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.
Lee found all his refutations futility in themselves for the man believed conclusively in that which he was saying.
“But even if it is true,” Lee argued, “in a white society where the family unit of the dominant group is patriarchal, doesn’t that make us something less?”
“I’m not trying to be like white people,” Elsworth said. “I’m seeking the truth about myself and my heritage, and I don’t give a damn what it proves.”
“But why accept a conclusion that in the society of your times makes you appear inferior?” Lee asked.
“If it’s the truth, it’s the truth,” Elsworth replied. “You can’t escape the truth—you must go on from there.”
If the man had been a Communist, Lee could have understood. For this was the Communist line. But Elsworth was not a Communist, Lee knew for he had refused at the beginning to join the union.
“You see, I’m only a temporary employee,” he had explained. “I hope shortly to become an employer, then I’ll be on the other side.”
The argument projected to convince him that no Negro could be on the “other side” from the worker had degenerated into a depressing sociological discussion.
What Lee rejected was not the truth of the knowledge of Negroes’ inferiority, for this he was learning on each succeeding day, but its value. Why learn conclusively that you were less than other people?—it was bad enough to suspect it.
But the hurt was in the knowledge he could not reject—the voices he heard, the faces he saw, and in his own emotions that he profoundly felt. And the first knowledge was his realization of his lack of knowledge.
“The Negro! The Negro wants this—The Negro thinks this—The Negro is this—”
Obscenity! Lee Gordon thought. All who had uttered these words or had these thoughts were obscene and always had been so.
The Negro! How many times had he, Lee Gordon, used the term “The Negro” with that pompous positiveness of ignorance to describe the individual emotions and reactions, appearances and mentalities, the character and souls of fifteen million people.
But now in four short days of organizing for a union he had learned that this much was not so. He had been faced with the humiliating realization that the Negro of his knowledge represented only a few thousand people scattered here and there. That not only were ninety-five per cent of American Negroes strangers to him, but seemed as atypical to him as they appeared to whites. That not only had he never thought of them, but had never visualized them in the farthest reaches of his imagination. That not only had he never known where they lived or how they lived, but that they lived at all.
There was the one who suggested: “Why don’t us get a union of our own? Just let the white folks have their union and usses have our own. Then that way we all get along and don’t have no trouble.”
And the other who said: “There never was a Negro got nothing but the dirty end of the stick out of any union.”
Many believed that the union was a racket. Such as the two men in the bar on Sixth Street who before the war had never worked at all, and who were only working now to “dodge the draft.”
Lee and Luther had dropped in for a drink and, seeing the badges the two men wore, approached them on the subject of the union.
“You know me, man, what’s in it?” was the first thing one had asked.
“Well—” Lee began. “Union benefits are more of a security than—”
“I mean on the line, man, what’s on the line?”
“Nothing, if you’re talking about a handout,” Lee answered with a snap.
“We with you, daddy-o, you know that. But the union got plenty dough, you know that. Give a man a ride, man. I seen you drive up here in your fine chariot—”
Luther gave them a dollar apiece and some leaflets to pass out “Now don’t leave us come back in a half hour and find these all over the street,” he said.
“Man, you know that ain’t gonna happen. You know us, man.”
The leaflets did not get as far as the street; they left them on the bar.
And the three teen-age boys holed up in a pad on Crocker Street, high off of marijuana weed—
“Oh, what does the wenches buy one half so good as the stuff they sells?”
“The men is talkin’ ‘bout the union, man!”
“Who is talkin’ ‘bout the union, man? I am reciting poetry. Oh, what does the wenches buy—”
“The lady said ‘venchas,’ man, not ‘wenches.’”
“What’s a vencha, man?”
“A vencha is a cat what makes venches.”
“That’s what I mean, man. What does the wenches buy just one third so fine as the stuff they sells—”
They bent double with laughter.
“Man, you is crazy.”
“The beginning of the Negro,” Lee Gordon thought.
Vera O’Neal who paid her initiation fee right then, thinking of the white men she would meet.
And Mrs. Lucinda Williams who promised to join if they’d have someone say a prayer before each meeting.
“I ain’t gonna have nothin’ to do with no Godless Communism.
If you don’t believe in the Lawd God A’mighty, nothin’ good gonna ever come to it. ‘On this rock I’ll build My Church,’ sayeth the Lawd. ‘And I am the rock—’”
There were some who knew the union, who had relatives who were members of the union in Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago. These would join but few would help organize.
Others who were “white folks’ niggers,” such as Harold, who would do whatever they thought their bosses wanted.
Those who would follow the majority, who would be on the popular side.
And those who did not care about the union or the bosses. Who would work the hours out the days side by side with any white man, grin in his face and laugh at his jokes, be his butt and take his dirt, and come night, would cut his throat from ear to ear if ever they thought they could get away with it.
Lee Gordon learned that what these people wanted and did not want was an individual process, different in each one. To have and to be and to do to the limits of their visions were the most that any of them could hope for. All would want more as time brought enlightenment, Lee could foresee. And the more they would want, the great
er the benefit they would be to themselves, the community, and the nation. Only the simple fact of being Negroes bound them all together.
But in the spring of 1943 few were thinking of the future, Lee also came to know. Few had ever thought about it and few ever would. They were making money, trying to enjoy it then and there, trying to live in that eternal present where they had always been the safest. They knew the past had been against them. They expected the future to be the same—“What is the union going to do for me now? Next year, man, I might be dead. You might as well say next century—”
These were some of the Negro workers at Comstock whom Lee Gordon interviewed. In each he saw the signs of what they were, and what the past three hundred years had made of them, reflected in himself.
Old man Lem Saunders with his parchment-colored skin and white kinky hair, looking like any Uncle Tom and talking like any Texas cracker. “Aye God, yuh boogers, yuh, ‘round heah talkin’ ‘bout that confound union. Aye God, All thought you wuz mah pals, yuh boogers, yuh. Buy the ol’ man uh quart bottle ‘n Ah’ll jine eny confound union that comes erlong.”
And Proctor Carpathian Johnson whom most people called “Posie.” He was a small, nappy-headed black man with delusions of grandeur. He had small, knotty muscles, reddish eyes, bad teeth, and one of those big wide mouths that droops at the edges like that of a cat fish. But as soon as he had three drinks he thought he was the best-looking man ever put a foot in a shoe; he thought that he was six feet tall and that women fell down and worshiped him.
He had had three drinks when Lee saw him. “Sure, man, gimme some of those leaflets,” he said eagerly. “Ill pass ‘em ‘round. There’s a couple pink tits been tryin’ a say something to me all week and this’ll give ‘em a chance.” He was the first enthusiastic volunteer they had yet recruited—for all of Luther’s Marxist training.
Well—yes, Lee Gordon thought. Why not? Wasn’t this opportunity, too? And wasn’t opportunity what the union also offered?
This growing tendency toward dangerous thinking also frightened Lee, for it was as if he had suddenly come upon himself and was shocked by the sight of himself.
Now homeward bound that Friday evening, he struggled to put it from his mind. Fear and discouragement had been the harvest of the days. “But please, God, let there be some consolation in the nights. Let Ruth be home,” he prayed. “Let her have dinner ready and for one time smile a welcome even if she didn’t mean it.”
The telephone was ringing as he arrived and he let himself into the empty house in time to catch it.
“I will be working late, darling,” Ruth’s voice came over the wire, faint, distant, remote.
“Okay,” he said, cradling the receiver before she could add the rest.
Shedding his raincoat as he headed toward the kitchen, he felt a sense of unreality envelop him. No one but himself would live a life so devoid of meaning; would suffer such depressing emotions or go through such aimless actions without honor, love, or purpose, he thought. No one but himself would suffer such prolonged agony, going forth into it daily to tramp its bitter trails, seeking what he did not know; nor was there any promise that he would know it if he could find it. Surcease? Surcease? he asked himself. Was it only surcease that he sought and did not know it?
He opened a can of sardines and made sandwiches with crackers, and as he sat in the cold kitchen at the bare table eating in solitude, the loneliness came like greedy swine rooting in the rottenness that might have been his soul, all the more terrible because he was afraid of it. Could you just curse God and die, he thought. What an easy out!
The ringing of the telephone sounded a warning. He got up to answer it.
“Mr. Gordon?”
“Yes.”
“This is Lester McKinley. Will it be convenient for you to call on me?”
“This evening?”
“At eight.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Thank you, Mr. Gordon.”
How he had forgotten McKinley he did not know. He was exactly the fellow Lee wanted, and he had already offered to help. For one full, futile week he had been following Communist leads. Lee Gordon shook his head, but the first sign of enthusiasm showed in his general attitude.
Chapter 5
ALL THAT DAY Lester McKinley had been absorbed in brooding. A black mood was upon him, affecting his entire family like a blighting plague and changing the usually gay atmosphere of his home into a sinister silence.
His wife Sylvia, a buxom blond white woman, had seen it in his face that morning upon his arrival from work. The limpid brown of his eyes had changed to smoky agate, and a restrained violence kept flashing like summer lightning across the tautness of his mouth. She had moved warily and remained apart, taking care not to vex him in the slightest, for out of these moods his rages struck abruptly and left destruction in their wake. She believed him capable of killing her and their three children and himself in one of his fits of fury—from nothing she had seen him do, however; it was just a feeling. But she respected it.
Now she prepared the breakfast and set the table while he bathed and shaved. While they ate she kept the children quiet. She hustled the eldest two off to school, then took the baby into the nursery and remained with it. She was not curious to know what had happened to him. She could tell from his expression that it had something to do with race. It was such a terrible business and he suffered so much because of it. She always wanted to do more for him than she ever could. Her heart hurt for him and her sympathy knew no bounds. But she never liked to hear the details. It was always so stupid that she could never clearly understand just what had happened or why he should be so furious, and her inability to understand enraged him so. He would call her when he was ready and tell her what had happened, and this time she hoped that she would understand. Until then she waited.
While in the living-room with the Venetian blinds drawn against the world and the door closed against his wife, McKinley sat in a deep armchair beneath a floor” lamp and let his blind gaze fall on the worn pages of his Vergil. But his thoughts were far removed from the Roman poet. He was plotting murder with deep concentration.
That morning near the end of the graveyard shift he had seen Louis Foster walking alone through his department, and had stopped him to apply for a job as inspector.
Foster had neither accepted nor rejected the application. With a grin he had asked: “Where’d y’all get that Harvard accent, Mistah McKinley?”
McKinley had kept his voice on level keel. “I am a graduate of Atlanta University for Negroes, sir.” But blind white fury had scalded him.
“Georgia, eh? What did you do in Georgia?” Foster had asked.
“I taught school—I am professor of Latin,” McKinley had replied.
“Latin!” Foster had said with a laugh. “This is a little different from teaching Latin, isn’t it?” Without waiting for McKinley’s reply, he had walked away.
Now McKinley sat devising a plan whereby he could murder Foster and escape punishment. But his attempt at concentration required a strenuous effort. For the blood-red lust to go to Foster’s home, break into his room, and cut his throat from ear to ear pulled at his mind and stirred a violence within his body that he could hardly control.
But he restrained himself. He had to do this in such a way that his wife and children would not suffer. Perhaps he could make it appear an accident, or at least so that he would be absolved from blame. Only the two of them must know that it was murder—Foster and himself. Foster must know. In that interval before death he must realize that he was being murdered. McKinley told himself that if Foster did not know that he was being murdered by the man he had ridiculed, he, Lester McKinley, would become a maniac. He might commit a violence on those he loved—his wife and children—and they should not have to suffer any more for what white people had done to him. They had suffered enough for his abrupt flights from place to place over the past ten years.
For Louis Foster was not the first whit
e man whom McKinley had felt compelled to kill. Sixteen years before at the age of thirty, Lester McKinley had fled from Atlanta for fear of killing some white man—any white man—and being lynched for it. Even before then he had felt the overwhelming compulsion to kill white men. At the age of twelve he had lain in ambush and had seen a Negro lynched. And ever since he had felt the urge to kill white men.
Following his escape from Georgia, he had settled in Albany and had changed his name to Lester McKinley. But his homicidal compulsion had not changed. He had felt the same urge to kill white men in Albany as he had in Atlanta. It was then he had visited a psychoanalyst in Rochester.
Sitting there in the silence of his living-room, it all came back. The talks, cagey at first, rose on a slow scale of intimacy until the bursting crescendo where everything had seemed to whirl in blackness and he had emerged standing forth in unashamed nakedness. Talking! Talking as if the very dam of his soul had burst.
He had related in a steady breathless flow how he visualized taking his pocketknife and cutting a white man’s throat, drawing the blade from beneath the ear in a clean, swift stroke underneath the chin. He saw himself stabbing the blade into the chest and lungs, cutting out the genitals—slashing the face until the white was obscured by blood. He had even studied advanced anatomy to learn more about the vital organs of the human body so that no knife stroke would be wasted.
How deep within this homicidal mania, and seemingly unrelated, was a desire to possess a delicate, fragile, sensitive, highly cultured blond white woman, bred to centuries of aristocracy—not rape her, possess her. Possess her body and her soul; her breasts to feel the emotion of his hands; her mouth to seek the communion of his lips; her whiteness to blend with his blackness in a symphony of sex, rejecting all that had come before and would come after.
How he would look at white women on the street and wonder at the exact shade of their nipples, the texture and coloring of their bodily hair, the flexibility and passion of their sexual responses, their underarm odors, the sharpness of their teeth, the positions of their sleep, their reactions to everything imaginable.
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