“I don’t get it!” he was finally able to say.
More lucidly, speaking one at a time, they explained that the time had come for all minority groups to join in the fight against discrimination and the other evils of a capitalist society. This war was but a repetition of the former World War, they claimed, instigated by capitalism for the “fool’s gold” of war profits. The Negro should not be hoodwinked by it. President Roosevelt had sold out to Wall Street, betraying the trust the people had put in him to keep them out of war.
“We have a war here at home more important than the petty quarrels of the power-mad nations of Europe,” the woman told him with an inclusive smile. “A war against poverty and insecurity, against the present barbarism that has blotted out civilized living for two thirds of the population. You should consider yourself a soldier in this war.”
“Come, Gordon, let us fight this thing together,” one of the men said as if overcome with emotion. “Let us stand side by side and fight the forces of injustice, intolerance, and prejudice. You Negroes have never had a break.”
Lee was moved against his will. “Well—you know I’m for anything that’s against discrimination. But I think we ought to be sure about Willie Gibson. It’s just possible that he might be guilty—even if he is a Negro.”
“We’ll form a permanent committee to fight all cases of discrimination,” the woman said. “We’ll meet for weekly discussions.”
“Well—all right,” Lee said, “put me down as a member.”
He attended the first few meetings with Ruth. But most of the discussions concerned politics. American capitalism and British Imperialism were denounced more than Nazism. The Nation and New Republic were cited to show “the pattern of liberal betrayal of liberalism in wartime.” The words of Eugene Debs were recalled: “I hate, I loathe, I despise Junkers and Junkerdom. I have no earthly use for the Junkers of Germany, and not one particle more use for the Junkers in the United States.” They were more concerned about the Hitlers in the United States than the Hitler in Germany.
Lee and Ruth found the meetings boring and quit attending. Although the committee grew in numbers and importance, and came to exert a certain political influence in the post office, no cases of discrimination were protested by it.
After June 1941, when Germany attacked Russia, it was disbanded. The Committee to Aid Russia took its place. The ones who had led the fight against the discrimination of minorities in America now called for unity in an all-out effort to defeat Nazism. They urged that petty racial differences and factional fights be forgotten until the Soviet Union emerged victorious over Germany. Their isolationism had changed overnight to rabid interventionism.
War seemed inevitable that summer. Huge new defense industries began mushrooming all over the city. Migrants poured into the city from the East, North, and South, each group bringing the culture of its section. Racial tensions rose and racial prejudices ran rampant.
In the departments where they composed the majority, white Southerners made life miserable for the Negro employees. Seemingly they had the encouragement and support of the superintendent. Flagrant cases of discrimination were now in evidence.
When Lee called upon the anti-discrimination committee for action, he learned to his amazement that it had been disbanded. He had not been notified, and it had not occurred to him that the Communists would change their position concerning racial discrimination. Now he urged the re-forming of the committee. The former members advised him to let it drop. They pointed out the necessity for unity. But they informed him that shortly there would be a shakeup in the Civil Service Commission, and all practices of discrimination in the post-office system would be abolished.
Lee accepted their counsel. He had no intention of protesting singly; he did not wish to become a martyr.
Then Pearl Harbor happened. Lee found the immediate effect in the post office to be startling. Fear and a blood-red hatred of all dark skin showed in the faces of all the white employees. Frightened and constrained by a tremendous sense of insecurity, Lee withdrew into silence. He began bringing his lunch and eating it on his bench alone. No longer did he loiter in the rest room for his ten minutes’ smoke for fear of being challenged by some race baiter. He avoided crowds, and every time he heard the oft-repeated epithet, “yeller-bellied bastards!” he winced. He made every effort to escape a racial crisis. When the first week had passed without incident he thought to himself: “I made it!”
And then on Thursday of the second week the superintendent strode angrily into the department and stopped behind Lee’s bench.
“How long does it take you to learn a scheme, Gordon?”
Lee went rigid and for a moment could not breathe. But he managed to control his voice: “I’ve known my scheme since the first month I went to work.”
“Then you must be sleeping on the job.”
“I thought I was doing fine; I haven’t made any mistakes.”
“Then I’m a liar?”
“No, sir. If you say I’ve made mistakes, I’ve made mistakes.”
“So now you admit it, eh? I’m warning you, Gordon, this is an essential war agency and I’ll have no incompetent employees here.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lee was so relieved by his escape that as soon as he thought the superintendent beyond hearing he muttered to himself: “I surrender, Mr. Hitler.”
The superintendent turned and came back. “You called me ‘Hitler,” he said.
“No, sir, I wasn’t talking about you. It’s just an expression we have.”
“I heard you! You called me ‘Hitler.’”
“No, sir, I wasn’t talking to you.”
But the superintendent returned to his office and suspended Lee for thirty days. And the Civil Service Commission discharged him. Lee telephoned the members of the former committee and demanded that they help him now. They flatly refused to have anything to do with it. No one showed him any sympathy. The woman who had called at his house told him bluntly that it served him right for agitating. He felt a subtle undercurrent of antagonism in the manner of them all.
“Never again will I have business with a Communist,” he told himself. But he was more bewildered than hurt; he could not see the logic of their turning against the Negro. In the end he and Ruth laughed about it.
“Now I can believe everything Pegler says,” he remarked.
Neither he nor Ruth were worried. Times had changed. It was not like the depression years when a post-office job was the pinnacle. Almost any job would pay him more than the eighty cents an hour he had earned.
But soon he was to learn that the new industries were not accepting Negroes in any capacity other than labor, and most of them were not employing Negroes at all. At first he would not accept a job as laborer because he thought he could do better. He resolved that if they had no better jobs than common labor for a college graduate, then he would walk the streets until they did. But as the months passed, January into February then March, worry settled over him, and the fear began tightening him up again.
He began citing Executive Order 8802, President Roosevelt’s directive for fair employment, to the recalcitrant personnel directors of war industries. They laughed in his face.
By late spring of 1942 there was an acute labor shortage in the city. War plants had sent out a frantic cry for help. Great numbers of workers were being imported from every part of the country. There was something so romantic about this new growth of industry and this great influx of migrant workers that a motion-picture studio made an epic picture of it. But Lee had not yet found a job.
His savings began to run out. Each succeeding month he found it more difficult to meet the monthly payments on his house.
Then one night planes flew in from the Pacific. Shore batteries sent up a furious barrage, shaking the ground and lighting the western sky. Lee and Ruth ran out into their yard to watch. They saw the red flashes of the guns toward Santa Monica, the white lines of the tracer bullets against the black
night.
“They’re here!” Lee cried exultantly. “They’re here! Oh, Goddammit, they’re coming! Come on, you little bad bastards! Come on and take this city!”
In his excitement he expressed a secret admiration for Japan that had been slowly mounting in him over the months of his futile search for work. It was as if he reached the conviction that if Americans did not want him the Japanese did. He wanted them to come so he could join them and lead them on to victory: even though he himself knew that this was only the wishful yearning of the disinherited.
But the white residents went craven. The power was cut off and a complete blackout hid the city in darkness. Transportation was halted. Motorists were ordered to put out their lights and park on the spot until daybreak. Thousands sought air-raid shelters. Other thousands roamed the streets.
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
SLOWED 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 i
n 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?”
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