Taken aback by the suddenness of the question, Lee could only stammer: “Why—yes, sir.”
“Your people have had a long hard struggle to attain their present position,” Foster went on, “and it would grieve me to see you at this point alienate the good will of us who have your problem at heart and are not trying to use you to foster our own selfish ends.”
“I’m sure we wouldn’t want to do that,” Lee Gordon said, and Foster smiled.
Now he would inject a little fun into this game the union played, Foster thought with a sense of secret satisfaction. For his object was not to break the union. He had not the slightest doubt but that he would squelch the union’s campaign by simply continuing his present policy. The workers liked him; they were satisfied. He had them in his control and there was nothing to be feared. He wanted only to annoy the unionists by taking their favorite colored boy away from them. He could already see himself telling it as a joke at a board of directors’ meeting.
“I’m sure you wouldn’t,” Foster said, “and that is the reason, I must confess, that I am concerned with your people, with your thoughts and ambitions and political convictions—and with you, boy. I am concerned with you as a man.”
Drawn by the quality of sincerity in Foster’s voice, Ruth and Mrs. Foster had come over to join them and were there in time to hear Foster’s last remark. Ruth looked sharply to see how Lee was taking it, whether he had kept his mind receptive to anything that Foster might have to offer.
But Lee experienced a slight withdrawing, a vague repudiation of the sincerity of this white millionaire who thought of him as a boy yet claimed to be concerned with him as a man. He knew that Foster was going to make him an offer and hoped that he would have the strength of will to refuse, because whatever Foster offered to a man whom he thought of as a boy would be a handout with condescension, like old clothes given to a servant.
Watching Lee’s every expression with clinical appraisal, Foster was immediately aware of Lee’s changed attitude, and he made a better offer than he had at first intended.
“For some time now,” he said, “I’ve been considering employing a colored man in the personnel department at Comstock. I think you are the man for that job, Lee. I’ll start you off at five thousand a year and you can report to work at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
Foster could not bear to have a Negro, any Negro, dislike him. And before he would allow a Negro to really hate him, he would make the Negro rich.
Ruth gasped audibly at the offer, and Mrs. Foster’s eyes went wide in amazement. Lee’s breath turned rock-hard in his chest and his heart seemed caught in his throat. For he was not prepared to withstand such an offer as this—Lord God! Five thousand to start! He could have Ruth home—home! And he’d never have to be afraid anymore—
“You have a streak of stubborn integrity in you, boy, that I like,” Foster said, smiling across at him, already gloating inwardly at putting this one over. “Ill see that you get the breaks.”
And it was this that gave Lee Gordon the courage to refuse; because if he had integrity that could be bought, he had no integrity at all. And if one man held it in his power to make the breaks for him, he held it in his power to make the breaks against him. He would feel alone, lost in a white office, afraid, his destiny subject to the whims of this one man—better to be with the union where there would be others who were lost, lonely, and afraid. So he said: “Well—thank you, sir. I want you to know, sir, I certainly appreciate your considering me for the job. But I can’t quit the union now. The union is depending on me.”
Admiration was first in the eyes of both Ruth and Mrs. Foster, and it remained in the eyes of the older woman. But Ruth’s next reaction was a sharp, deep hurt, because she thought that he had only been thinking of himself; if he had been thinking of her, or of them together, he could never have refused.
But it was shock that showed in Foster’s face, stronger than his control. In the sudden fury that raced through his mind he thought with deadly venom: “You goddamn black bastard, you’ll pay for this—” And then he composed his features to a stillness and kept his voice on an even keel: “I won’t try to persuade you, boy, for I can understand your loyalty even though I know it to be misplaced.”
It was the end of the afternoon and now Lee and Ruth awaited their dismissal. But Foster was not ready to dismiss them quite yet—This was the second colored boy, he was thinking. First a worker at the plant, the Lester McKinley boy, and now this boy. Either he was losing his touch or they were having too much war prosperity. But he would see, he would see. It goaded him to say: “I’d like to give you a bit of advice, boy, keep an eye on your fellow organizers. They’re not as honest as you seem to think. Less than a week ago one of them came to me with an offer to break the back of the organizing campaign. I chased him from my office but there are other executives in the company who do not have my impartiality toward the union at this time.”
But now that Lee had had the strength to refuse his offer, he could resist this scare of union treachery Foster sought to throw into him, and it was only out of politeness that he asked: “I don’t suppose you want to tell me who it was?”
“I don’t mind telling you; I would like to tell you. But it wouldn’t do you any good; it would just get you into trouble. This man is too big for you to tackle; he is one of your big boys. I’m not telling you this to make you lose confidence in the union, or through any desire to undermine your loyalty. I am just advising you to watch your step.”
“Well—thank you, sir,” Lee Gordon said.
And now the silence dismissed them, and Ruth spoke the words of departure: “We’ve had such a wonderful time! I don’t know how to express it, but I’ve enjoyed every minute.”
“I have enjoyed it very much also,” Lee echoed.
While waiting for the car to come and take them home, as at the beginning, they discussed for a moment the beautiful house. Foster was his charming self again, and when Roy sounded the horn, he gave Lee his quick, firm clasp and turned his devastating smile on Ruth.
But it was Mrs. Foster who walked to the door with them. She shook Lee’s hand with added pressure and said with genuine emotion: “I wish you luck, both of you.” And her parting smile to Ruth was completely wistful.
It was this memory they both carried as they walked down to the car unaccompanied, and now separated from each other by Ruth’s reproachful silence.
Chapter 15
ON INTO THE night her silence ran like a river down from a hill of memories into the rapids of change. This was too hurting to talk about, too much of a final repudiation to probe into with words. After all the privation she had been through during their eight years of marriage, all she had done for him, had taken from him, if he couldn’t do this for her, if his honor was so great and his pride so priceless—
“Do you love me, Lee?” Her thoughts had found their first words since they had left the Foster’s.
He raised his head wearily from where he sat hunched in bewilderment on the davenport, thinking that now it was coming and he would catch it for whatever it was that he had done to hurt her.
“Yes, I love you, Ruth.” There was only a dull resignation in his voice.
“Do you ever think of me?” As during that wonderful, peaceful noon, many centuries ago it now seemed, she sat curled in the deep arm chair. But where then she had been lazily relaxed, now she was tense with a poignant ache.
“Yes, I think of you. I always think of you, Ruth.”
“Do you ever remember that we are married, that you are not just one person in the world?”
“I do.”
“But you couldn’t have been thinking of me this afternoon, or of us and our marriage.”
“I was.”
“Then how could you have turned down Foster’s offer without at least talking it over with me?”
“I was thinking of us,” he doggedly defended. “I thought of what the salary would mean to us, what we could do with it.
I thought perhaps if I accepted it you would be willing to quit—”
“If you had been, Lee,” she interrupted—“if you had actually been thinking of me, that only makes it worse, because it proves that you don’t care anything at all about me anymore.”
“I couldn’t sell out the union, Ruth. Is that what you expected me to do?”
“Would you be selling out the union to accept a better job?” she questioned bitterly. “That’s the same as saying that I’d be selling out the Jay Company if I went to work for Comstock.”
“Is that all the union means to you, Ruth? You used to make me think that you believed in unionism.”
“I do believe in unionism; but I wouldn’t put it above you, above our welfare, Lee.”
“You don’t understand. I don’t put it above you, but—”
“Then what is it, Lee?” she cut him off again. “For God’s sake, tell me what it is? Are you deliberately trying to hurt me?”
“I’ve got to be true to myself, Ruth. Can’t you understand that?”
And though she did understand the quality within him that had made him refuse the job—a quality that once she had been so proud of him for having—now she felt excluded by it and resentful of it, as though she wanted him to be honorable and courageous, but only for herself. It was this that kept her tearing at him.
“At the expense of me, Lee? Is that how you have to be true to yourself, by having us live in poverty and fear all of our lives?”
Her face came suddenly, and with a stab, into the focus of his vision. Now he saw the harshness in features he had always thought so inexpressibly feminine. He saw frowning lines around glazed brown eyes that had seemed like lighted candles in a darkened church when he had first looked into them. He saw ravages in her mouth, as if the smiles had come with too much pain. Had just so short a period of working in the world done this to her? Or was it hurt? Had he hurt her so much in their eight years of marriage?
“Ruth,” he said slowly, “I’ve always wanted you to have the best of everything.”
And now she looked at him, at his tight, gaunt face with too much blankness in his eyes hiding all his fear and torment and sense of inadequacy that she could feel hard and constricted inside of him. She opened her mouth to say: “I know it, darling. Please forgive me for being so cruel to you.” But in her state of discontentment she could find no voice for words as these. So instead she continued to reprove him. “How can I believe it, Lee, when you just refused an opportunity for us to live as decent human beings?” And now each hurting thing she said led her on to say another. “Is it that you are trying to evade the responsibility of marriage? Is that it? Ever since you left the post office you’ve acted as if you wanted to get out of supporting me. Is that why you ran off to New York City and left me? You don’t have to support me, Lee, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“I do want to support you,” he contended.
“But how? By sticking to your little union job where you can hide from life? Lee, I’m not asking for the best, God knows! but I want more than just bare poverty. I want a few pretty clothes and enough money not to feel strapped all the time. I don’t want to be a drudge all of my life. For five years I made excuses to keep Mother from visiting us because we were so poor. Don’t you think I love my mother and want her with us sometimes? I’d like to be able to have her live with us; she’s not rich, you know. I should be helping Ronnie to support her.”
“I’m sorry, Ruth. But that was all I had to offer—that was the very best. If you didn’t want that, you didn’t want me.”
“But you can’t say that now, Lee. Other people are making money on jobs you’ve refused in the past. And now this job—where can you ever beat it?”
“Would you want me to work on a job where I’ll be unhappy all the time?”
“Do you think I’m any more happy on my job than you would be? I suffer from all the racial strains and tensions you do. I die from some humiliation or other almost every day. I always have, ever since I took my first job. But I don’t try to take them out on you. I keep them to myself so as not to worry you. Perhaps that’s what makes me appear the superficial person I must appear to you.”
“What do you want me to do, Ruth?” he asked, running the flat of his hand hard down his face. “Go back to Foster and beg him for the job?”
“I only want you to think of me sometimes, Lee, instead of always thinking of yourself. I can’t stand it much longer. It’s only because I’ve always hoped that some day you might think of me that has kept us together this long.”
Because as her husband, Lee Gordon had been the greatest disappointment in her disappointing life. Not so much for what he had failed to do, to offer, and provide, as for what he had failed to be—a greater, braver, stronger man. Nor so much that he had failed, because any man could fail, but the way that he had failed, as if failure was his destiny. It was within the man that she saw the failure.
And this hurt her more than he could ever know. For all of her life she had dreamed of this one man who would come into her heart. Her years before their marriage had been one long odyssey of books, and from all the stories she had ever read she spun these dreams of him. A tall, strong, handsome Negro, as brave as any knight, who would come to her and take her and love her and cherish her and protect her; who would make his way through the world with her always at his side and never be afraid of white people.
At first he had been the star halfback for Sumner High School the year they played Wendell Phillips from Chicago. Then he had been the erect, distinguished, middle-aged man whom she would see from time to time alighting from a Rolls-Royce limousine in front of Poro College. For one brief interlude he had been the turbaned East Indian visiting down the street from them. The last of these was her sociology professor at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri.—Only in her dreams.
It had remained for Lee Gordon to bring reality. She had seen him then as a tall, proud Negro youth with hurt eyes and a tormented smile and a touch of Byron in his make-up. And when she discovered after she had married him that he was afraid of white people, that this fear from which he did not hope ever to escape had beaten his life into a weird infirmity, it was a disappointment, as it would have been to any Negro girl with dreams.
Even now after eight dreary years of marriage this romance in her heart was too un-dead, too filled with eternal yearning, too much like just lying down and crying like a baby.
And now this man whom she had married and who had disappointed her was saying: “I don’t know how I could think of you any more than I do, Ruth. But you don’t make it easy for me.”
“I don’t make it easy. How could I make it any easier? I am working like a slave every day. What more can I do?”
What she could not understand, Lee Gordon thought, was that he could not be the man she wanted him to be without first being honorable. If she wanted him to be more than the Negro he was, she would first have to think of him as more than the Negro he was made to be. She would have to believe that he wanted to do all the things for her she wanted him to do—support her in comfort, idolize her, cherish her, give her everything in the world. And she would have to understand that he could not do so without honor; that he had reached the point in life where if he could not have the respect of men he did not want the rest. And if this entailed her having to work for what he would not give her in dishonor, she should at least understand that there was nothing noble in her doing so; it was only the white man’s desire to deride the Negro man that had started all the lies and propaganda about the nobility and sacrifices of Negro women in the first place.
Perhaps once he could have said this to her, but not now. For the years in between them, shaped by his inadequacies, his helplessness, confusion, and fear, had brought a change in their relationship. That was progress, he thought with searing cynicism—the movement of materialism. Time will bring the change—dialectics. Johnson P. Time, the Great Leveler, who would make all people equal, b
lack, white, brown, and yellow. If He could not do it with the flesh, He would do it with the dust. And in the dust Lee Gordon would find his honor, Lee Gordon thought with bitterness.
He took a deep breath and said aloud: “You can quit your job, Ruth. Will you do that? I’ll make you a promise that you’ll never regret it.”
No, not eventful, like the winning of a war, or dramatic, like the dying of a hero; but to Lee Gordon who found it hard to make any decision, it was the most important decision that he had ever made. For he had hit that height within himself. He had been trying for it, never really believing that he would make it; and then suddenly he had made it.
If she had said okay, he might have gotten everything he had ever needed—reassurance, courage, even honor. He might have taken that feeling and gone on and never looked back.
And if she had known that all she had to do to give him that feeling was say okay, and mean it, she would have said it over and over again. It would have been a pleasure for her to quit her job. But she did not know that he had hit that height. She had lost faith in him to the point where she no longer believed that he could hit it.
So she cried as if he had wounded her: “Is that it, Lee? Is that what you’re waiting for? Is that why you refused the job today—to have me at your mercy again? Is that it?”
So he lost it—The quality of human courage is a fleeting thing, God knows. To some it comes again and again. To some it never comes. To him it might never come again, Lee Gordon thought. And he knew that no degree of reason, no purity of logic, no amount of common sense—nothing!—would suffice for his having lost it.
“Ruth, I refused the job today simply because I did not want to take Foster’s goddamned handout.”
“Don’t you see!” she exclaimed. “I couldn’t quit with you feeling like you do. I couldn’t face the uncertainty again of not knowing whether you would have your job from one day to the next.”
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