For a brief, hurting moment he recalled the funny, crazy times they used to have in bed on rainy nights like this, that first year of their marriage. They had lived in a tiny back bedroom, so cramped for space that only one could dress at a time; and when they had been in a hurry to go some place, the other had to dress in the bathroom.
For the most part he had been out of work, and many times the nights had been filled with hunger. But never with emptiness like this.
And often when they had had the money to buy food, they had chosen wine instead. For with the wine they could lie together in the warm, dark nights and imagine things. This was the best, the highest they could reach in that dark-toned pattern of existence. It had seemed like something burnished—almost silver, almost gold. Really, it had been tin foil. But when both had caught it at the same time, it had been beautiful in a way. All the pageantry and excitement of life in white America had been there—the Rainbow Room and the Metropolitan Opera on an opening night; Miami and Monte Carlo, deluxe liners and flights by night. And doing noble, heroic, beautiful things for her, and at her pleased smile, saying: “Only because I love you.”
At other times they had lain abed and read to each other. It had been a pleasure just to listen to her voice. She had taught him to enjoy literature, as she had taught him so many other deep pleasures of existence, and had introduced him to such men as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Balzac.
Together they had felt the tragic thanatopsis of their little dog’s death. They had exulted together on warm spring days in the incomparable glory of just living. And they had seen burlesque shows on Main Street together.
Together they had laughed. It had seemed then as if nothing on earth could have pried them apart.
Gone now, in the pages of America…
Well—yes, Lee Gordon thought. When you were a Negro, so many things could happen to keep you from fulfilling the promise of yourself. No doubt he had been some sort of promise to her that he too had never fulfilled.
Yet now he was of a mind to blame her for all of it. He had acquired the habit of blaming her for most of the things that happened to him, knowing as he did that she was not to blame.
“Don’t you want to celebrate?” he forced himself to ask.
“I’m tired, Lee. I had a hard day at the office.”
“You’re always tired—especially when I want something. I’ll be glad when you quit.”
Again she withdrew in silence. He fought for dominance, struggling to force submission into her living flesh. But he could feel no desire, and she could show no response. He conjured up lust-provoking visions of other women he had seen and desired, women of the street, women of his imagination. It had no effect. He hated her because he could feel no desire. She hated him.
Yet he had her anyway, because she was his wife. And as his wife, the vessel of his impotency, into whom he must release his slow, numbing sense of panic.
Even in this, he failed. For it was as self-abuse, repulsive and never ending; and even ending was all the same as when it had begun, passionless, unrelieving, and as unemotional as spitting on the street. Nor did the fear abate.
Now it was through. He had awakened her and made her listen. And then had raped her without desire. Maybe some day he could tell her why he had done it, and she might forgive him, he thought. But now, bone tired with the first thin rottenness of remorse beginning to leak into his mind, the only thing he wished to do was go to sleep. She must be unutterably weary, also, he thought.
But he came back to it inescapably, dreading it as he did so, as a man will come back to a place where he has committed a brutality to view in horror his own degradation.
“Smitty said I’d get a raise if we’re successful at Cornstock,” he said. “Then you can quit your job and stay home. You won’t have to be tired all the time.”
“Oh, Lee, let’s don’t start quarreling.” The thin thread of exasperation in her voice was near the breaking point.
“I’m not quarreling. I’m just commenting on my job.”
“You used to hate the union when I was active in it,” she reminded him.
“I just didn’t want you running around with all those lousy Communists.”
“Is that what you intend to do?”
“Look, why is it you always try to belittle everything I do?”
“I am just reminding you of your attitude when I was interested in unionism.”
“At least Fin not going to get so involved that I bring it home to bed.”
“Then what are you doing now?”
“I simply remarked that you should be able to stay home and be a wife after I get my raise.”
He could not tell her how much it hurt him for her to have a better job than he had ever had. Nor what it had done to him inside for her to have supported him since he’d been out of work. Now if she could not understand herself, to hell with her, he thought.
“Oh, Lee, please let’s go to sleep!” she cried.
“Go to sleep then!” he shouted. “I’m not stopping you!”
She turned her back and drew the covers. Soon she was asleep.
He lay and listened to the rain. He was not only a coward, but a beast, he berated himself—lower than a dog. The bravest thing he had ever done was to rape his wife. What tortured him now was the cold, sober realization of the extents his fear could drive him—as if always he lived on the border line of his own restraint.
Maybe it came from knowing too much, he tried to rationalize. From having read too many newspapers, magazines, and books, and having studied his American history too well. Had he never known the long history of brutalities toward Negroes, he might not now be so afraid, he told himself. But as it was, every time he read of a white mob lynching a Negro in Mississippi, he felt as if they had lynched Lee Gordon too.
But all this fear now just because of one, small, insignificant job was senseless, he told himself. Just a case of stage fright, first-night jitters that anyone, white or black, might experience on the eve of a new, strange job.
He would think of something to refute this fear, then relax, and go to sleep, he decided. Tomorrow he would have forgotten it. But he could think of nothing that would make him unafraid.
Chapter 2
LEE GORDON came suddenly awake, blasted from his sleep. The darkness had not lifted, and for a moment he wondered what it was that had awakened him. It seemed as if he had just dozed off. As he turned sleepily to settle back again, a sense of urgency arrested him. He cocked his head to listen but heard only the faint traffic sounds that filtered from the night.
Lord, he had a headache, he thought, rubbing the flat of his hand hard across his forehead. The ticking of the clock called his attention. Turning, he switched on the night light to check the time. The face of the clock showed twenty-five minutes until seven.
He jumped from the bed in a crowding sense of panic and began dressing in frantic haste. How he had forgotten to set that alarm, he did not know. Smitty had said he’d call for him at six-thirty; he would be there any minute. It would never do to be late on the first day.
He was pulling on his undershirt, debating whether he would have time for a quick shave, when the horn sounded again. Now he realized that it had been the sound of the horn that had awakened him. Emotions rippled across his face and settled it in slanting lines; and the abrupt halt of haste glazed his eyes.
Well…he had done it, he thought. He had kept the record straight. A “nigger” was never on time. He hated this. It was as if he had begun with failure.
Drawing on a bathrobe, he crossed the living-room to the front door. A sense of inner disparagement weighted down the edges of his self-confidence. Now the day was harder to face.
Opening the door, he called: “Okay, Smitty, just a moment!”
The rain beat out a dismal melancholia, muffling his voice. Gray darkness veiled the coupe at the curb. He wondered if Smitty had heard him. As he waited for the answer, the wet coldness penetrated his thin bathrobe. He s
huddered as if a foot had stepped on his grave. Then he closed the door and returned to the bedroom to finish dressing.
Ruth sat propped up in bed. “Was that Smitty?” she asked.
He glanced quickly at her, then glanced away. “Yes.”
Remorse assailed him, and for a fleeting instant he was inclined to apologize for his brutality of the night.
But her next words, “Didn’t you know that he was going to call for you?” brought annoyance, and the inclination passed.
“Yes, I thought I told you,” he replied in a monotone.
“Have you eaten breakfast?”
“No.”
“You should have set the alarm.”
“Which is now apparent,” he muttered, realizing now that he would have to go without a shave.
She started to arise. “I’ll make some coffee.”
“It’s too late now.” His voice was accusing.
“It won’t take but a minute,” she persisted.
He compressed his lips and jerked on his coat.
“You shouldn’t go without your breakfast,” she said disapprovingly.
“I wouldn’t have to if I had a wife.”
She sat back, withdrawing from him. Now as she looked at him with quick anger, she suddenly saw him and realized with deep shock how much older he looked than when she had last noticed him. It was as if he had aged ten years during the past nine months. The cut of his features, which had first attracted her, were angled thin now, and there was a bitterness in the droop of his mouth that marred his whole appearance. In the light of the low bed lamp his tall, thin frame looked gaunt. The realization that she had not actually seen him for all that time, although living with him in the same house and sleeping with him in the same bed, brought a sharp pang of guilt.
“Do you have everything you need, Lee?”
Her voice drew his stabbing stare. “What the hell do you care?” he thought.
But aloud, without inflection, he said: “Yes.”
“Now don’t get angry and impatient with everyone,” she cautioned. u Give yourself a chance.”
He turned the full impact of his contempt on her. “Lord, you’ve gotten important since you’ve become a counselor. I’d hate to be around you if they made you manager of the joint. Well, listen, suppose you tend to your job and let me tend to mine?”
She lay back and looked away from him, feeling the full, hard brunt of his rejection. She had been foolish to say anything at all, she upbraided herself. She should have realized that he would take advantage of it to hurt her again. Mentally she washed her hands of the whole proceedings—let him do as she wished.
He slipped into his trench coat, jammed on his hat, and turned toward the door.
But now it was she who could not let it go. “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” she called.
The question startled him. Then it brought a blind, cornered rage against her subtle pressure. This dirty, despicable, underhanded trick, he thought. Only a petty woman would stoop to such a thing. For she knew that he did not want to kiss her. She never kissed him when she left for work. But she knew also it would cost him more in peace of mind to refuse. It was her sly way of forcing him to accept the token of her Godspeed after he had rejected the accompanying counsel.
So he turned and came woodenly and with blank face across the room and bent toward her. In the moment intervening she had put passion into her manner. Now prone with one of her large, ripe breasts overflowing in brown warmth the blue night gown, her lips flowering prettily against the darker brown of her heart-shaped face, she looked more desirable and voluptuous than in many a long, lonely night. But he did not see her. He put his flat, cold lips to the pressure of her kiss, and when her arms came up to encircle him, he broke quickly away.
Outside, the horn sounded three times. Coming as it did against Lee’s cornered fury, it planted the first seed of discord in his attitude toward Smitty. His impulse was to just stop still and let him wait. But he shook it from his mind and continued outside. At the steps he stiffened, then took a deep breath, braced himself, and went down the walk in the rain. It was like stepping into another world.
Smitty opened the door of the coupe and greeted him in a deep-toned, inflectionless voice: “It’s not that I’m rushing you, Lee, boy, but we want to get out to the plant before the day-shift boys go inside.”
Lee felt a sudden defensiveness under the flat, unsmiling scrutiny of Smitty’s light blue eyes, which protruded from the pink and white roundness of his face like painted marbles.
“Oh, I was waiting,” he said, adjusting himself in the seat and closing the door. “But a couple of last-minute things came up I had to do. You know these wives.” Now, addressing a white person, there was a difference in his speech, something of a falter, a brief, open-mouthed hesitancy before sound, the painful groping, not quite a stammer, for the exact word.
Turning the car into the northbound traffic on Western Avenue, Smitty replied: “We’ve got a job ahead of us.”
It was not intended as a reproof, but Lee took it as such. “Oh, I know. But my wife doesn’t seem to understand the importance of unionism.”
“Many people don’t. It’s our job to convince ‘em.”
Although Lee did not look at Smitty, he could visualize him sitting there, his big, paunchy body uncomfortable in a suit that had been wrinkled from the first day he had put it on, gripping the wheel in his two big, white, flabby fists more as if wrestling the car than driving it. Yesterday, he had felt an unconscious liking for Smitty, but now it was gone. He felt restrained by his slow-motioned seriousness, compelled against his will to make it some concession.
“It seems that Negroes should be convinced already—all the union’s done for us.”
As quickly as he said it, he wished that he had not. It had come, he knew, from a strange, involuntary urge to please, to dissemble, to impress Smitty with his acumen. He hated this in himself yet many times lately he had caught himself doing it.
But Smitty had not heard; driving had claimed his attention.
The rain fell in a steady, windless downpour. It came drearily out of the dark-gray sky and filled the streets to overflowing. It drummed on the car top, splattered on the hood, poured down the windshield in rivulets, making driving perilous.
Lee lowered the window on his side to stop the windshield fogging, and the spray wet his face and hands, beaded on his raincoat. The coolness felt refreshing to the hot haze of his mind, but the tight defensiveness continued to nag him.
At Washington Boulevard they turned west, taking their position in the long line of warworkers’ cars. Headlights glowed yellow in the gray gloom, and from the flanking murk a drab panorama of one-storied, stuccoed buildings unfolded in monotonous repetition. At every intersection a streetcar ahead forced them to a stop.
“Let’s see if we can’t get by,” Smitty said, gunning the coupe through the curb-high flood.
Cutting back to the center of the street after they had passed, they narrowly missed the streetcar; and the motorman clanged furiously, frantically on his bell. Lee’s heart caught in his throat. But the physical tension abruptly loosened the tightness of his mind, causing him to give a spurt of laughter.
“Sunny California,” Smitty muttered.
“That’s what the post cards say.”
“How long have you lived here, Lee?”
“I was born here. Didn’t I tell you?”
“I believe you did at that. Then you know about the history of unionism here.”
“Well—not too much. Only that the road has been rocky.”
“Didn’t you tell me that you hold a union card?”
“Not now. I joined the Cannery Workers when I worked in the cannery. But that was only through the spinach season—about a couple of months—then I let my membership lapse.”
“That’s been part of the trouble here; the work has been too seasonal.”
“The cannery and agricultural workers haven’t been so difficul
t to organize, have they?”
“Not the workers, no; but the golden sons and daughters have fought us at every turn in the road.”
“I thought you were getting those workers pretty well organized.”
“We’re bringing ‘em into the fold. But they’re not the only workers in California. They’re just the only ones who want to admit that they’re workers—aside from the dock hands, of course.”
Lee gave a perfunctory laugh. “Well, now that industries are coming here, we’ve got a whole new group of workers,” he said.
“Have you ever stopped to think, Lee,” Smitty began ponderously, “that ninety per cent of the people are workers?”
“Is that so?”
“I don’t mean that all are workers in the sense of industrial workers, agricultural workers, office workers, and such. I mean in the professions, in the sciences—doctors, lawyers, technicians. Why, half of the staffs of managements are workers. Any person who does not own the business from which he derives his income is a worker.”
“That sounds like Marx,” Lee commented.
“I don’t give a damn who it sounds like. I said it, and it’s true. And sooner or later we’re all going to realize it, and they’re going to realize it, too.”
“Well—yes. But the industrial workers are the ones who must be organized first.”
“Yes, that’s the ticket, now,” Smitty nodded. “That’s why this job is so important.” He slapped the steering wheel in emphasis. “This is the beginning. We’re going to organize every worker in a war industry. But it’s always important at the beginning.”
“Yes, that’s the hard part,” Lee agreed.
“This job is big, boy. There is a possibility that the future of the union may hang on it.”
“I can see that.” From the sound of his voice Lee appeared alert and attentive, but he was scarcely listening. He wanted to arrive and get over the first shock of strangeness, to see what sort of fellows the local officials were, and to learn of their attitude toward himself.
Lonely Crusade Page 2