Lonely Crusade (42 page)

She knew as she said it that it was not true and would never be true. She would always be in love with him, no matter what he did. But she sat there, rigid as death, watching him pack his bag and leave, and did not change a line.

“Well—yes,” Lee Gordon thought as he returned to Jackie.

But Jackie was now thoroughly frightened and demoralized. She had heard vague stories of the savagery of Negro women where their men were concerned. She could picture Ruth attacking with a knife and cutting her to death. Never having seen Ruth, she now imagined her as a huge, dark Negress of tremendous strength and possessed of a vicious temperament, against whom she had securely locked and barred all the doors and windows of her flat.

But equal to her fear of violence was her fear of public condemnation. It had been all right to flaunt Lee Gordon before white eyes as a Negro male with whom she dared to have a sex affair. That was her own business as a prostitute’s business is her own. Her body was hers to bestow on whom she pleased.

But to be caught in a Negro emotional mess—and as the other woman!—was altogether different. She could not fight with a Negro woman for the affection of a Negro man—or even bear the thought of it.

And now in this chaotic fear Lee Gordon became not a man, but once more a Negro. For over and above whatever passionate attachment she might have had for him was the simple fact of race. She would take him and have him and hold him and love him. And if she wanted him badly enough, she would fight for him with any white woman in the world. But she would not fight for him with a Negro woman—she would not sink so low, she thought.

And now at sight of Lee returning with his bag, trepidation seized her. “You can’t stay here!” she said in alarm.

“Why not? Ill keep out of sight,” he told her.

“It isn’t that, it’s your wife. This will be the first place she’ll come looking for you.”

Placing his bag on the floor, he closed the door behind him and halted just inside the room. She stood a few paces in front of him, as if to bar his coming further, and neither in their uncertainty made a move to touch the other.

“We’re through,” Lee told her. “She won’t do anything.”

“We can’t fight her, Lee. Don’t you understand that?”

“We won’t have to fight her—”

“Don’t you see what would happen? She’s a Negro and you’re a Negro and I’d be an outsider, breaking up her home. I couldn’t do that to her, Lee. I couldn’t take advantage of her like that. Can’t you understand?”

“I told her that I love you.”

“No, Lee, no! You didn’t!”

“I already have, Jackie.”

“Then go back and tell her that you didn’t mean it! Tell her you were just infatuated for a time. She’ll understand. And she’ll forgive you, darling.”

“She’ll give me a divorce, Jackie.”

“No, Lee, I can’t do that to her.”

“Don’t you love me, Jackie?” he asked, so softly and so prayerfully.

“Yes, I love you, darling,” she replied. “You know I love you, darling. That’s why I want you to be happy. You go back to your wife and—”

“If you love me, Jackie, that’s all that matters,” he said, taking a step toward her.

“No, Lee,” and she took a step away.

“Jackie, if you will marry me, I’ll—” He broke off to watch her stoop to lift his bag.

Patiently, as with a little child, she extended it to him and said in a patient voice, dismissing him: “Go to a hotel, darling, and think this over. Then call me tomorrow. But call your wife tonight and tell her where you are. She’ll understand.”

“What’s the matter, Jackie? Are you afraid of me?”

She could not tell him that now in her mind, in the whiteness of her soul, she was repelled by the very blackness of the skin that sexually had first attracted her. So she continued to simulate this sympathy for Ruth.

“I can’t do that to a Negro woman, Lee.”

“Why not?” he wanted to know.

“I couldn’t do it. My conscience wouldn’t let me do it. I couldn’t take that much advantage over her.”

“What advantage?”

“I’m white, Lee—white! Can’t you understand? I’m a white woman. And I could not hurt a Negro woman so.”

For a long, emasculating moment, during which he suffered every degradation of his race, Lee Gordon stood looking at the whiteness of her face.

“Well—yes,” he finally said, and accepted his bag from her hand and went out of the door.

Chapter 26

H
E WALKED
fast through the dark streets of early morning, going nowhere. And a sickness came into his face, all up and under and around his nose and mouth and eyes. His muscles and his skin felt sick, and his eyes felt sick as did his stomach, and his soul felt sick.

Her being white was nothing newly found; she had been white at the beginning, and at the beginning, he recalled, she had used it as at the end. But he had gotten past thinking of her being white, and he had hoped that she had too. And now as the hurt came, it drenched him because he had gotten past believing that she would use it thus to reduce every mood they had captured into nothing.

It was as if his heart had been taken out and beaten with a hammer. Because he had wanted to marry her, to adore, protect, and support her; to walk with her through life, defy traditions, and track fulfillment down. And to have her at his side he had been willing to pay whatever cost—his life, his honor, or his tears. No, not that she was white, but that she was the woman he truly loved. Now to have this extreme ardor of his self-immolation rejected on racial grounds was all the more agonizing because he had been defenseless from tire first.

So he hastened through the deserted streets, not seeking a place to go, but trying to escape where he had been. But he carried it along in the dull, beaten memory of the words: “I’m white, Lee. White! Can’t you understand?”

And this was her rejection, not the product of environment. For this was Los Angeles where many interracial marriages had brought success and happiness; where it was up to the people involved. As two people they might have failed, but they could have tried, he thought. She did not have to do what she had done to him, and this was the fact that hurt, for it removed all reasons but that she had wanted to—and made of him from the beginning just a beast to satisfy her sexual urges, or perhaps a therapy to ease her personal hurt. The realization was like salt sprinkled in an open wound. By this she had denied him all the qualities of manhood—soul, mind, spirit, emotions, and honor—everything but just one organ. And she had done so at her pleasure.

This in the end became the greatest outrage—not so much what she had done, as that she would do it. It was this racial advantage all white women have over Negro men, to employ or not according to their whims. Outraged by the indignity that they should have this advantage; that in this predominantly masculine society the hammer of persecution over the male of the oppressed should be given to the female of the oppressors. It was this that completed his spiritual emasculation. First, Ruth, his own wife, could not see him as a man; and now Jackie, who could, would not.

For a moment he contemplated calling her and saying vile and abusive things over the telephone. But he knew this would not make a dent in her white soul and only bruise his own; and she would know why he had done it—this more than the other decided him against it.

His mind went back, moment by moment, over all the time he had spent with her to see where he had failed. Should he have shown less excitement over her body, or expressed more emotion over her music? The first time she had let him have her, he had cried, he recalled. Was it weakness, then, that had repelled her? Or was it that he, Lee Gordon, did not have a soul? Was that it? Was that what all these people looked for within him and could not find?

Suddenly in the groping torment of his thoughts his mind came face to face with Ruth. He saw her as he had at the bottom of the stairway leading down from Jackie’s, and he was rooted to the spot, somewhere beside a hedge on a lonely street in Beverly Hills. Perhaps she did not think he had a soul, either. But she had loved him—the only woman who had ever loved him. And as his mind scanned the period of his life, he corrected—the second woman; his mother had been the first.

And now came the sudden gouging realization that not only had he tossed away her love, but he had been willing, anxious, and eager to destroy more. Beyond the irremediable damage of this, he had offered the complete destruction of their lives, like the bloody head of Saint John on the platter of Salome. Now in the shadow of a hedge in the beginning dawn, to realize that he had done this to Ruth was inconceivable. And what he had done it for was now incomprehensible.

Was there some capacity for self-destruction in the traditional status of Negro men which only white women could release? Was it this capacity that made every act of interracial sex a gamble for one’s honor? Was it the challenge or the threat; or just the human impulse, planted in Eden, to seek the forbidden?

But at this cost? Was the simple fact of lying in a nude white woman’s arms worth this much to him? Was it the mere white legs and pinkish brown nipples of her breasts? Certainly she was no more noble in her soul than the wife he’d abandoned—nor more beautiful physically.

Or was it pity that had taken him back to her; and only pity afterward instead of love? But that he could have felt such a degree of pity for a white woman as to destroy the love of his Negro wife would take no form but lunacy in his present state of mind.

The questions passing through his thoughts added to his despair. It was more; he knew it was more. If he had not loved her, he had wanted to, so very much. And now he felt an emptiness, a betrayal, a loss not so much of what had been, as of what might have been.

It started him on the move again, not toward a destination, but to a conclusion whereby he could live through the day. He lowered the stark chagrin in his eyes unconsciously to the ground and hurried on, each step a separate torture. Later, when the taste of salt came into his mouth, he knew that he was crying and put down his bag to wipe his eyes. But seeing the bag again brought the realization that he had left Ruth and his home and quit his job—and for what? Had it been just for this woman, who in the end was no more or less than she had been in the beginning?—white!

Now this question brought the conclusion he had sought but did not want: that he, Lee Gordon, was simply this kind of a nigger. He had never been anything but this kind of a nigger, and never would be; and all the rest had been just so much self-delusion.

He caught the Santa Monica red car back to town and rode the yellow “U” car over to a hotel at the lower end of Skid Row. Stepping out into the bright sunrise, livid against the early morning desolation of the now-closed joints and flophouses, he felt a sudden affinity with all the other unkempt, unshaven, dirty, bedraggled, desperately sober bums in sight. Here at last was where he belonged, he thought. He had been heading toward it for a long time. And now he had made it. For this was the end of the line for all those who did not embrace the color of their skins and live by it, he told himself with cynical self-deprecation.

He saw a cheap hotel and entered it and rented a room without a bath. Once for a fleeting moment he thought of Ruth and how it might have been with her; and of Jackie and how it had been with her. And in the doorway going out, some tattered remnant of the man he’d always wanted to be halted him for a moment’s self-appraisal. When he began walking again he knew where he was going and what he was about to do.

Eight o’clock found him, now showered and shaved, waiting in the anteroom to Foster’s office, with dull, glazed eyes in his thin, sagging face, and thoughts so low he could not look into them. Now he was on the slave block, the next logical step toward the completion of his degradation. He had put himself here of his own free choice, out of his own conclusion that to live in fair comfort, relieved of the necessity to protest, his sexual urges satisfied by those who made a business of it, was worth more than all the freedom and virtue he had attained or hoped to attain. Now in the end he recognized the simple fact of his inadequacy to cope with both life and race. No doubt there were many Negroes who could do both with honor and integrity—and did so. He did not know. He only knew that he was not among them.

Ruth had been right about Jackie, after all, Lee Gordon thought with sudden hurt.

If he could just get it out of his mind! He had begun it. And now, please, God, just let him go ahead and finish it without so much awful memory. His mind soared and flared as he struggled to clear it of the memory of Ruth’s eyes when she had begged: “Just let me go and talk to her—”

Foster passed through the anteroom, drawing his attention. He half rose, but Foster’s glance just briefly touched him and went on, and he sank down again.

After a time the receptionist informed him that Mr. Foster was busy and requested that he wait. Now once again the choice was given him. He could have risen and left—and tried again—How did that verse go, out of his past?

I’ve stood alone, deserted,

And sweat my heart’s red blood.

I’ve seen the waves of failure

Engulf me in a flood.

I’ve felt the throbs of error,

I’ve seen my fortunes spin;

But by the living God I swear

I’ll try again and win!

“But not for me,” Lee Gordon thought. Now, by the simple alchemy of events, this job, which once would have meant a definite advancement, was an admission of failure. He admitted this in seeking it. Within himself he was through. Ruth had always known that he was nothing without her, he thought bitterly. And he was nothing.

At eleven o’clock Foster admitted him, smiling cordially across his desk.

“Good morning, Gordon. Have a seat.”

“Good morning, Mr. Foster,” Lee said nervously, groping for the seat.

“How is the organizing coming along? Do you have all of our workers signed up now?”

“I don’t know. I’m not with them any more.” And now the falter was in his voice again.

“You don’t say? As I recall, you turned down a very nice offer I made to remain with the union.”