Lonely Crusade (8 page)

Next day raw panic reigned. People left the city in droves, by automobile, train, and on foot. The daily papers carried great black banners with conflicting reports. One stated that a squadron of Japanese carrier-based planes had carried out a reconnaissance flight over the city. Another reported that the planes had not been identified as Japanese. A reporter wrote that two of the planes had been shot down. He gave the location and a description of the wreckage.

When Lee went down to the United States Employment Service that day, he was shocked by the raw hatred in the interviewer’s eyes. Even then in that extremity, with the country in its most desperate need, with all the fear and panic and the fatal unpreparedness, he discovered that white industry did not want Negro workers.

Lee said: ‘To hell with it!” He made a vow to himself that he would never work in a war plant. That nothing on earth could force him. That he would be taken out and shot before he did. “Never!” he said. And he meant it.

Ruth offered to get a job. She pointed out that it would be easier for her. Some of the plants that had rejected Negro men were then employing Negro women—many in skilled capacities. He wanted to jump on her and beat her for just saying it.

“We’re behind in the payments on our house, Lee,” she said. “We’re in debt. We’re on the verge of destitution.”

“I don’t want my wife to work,” he said.

“But one of us has got to work. You’ve tried and can’t find anything. Let me try.”

“No!”

“Then what will we do?”

“I will steal,” Lee said. “I’ll prowl through every house in Beverly Hills. I don’t have to take all this!”

The next day she went out and got a job at Western Talkie, a small plant in Hollywood making radios for the Navy. When she told Lee, he left the house and did not return until morning.

Shortly, Ruth learned that the plant was owned by Jewish Communists. Most of the employees were Communists. They were organizing a union local when Ruth went to work, and she was elected to the executive board as a demonstration of racial unity.

She became enthralled with both her job and the activities of the union. This was the first time in her life that she had worked away from home, and it kept her in a continuous state of excitement. When the other workers learned of her educational background they were impressed. Having no political convictions, she was wooed by the Communists and included in all of their activities by day and by night. They gave her books, magazines, and other literature to read, and nights when her conscience kept her home she sat up reading it.

Lee felt that the Communists were taking her away from him, and he began a slow, losing struggle for possession of her. It was then he studied Marxism to combat the Communists’ arguments. But what saved her was that she got a better job. Answering an advertisement in the paper, she got the job as women’s counselor at the Jay Company, an aircraft feeder plant. The Communists did not win her. But he lost her to the job.

When it had become fully impressed on him that he ran no competition to her success, he borrowed five hundred dollars on their house and went to New York City. It just hadn’t panned out, that was all. He did not bother to say goodby to her.

Hours had passed since Lee had left the house. He was now about to be ejected from the fourth bar he had visited. The bartender was closing up. Not so nice a way to celebrate his new job. Now he was an organizer. Not a Communist organizer, no. But he may as well be, he thought, since he would have to work with them. Good old Lee Gordon, the proof of democracy. Now he was everything he had ever wanted to be—but one. His wife’s husband.

His footsteps had taken him home. He became aware that it was raining. He sat on the stone steps and took off his hat and bowed his face in his hands. The cold rain wet his head and ran down his neck. But it did not clear his thoughts.

He sat brooding over that crazy, depressed period he had spent in New York trying to escape from himself. In the dull, aching reality of his beginning hangover, it seemed dreamlike.

Nights end to end there of whoring around. Up and down St. Nicholas Avenue. In and out the joints of Harlem. Drunk every night. Never seeing the light of day. Unable to remember any morning the name of the one who had been his bedmate the night before.

There had been that deep fascination, that tongueless call of suicide, offering not the anodyne of death, but the decadent, rotten sense of freedom that comes with being absolved of the responsibility of trying any longer to be a man in a world that will not accept you as such.

You could not be a man in a war plant, so you were a man in a bed. Everything you could not be in a war plant you were in a bed. So to the women in the war plant where you could not work you became the promise of what you were in bed. But always you had the depressing knowledge that it was not so much your masculine superiority as your enthusiasm to prove you were that which in the war plant they said you were not, that fed the legend of what you were in bed. The difference between you the denied and those who denied you lay in the objective—theirs being to re-create themselves, and yours being to find creation of yourself. And when you had learned hurtingly and sufficiently that it never would, you came home to where at least it might have been.

“Well—yes,” Lee Gordon thought. He stood up and went into the house and went to bed, where he was nothing.

Chapter 4

S
LOWED IN HIS
reflexes by a slight hangover and bowed beneath a clinging apathy, Lee dressed in the kitchen while his coffee water boiled. He had not awakened Ruth. What was the use, he thought. The importance of his job, which he had felt the previous morning, was gone. Now it was just a job and she had a better one.

When the water boiled he poured it into the percolator, but the smell of the freshly made coffee was singularly unappetizing this morning. He felt depleted, let down, cheated somewhat, as if he had spent all of his emotions and received nothing in return.

But he was not assailed by the fear of emerging from his hole, as he was the day before. For this day he would face the Negro, not the white man, and that always made a difference. It was more of a disinclination for the task and the lack of enthusiasm to pull him out of it.

There were so many more angles than just the simple job. The praising of the white Cæsar that he, as much as any one, could only wish to bury. The hawking of the white man’s medicine with all the interpretations that in itself presupposed, to other Negroes who, like himself, could point out that it had not cured the white man’s ills as yet. He did not want to bother. He did not have the personality for it. Nor the drive. Nor the gall. Nor the faith. He wanted merely to sit home and avoid it.

But he went doggedly ahead and dressed. Because even though his heart was not in it, he knew he had it to do.

Finished with drinking his coffee, he stopped for a moment at the bedroom doorway to say cheerio to Ruth. Without waiting to learn if she’d awakened, he went out of the house.

The rain had stopped but the dreariness of a Los Angeles winter morning remained. Out of the gray fog crouching close against the earth the cold, wet scene came hard into his sight, and the clammy chill encased him. He was the picture of dejection as he went down the walk in the gloom.

“Man, what is the matter with you?”

In his moody absorption Lee had not noticed the car parked at the curb and he started at the sound of the voice.

“What!” he snapped, then recognizing Luther, added lamely: “Oh! It’s you.”

“You look like you been bitten by a boa constrictor,” Luther observed cheerfully, opening the door. “What’s the matter, man, your wife stay out all night?”

For an instant Lee debated whether to walk on or to reply, then gave in to the comfort of a ride. “The weather’s got me down,” he mumbled as he got into the car.

“Better get yourself together then,” Luther said. “We got a busy day.”

“Doing what?” It was more of a challenge than a question.

“You heard about the boll weevil?”

“No.”

“He bores from within.”

“Look,” Lee said harshly. “Don’t include me in your plans. I appreciate your giving me a lift out to the plant but that’s as far as it goes.”

“We ain’t gonna work at the plant today,” Luther told him. “I got a list of some folks we gonna see.”

“You see them then,” Lee replied, opening the door to get out.

“Wait, man!” Luther clutched his arm, restraining him. “You wanna organize the union, don’t you?”

Lee hesitated only because he did not wish to indulge in a tug of war. “That’s my job,” he replied.

“How you gonna do it?”

“I’m going to do it my way.”

“How’s that, man? What is your way?”

“Well—” Lee paused. “So we can get this straightened out once and for all, I will tell you. I intend to organize a crew of volunteers—”

“Ain’t that what I’m talking ‘bout, man?” Luther interrupted, extracting a notebook from his pocket. “That’s what this list of names is for—the people we gonna recruit for inside organizers.” At Lee’s look of disconcertedness, Luther asked, “Is you got a list?”

Now Lee felt foolish; all of the wind was taken from his sails. Depend on a Communist to come prepared with all the answers—and the questions too—Lee thought resentfully. He had no list, nor had he formulated any plans. But he did not wish to admit it.

“I don’t have my list with me,” he said. “Anyway, I’ve got to talk to Joe.”

“I done talked to Joe already. He said it was all right for you to work with me today.”

“They never miss a bet,” Lee thought, beginning to feel cornered. “When did you talk to Joe?”

“Last night.”

Now the anger grew in him. “And he said for us to work together?”

“That’s right. Call him if you don’t believe me.”

“So that’s the way it is,” Lee Gordon thought, feeling a sense of betrayal. “So Joe’s a Communist too.” He realized he should have recognized the Workers’ Alliance line in Joe’s gab about organizing the unorganized. For a moment he fought down the impulse to go back into the house and quit the job. His decision to go on and make the best of it came only from the desire to show Ruth he could do it.

“Okay, Commissar,” he said. “What seeds of revolution do we sow today?”

“Man, what’s eating you?” Luther asked angrily. “We both working for the same thing, ain’t we?”

“Are we?”

“Aw, man, you got a lot to learn,” Luther said, grinding the gears as he started off.

Lee learned. His lack of enthusiasm for the job, and because he was a Negro too, made the things he learned come hard. But meeting Negroes eye to eye, and talking to them lip to lip, he could not help but learn.

They went first to the house of Harold Green, a swing-shift worker in the warehouse. At Luther’s ring the door was opened by a lean, dark, slack-bodied man clad in a maroon robe, holding a blanketed baby in his arms.

“Now what in the hell do you want now?” he said with a scowl.

“I see you’re the walking boss,” said Luther, grinning and placing his foot on the doorsill without pretense of finesse.

“Get your foot outen my door,” Harold ordered.

“Sure, man, sure,” Luther said in a conciliatory voice as he pushed past Harold into the squalid living-room. “Come on in, Lee, come on in, man,” he called over his shoulder.

Lee followed without comment.

“You just gonna break into my house, eh?” Harold asked belligerently.

“Just paying you a li’l visit, man. Brought Lee Gordon by for you to meet. He’s the new organizer.”

Lee extended his hand. The day before, when Todd had refused his hand, hurt had embraced him. Now, when this black man did the same, all he could feel was rage. “To hell with him!” he thought, wheeling toward the door. He was no thick-skinned Communist to take these niggers’ insults. Then he cooled off and turned back, ashamed of the thought.

“What you say, fellow?” His voice was condescending.

“I ain’t got no money to be giving to no union so you may just as well go on,” Harold said.

From the kitchen came the smell of frying food. “Who that talkin’ ‘bout the union?” called a woman’s voice.

“He Luther, baby.”

“Oh, him! Is that white lady with him?”

“No, some other nigger he done brought along.”

“Hello, Margaret,” Luther called.

“Hello, Luther. How’s your white woman?”

“She’s fine. She asked ‘bout you.”

“I don’t see what for.”

Luther chuckled. “Your old lady’s a pistol.”

“She all right for me. I don’t want no white woman.”

Turning to Lee, Luther said: “Tell the man what it’s all about.”

“He just be wasting his breath,” Harold said with a grunt.

This was the moment Lee dreaded, but he did not shirk it.

Bracing himself, he asked the pedantic question: “Look, Harold, have you ever thought about the benefits of unionism?” He had been vaguely aware beforehand that it might sound a note of incongruity, but he was unprepared for the effect it produced.

One moment three Negroes were in the room, remote from the white world, bound together by the heritage of race, close to each other emotionally, unafraid of their thoughts, casually bantering to pass the time away; and the next moment the white man was there, changing the face of the day.

Slowly, both Harold and Luther turned to look at Lee. In Luther’s expression was the look of startled incredulity of one who has come suddenly upon something not only unexpected, but also unbelievable.

But Harold’s white-rimmed eyes shone with bitter animosity, and suspicion edged his whining voice. “I done told you niggers I don’t want no white woman, so go on and leave me be.”

“Aw, man, ain’t nobody asking you to marry the union,” Luther said, coming to Lee’s aid. “All we want you to do is pass ‘round a few leaflets to the guys in the warehouse. Now that ain’t gonna hurt you, is it?”

“It ain’t gonna hurt me ‘cause I ain’t gonna do it.”

“You have the wrong idea of the union altogether,” Lee said, trying again. “No one is urging you to socialize with the white workers. What the union offers is security, job equality—”