Lonely Crusade (40 page)

“I mean it. I want to. I’d be your white whore and make you a hundred thousand dollars and the proudest black man who ever lived.” Why not the fact with the feeling, since she could not be his wife and race would not let her be the mother of his children?

“Don’t talk like that!”

“Why not?”

“Because it isn’t like that.”

“How is it?”

“You know how it is.”

“Tell me.”

“No, I’ll let you tell me. How is it, Jackie?”

And then the drawing back—

“I didn’t mean it, darling.”

“I know you didn’t mean it. But please don’t say it.”

“I won’t say it any more.”

But all that night he wondered if she had, and if he had been a fool for not accepting it.

So in the end he had to tell her: “I had a funny dream the night before I came to you.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t remember all of it. Just the single line: ‘Thy immortal woman will hold thy hand.’”

The look for which from the first he had searched came into her ethereal features, and slowly, their eyes on one another’s, they groped for each other’s hands.

That day they almost attained the communion, fulfilling each other and themselves—But not quite.

For between them were their colors—race.

And his wife—Ruth called that night.

Chapter 25

R
UTH SAT IN
the window of the darkened front room, a framed silhouette against the soft, cool night, and stared down the walk toward the street. Beneath her feet was a tiny spot in the nap of the carpet where her agitated shuffling had flattened it the night before as she had sat there waiting for him. And now it was past twelve of another night and he had not yet returned. But her thoughts were so deeply absorbed in a dull, self-condemning agony that she would not have seen him if he had then come up the walk.

For it had been her lack of faith that had driven him away, she berated herself. Her childish theatricalism of sleeping on the davenport, as though one more night of sleeping in the bed with him would matter. And why should he be guilty because she had thought so? Was her faith in his fidelity so cheap it would not withstand a tone of voice? Was his every noble purpose to be debased by the unfounded suspicions of her jealous mind? Was it so impossible that he had defended the woman as he would have defended any victim of injustice?

She wanted to believe him, and her heart held out for this belief implicitly. But there was no support for it, no precedent, nothing in her experiences as a Negro woman to convince her that a Negro man’s defense of a white woman could be for justice’s sake. To believe it, to have faith in her husband’s motive, would have been to contradict all that she had ever read or seen or heard of Negro men and white women in America.

But to doubt it brought agony unendurable. For that made him like all other Negro men lusting after white women, and more than the threat to her future, the knife of torture in her heart, was the fear that all eight years of her marriage had been nothing but waste. And this she could not bear.

But in the dead hours of early morning, her self-condemning ardor ebbed and self-pity came with a numbing sense of weariness. Her mother had warned her against marrying Lee, she recalled. Her mother had said at the very first that he was undependable—that he would be unfaithful and lead her the life of a dog. She wished now that she could go to her mother and cry out her heart in her arms. But she had never done that and could not now. Her mother lived in a different world—a world of values absolute in segregation. Should she make the long dreary journey to St. Louis only to announce that her husband had left her for a white woman, her mother would not be able to understand why she simply did not leave him and put him from her mind.

So she sat out the night alone, slipping down each passing minute into deeper despondency. Mercifully, daylight brought a change. Although she was dead on her feet and had a grinding headache, now it was anger that she nursed. By evening she had resolved to live her own life, to go her own way.

But nightfall brought worry again, conjecture, desperation. When she had not received word from him by eleven o’clock, she could no longer endure her own grim imaginings. Calling the union hall, she caught Smitty still at work.

“This is Mrs. Gordon, Mr. Smith. May I speak to Lee—if it’s not too inconvenient.”

“Lee? Lee’s not here, Mrs. Gordon. In fact—” He caught himself on the verge of divulging that Lee had quit that morning.

For an imperceptible moment she waited for him to finish, then spoke rapidly to conceal that she had done so: “Oh! He said when he left this morning that he would be working late, and I presumed that he would be at the hall—”

She did not want Smitty to know that she was worried, yet she could not hang up without some definite information.

But Smitty had already divined that Lee had returned to Jackie’s, and now he sought an explanation to relieve Ruth’s anxiety. “We sent Lee to San Francisco on urgent business, Mrs. Gordon. He was terribly rushed and didn’t have an opportunity to call you, but you should be hearing from him at any time now.”

“Oh, thank you. My business wasn’t urgent anyway.”

“No doubt he has already sent you a message. You should receive it at any time.”

He knew as he spoke that he sounded unconvincing. Nor was she convinced. But she was somewhat reassured by the fact that Smitty would go to the trouble to lie for him. That proved that he meant something to the union.

And now her hand touched her hair in a weary reflex gesture as the slow torture of his absence brought a recapitulation of their relationship, forcing an admission of what he meant to her.

She had always been in love with him from the moment she first saw him in the drugstore on Central Avenue many years ago. There had been a great, swelling happiness when he asked her to marry him. She had complete confidence in herself those first nights of love, the sense of assurance. She felt pride in him, in being with him, and the feeling that nothing could touch them—

Unaware of her action, she went back and stood in the window. Her muscles felt stiff and lethargic and her knees kept buckling, the strength gone out of them. She wanted just to stand there and never move until Lee returned.

Where before she had seen only the empty night, now she saw the rows of yellow flowers lifting their heads to the faint translucence of the city night. With a dry, blunt bitterness she recalled the enthusiasm with which they had planted them, the feel of the everlasting earth in her warm moist hands, the unbounded joy of the house at her back, knowing it was theirs after the long, lean years, now always, forever and a day. She remembered how it had been when they had first discovered that they owned the bed and the sheets were clean and they did not have to worry about what their landladies thought or heard, so passionate and wonderful. After a shower there was the nice, clean piney smell in the bed even in the heat of the day.

It was hot inside during the days, with the hot wind billowing the white curtains and sweat trickling slowly down the insides of her smooth tan legs. But the nights were always cool and there had been something ecstatic about going to bed in the cool of the night after a scorching day.

But that had been but a brief interlude in the grinding hurt of years, after his escape from the walled-in destitution of WPA and worse, and before her rise to individuality, when he had seemed contented in the post office and she had lived her life in their home.

Before, in the blue years when happiness had always seemed so far away and unattainable, there had been those times of awful fear and actual hunger—when he had felt the crush of circumstances closing in upon him, wanting to fight back, to strike out, but there had been nothing to fight.

The time when she had been sick, sitting in the one rickety chair in their second-story rented room, waiting for him to come up from the mailbox, which he haunted for a reply to one of his many applications for a job.

“Any mail?” she had asked, screwing around to look at him when he came into the room.

“No, there wasn’t,” he had replied, looking away until he could straighten his face.

But she had already noticed his expression, and her hand had moved in a spasmodic gesture as if to comfort him.

“Maybe the postman hasn’t passed yet.”

“Yes, yes, he’s been by. I saw him. There just wasn’t any mail, that’s all.” His voice had been so harsh that she had felt an odd sort of embarrassment for him. And then with a look of sudden contrition he had come over and stroked her cheeks. “Now don’t you worry, baby doll, don’t you worry.”

“I’m not worrying. I just don’t want you to worry.”

He had turned to look out the window, down the street. “We got anything for dinner?”

“We—we’ve got some rice.”

His lips had flattened. “You’re not hungry now, are you?”

“No, I won’t want anything until you do.”

“I’ll get something after a while.” He was sitting on the table and looking down the street. “I just don’t feel like going out right now.”

Each, unaware of the other, had turned to look at the bare spot on the small side table where a radio, then in the pawnshop, had once sat. Glancing away, their gazes had crossed. And as she had watched the hurt go through his eyes, she had never felt so sorry for anyone.

“I’ll get something after a while,” he had said, but his voice had thickened from the awful hurt.

“Oh, I’m not hungry,” she had said.

He had looked at her quickly again. “You’ve got to get back on your diet.” Then he had looked away. “You’re not well yet; this rice and stuff—I’m going to see some friends.”

“I wouldn’t, Lee. We’ll get something. Everyone is having it tough right now.”

“But not as tough as us.”

She had waited the long afternoon for his return, and had seen the answer in his eyes even before he opened the hand in which he had carried the coin for two hours and nine miles—“A quarter.”

She had never heard such helpless fury in his voice.

Together they had looked at it.

“You were never afraid, were you, baby doll?” he had suddenly asked.

She had twisted around so she could look at him, alarmed by the urgency in his voice. “Why, no, Lee. Why, no, I’ve never been afraid. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Lee.”

“You were never sorry for anything?” he had persisted. “You were never sorry for marrying me?” His voice had been husky with emotion.

She had been so terribly afraid but she had smiled. “No, Lee, why should I? I love you, Lee.”

“I love you, too,” he had said.

“We’ll make it, Lee. We love each other. We’ll make it,” she had said, still smiling. And when she had no longer been able to smile, when the smile had begun to freeze in the awful fear that had come over her, she had turned abruptly away to keep him from seeing that she was no longer smiling.

And now the memory of it coming down the channel of the years brought the bitter question: at just what point had she begun to fail? In the self-searching of that endless night she could not believe it had been so simple a thing as just her job. It must have been something more—

If she had had a baby—She had wanted a baby, but he had never wanted children. Now she knew it had been because he had not wanted to bring more black children into this prejudiced world. But he had never said it. He had just kept putting it off, asking her to wait. In all that time she had tried so hard not to have a baby that when she had decided to have one anyway, she could not.

This she could not tell him, just as there had been so many other things within her thoughts she had never been able to tell him—at first because she had not wanted to worry him, and later because she had been afraid he would not care.

There had been so many, many things in the slow tortured movement of the years, while watching his slow disintegration under the impact of prejudice and feeling the tearing, hurting, awful inadequacy at not being able to help. There had been the sublime joy when she had first learned that she could absorb his hurts—the great feminine feeling of self-immolation when he struck her, the sharp hurt running out of his arm into her body.

Then came the slow knowledge that this was not enough—that what she could give him as a sponge for his brutality to rebuild his ego would never be enough. In this living, peopled world nothing took the place of acceptance; nothing could assuage rejection. A man could not be less than a man to the world and more to her. Whatever of a man the world rejected, she rejected too. For her values were common values and her thoughts common thoughts. And when she looked at her man and saw he was less than white, unwhite in a white world, that was what he was and there was nothing she could do about it. No matter if she should suffer hell for him and die a thousand tortured deaths, she could not change it unless she changed the way she looked at it.

And what had this done to her? Now she could see it in that dead dark before day, weary beyond words. She could see how she had lost to white values in a white world the man she had married—and how he had lost his wife. There had been nothing she could have done about it. She would have lost him whether she had gone to work or whether she had remained home. For down the line in her vision, colored by her country and her times, he had become less than his own image. Where once she had needed him to fulfill herself, she had sought to fulfill herself alone. And where her necessity had made him strong, her lack of it had made her stronger.

Society had put her in this place of advantage and she had accepted it, had accepted its values. She had accepted the condescending smiles of her white employers whenever she referred to him, simultaneously indulging her and denying him any claim to achievement. Even the foreknowledge that in a predominantly masculine society the pattern for oppression would be masculine too did not inspire the rejection of the values, for these were what you lived by, black or white, or else they killed you.

But, dear God, please send him back tonight, she prayed. And it will be different. I promise, God—