Lonely Crusade

by Chester B Himes

  Sight of their well-trimmed lawn reminded Lee that his needed cutting but he put it quickly from his mind as a horrible thought and settled in complete relaxation. If life could be like this, just one long lazy day—he was thinking when the telephone rang.

  “I’ll answer it,” he finally said.

  “You’re welcome,” she smiled.

  He struggled to his feet and went into the bedroom. During the few short minutes of conversation the pleasantness had gone from the day. For a long moment after cradling the receiver, he stood beside the night stand wondering what it was that Foster wanted of him as uneasiness settled in his mind. Then he went back into the living-room and announced to Ruth: “Foster wants us to come to dinner this afternoon. Would you like to go?”

  She looked quickly up, frowning at the constraint now in his voice. “What’s the matter, what’s happened?”

  “We have an invitation to Foster’s for dinner this afternoon.”

  “Foster? Who are the Fosters?” She made it sound as distasteful as if she had spoken of filth.

  “Foster,” he said, “is vice-president of the board of directors of Comstock Aircraft Corporation, one of the major stockholders, and general manager in charge of production in the plant.”

  “Oh, Foster!” Her voice had a sudden singing quality. “Of course. For dinner?”

  He gave her a sighing look as if torn between tears and laughter. She had gained her feet and was moving quickly toward the bath when suspicion overtook her. “What does he want, did he say?” she questioned sharply.

  “It was his secretary who called. He only said that Foster wanted us for dinner.”

  But she would allow no stray doubts to dim her enthusiasm. “Oh, he probably has a job for you.”

  “I doubt it,” he replied.

  And then he recalled what Joe Ptak had said to him his first day on the job: “There is a man named Foster. If you want a job making twice as much as you do, go over and tell him you’re working for me.”

  But if it was just concerning a job, why would Foster invite them both to dinner on a Sunday afternoon? his reason asked him. Was it to exert some kind of pressure on him, to put the fear of God in him, or have him slugged by goons? He thrust this from his thoughts as foolish. But then McKinley had said that Foster was “a bitter and ill-tempered man, given to violent rages,” who “hated the union in a deadly manner.” Afterward, at the meeting the week before last, McKinley had stated further that Foster had bought out one of the union leaders. Lee had thought it silly at the time but now it took the shape of credence. And then that “Beware!” McKinley had whispered just as he was leaving; had it been a warning that Foster would also try to buy him out? McKinley had been absent from the meeting the night before and only eight Negro workers had put in an appearance. Did that mean that something had already happened to him?

  He checked his galloping imagination and took himself in hand. Just because Foster had asked them to dinner he was seeing goblins in the land. What harm could possibly come to them? As Rosie had said the other day, people had other things to think about besides dreaming up tortures for poor Negroes.

  It was, no doubt, as Joe had stated and Ruth had guessed, that Foster wanted them out to dinner to offer him a job. After all, Jackie thought he was all right—swell, she had said—and she should know since she worked right in his office.

  But his uneasiness would not relax and it kept him wondering just the same.

  “What shall I wear, Lee?” Ruth called from the bathroom.

  “Wear? Oh, just a dress. I don’t suppose it’s anything elaborate.”

  “You’re a lot of help,” she cried. “I mean what type of dress? Will there be sports, tennis or riding—”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He just said dinner.”

  “Do you think my black satin will be too flashy? It’s for afternoon.”

  “Any dress. What difference does it make?”

  “It makes a lot of difference if you’re looking for a job. I don’t want to appear too prosperous and still I want to make a nice appearance—”

  “I’m not looking for a job,” he growled.

  “Oh, don’t be so pessimistic, he might offer both of us a job.”

  Lee Gordon did not reply to that because he hoped it was not so. But it rooted in his uneasiness, and by the time he had combed and brushed his hair and changed his clothes he was of half a mind to call the whole thing off. Before he could reach a decision he looked out the window and saw the long green convertible pull up before the house.

  “The car’s here,” he called, catching some of Ruth’s excitement.

  “I’m ready,” she replied, and came dashing into the bedroom fresh from her bath.

  Looking up again, Lee saw a short dark Negro in chauffeur’s livery alight from the car and saunter toward the house, and he went to the door to meet him.

  “You Lee Gordon?” the chauffeur asked.

  “Yes, I am. We’ll be right out.”

  “Mr. Foster wants you to come and see him. He sent me after you.”

  “Yes, I know. His secretary called.”

  The chauffeur gave a sheepish grin. “He been double-checking on me. He told me to call but I was going to surprise you.”

  “I can imagine.” Lee started to withdraw but the chauffeur stopped him, “This your house?”

  “My wife’s and mine,” Lee replied.

  “Partners, eh?”

  “Well—yes.”

  “Nice place. Me and my old lady been thinking of buying a little place like this, but Mr. Foster says he’s going to build us a house on his grounds and we just going to wait and let him do it.”

  Turning indoors, Lee called: “Ruth—”

  She came quickly beside him, serene and svelte in a chic black ensemble, wearing the tiny professional smile she had developed for the working class.

  But the chauffeur was not to be awed by people of his own race. “My name’s Roy,” he announced, letting them know that they were Negroes too. “This your wife?”

  Lee felt a slight resentment at his familiarity. “Mrs. Gordon,” he said.

  But Roy mistook it for something else for he grinned engagingly at Ruth and said: “Lee’s scared, but it ain’t nothing bad. Mr. Foster ain’t going to hurt him.”

  Now he permitted them to follow him to the expensive car. Climbing beneath the wheel, he left the front door open for them. “There’s plenty room in front.”

  Ruth hesitated, but at Lee’s nod she took the middle seat and he climbed in beside her. As the long low car moved into fluid motion, Roy asked as proudly as if it was his own: “How do you like it?”

  “Oh, fine,” Lee replied absently.

  “Cost eight thousand dollars,” Roy informed.

  “Does Mr. Foster own many cars like this?” Ruth asked.

  “Only seven,” Roy grinned.

  “How does he get along?” Lee murmured.

  But Roy had given his attention to the traffic as they swept along Sunset out toward the Pasadena speedway and did not hear. On the wide, winding turnpike the long car flowed along at sixty, curving effortlessly past the green lush countryside. It was pleasant with the wind in their faces and the bright sun overhead. Life could be so simple, just floating along, Lee thought—no movement of the masses, no racial problems, no workers’ unions, just relaxation and enjoyment.

  But Lee could not relax. This crossing into the domain of wealthy white seclusion was never a casual thing, and to Lee Gordon it was something more. For now after seventeen years he was going back to the city where he had been born and he did not relish seeing it again. He had no pleasant memories of Pasadena; he had been born in the backyard and in his unhappiness had known only the back door. He and his parents had been driven away like thieves in the night.

  Now he was going back to dine at the master’s table, but without honor it seemed from their treatment by the chauffeur. He would be on his mettle, required to act a part that life had never given him a c
hance to rehearse, and now his thoughts concerned themselves with minor things. How should he act in Foster’s presence?—like the timid Negro son of domestic servant parents; or the reserved and quiet Negro college graduate, picking his chances to speak, weighing his words for the impression they might make; or as the blustering unioneer, walking hard and talking loud and trying to give the appearance of being unafraid? He wondered how Ruth felt in this situation, how she would react, whether she would have any emotional advantage in being a woman. But Foster would expect more out of him, he knew.

  And with this thought all of his senses tightened and panic overwhelmed him. It was as if the unseen gatekeepers of the white overlords demanded of him a toll to enter—an incredible toll in disquiet, anxiety, trepidation, and, greatest of all, in fear. He could not help his fear, he knew, and waited for it to strike.

  But from somewhere deep inside of him came the reassuring thought, he was not returning to Pasadena as a Negro begging opportunity or as a worker seeking a raise in pay, but as a representative of many people. And that made quite a difference, for when they turned into the private driveway and circled through the landscaped woods to draw to a stop before a huge colonial mansion and Lee looked up to see the tall, gangling man in a plaid woolen shirt and old corduroy trousers whom he knew immediately to be Foster, strangely he was not afraid. It was amazing what just the realization of the other people in the world could do for him, Lee Gordon thought, as he alighted from the car and helped Ruth to alight.

  Foster came down the flagstone walk and met them by the two cast iron statuettes of pickaninnies that served as decorative hitching posts. His face was deeply seamed yet mobile with vitality, and his gray streaked hair still retained youthful cowlicks.

  “Mrs. Gordon,” he greeted first, touching her with a glance that was at once appraising and admiring from deep-set eyes of the youngest, brightest blue. Then turning to Lee he tapped him lightly on the chest in a friendly gesture. “Lee Gordon, I’ve seen you before.”

  “How do you do, sir,” Lee mumbled stiffly, offering his hand.

  Foster gave Lee’s hand one quick, firm grasp and quickly let it go as his gaze raked Lee with bright penetration. And then to both he said with a sudden fascinating smile: “I’m delighted that you could come on such short notice.” His voice was richly cordial without condescension or constraint, and in his slow enunciation was the hint of infinite patience.

  “Oh, we think it grand of you to ask us,” Ruth was the first to reply, looking up at him in feminine wonder and finding him completely charming.

  “That rascal Roy didn’t frighten you with his wild driving, did he?” he spoke again to Ruth.

  “Oh, no, I enjoyed it,” she replied.

  “He must be lazy today; the sun’s got him. He likes to rip and tear up and down the highways.”

  Roy stood to one side with a grin of ecstasy on his flat, black features. “Now you know I don’t do that, Mr. Louie. You know I’m just like a lamb.”

  “A wolf, you rascal. You know you’re a rascal.” He turned his attention back to Lee and Ruth. “Roy’s a great man with the ladies,” adding dryly: “especially with my cars.”

  Roy turned to Lee and gave a companionable grin, different in both essence and execution from the one he had used on Foster. “Have a good time, Lee. Don’t let Mr. Louie get you balled up in no argument. He likes to get people out there and then drop ‘em.”

  “Lee is not like you,” Foster said with a faint touch of sarcasm. “He’s an arguer by profession.”

  “Well—by necessity more than by profession,” Lee demurred.

  Foster gave him another quick glance.

  When they turned toward the house, Ruth exclaimed as if she had just noticed it: “Oh, what a magnificent place!—and so American.”

  She could have said nothing to please Foster more. He had erected this mansion of twenty-one rooms, each feature of which was an exact replica of features in the homes of early American patriots, upon his return from a war-crazy Europe in 1939, and had dedicated it in solemn thankfulness to the fact that he was an American. For Louis Foster considered being an American the greatest thing of all. He was an American-first-to-hell-with-all-others American. The difference between him and other American-Firsters being not that he loved his country less, but not so rhetorically.

  “Would you like to see through it?” he asked.

  “Oh, we’d love to,” Ruth replied.

  “We like it and we think everyone else should like it too,” he smiled. “That’s terribly presumptuous of us, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, not at all,” Lee said.

  Foster restrained from looking at him again, but the urge showed plainly in his gesture for them to walk ahead. From the outside the wide, rambling structure, with glass-enclosed verandas flanking the center section, seemed imposing, but inside the arrangement gave a sense of intimacy. They entered a tiny foyer, flanked by a powder room done in pale print and a tile-lined washroom, and then came into a wide, paneled hallway, at the end of which red-carpeted stairs, converging at a landing, led above. To the left, three steps led up to a small, book-lined living-room, beyond which were the bedrooms of Mr. and Mrs. Foster separated by a bathroom, hers furnished simply in a period style and his, in dark-toned, rugged, he-man fashion, smelling of horses and dogs. Returning through a flower room with a concrete floor and drain, they reentered the hall through a door beneath the landing, and crossed into the huge living-room that extended the depth of the house. An immense fireplace surrounded by mirrors occupied the center of the back wall. It was flanked by French doors looking out upon a patio, beyond which was the swimming pool. To the front, similar doors led to one of the enclosed verandas. Through an archway they entered the dining-room, which contained a mammoth banquet table, beyond each end of which grew an indoor hanging flower garden.

  Until then they had met no other occupants of the house and Lee thought cynically: “Now we will go in and meet the servants,” whose voices he could hear beyond the kitchen door. But with a curious realization of his misgivings, Foster did not take them through the kitchen as he did all other guests, and by not doing so earned Lee’s eternal gratefulness.

  “On Sundays the servants prepare a little buffet snack and take the remainder of the day off,” he explained.

  Neither Lee nor Ruth cared to comment on this, and Foster was afforded a faint amusement by their silence. All along he had been covertly appraising both of them, for although he prided himself on his knowledge of Negroes, these were of a type he had rarely seen, and he was curious to know all that went on behind the lean, dark features of this boy. That they were laboring under an emotional strain, he had no doubt, for he could fully comprehend the delicacy involved in any situation that put the three of them together on a social plane. He knew that he held in his power their peace of mind, and this brought forth a greater effort to put them at their ease than he would have made for any white persons, rich or poor.

  Now he led them back through the living-room out into the patio. “We call this our ‘WPA Project.’” he informed with a sweeping gesture toward the terraced landscape of which the swimming pool was but a tiny part.

  “Oh, how beautiful!” Ruth involuntarily exclaimed, and Foster laughed delightedly.

  “I think we must have built it just to startle people,” he confessed with engaging candor.

  “And named it after Roosevelt’s relief program,” Lee commented curiously.

  Foster turned and looked at Lee until he drew his gaze, and then he smiled inclusively, “We discovered it to be a waste of time and money—also.” But in his voice beyond control was the indication of his hatred.

  For he abhorred Roosevelt with an intensity that he could not contain. Not only did he detest Roosevelt as a President, considering him a meddler, a socialist, and a stooge of Stalin, but he despised him as a man, a traitor to his heritage and profaner of tradition, “a cripple bastard with a cripple bastard’s spitefulness and lack of hono
r,” as he was wont to say.

  So incensed had he become with the Roosevelt Administration that in 1934, at the age of forty-six, he had retired from active business, shut down the steel plant he had inherited, and spent the next five years abroad. For every subsequent event and occurrence detrimental to his personal prosperity and well-being and opposed to his personal convictions, he blamed Roosevelt; for Communism and unionism, as if Roosevelt had sired the one and given birth to the other; for the raise in taxes, which he considered more Marx than Morgenthau—as if one had a choice, he thought; for the entrance of the United States into the war. By God, with any other President under the sun the yellow-bellied Japs would have been afraid to breathe in America’s direction! It took a war in Europe to send him back to a Rooseveltian America. And now just the thought of Roosevelt was riding him again.

  But Lee did not know this and he was inclined to argue. “I always thought that WPA saved the country from revolution,” he contended.

  “I have more faith in America than that,” Foster quickly challenged.

  But by now Lee had sensed the danger signs. “Well—yes,” he said and let the matter be.

  Seizing the opportunity, Ruth came quickly to his aid, bringing the conversation to safer matters. “Oh, there’re the stables.”

  But Foster was also willing to let it pass, for he wanted no psychological barriers in between them when it came time to broach his proposition. So he became the charming squire again. “I imagine my daughters are down there. They’re at the horsy age.”

  “Oh, do you have daughters?” Ruth asked.

  “Three,” Foster replied. “They’re my pets”—which was an untrue statement, for of them, he liked only Hortense, slim, blond, and boy-crazy at sixteen. Martha, his oldest, who was nineteen and feeble-minded, he wished had never been born; and he resented Abigail, who at nine was the most serenely sensible of the lot, because Hortense did not have her mind. As an afterthought he asked: “Do you have children?”