Lonely Crusade (38 page)

“You know it was Bart who had me framed—” Jackie began, but Maud cut her off.

“A white woman made the charges.”

“At Bart’s direction—and she was Jewish, anyway.”

And even though Maud had braced herself against such racial slander, she winced again, and the stub of her missing arm jerked spasmodically. “I see you are determined to draw the difference,” she said.

“You’re making me do it,” Jackie said. “You’re trying to imply that white people are responsible for this when I know no white person would do such a thing to me.”

“Is that why you committed this treachery?” for the first time accusing her of it. “Did you think you would not be disciplined because, as you say, you are ‘white’?”

“You know I didn’t do it, Maud, you know it!” Jackie sobbed.

“You know I’m being persecuted by all these vicious Negroes—”

“Lee Gordon came to your defense,” Maud told her levelly. “He stood on the floor at the union meeting and claimed that you were innocent—and he’s a Negro.”

“I don’t believe it!” Jackie gasped, shocked out of her urge to cry. For if this was right, then everything was wrong. “I don’t believe it!” she repeated harshly, as outraged at being defended by a Negro as persecuted by one. “You’re just trying to confuse me, to hurt me more—”

“By informing you that your lover came to your defense?”

“He is not my lover,” Jackie said, blushing furiously. “I would not have a Negro as a lover.”

“I was under the impression you had volunteered to recruit him—”

“By other means. I helped him with his problems and he always did just what I asked—”

“Because you are ‘white’?”

“Yes, if you must know.”

“Are you Protestant also?”

“No, I am Communist.”

“Were your parents Protestant?”

“Yes, but what has that to do with it?”

“It is stylish now for a certain type of woman to say to Negro men with whom they are having an affair, that they are American, white, gentile, and Protestant, which makes them the greatest women in all the world. Is that what you said to Gordon to make him do what you always asked?”

“I hate you!” Jackie cried, bursting into tears as she rose suddenly to her feet. Turning, she fled rapidly from the house.

But Maud did not even move to close the door. Her hard, mannish features were set in hurting lines, with her eyes closed tightly against the tears. For a one-armed, dirty Jew, as she knew this girl thought of her, she had scored a singular victory. Yet, of the two of them, she was more deeply hurt.

The day following, the party paper reported the story of the union meeting with a front-page spread containing two column pictures of Jackie Forks, “The Traitor,” and Jane Weaver, “The Exposer.” Not only had Jackie Forks accepted the bribe to sell out the union and the Communist Party, the story explained, but in so doing had endeavored to cast suspicion upon a loyal, militant, entirely dependable party member whose name would not be mentioned out of respect to his feelings. As a consequence she had been expelled from the Communist Party “…for gross violation of party discipline and active opposition to the political line and leadership of our party, and for betraying the principles of Marxism-Leninism, accepting money for such betrayal, and deserting to the side of the class enemy, American monopoly capitalism.”

Thousands of copies of the paper were printed and distributed by a score of party workers at the gates of the plant. The story dropped a bombshell among the workers, many of whom had no interest in the union heretofore. On the whole, the members of the union were embarrassed by the story, and many did not believe it. Lee Gordon was blindly furious, but Joe Ptak went about his business as usual, his hard, uncompromising demeanor giving no hint of his inner thoughts.

But the Communists were jubilant. For they considered their victory threefold. Not only had they cleared Luther of Lee’s charges and blown into the open the “truth of the treachery,” but they felt assured that they had accomplished a political coup d’e’tat. For now they had established their position of leadership in the union’s organizational campaign.

And this day Jackie returned to work, resolved to brazen it out despite the finger of accusation. For she was free, white, and twenty-one. But the other office workers made her job unbearable, even though Foster encouraged her to remain. For though he enjoyed to the full the whole incredible story as he reflected with broad amusement upon the union’s embarrassment, the women with whom Jackie had to work manifested the instinctive American antipathy toward a traitor. They avoided her, refused to speak to her, and when she approached drew away from her as from someone filthy. So at the end of the day she quit.

In all the city she had not one friend. Dreading the return to her empty, haunted rooms, she stopped in a Hollywood motion-picture theater. Afterwards she ate dinner in a little restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard and walked herself to weariness. But once at home, showered, and in bed, she could not sleep. She tried to read, but though her eyes transmitted the words, her brain gave them no meaning.

For all of her consciousness was consumed with the thought of three black men—one who had persecuted her, one for whom she had been persecuted, and one who had defended her. And she hated all three of them indiscriminately, she told herself. But this was as far as she could get. Because this was a contradiction—if she hated the persecutor, she could not hate the defender. But she did, she told herself. She hated him because he was a nigger, too. And if this was wrong, then everything she had ever known was wrong and there was no meaning in anything.

And there was no meaning.

She had to get out! It was imperative that she get out! Out of such confusing, condemning, tormenting thoughts. Out of the city, the state, the world. She could not bear it! she told herself. Because if there was a contradiction in three black men—if one was brutal and one evil and one good—then she was wrong and her race was wrong and she was nobody. But she was white—white! And now it was urgent that she go where black was always evil and only white was good. But where could she go that the three black men wouldn’t follow?—Death?—No! No! she cried to herself. Was it all so wrong and false she had to die when faced with what she’d been taught was never true? Wasn’t being white enough to withstand any truth—enough to support her in the face of any contradiction?

She thought of returning to her home. But what good would that do? she asked herself. As she faced the I-told-you-so’s of her staid and conventional parents, the three black men would mock her from the shadows. And she could not tell her parents of them, for her parents would only see two in reality and the third one in her own disgrace. Then she would have them to herself, in the stagnant pool of days, and they would rise from the dreariness and consume her brain. No!—Not home!—Now more than at any time she needed the excitement and physical freedom of communistic life and nothing less would do.

She thought of dressing and going out and picking up a date. But she was afraid of all white men now because of what she had been to one Negro man—and what he had been to her. To the soldiers and the sailors she’d be but another lay—and she was more than this—dear God, she was more than this. And yet she would not think his name.

Slowly in the terrible loneliness her body grew rigid as her mind willed that someone call her on the phone, and her heart cried out for just one word from anyone. And when midnight passed and that word had not come, she turned over and lay face downward and cried into the lonely night.

But daylight brought the hard, unyielding necessity of getting up and living. Now friendless and out of work in a hard hostile city, she was faced with the inexorability of human activity. The past was closed and the present moved and there was only the haunted future. What to do?

The formal notice of her dismissal from the Communist Party arrived in the morning’s mail. She did not open it. When the house became unbearable, she dressed and went out, wandering—a stranger in a strange city. In the faces of the people in the street she saw the hard indifference of their eyes, the remoteness of their souls. She felt forsaken by humanity and terribly afraid.

At first she shuddered at sight of every passing Negro, little realizing their kinship of emotion. But as the hours dragged through her terrible hurt, within her grew a sense of affinity to these Negroes whom she shunned—for they were always terribly hurt. With some strange strength that this afforded, she went home to wait. For what, at first she did not know. And then she did.

For in the end her thoughts came back to Lee Gordon who had defended her, and she thought of him as having defended her, and the confusion left and the contradiction became the truth—there were these three black men side by side, and one was brutal, and one was evil, and one was good. For this was the truth, and knowing it for the truth, she wanted Lee Gordon that moment to hold her in his arms and pity her. And Jackie Forks, the greatest woman in all the world, was beaten. Yet she knew that it was better so.

The hours of the afternoon were spent in wonder at her emotions concerning him. And finally she could think the words: “In a way he’s such a wonderful guy—and a man, yes, a man!”

It was then that she began to cry—crying out the horror and the strangeness of the world—“Oh, God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” The final refuge of anyone of any race. And it was as if she had been released from hell and with God’s blessing was human once again.

And it was thus that Lee Gordon found her.

Chapter 24

T
HAT NIGHT ALONE
, since Ruth had not returned to bed with him, Lee Gordon dreamed an involved and painful fantasy. But on awakening all he could recall was but the single line: “Thy immortal woman will hold thy hand.”

He was assailed by such a sense of poignancy he all but cried aloud. All that morning he was haunted by the line. The tearing, hurting, exciting implication, pulled at his mind, and its simple melody sounded in his soul, stirring up those deep, hidden dreams of how it should be, of how he’d always hoped it would be, and how it never was.

“Well—yes,” Lee Gordon said aloud, and took the road to Jackie’s.

By the still, damp tear stains on her cheeks, the softly moist lashes, giving to her features the charm of feminine despair, Lee Gordon could tell that she had been crying and had suddenly dried her eyes when he rang the bell.

He did not wait. It made no difference that they stood in the open doorway for anyone in the hall to see, because this was the world and they were the people and now was the discovery of their sexes. She came into his open arms, and for a moment longer he held her lips from his while he looked into her eyes and at the finely sculptured lines of her face and at the slight quiver of her mouth as if to etch it forever on his mind, and then with urgency they kissed. He could feel her lips trembling and breaking up softly beneath his. And he could feel her body trembling in his arms—And taste her tongue—And smell her hair. And the long, full moment lingered in the desperation of their embrace and would never end. In their awful urgency there was no end.

It was as if they had never had each other—had never had anyone—had waited for this moment to consummate their gender. The door was shut and neither knew who shut it. They groped across the room in a trance, never taking their eyes from one another’s. Their fingers were stiff, unable to cope with the maddening intricacy of buttons, and they broke them off and tore their clothing in haste—now blinding and consuming, as if to make the earth anew and people it this instant.

It had been early afternoon when he had arrived, and now it was dark and she switched on the light and got up and closed the Venetian blinds. He got up and went to her and kissed her eyes and hair and mouth. They went into the bath and showered together, staring at each other as the first man and woman.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, not tritely or amorously, but with all the homage in the world.

After a moment she looked up into his face and murmured: “I am?” slightly questioning, the corners of her mouth quirking in beginning laughter.

Now barefooted and nude and dripping, leaving footprints across the floor, they went into the kitchen and scrambled eggs and cooked hamburger patties rare with brown sugar sprinkled on them. She split a loaf of French sour-dough bread, rubbed it with garlic, spread butter on it, and put it in the oven so the butter would melt. He washed and sliced onions and found mustard and green peppers. They put their chairs together so their legs could touch, and ate garlic bread, scrambled eggs, and rare hamburger patties sprinkled with brown sugar and spread with mustard and onion and peppers, and drank sour claret wine. And it tasted more delicious than anything they’d ever eaten in all their lives. From each other’s mouths they took the food like children, and to each it tasted the same. In their five senses, in their sex and emotion, they had achieved a oneness in which their colors blended.

It was in their minds that the difference lay. In their inherent thinking to which they had been born and raised, that color made the difference. It was something they could not help, could not overcome. But yet they thought they had. And to each it gave a story of that afternoon—a different story.

To Lee Gordon, that afternoon became one more step toward the consummation of his destiny. Out of all the white women he might have or would want, this was the one who had meaning, the one who brought change. Finding it was Jackie who now needed comforting re-created the image of all white women in his mind and changed completely the structure of his own emotions. He pitied her, and to be able to pity this white girl gave him equality in this white world. With the equality of his pity for her he could now love her; and he did. He loved her desperately, violently, and completely.

And to Jackie Forks, that afternoon was the discovery of the world and the people thereof and the purpose of the people of the world. For to her came the knowledge that manhood was a many-colored thing and hers to serve the color of her heart’s selection. And it was his, and he was hers, and she was of no race and of no color but only of the people of the world. For this was the way God made it, and now she knew it was the way He wanted it to be. And still there was deep within her the consciousness of race, covered over for the time by the consciousness of truth.