party it’s getting so a white person is subject to any persecution.”

“Now what is it you’re trying to say, Jackie?” Maud asked in her rasping voice. “Are you accusing Bart on racial grounds of some attack on you?”