Lonely Crusade (9 page)

“Equality with who?”

“On the job, with the white people you have to work with.”

It was as if Lee’s words released some hidden dam in Harold’s mind, for now the words came rushing out in that grating, whining voice. “With them poor white trash out there at Comstock? What you talking ‘bout? I’m better’n all the poor white trash ever lived! And if you talking ‘bout the rich white quality folks—if it wasn’t for them you wouldn’t be living. They the only friends a nigger got. All these agitating Reds and union white folks just tryin’ a turn us ‘gainst our friends. And what they gonna do when they get us in trouble? They gonna run off and leave us, and then we ain’t gonna have no friends at all. And here you is, s’posed to be a smart man and educated and got brains and all. I done heard about you.

Went to school and all. And what you learn? Nothing! ‘Cause you ain’t even got sense enough to see that you is being used. You is a fool!”

Now Luther slipped in the statement that was designed to disconcert. “Man, even Roosevelt urges the workers to organize. And you know he’s our friend. You know yourself if it hadn’t been for Roosevelt—”

But it didn’t work on Harold. “Roosevelt! Roosevelt!” he cut in. “All he ever done for the nigger was to put him on relief. If my mister hadn’t just kept me and Margaret on, we’d have starved to death like you other niggers was doing. Roosevelt! You is Roosevelt-happy like the other niggers. Roosevelt! How he done it I do not know—starve you niggers and made you love ‘im. Everybody know the Republicans got the money. You admit that, don’t you?”

“But you can’t say that the Republicans are the only people who have money,” Lee said.

But Harold had been brought up in the best traditions of the freedman. “They got the money! You know they got the money! By now Roosevelt might have made hisself ten or twelve million dollars in graft but he the only Democrat got anything. You got to admit the Republicans got the money. Now if they get mad at us, what we gonna do? That’s what happen before. They got mad ‘cause we got to messing ‘round with Roosevelt. And what happened? They leave us have Roosevelt. And then what happened? Charity! Starvation! WZA—the ‘Z’ is for zigaboo. Now here you is tryin’ a get us mixed up with the Reds and the unions—”

“I’m going,” Lee announced. “It’s bad enough to be a nigger but this man is a fool.”

“Call me a fool if you want!” Harold shouted. “But I’m keeping outa the army. I’m making money. When this war is over and you niggers is running ‘round frantic, me and Margaret got a job.”

“In the white folks’ kitchen,” Lee added.

“Where you gonna be eating? With Joe Stalin? Or with the poor white trash? They gonna be starving, too.”

For a moment longer Lee stood there, loath to leave but caught without words. Then he followed Luther back into the street. For he could think of no argument stronger than the reality of the past. As Gertrude Stein might say, a nigger is a nigger is a nigger was a nigger and can see nothing in life to indicate that he will not always be a nigger. “To hell with Harold,” he thought. But nevertheless it affected him, for how could he escape such a reality with his dark, identifiable skin?

Next they visited a migrant Alabama worker named Riley Storey. Driving through the deserted ghost town of Little Tokyo, then showing the first signs of Negro migrant tenancy, they came to the back-alley tenement where Storey lived with his wife and four stairstep children in two filthy rooms. In bed but not asleep, he welcomed them with the unsuspicious friendliness of black men for men as black.

“Come in, boys, jes come right on in. Jes move some of them things there ‘n set down, son. What you boys want out de ol’ man dis mawnin’?” He was a black, bald, gnarled man, broken by hard labor.

“Just wanted to say hello, Pops,” Luther led off.

“Mighty nice of you boys—” He was interrupted by the sound of scuffling and boisterous laughter from the other room. Raising his voice, he shouted: “Pie, make dem children hush!”

Lee asked about his family and how he liked his job. It was not until they broached the subject of the union that his share-cropper’s beaten caution began to show itself.

“I been hearin’ ‘bout dis union,” he said. “You boys ‘long to it?”

“We’re helping to organize it,” Lee explained. “We have to get—”

“It’s like this, Pops,” Luther said, interrupting. “We got a bunch of colored mens who gonna pass out leaflets for us. But we ain’t got nobody yet down there in the boiler room.”

“How many you got—colored mens, I mean?”

“Oh, ‘bout fifty—ain’t it, Lee?”

Lee nodded. “Something like that.”

It was obvious that the old man didn’t believe them, but he didn’t challenge them. “Who gonna ‘long to dis here union if you boys ain’t?” he asked instead.

“All of the workers will belong to it,” Lee explained in stilted tones. “They will elect officials, and the officials will represent them in their dealings with management—negotiate contracts, get them better pay, better working conditions, help them keep their jobs.”

“White folks, too?” the old man wanted to know.

“Sure, white workers, too. Black, green, yellow—”

“Now what you say you tryin’ a do?”

Lee jerked a startled look at the old man then. But quickly Luther said: “Just tryna get you to pass out leaflets in the boiler room.”

“How much it gonna cost?”

“Cost for what?” Lee asked.

“To jine.”

“Oh!” Lee said. “Two dollars initiation fee and a dollar and a half monthly.”

“Whassum I gonna git outen it?”

With strained patience Lee explained about collective bargaining, grievances, seniority, and other union benefits, quoting from the booklets he had read the day before.

“Gonna git me a job atter the war?” This was the first Lee noticed of the native shrewdness underlying the profoundly idiotic performance the old man had been giving them.

“It will help you keep the job you have,” Lee replied. “And then in peacetime it will fix it so you won’t be discriminated against when you look for other employment.”

“Git me some place to live, too, eh?”

“It will help.”

“The union! One for all and all for one. Dat right?”

“That’s right, Pops,” Luther replied.

“It’s a good thing for us colored folks, ain’t it?”

“Sho is, Pops.”

“Son, I been hearin’ ‘bout this union ‘fore you wuz born—”

Lee again looked sharply at the old man, but again Luther was the first to reply: “Not this one, Pops, this is a new union—a better union—”

“I know ‘bout dissun, too.”

“Then you know it’s all right. You know it’s fair.”

“That ain’t the pint, son. I’ll jine it when you git it to goin’. But you know yo’self ain’t no black man got no business out dare in front of de white folks—”

“The white workers are joining,” Lee said.

“Well, when dey git all jined I’ll jine—ef’n dey ain’t got no objections.”

“Then how ‘bout passing ‘round some leaflets, Pops?” Luther asked.

“I tell you what I’ll do, boys. I’ll tell mah frien’s and us all ‘ill git ready to jine. But ef’n any trouble come I’ll deny it. Dat fair ‘nough, boys?”

“That’s fair enough, Pops,” Luther said, and Lee added: “There won’t be any trouble, Mister Storey.”

As they were riding along in the car once more, Luther remarked: “Man, we dug old Pops, didn’t we? He’d make a revolutionist.”

“The question,” Lee replied acidly, “is whether he’ll make a unionist.”

Luther gave him an exasperated look. “What’s the union but a revolutionary movement?” he asked.

Lee did not reply. But against his will he had to admire the Communists for the job they had done on Luther. They had taught him poise, restraint, the skill of adjustment, how to time a parry, the art of interviewing, and the value of retaining and restating and persisting in a contention, no matter how distasteful it might become to everyone, until it wore all opposition down. And they had taught him the subtle trick that was the trade-mark of the Communist—confusing the opposition with the disconcerting question, then holding forth the Marxist answer in all its pristine logic. All such insidious techniques of coercion were considered dangerous in the knowledge of the oppressed. The gall and the effrontery no doubt had been Luther’s own, Lee conjectured, but he could see the fine hand of the Communists in the manner in which Luther now employed them.

It was wormwood to admit, but Lee realized that within the short period of time he had known Luther, he had come to lean on him for emotional support. He found Luther’s company comforting even though it was annoying, and it was distinctly pleasant to ride in Luther’s car.

He was recalling with faint amusement the old saw that there was nothing too good for a Communist, as they rode in silence to the home of a woman who operated a punch press on wing assembly. She was a tall, fair woman whom Lee remembered vaguely as interested in sorority activities about the university, and he wondered how she had come to be on Luther’s list.

Clad in a housecoat with printed design, she invited them into a comfortable living-room and after one glance ignored Luther completely.

“So the aloof Mr. Gordon finally deigns to call,” she said with a little laugh.

And although Lee tried to head it off, the conversation went rapidly to the personal, and they found themselves listening to a recital of her misfortunes, unable to utter a statement in the union’s behalf. The army had taken her husband even though they had a child, which showed how perfectly unreasonable the whole system was, and she was simply bored to tears. And what was Lee Gordon, with his dreamy eyes and moody face, going to do about that?

There was a sexual overripeness that embarrassed Lee to witness in her every gesture, floating her personality in an unnatural repression. In desperation he broke into her nervous chattering with word about the union.

“Oh, I’m a member, darling,” she said, smiling coquettishly. “I was one of the first who joined.”

“Oh! Well in that case, maybe we could get you to pass out some union leaflets in your department,” Lee said.

“I’d just love to,” she answered so quickly that Lee was convinced she would do no such thing.

But they left a batch of leaflets and took their departure.

“Call me in a day or two,” she called from the doorway, “and see how I’m making out.”

“I’ll do that,” Lee said.

“That’s for you, man,” Luther commented as they rode along again.

“Not for me, for you,” Lee replied. “Your politics permit it.”

“I likes ‘em transparent,” Luther said.

After a silence, Lee asked: “How did you get her on your list?”

“She a worker, ain’t she?”

“I know, but what made you think she would take an interest in the union?”

“She a member, ain’t she?”

“I know that too. What I’m trying to find out is how you drew your list; on what basis did you select the people you thought might work for the union?”

“Them ain’t the ones we want, man, them the ones we got; we gets the ones we ain’t got.”

“I see,” Lee said. “Politics!”

“So what about it, if we gets ‘em into the union first?”

“Nothing about it—only once Negroes become members of a democratic union they’ll never become Communists,” Lee answered, more to irritate Luther than from any high regard for his own perspicacity.

“That ain’t the way it works, man. We gets the union and the niggers, too. But we just getting ready now. We don’t wants either of ‘em ‘til we wins the war.”

“I’m afraid you don’t know the Negro, son,” Lee said condescendingly.

“That’s what we both got to learn then, man, ‘cause you don’t know me neither,” Luther replied cryptically.

And what Lee learned, as that day wore on and ran into another and still another, was disheartening, discouraging, and depressing. First of all, he learned that not only did he know very little concerning the Negroes of America, but that he knew very few of them. As he gained in knowledge concerning them he also gained in fear. For the knowledge of them was like looking into a mirror and seeing his own fear, suspicion, resentments, frustrations, inadequacies, and the insidious anguish of his days reflected on the faces of other Negroes. It frightened him all the more because he could not divide himself from the sum total of them all. What they were, he was; and what they had been, he also had been. Their traditions were his traditions; and their identities described him too. What life held for them, it also held for him—there was no escaping.

During those days of that first week as he and Luther rode about the city interviewing Negro workers, Lee came to believe that more dissimilarities existed among Negro people than among the people of any other race on earth. They did not look alike, act alike, or think alike. Their emotions were as different as their intelligence; and their educations as different as their environments. That what was a joke to one might be an insult to another; that what one saw as beneficial, another saw as detrimental. That each one’s reaction to an interracial union was an individual emotional process, each reaction requiring an entire organizational campaign to itself. That in only one reaction did they all seem to concur—all were suspicious of a “black Greek” bearing “white Greeks’” gifts.

“I’m afraid you don’t know the Negro, son,” he had said to Luther with jeering condescension, and many were the times in the days that followed when he felt like kicking out his own teeth.

Yes—he was learning the Negro, Lee Gordon thought. And most of what he learned was hurting knowledge. It brought fear and hurt and shame to learn of the beaten, ignorant Negro laborer, so indoctrinated with the culture of his time that he accepted implicitly the defamation of his own character and was more firmly convinced of his own inferiority than were those who had charged him thus. But it was like tearing out the heart of reason to learn of the Negro scholar who not only was convinced, himself, of his own inferiority, but went to great scholastic lengths to prove why it was so.

The Tuskegee graduate John Elsworth who had majored in architecture was then bucking rivets for a white woman riveter on the graveyard shift. For three hours Lee sat with sinking heart listening to him propound learnedly and vehemently that the Negro family unit was matriarchal.