“She knows I’m not a Communist,” Lee said.
Mollie laughed. They washed down the meat balls and spaghetti with a concoction of Rhine wine and vodka, which enhanced the taste of garlic in the sauce. Luther took off his T-shirt and suggested to Lee: “Take off your coat and tie, man. Your shirt, too. It’s hot in here.”
“What are we to have, a wrestling match between my two dark gladiators?” Mollie asked delightedly.
“I just b’lieves in being comfortable,” Luther said.
“Oh, I’m quite comfortable,” Lee declared.
“You are so beautiful, my Caliban, so unsullied and undomesticated. You remind me of a baboon I saw in the Paris zoo.” She was laughing outside and all down inside where the effect of the drinks was concentrating the heat of passion in her.
“That’s why you likes me.”
“I like you because you are black.”
“I know you likes me ‘cause I’m black.”
“Why else do I like you?”
“Now, Mama, we got company.”
She turned to Lee. “Isn’t he marvelous?” Then she began feeling the muscles in Lee’s arms as if she had just discovered them. “You are marvelous, too. A man of thin, dark tempered steel.”
“All dark mens is tempered steel to you,” Luther said sarcastically.
“You, my darling Caliban, are more than just steel. You are bone and steel. You are fire and bone and steel. What do you call those things that make all the noise in the street?”
“A garbage truck,” Lee suggested helpfully.
“Aw, man, she mean an air hammer,” Luther said sheepishly.
“You know what I mean, you air hammer, you.”
“We’re shocking Lee, Mama. He don’t go for all this stuff.”
“Oh, I’m doing fine,” Lee averred drunkenly.
“Do you see that nigger?” Mollie finally asked. “That nigger does something to me.”
“You drunk, Mama,” Luther said levelly. “If you warn’t I’d slap you ‘way from this table.”
“I’m a white woman, and you’re a nigger from Mississippi. You wouldn’t dare touch me. You lived in Mississippi too long.”
“Now quit showing off, Mama,” he warned. “You know I lived in Frisco too. That’s the sheet you gots to bleach.”
“What did you do in Frisco, as you call it, that was so important?”
“I had a fine time and you know it.”
She turned to Lee, laughing. “Let me tell you about my Caliban in San Francisco—”
Lee remembered only the part about Luther sunning on the beach, exercising his right as an American citizen and a member of the Communist Party, when a blond, skinny, predatory, oversexed white woman stopped to admire him, picked him up, took him home, fed him, and slept with him.
After that day, Luther quit his job on WPA and moved into her mansion, Mollie related, and under her supervision he began writing illiterate stories about his boyhood in Mississippi. She joined the Communist Party to be near him always, and informed the party officials about Luther’s beautiful soul. How exquisitely sensitive he was underneath his Negroid exterior, how noble and courageous, yet retaining the purity of the primitive, the unspoiled, uncluttered originality of the aboriginal—“Now, Mama, you laying it on too thick,” Luther interrupted her.
“And didn’t I take you away from her?” she asked.
“Must have. You got me.”
She took him by the hand and led him from the table. Without excuse or apology, they crossed the green-lighted living-room into the bedroom beyond and closed the door. Presently the sound of laughter came from within. Lee served himself another drink, speculating as to the cause for laughter now.
From unionism to Communism to sensualism, he thought with drunken cleverness. But was that not man’s spiral to man’s own humanism? For were not these two the appointed apostles of Marx and macrogenitals? And who was he, Lee Gordon, to make fun? What did he, Lee Gordon, believe in? Nothing! Lee Gordon did not even believe in salaciousness, which would have at least procured him a white woman in the last stages of debauchery and a green-lighted living-room on the Roman order, he told himself.
He awoke to find himself stretched upon the bedroom couch, dressed except for coat and shoes. From the other room came the sound of many voices. Jumping to his feet, he fought down the impulse to escape through the window and began a frantic search for his coat and shoes, throwing aside the bedding and disarranging the room. He could riot tell how long he had slept or what had happened during the interim, which was the thing that worried him. Finally finding the missing garments before his eyes, he fled to the bathroom where he sloshed cold water over his face until his sense of panic left.
A swift, engulfing fear of self-abasement sobered him. He scoured his memory until he had provided himself with a fragile absolution. But it was with considerable aversion that he put on his coat and went hesitatingly into the living-room.
In the weird green light, frantic people in defiant garb created the illusion of a costume ball. But the workers had come as workers —proudly, the Negroes as Negroes—apologetically, the Jews as Jews—defiantly. Only the two Mexican girls had come in costume—they had come as Castilian Spanish.
The self-styled Marxists of Los Angeles were having their hour. Each drink served across the table blocking the kitchen doorway meant another dollar for Russian aid. Russia was being aided while the guests were becoming hilarious, argumentative, indignant, or belligerent, as was their bent.
Nothing said in the babbling flow of words was intelligible. And had it been so, had each shouted word presented the answer to man’s eternal seeking, the import would have been lost on Lee Gordon. For Lee was troubled in mind and heavy in heart, hot but he could not sweat. His thoughts were on his wife now, and he was but little short of hating her. If she had come, her presence would have maintained some semblance of decorum, for not even a white woman as depraved as Mollie would want a Negro woman to witness her abandon with Negro men, he told himself. He would not have become drunk. And even if he had, he could have at least retained his self-respect so he would not now feel as depraved as those other two.
Seeing him, Mollie came over quickly and asked with an air of concern: “How do you feel now?”
“Oh, all right,” he muttered, avoiding her gaze.
Now debonair in a dramatic red dress, she seemed to have forgotten the episode. She laughed and felt the muscles of his arms.
“And you will do your bit for Russia too,” she said sardonically.
“Well—yes—”
“I’m sure you will.” She patted him on the cheek, laughing, and moved on.
And later Luther came over, his snow-white, turtle-neck sweater accenting the blackness of his skin. “Hey, man, how you doing?”
“Oh, all right. Have a drink.”
“You have one on me, man.”
They had their drink. Someone called Luther away. The girl on the other side of the table said precisely: “That will be two dollars.”
“Well I—Well yes—”
He wondered if they knew that he was not a Communist. Maybe a Communist had some way of identifying another Communist—as a Jew can identify another Jew, or a Negro, another Negro. Maybe a Communist could smell another Communist—the proletarian pungency or the Stalinist scent. The thought stirred a laugh in him.
A white girl passing turned a brightly painted smile. “Is it personal or can we all share in it?”
“Oh, it’s for the masses,” he assured her. “I was just thinking about the Stalinist scent.”
“What?”
“If a Communist could smell another Communist.”
The smile went off. She looked at him a moment longer with hostile curiosity, then went to the table, jerking her head toward him. “Where did they find that?”
The girl selling the drinks shook her head.
After that no one said anything to him or included him in what they were saying. And he had th
ought Communists were supposed to pounce on a single male Negro. But times had changed, he told himself. Now, there’s a war, didn’t you know? Or rather the Communist twist, there’s a war against fascism.
A defensiveness grew within him. They could not reject him any more than he could reject them. He bought another drink, staring into its amber depths as into a crystal ball, listening to the tinkle of the ice. And his thoughts went back to where for eight long years they had always ended and begun—Ruth!
During the time she had worked at Western Talkie, he had spent a week in San Francisco looking for a job. While he was there he had received a letter from her. He did not know how many times he had read that letter since, because it was the only letter he had ever received from her, and now the words of it came easily to his memory, “A little while ago a book entitled, You Might Like Socialism, fell into my hands and I read it to the delight of all my Leftist socialist-minded friends, who had persistently not given me up in spite of the fact that they labeled me as an ignoramus who dares live in America as a member of the most oppressed group without joining forces with them in their fight for freedom. My own efforts they say are silly, ineffectual, and even a bit ridiculous. They tell me that unless I awaken very soon I will be living in a world bowed down in slavery forevermore by international fascism.
“Realizing my ignorance I admitted that I would like to learn more about this international fascism and I am greeted with sneers and shouts. They all speak at once denouncing everything.
“They point out eagerly that I am a social worker trained for my job and have to accept work for a time as an industrial worker. They become very bitter and accuse me of trying to evade the issue. They ask me what I know of the Marxian Scientific Formula and want to know sarcastically if I am not aware of a great class struggle going on of which I am a part and parcel. They look quite wild and apoplectic.
“They point their fingers in my face and ask me, answering their own questions: ‘You are black, aren’t you?’ Sometimes, when I am worn out mentally and physically, I say facetiously: ‘I’m brown,’ and they pounce wildly on me with: ‘If you have one per cent black blood, you’re a nigger.’ They sit back triumphantly after such a statement as though to say: ‘There you are.’
“What they apparently can’t see is that I like being a Negro regardless of what color I am; that I like being an American even more so and that I wouldn’t exchange this democracy I live in for all the Utopias they can possibly picture—”
That was crazy, silly, contradictory! he thought. But so like her. For a moment he felt a smother of tenderness for her, remembering all the pleasant passionate things that had happened between them. All of a sudden from some passing woman he caught a faint essence of perfume that reminded him of her standing in her black lace nightgown on their wedding night, rubbing lotion over her face and arms and spraying perfume on her lips and ear lobes and over her firm young breasts and all down her round slender body so she would smell sweet when she came to him in bed. He filled with a compelling desire for her. His eyes clouded with a film of tears and he remained rigid for a long time, his hand grasping the empty glass in a death grip. His love for her was so intense he could feel it like a separate life throughout his body.
A voice in front of him said: “If we don’t get a second front the worst is yet to come.”
When Lee Gordon came out of it, he did not see the stubby, bald-headed man in front of him. He saw Ruth as he had left her, critical, cold, apart, a long way off. Still without seeing the man, he said evenly: “Goddamn a second front!”
And then he stepped over to the table and said: “Make it a double this time.”
A big white man in a dark gray suit, also buying a drink, braved Lee’s tight, black scowl. “I’m Ed Jones, I work for a newspaper.”
It required a moment for Lee to get the handle to his voice. “I’m Lee Gordon, I work for a union.” Then suddenly he grinned and felt better.
“Good. I belong to a union—and work for it, too.”
“Well, I—” He started to say that he was not a member of the union but said instead: “I am strictly for the union men.”
Ed looked at him curiously. “At least we don’t say grace to the wrong people.”
Now Lee looked at Ed curiously. But before he could reply, a pleasant-faced young man with a Boston accent and crew haircut, dressed as a college student, spoke up with a smile: “We don’t say grace—period.”
“Why?” Lee asked, yielding to the impulse to bait the both of them.
“There is no one to say grace to,” Ed replied seriously.
“We have not yet discarded the great god Money.”
“But we are discarding it.”
“And quickly at this moment,” Lee said, noting his empty glass.
The young man laughed and bought them drinks. “What is money but a means for its own discard?” he stated more than asked.
“I might point out that religion and materialism are much the same,” Lee said.
“How is that?”
“There is no proof for either unless one believes. I wonder how many of you Marxists realize that it is your belief, and not Marx’s proof, that has established the truth of materialism.”
“But Marx did not establish the truth of materialism, no more than did we,” a fourth voice said. “He merely employed the dialectical conception of it to demonstrate the cycle of capitalism.”
Lee looked down at the stubby, bald-headed Jew who had made the remark concerning the second front. “To me the two are the same—Marx and materialism,” he replied.
“To you, yes. But you will admit the danger of drawing any conclusion from a lack of information?” the stubby Jew asked equably.
“I admit nothing,” Lee snapped. “I said—”
“By the way, my name’s Don Cabot,” the young man with the Boston accent interrupted quickly.
“Lee Gordon,” Lee replied shortly.
“I’m Abe Rosenberg,” the stubby Jew said. “But they all call me Rosie.”
“Lee, dialectical materialism proves itself,” Ed argued doggedly. “Which religion does not do. We see the truth of dialectical materialism in our daily lives, in each step of progress we make. Man discovers nothing, learns nothing—he reflects. Matter changes, develops, progresses, but we think only of the change, the development, the progress of man. But every scientist knows that man could not develop if matter were unchangeable.
“While on the other hand, religion is static. We can not see the truth of religion; we can only believe it. And we can only believe it so long as it serves its purpose. Man is not embodied in religion—religion is embodied in man. There is no religion that man, in his reflection of materialistic progression, can not outgrow and overthrow—in fact, has not already outgrown.”
“You make it sound as logical as Lenin did, I admit,” Lee replied. “But you can not convince me that the masses in Russia are converted to the philosophy of dialectics, or that they know themselves to be reflections of materialistic change. I say the majority of the peasants in Russia have just swapped the Greek Orthodox faith for the Communist faith.”
“To be sure,” Rosie agreed, spreading his hands. “That only illustrates the truth of dialectical materialism. Are not the masses of Russia reflecting change? Do they have to know it? Or even believe it?”
“As long as they are it f eh?” Lee asked.
“What have you against the Soviet Union?” Rosie challenged.
“The people have no freedom.”
“The people have more freedom than any people in the world. Do you have freedom here?”
“We have more than they.”
“Pfui! There can be no such thing as freedom in a capitalistic society. They say we have a free press. Pfui! We have the most controlled press in the world today. First of all, it takes a million dollars to buy a small newspaper. Is that free?”
“It is freer than having a big newspaper and having what goes into it dictated to y
ou.”
“Are you so naive as to believe that the contents of an American newspaper are not dictated by the overlords?”
“Not to the extent the contents of the Russian newspapers are dictated by Joe Stalin.”
“Pfui! There are no dictators in Russia. The people dictate—all the people. Do all the people in America vote?”
“Why ask me that?”
“Because you, of all people, should know. Freedom! What is freedom?”
“According to Martin Dies it is anti-people,” some one said.
“According to Father Coughlin it is anti-Semitism.”
“To Hitler, it is anti-everything.”
Several laughed.
Lee quoted with drunken memory: “According to Karl Marx, ‘Freedom is the appreciation of necessity.’”
There was a moment of startled silence.
“Hear! Hear!” a broad-shouldered man with coarse, lumpy features called from the center of the room. “May I have your attention, please.”
“Mike!…Mike!…” The name ran through the crowd.
“The young man is right,” Mike stated. “Freedom is the appreciation of necessity. That is why I am here. We must be informed of the necessities. The necessity of aiding our great ally Russia, who is now valiantly fighting our battles for us—”
From one side of the room came a spontaneous cheer.
“You don’t have to cheer me,” Mike declared. “All of you know what I am saying. You all know it is the truth. What I am talking about is the necessity of knowledge, the necessity of news from the battle fronts that is not falsified to serve imperialistic ends, the necessity of a free press bringing you true and correct information. I am referring to the Daily World. We need money to bring you news coverage of the world during this most important period in the history of mankind. You know that. We need money to compete with the imperalistic press. Our goal is to raise three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Now I am going to ask for a collection of ten dollar bills. I want nothing but tens—” He smiled indulgently. “Last night I was to a party in Beverly Hills where” I collected nothing but hundreds. Now come on, folks. Don’t rush. Nothing but tens—”
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