“Were you after one of those little girls?” his mother asked.
“I just wanted to see them,” he replied fearfully.
“For why?”
“Just to see if they were different.”
For a long moment she simply looked at him. Then she said in a voice of positiveness: “You’re just as good as any white person. Don’t you let nobody tell you no different.”
“Now all you got to do is prove it,” his father said, whether sincerely or satirically Lee Gordon never learned.
But his mind would not dismiss it so easily as this. He came to feel that the guilt or innocence of anything he might do would be subject wholly to the whim of white people. It stained his whole existence with a sense of sudden disaster hanging just above his head, and never afterwards could he feel at ease in the company of white people.
His parents moved to Los Angeles where his father got a job as janitor in a department store while his mother did daywork in Beverly Hills. Lee entered Jefferson High School where the enrollment was almost equally divided between Negroes and whites. Slowly he overcame his constant trepidation, but the harassing sense of deficiency still remained because just the fact of different color didn’t answer it. Nor could he forget what had happened in Pasadena.
He came to wonder if there was something about white girls which grown-up white people were afraid of a Negro finding out—some secret in their make-up that once discovered would bring them shame. It made him curious about white girls, but filled him with caution too. Sometimes he watched them covertly but never made advances; he did not want to bring disaster down again. At the time of his graduation he had never said more than a dozen words to any white girl in his class.
Late one night the following summer as his father left the store where he worked, he was mistaken for a burglar by policemen and shot to death. The Negro churches organized a protest demanding that the officer be punished. But the city administration contended that it had been a natural mistake, and nothing was done about it.
Lee had never loved his father nor greatly respected him and was not deeply grieved by his death, but he felt an actual degradation by the callousness of those responsible. The fact that they called it a “natural mistake,” as if all Negroes resembled criminals, only confirmed what he had learned in Pasadena. But to know that any Negro might be killed at any time a white person judged him to be a criminal filled him with a special sort of terror.
After that he was afraid to be caught after dark in white neighborhoods. Each time he left the Negro ghetto he felt a sense of imminent danger, as if any moment he might be mistaken for a thief and beaten, imprisoned, or killed. It made just walking down the street, just crossing Main Street into the poor white neighborhood beyond to buy a loaf of bread, a hazard.
A collection of twelve hundred dollars was taken up among the department-store employees and the members of the police force. The policeman who had fired the fatal shot gave one hundred dollars and got his picture in the papers. The owners of the department store gave two hundred dollars more.
And this too seemed more degrading than charitable. If this was what his father’s life was worth to all these people, a Negro’s life was nothing. He had once read where a pedigreed dog was worth more actual money and held in higher esteem. For the first time bitterness came into his life. He lost all ambition. Why try to be somebody in a world where he resembled a criminal and was valued at less than a pedigreed dog? But afterwards it served as a spur to his ambition. He would prove that he was worth more than that. He might never become important, but at least he would make white people give him more consideration than they had given his father. He made a vow he would pass beneath the earth no common shade.
With the fifteen hundred dollars donated for his father’s death, he entered the University of California at Los Angeles. In many respects he found college but a repetition of the grammar school in Pasadena on a higher level. But he went prepared for the lack of Negro recognition in American education, and he expected no honor for himself. At home his mother was finding it difficult to make ends meet. To help pay his way Lee washed dishes and waited table in the white fraternity houses.
On the whole, his college life was not unpleasant. He kept away from where he was not wanted, and had a few companions among the students, both Negro and white. The Negro students had activities among ‘themselves, and a Negro fraternity was represented. But Lee did not have the time or money it required to take part. He lived just beyond the edge of social life, concentrating on his studies.
After his first year he majored in sociology. His greatest interest was in the how and why of people—what it was in some that gave them a sense of superiority, and what was lacking in others that contributed to this feeling of inadequacy. And though he learned much about the sources and the causes, he never learned about the logic of it.
The most unpleasant thing that happened to him occurred at a lecture on minorities in his sociology class. The young professor compared the problems of the Negro minority with the problems of the homosexual minority, contending that of the two the latter suffered the greater discrimination. Lee drew the implication that black skin was also being considered as an abnormality. This he rejected bitterly, denouncing the parallel drawn as stupid and malicious; and was asked to withdraw from the class.
He graduated in the spring of 1934. The only employment that he could find for Negro college graduates was in domestic service. This he refused to do.
The neighbors condemned him for sitting home and letting his aging mother support him by working in the white folks’ kitchens. It was then he first got on his muscle; he resented their pious judgments. He could not begin life as a domestic servant; nor did his mother want him to.
The day before that Christmas his mother died. Some said from overwork. Others said from heartbreak over seeing her son go bad.
After that the only thing that kept him going was a posed belligerence, a high-shouldered air of bravado, disdain, even arrogance. For many times he went hungry. And always he went alone.
White people found him disturbing—those to whom he applied for work he knew they would not give him. They resented his tight-faced scowl, his hot, challenging stare, his manner of pushing into an impersonal office and upsetting everyone’s disposition with the problem that he rolled in front of him, as big and vicious and alive as if it were a monster on a chain. They resented his asking for the jobs he knew he wouldn’t get. Did he think he was the only one concerned about his problem? Or with a problem?
Hunger and this constant refusal of employment brought about his fear.
Afraid at first of giving in and working as a servant just to live. Then afraid of what would happen to him if he didn’t. Of becoming a thief, a panderer, or worse, an Uncle Tom.
Afraid that some day when he felt on the ragged edge of desperation one of the rife blond receptionists with the revealing blouses, who had let him stand unattended before her desk while she carried on a quarter-hour telephone conversation, would look up and say impatiently: “Why in heaven’s name can’t you people realize we cannot use you?”
And he would lean across the table and slap her.
Afraid of the sudden, fearful penalty that he would have to pay. The entire Negro race would have to pay it with him. And if he was still alive when the police got through with him, he would feel like a traitor to a cause.
Just a pure and simple fear of the white folks and the days.
He met Ruth in March 1935. He had stopped to get cigarettes in a drugstore on Central Avenue. A former classmate from the university looked up from his soda.
“Hey, Lee, whataya know, boy?”
Lee turned. “Hello, Hank, what’s new?”
“The white folks on the top and the niggers on the bottom. But that ain’t new.”
“Make ‘em kill you,” Lee said with a laugh.
“They doing that without my help,” Hank replied dryly, then added: “Say, I want you to meet this
gal. Ruth Roberts, Lee Gordon.”
She turned from beside Hank on the soda fountain stool and smiled. Both she and Lee knew at that moment that they were made for each other, as it is given to some people to know.
“Ruth and her mother are here on a visit; she’s a St. Louis gal,” Hank went on. “Pretty, isn’t she?”
But they were not listening. She looked at Lee through eyes like two lighted candles in a darkened church, and in them he was seeing the end of loneliness and the faintest stir of meaning in a meaningless world. They were together then in wonder, and in time following they were together in each other’s hearts.
One night in April as they stood in the hard, cold rain where Skid Row crosses Main Street aching with desire for each other, he reached for her hand and said spontaneously:
“We could get married.”
She was the first girl whom he had loved, and the only one. But he had not intended to ask her to marry him. She was a college graduate with at least the promise of a better future than himself.
But her reply: “Yes! Yes!” had been waiting for the question.
Her mother disapproved. It was not that she disliked Lee. Only that she could see no future for a Negro of Lee’s temperament. After all, most Negro college graduates had served an apprenticeship with mop and pail before they got ahead, she pointed out. Once during a dinner party at a dentist’s convention in Atlantic City, which she and her late husband had attended, some prankster had shouted: “Front, boy!” and all but one of the successful dentists stood quickly to attention, she related laughingly.
Nevertheless, the following day she went with her daughter to the Justice of the Peace where Ruth and Lee were married. And the following day she went home.
At first their marriage was like a tale by Queen Scheherazade set to music in a blues tempo, the bass keys sounding out a series of shabby rooms that somehow anchored their sordid struggle for existence—room rent when it was due and and enough food for each meal coming up. Not once during that time did they buy any salt, or sugar either, until each landlady in turn learned to keep hers put away. And the treble keys sounded laughter in the night.
Marriage made him break his promise to himself. He worked at many jobs that he had refused before—bus boy in a hotel dining-room, porter in a downtown drugstore, laborer in a cannery during the spinach season. And as often, he did not work at all.
For two months Ruth was seriously ill. He sat beside her bed and nursed her back to health. He never paid the doctor who treated her.
But they braved the hunger and the illness, and the next spring he got a job at the country club serving drinks in the taproom. It was the best job he had ever had, a job where all he had to do to earn fifteen dollars or more each night was just to be a nigger. But he was afraid of the members when they became drunk. They said things to him even a nigger should not be expected to take. What finally gnawed him down to a jittery wreck, however, was the fear that one might ask the price to see his wife, as one had asked another of the waiters. He simply quit.
He had thought that with Ruth he would never be afraid again. But it merely changed the pattern of his fear. Now it was the fear of being unable to support and protect his wife in a world where white men could do both. A fear that caused him to look inside of strange restaurants to see if Negroes were being served before entering with his wife.
Slowly, this changed the pattern of their relationship. For he could not contain his fear or resolve it. His only release for it was into her through sex and censure and rage.
Twice they were refused service in downtown restaurants. Each time he stood there in that blinding, fuming, helpless fury, moved by the impulse to beat the proprietor to a bloody pulp, restrained by the knowledge of the penalty. As enraged at having Ruth witness his cowardice as at being refused.
Each time having to decide before jerking her out into the street the value of his pride and how much he was prepared to spend for it.
Each time accepting Ruth’s tense entreaty: “Let’s go, Lee. Don’t get into any trouble; it’s not worth it.”
Each time lying awake all night, hating her for offering him the easy and sensible way out. Tortured by the paradox of managing to live on by accepting things that afterwards made him want to die.
The first time he slapped her was not for anything she did, but for what he did not do. Preceding him between the rows of seats in a darkened theater, she requested a white man to remove his hat from an empty seat. Looking up, the man observed that she was a Negro, and snapped: “Sit some place else.”
“I will not,” she snapped back.
The man had moved as if to strike her when he noticed Lee and subsided.
“What’s the trouble?” Lee asked, coming to her rescue.
“Oh, nothing,” Ruth replied.
“I thought you were arguing with that man.”
“No, it wasn’t anything.”
But he had seen and heard it all. He could have reprimanded the man then. But he accepted her dismissal of the incident. He could not enjoy the show and sat there fuming. When they had returned to their room he brought it up again.
“I thought I heard you arguing with that white fellow.”
“Oh, he just didn’t want to move his hat.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“He got up as if he was going to slap me but when he saw you he sat down.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Oh, Lee, it wasn’t worth starting any trouble.”
“I’m your husband, don’t you know that? You don’t have to take insults from anyone, don’t you know that?”
“But, Lee—”
“If a white man’s wife had been insulted she’d expect her husband to protect her.”
“Oh, Lee, a white man, yes—”
He slapped her.
Thus each night he renewed his will so upon rising the following morning he could assume the role that he played throughout the day, that of swaggering with feigned courage through the ever-present knowledge that beyond the black ghetto he was without defense or appeal.
In the fall of 1937 he got a job as research assistant on WPA. During the lunch hour, a couple of weeks later, a Jewish girl told him: “When I first saw you, I said to myself: What’s this guy doing on his muscle? What have we done to him?’”
“I didn’t know I was,” he said.
She shook her head. “You needn’t say. I know.”
The hurt of all these things he took home to Ruth. And for as long as she could, she healed them.
In 1939 he took an examination for postal clerk and was employed. The job did wonders for Lee—gave him self-assurance, poise, and even friends. He loved Ruth then as he first had but was able to express it in many more ways. He became tender, ardent, considerate; and a pleasantness ran through the ardor of their passion.
They concentrated on a house to hold this first-born happiness, and the following spring went to live in a little white stucco bungalow on West 39th Place that was their own. The houses on the street were white in the sunshine with red-tiled roofs, and the lawns were a green velvet background to the pageantry of flowers. No day was ever long enough.
Ruth’s mother came to spend a two-weeks’ visit and stayed the summer long, and they were the first happy family Lee had ever known. Afterward, Ruth’s younger brother Ronnie, a struggling young dentist in the footsteps of his father, and his wife spent a fleeting week with them, and gaiety had filled the little house.
Ruth admired Lee then. Even later when the white Southern migrants began taking over the post office, imposing their traditions on the others, and Lee began bringing home his hurt to take it out on her again, she still had faith. At least Lee didn’t let it trample him as it had before.
When a Louisianian was appointed superintendent and publically announced his opposition to the employment of Negro clerks, Lee adjusted to it by calling him “Hitler.”
“Hitler jumped Lou today. You should have s
een Lou; he got so mad he turned ashy.”
“If that old man ever heard you calling him ‘Hitler,’ he wouldn’t like it, I am sure.”
“He’d probably just outrage away.”
“He’d probably want to fire you.”
“He probably would. But there’s a difference between wanting and doing. I’m on civil service, baby doll—remember?”
Nevertheless, he joined the embryo union then taking shape in his department. He could not afford to lose this job.
That summer a new cause for fear came in the form of Selective Service. Before Lee was finally classified III-A, both had developed what they called the “mail-box qualms.”
War was in the air, and it affected everyone. There was no escape for the black or the white. The split in convictions between isolationism and interventionism touched deeply into homes. Lee’s was not passed over.
Using the union as a lever, the Communists pried into his family life to recruit him into the ranks of isolationism. They first came uninvited, two men and a woman from his department, to ask him to head a committee to protest against the discrimination in hiring Negroes and Jews. But Lee was loath to take the leadership in such a move. He thanked them for the honor of considering him but declined.
They did not give up, however. Soon afterwards they called again. This time they requested that he join a committee to fight the discharge of a Negro clerk who had been accused of opening mail. Lee knew of the case and had thought at the time the clerk got off easily, considering the offense.
“If the guy’s really guilty what do you want to do?” he asked.
“He’s no more guilty than you,” the woman replied.
“Then why doesn’t he take his case to the Civil Service Commission?”
“They’ll put him in the army,” one of the men said.
“I don’t see how they could do that. It’s up to his draft board.”
All of them shouted at him. From out of the clamor he distinguished bits of sentences. “…practically impregnable to attack from the Atlantic or Pacific…Wall Street’s dollar empire in Europe and Asia…Negro in a capitalist democracy…blood and agony the people would find a warless world…”
Lonely Crusade Page 5