The Federal Negro Theatre, for which I was doing publicity, had run a series of ordinary plays, all of which had been revamped to “Negro style,” with jungle scenes, spirituals, and all. For example, the skinny white woman who directed it, an elderly missionary type, would take a play whose characters were white, whose theme dealt with the Middle Ages, and recast it in terms of southern Negro life with overtones of African backgrounds. Contemporary plays dealing realistically with Negro life were spurned as being controversial. There were about forty Negro actors and actresses in the theater, lolling about, yearning, disgruntled, not knowing what to do with themselves.
What a waste of talent, I thought. Here was an opportunity for the production of a worth-while Negro drama and no one was aware of it. I studied the situation, then laid the matter before white friends of mine who held influential positions in the Works Progress Administration. I asked them to replace the white woman—including her quaint aesthetic notions—with someone who knew the Negro and the theater. They promised me that they would act.
Within a month the white woman director had been transferred. We moved from the South Side to the Loop and were housed in a first-rate theater. I successfully recommended Charles DeSheim, a talented Jew, as director. DeSheim and I held long talks during which I outlined what I thought could be accomplished. I urged that our first offering should be a bill of three one-act plays, including Paul Green’s Hymn to the Rising Sun, a grim, poetical powerful one-acter dealing with chain gang conditions in the South.
I was happy. At last I was in a position to make suggestions and have them acted upon. I was convinced that we had a rare chance to build a genuine Negro theater. I convoked a meeting and introduced DeSheim to the Negro company, telling them that he was a man who knew the theater, who would lead them toward serious dramatics. DeSheim made a speech wherein he said that he was not at the theater to direct it, but to help the Negroes to direct it. He spoke so simply and eloquently that they rose and applauded him.
I then proudly passed out copies of Paul Green’s Hymn to the Rising Sun to all members of the company. DeSheim assigned reading parts. I sat down to enjoy adult Negro dramatics. But something went wrong. The Negroes stammered and faltered in their lines. Finally they stopped reading altogether. DeSheim looked frightened. One of the Negro actors rose.
“Mr. DeSheim,” he began, “we think this play is indecent. We don’t want to act in a play like this before the American public. I don’t think any such conditions exist in the South. I lived in the South and I never saw any chain gangs. Mr. DeSheim, we want a play that will make the public love us.”
I could not believe my ears. I had assumed that the heart of the Negro actor was pining for adult expression in the American theater, that he was ashamed of the stereotypes of clowns, mammies, razors, dice, watermelon, and cotton fields … Now they were protesting against dramatic realism! I tried to defend the play and I was heckled down.
“What kind of play do you want?” DeSheim asked them.
They did not know. I went to the office and looked up their records and found that most of them had spent their lives playing cheap vaudeville. I had thought that they played vaudeville because the legitimate theater was barred to them, and now it turned out that they wanted none of the legitimate theater, that they were scared spitless at the prospects of appearing in a play that the public might not like, even though they did not understand that public and had no way of determining its likes or dislikes.
I felt—but only temporarily—that perhaps the whites were right, that Negroes were children and would never grow up. DeSheim informed the company that he would produce any play they liked, and they sat like frightened mice, possessing no words to make known their vague desires.
When I arrived at the theater a few mornings later, I was horrified to find that the company had drawn up a petition demanding the ousting of DeSheim. I was asked to sign the petition and I refused.
“Don’t you know your friends?” I asked them.
They glared at me. I called DeSheim to the theater and we went into a frantic conference.
“What must I do?” he asked.
“Take them into your confidence,” I said. “Let them know that it is their right to petition for a redress of their grievances.”
DeSheim thought my advice sound and, accordingly, he assembled the company and told them that they had a right to petition against him if they wanted to, but that he thought any misunderstandings that existed could be settled smoothly.
“Who told you that we were getting up a petition?” a black man demanded.
DeSheim looked at me and stammered wordlessly.
“There’s an Uncle Tom in the theater!” a black girl yelled.
After the meeting a delegation of Negro men came to my office and took out their pocketknives and flashed them in my face.
“You get the hell off this job before we cut your bellybutton out!” they said.
I tried to talk to them, but could not. That day a huge, fat, black woman, a blues singer, found an excuse to pass me as often as possible and she hissed under her breath in a menacing singsong:
“Lawd, Ah sho hates a white man’s nigger.” I telephoned my white friends in the Works Progress Administration:
“Transfer me at once to another job, or I’ll be murdered.”
Within twenty-four hours DeSheim and I were given our papers. We shook hands and went our separate ways.
I was transferred to a white experimental theatrical company as a publicity agent and I resolved to keep my ideas to myself, or, better, to write them down and not attempt to translate them into reality. I dodged the Negro theatrical world and kept rigorously clear of all members of the Communist party. Whenever I met any of my erstwhile comrades, they refused to acknowledge my existence in accordance with a party principle that made it imperative that all “traitors be isolated from the working class.”
One evening a group of Negro Communists called at my home and asked to speak to me in strict secrecy. I took them into my room and locked the door.
“Dick,” they began abruptly, “the party wants you to attend a meeting Sunday.”
“Why?” I asked. “I’m no longer a member.”
“That’s all right. They want you to be present,” they said.
“Communists don’t speak to me on the street,” I said. “Now, why do you want me at a meeting?”
They hedged. They did not want to tell me.
“If you can’t tell me, then I can’t come,” I said.
They whispered among themselves and finally decided to take me into their confidence.
“Dick, Ross is going to be tried,” they said.
“For what?”
They recited a long list of political offenses of which they alleged that he was guilty.
“But what has this got to do with me?”
“If you come, you’ll find out,” they said.
“I’m not that naïve,” I said, smiling. I was suspicious now. Were they trying to lure me to a trial and expel me? “This trial might turn out to be mine …”
They swore that they had no intention of placing me on trial, that the party merely wanted me to observe Ross’s trial so that I might learn what happened to “enemies of the working class.”
“But I’m not your enemy,” I said.
“We want to save you,” they said.
“Save me from what?” I asked. “I’m not lost.”
“We have your welfare at heart,” they said.
“Then why did you-all lie and call me a Trotskyite?”
“Nealson lost his head,” they said. “When you left the party, he had to hit at you some way.”
“Why do you spend your time in these crazy witch hunts?” I asked them. “You claim to be fighting oppression, but you spend more of your time fighting each other than in fighting your avowed enemies.” As I spoke to them I recalled the time when my mother had slapped me when I had asked her—in the far-off days of Arkansas—
why my “uncle” had run away from the white people, why he had not fought back; my mother had given me a ringing slap—fear had made her do it. And I felt that it was the fear of their enemies that made Communists—unconsciously compensating for their fear—fight one another so doggedly and persistently. But I did not tell them that; they would not have understood. “Look, Ross is a minor street agitator. Forget him. And in two weeks he’d be no issue at all.”
“We’re going to make an example out of Ross,” they told me. “His trial will be an education for the working class, and for you, too, if you’ll come.”
As they talked, my old love of witnessing something new came over me. I wanted to see this trial, but I did not want to risk being placed on trial myself.
“Listen,” I told them. “I’m not guilty of Nealson’s charges. If I showed up at this trial, it would seem that I am.”
“No, it won’t. Please come.”
“All right. But, listen … If I’m tricked, I’ll fight. You hear? I don’t trust Nealson. I’m not a politician and I cannot anticipate all the funny moves of a man who spends his waking hours plotting.”
Ross’s trial took place that following Sunday afternoon. Comrades stood inconspicuously on guard about the meeting hall, at the doors, down the street, and along the hallways. When I appeared, I was ushered in quickly. I was tense. It was a rule that once you had entered a meeting of this kind you could not leave until the meeting was over; it was feared that you might go to the police and denounce them all.
Acting upon the loftiest of impulses, filled with love for those who suffer, urged toward fellowship with the rebellious, committed to sacrifice, why was it that there existed among Communists so much hate, suspicion, bitterness, and internecine strife? I stood in the midst of people I loved and I was afraid of them. I felt profoundly that they were traveling in the right direction, yet if their having power to rule had depended merely upon my lifting my right hand, I would have been afraid to do so. My heart throbbed and I whispered to myself: God, I love these people, but I’m glad that they’re not in power, or they’d shoot me!
No one spoke to me. Some of the party leaders shot me hostile glances and looked away. Why had I been called in to witness this trial? I sat with jumpy nerves, impatient for the trial to get under way. Despite my fear, I was keenly curious. But I was determined not to participate in any way, for that would have surely, by implication, incriminated me in a network of guilt which I did not share.
Ross, the accused, sat alone at a table in the front of the hall, his face distraught. I felt sorry for him, yet I could not escape feeling that he enjoyed this. For him, this was perhaps the highlight of an otherwise bleak existence.
I was for these people. Being a Negro, I could not help it. They did not hate Negroes. They had no racial prejudices. Many of the white men in the hall were married to Negro women, and many of the Negro men were married to white women. Jews, Germans, Russians, Spaniards, all races and nationalities were represented without any distinctions whatever.
Racial hate had been the bane of my life, and here before my eyes was concrete proof that it could be abolished. Yet a new hate had come to take the place of the rankling racial hate. It was irrational that Communists should hate what they called “intellectuals,” or anybody who tried to think for himself. I had fled men who did not like the color of my skin, and now I was among men who did not like the tone of my thoughts.
In trying to grasp why Communists hated intellectuals, my mind was led back again to the accounts I had read of the Russian Revolution. There had existed in Old Russia millions of poor, ignorant people who were exploited by a few, educated, arrogant noblemen, and it became natural for the Russian Communists to associate betrayal with intellectualism. But there existed in the Western world an element that baffled and frightened the Communist party: the prevalence of self-achieved literacy. Even a Negro, entrapped by ignorance and exploitation—as I had been—could, if he had the will and the love for it, learn to read and understand the world in which he lived. And it was these people that the Communists could not understand. The American Communists, enjoying legality, were using the methods forged by the underground Russian Bolshevik fire, and therefore had to have their followers willing to accept all explanations of reality, even when the actual situation did not call for it.
The heritage of free thought,—which no man could escape if he read at all,—the spirit of the Protestant ethic which one suckled, figuratively, with one’s mother’s milk, that self-generating energy that made a man feel, whether he realized it or not, that he had to work and redeem himself through his own acts, all this was forbidden, taboo. And yet this was the essence of that cultural heritage which the Communist party had sworn to carry forward, whole and intact, into the future. But the Communist party did not recognize the values that it had sworn to save when it saw them; the slightest sign of any independence of thought or feeling, even if it aided the party in its work, was enough to make one suspect, to brand one as a dangerous traitor.
The trial began in a quiet, informal manner. The comrades acted like a group of neighbors sitting in judgment upon one of their kind who had stolen a chicken. Anybody could ask and get the floor. There was absolute freedom of speech. Yet the meeting had an amazingly formal structure of its own, a structure that went as deep as the desire of men to live together.
A member of the Central Committee of the Communist party rose and gave a description of the world situation. He spoke without emotion and piled up hard facts. He painted a horrible but masterful picture of Fascism’s aggression in Germany, Italy, and Japan.
I accepted the reason why the trial began in this manner. It was imperative that there be postulated against what or whom Ross’s crimes had been committed. Therefore there had to be established in the minds of all present a vivid picture of mankind under oppression. And it was a true picture. Perhaps no organization on earth, save the Communist party, possessed so detailed a knowledge of how workers lived, for its sources of information stemmed directly from the workers themselves.
The next speaker discussed the role of the Soviet Union as the world’s lone workers’ state, how the Soviet Union was hemmed in by enemies, how the Soviet Union was trying to industrialize itself, what sacrifices she was making to help the workers of the world to steer a path toward peace through the idea of collective security.
The facts presented so far were as true as any facts could be in this uncertain world. Yet not one word had been said of the accused, who sat listening like any other member. The time had not yet come to include him and his crimes in this picture of global struggle. An absolute had first to be established in the minds of the comrades so that they could measure the success or failure of their deeds by it. There was no mysticism, no invoking of God, merely a passionate identification of all present with a will to right wrongs. It was a simple, elemental morality. Communism had found a moral code that could control the conduct of men, yet it was a code that stemmed from practical living, and not from the injunctions of the supernatural.
Still another speaker rose and described the domestic situation in the United States and linked it with the world scene. This was done in a leisurely, painstaking manner; yet the people in the hall were charged with passion; a sense of human destiny lived; an atmosphere of human frailty was present.
Finally a speaker came forward and spoke of Chicago’s South Side, its Negro population, their sufferings and handicaps, linking all that, also, to the world struggle. Then still another speaker followed and described the tasks of the Communist party of the South Side. At last, the world, the national, and the local pictures had been fused into one overwhelming drama of moral struggle in which everybody in the hall was participating. This presentation had lasted for more than three hours, but it had enthroned a new sense of reality in the hearts of those present, a sense of man on earth. With the exception of the church and its myths and legends, there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth
and the people upon it as the Communist party.
I knew, as I watched, that I was looking at the future of mankind, that this way of living would finally win out. I knew that in no other way could the emotional capacities, the passional nature of men be so deeply tapped. In no other system yet devised could man so clearly reveal his destiny on earth, a destiny to rise and grapple with the world in which he lives, to wring from it the satisfactions he feels he must have. I knew, as I watched and listened, that but few people understood the essence of Communism, its passional dynamics; but a few knew that Communism was more important than any of its individual parties, than the sum of all its tactics, strategies, theories, mistakes, and tragedies. I knew that once this system became entrenched on earth, for good or bad, it could not fail, that all Europe and her armies could not destroy the Soviet Union, that the spirit of self-sacrifice that Communism engendered in men would astound the world.
And these people had asked me to come and listen to another man being tried so that I might know what was in store for me if I went wrong. I was with them. Could I not rise up and tell them? But, even as I thought of it, I knew they would not be able to know when I was telling the truth. My kind of helping was something frightening to them. If I talked, I would only incriminate myself further.
I had wanted to tell others what these men felt. I understood their impulses, the long years’ privation and hurt out of which they had come to Communism. I knew that I did not know as much politics as Buddy Nealson, as the members of the Central Committee, or the members of the Communist International. Politics was not my game; the human heart was my game, but it was only in the realm of politics that I could see the depths of the human heart. I had wanted to make others see what was in the Communist heart, what the Communists were after; but I was on trial by proxy, condemned by them.
Toward evening the direct charges against Ross were made, not by the leaders of the party but by Ross’s friends, those who knew him best! It was crushing. Ross wilted. His emotions could not withstand the weight of the moral pressure. No one was terrorized into giving information against him. They gave it willingly, citing dates, conversations, scenes. The black mass of Ross’s wrongdoing emerged slowly and irrefutably. He could not deny it. No one could.
American Hunger Page 12
