Lonely Crusade

by Chester B Himes

  How race had come to be within him not a designation of a people, but a real and live emotion, stronger than love or hate or fear, containing the compulsion for self-identity so urgent at times he felt that nothing less than murder would create the acceptance of his humanity in this living world.

  Listening, probing, the analyst had drawn it out of him like some malignant cancer and had prescribed a cure. First, to overcome the fixation of racial inferiority, McKinley must possess a white woman. He must marry her and have children by her—this to overcome the psychosis of race. But within the society where he lived, he might never overcome class. So he must marry a white peasant girl because he was of peasant stock himself.

  McKinley had married Sylvia, a second-generation Russian Jew from New York’s lower East Side. He had possessed her body and soul, fathered her first child, Miriam, and had felt secure. They had been happy and contented, and for a time his life had seemed normal. They had moved to Chicago and had prospered.

  But within the very cure had been the germ of its recurrence. For in time McKinley came to interpret the very prescription as an acknowledgment by the analyst of the fact of Negroes’ inferiority. He had sought cure from the fear and had been presented with the fact.

  He had become convinced that the analyst, even while prescribing for his cure, had known that in this society there was no cure. He became certain that the analyst had known beyond all doubt that over the centuries of oppression—an oppression of body, spirit, and soul so complete that no one had ever plumbed its depths; an oppression composed of abuses that had completely destroyed the moral fiber of an entire people, abuses to the innate structure and character and spirit so brutal that their effect was inheritable like syphilis—the Negroes of America had actually become an inferior people.

  This conviction had tortured him, had driven him from job to job, from city to city, and more than ever he felt the urge to kill white men. Finally he convinced himself that there were many people in the world—perhaps all intelligent people—who, like the analyst, knew beyond all doubt that the Negroes were mentally ill from this oppression—ill beyond the circumstances of their present lives. People who knew that these products of oppression would be ill in any environment under any conditions, and that only centuries of equality—the mixing of blood and race and culture—would ever effect a cure.

  Now, sitting in his living-room, plotting the murder of Louis Foster, McKinley knew that he was insane. But the knowledge did not terrify him, because he was through fighting against it. He had accepted it. He would kill this white man, he resolved. And if that did not do any good he would kill himself.

  Now that he had settled that he gave his whole attention to the planning of the murder. An accident would be next to impossible—he discarded that. There were too many safety devices, the safety inspectors were always on the alert, and Foster did not take unnecessary risks.

  But there were other ways. He knew of two frailties in Foster’s character he felt certain could be put to use—Foster’s lightning temper, giving vent to uncontrollable rages, especially at being thwarted by a Negro, and his deep, gouging hatred for the union, which he could scarcely contain. Few others suspected such foibles in Foster’s make-up, but McKinley had the faculty of seeing first the evil in all white men.

  Once he had seen Foster move as if to slap a Negro who had brushed him with a hand truck. Watching him ride out his rage McKinley had thought to himself: “If he would slap me I would kill him.”

  And from that quite suddenly came the plan, simple in its formulation and foolproof in its execution. He would begin working for the union as a volunteer organizer, passing out literature in the shop. This would enrage Foster on two counts and would strike at both of his weaknesses. It would be very easy to stage an incident that would send Foster into a rage. Perhaps he would need do no more than let Foster see him reading union literature on the job. Then he would have a weapon within easy reach—perhaps a ball-peen hammer. He would wait until Foster had slapped him, and then as if he had gone out of his senses, he would snatch the hammer and bash out Foster’s brains with a single blow. It would be an open-and-shut case of temporary insanity, Public opinion would condemn him, yes, but no court would convict him. And what was more, he would have the support of the union for he would have become a martyr to a cause.

  Now for a moment his thoughts lingered on Lee Gordon as he had first seen him sitting there in the union shack ringed in by hostile whites, and he said to himself: “I’ll call him and offer my aid; by the time I have killed Foster they will have made him into a perfect witness.”

  But first he called to his stolid blond wife: “Sylvia! Sylvia!” When she appeared in the doorway he asked with sharp suspicion: “Where have you been all day, dear?”

  Chapter 6

  LESTER McKINLEY opened the door and said in his softly modulated voice: “Come in, Mr. Gordon, come in; we are awaiting you.” He appeared stiffly formal in collar and tie and a blue-bordered, gray flannel smoking jacket.

  Lee turned his thin, gaunt face to the brightness of the scene and was suddenly cheered. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  After taking his coat and hat McKinley introduced him to his wife: “Mr. Gordon, Mrs. McKinley.”

  “I’m happy to meet you, Mr. Gordon.” She came forward and extended her hand. “My husband speaks so well of you.”

  “Oh—how do you do?” Lee stammered, belatedly accepting her hand. “I didn’t know Mr. McKinley had given me a thought.”

  “But he has,” she assured him with a smile. “You made a good impression on him.”

  “Oh—well I’m glad of that,” Lee said.

  It was not so much the fact of her being white, as it was the unexpected that caught him off his balance. McKinley had certainly not impressed him as being a Communist, and among Negro workers he expected only Communists to have white wives. But it was a pleasant surprise, for he liked her immediately.

  “And now I would like you to meet my children,” McKinley said, putting his arms about the two children who had materialized by his sides. “This is Miriam—she is nine years old and in the fourth grade; and this is Lester Junior, who is six and in the first grade.”

  They greeted Lee seriously and he spoke to them seriously in return. Then Sylvia brought the baby in her arms for him to see. They were all beautiful children with brown wavy hair and complexions of sepia and rose, alert but well mannered. Lee was profoundly impressed by their appearance of intelligence.

  “Mr. Gordon is organizing a union in our plant,” McKinley explained. “In that way our rights will be better protected.”

  Miriam nodded solemnly and Lester Junior looked at Lee with childish awe. But Lee felt like an intruder, bringing such a controversial topic as the union into that perfect family scene. He was relieved when Sylvia took them off to bed.

  “It’s an hour past Junior’s bedtime, but we wanted you to meet them,” McKinley explained.

  “It was a pleasure to meet them,” Lee replied.

  “Be seated,” McKinley said, for Lee was still standing. “May I fix you a highball?”

  “That will be fine,” Lee said, and a few minutes later they were settled comfortably for their discussion of the union.

  “What is Foster’s official position on the union?” McKinley asked.

  “No one seems to know. Joe Ptak—he’s the white organizer—takes it for granted that Foster is opposed to the union.”

  “That would be my opinion.”

  “I don’t know. From all I hear he seems to be very shrewd. And after all the union won’t cause any trouble for management.”

  The poor boy doesn’t know, McKinley thought as he sat calmly studying the haggard lines in Lee’s thin face. “However, I would say that Foster will fight the union with an unrestrained viciousness,” he finally said.

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Lee replied. “He doesn’t seem that sort of man.”

  “Are you acquainted with him?” McKinley asked.<
br />
  “Well, no. I’m just going on what I’ve heard.”

  “It does seem a bit far-fetched,” McKinley said with a smile, “but I am acquainted with the man.”

  “Oh, is that so? Then of course you know much more about it than I.”

  “Much more than you will ever know,” McKinley thought with an outward air of attentiveness. “For I know what this bastard thinks of both you and me, therefore I do not have to strive for fairness in my talk of him.” “Foster is a bitter and ill-tempered man given to violent rages,” he said aloud. “And he hates the union in a deadly manner—that much I know.”

  Lee showed his amazement, for McKinley quickly added: “He keeps his feelings well concealed, I will admit, but I think that I am right about him, Mr. Gordon.”

  “Oh, well—” Incredulity struggled with concession in Lee’s revealing face. “I was going to ask your help, but if it’s dangerous—” He broke off lamely.

  Insanity? Of course it was insanity, McKinley told himself, looking at the tired, dull hurt in Lee Gordon’s eyes. This thin, too intense, tightly hurting boy across from him was also insane, but did not know it yet, as were all Negroes, he told himself. But aloud he said pleasantly: “I will be glad to help you, Mr. Gordon, regardless of the danger. That is why I sent for you tonight.” And with a sudden smile he added: “Perhaps I’ve grossly exaggerated the danger of Louis Foster—he’s just a human being after all.”

  Lee returned his smile and said: “I think so too; not that I was going to charge you with gross exaggeration.”

  “The worst that could happen would be for him to lose his temper and strike me,” McKinley conjectured. “And if I kept my temper there would be no great harm done.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he would do that,” Lee said. “At least I hope not.”

  “You need have no fear of me: I have a pretty level head,” McKinley reassured him.

  “Thank God that some of us do,” Lee said. “Now as to what you will have to do, all I want at the present is for you to distribute a few leaflets announcing the time of the meetings.”

  “You have only to give them to me, Mr. Gordon, and I will distribute them not only to the workers in my department but to all the workers I meet,” McKinley said.

  “Thank you,” Lee said, arising. “It has really been a pleasure to meet a man of your intelligence among the workers at Comstock.”

  “I strive more for sanity than for intelligence,” McKinley replied enigmatically, helping Lee into his coat.

  “Well, I certainly thank you, and good night.”

  “Good night, Mr. Gordon.”

  Walking through the dark night to catch the streetcar home, Lee’s thoughts lingered long on McKinley and his family. His was certainly a favorable example of the mixing of the races. Maybe it was the salvation of the Negro, after all, for McKinley seemed as calm and sensible and sane as a man could wish to be. Lee wondered what would be his own reaction to a white wife. It was hard to imagine. Yet he deeply envied McKinley his.

  Chapter 7

  AT THE END of the working day that Saturday, Luther invited Lee to a party at his house. “Bring your old lady, man, we gonna have a time.”

  “Oh, we seldom go out any more—” Lee broke off because he could not bring himself to add “together.”

  “I tells you what, you brings your old lady to dinner and just stay on,” Luther said persistently. “The party begins right after anyway.”

  “Well—I’ll see what Ruth has to say.” It would be a change, he thought.

  Leaving Luther in the car parked before his house, he went in alone to speak to Ruth. But she did not want to come.

  “You always objected when I wanted to go to some Communist affair,” she reminded him.

  “But that was different,” he said. “I’m using them.”

  “So was I.”

  “No you weren’t! You weren’t doing anything but running around with them, agitating and having a fine time.”

  “Why, Lee, that isn’t so. You know, yourself—”

  “Oh, let’s don’t argue,” he cut in. “Do you want to go or don’t you?”

  “You make everything so hard,” she answered, but when he turned and started off, she reluctantly said: “Oh, all right, I’ll go.”

  But the spontaneity was gone. Standing there a moment before replying, his head seemed to swell almost to bursting with a resentment underscored with bitter fury. Why couldn’t she just say yes for once without always pointing out his inconsistencies? Why did his slightest request have to bring on this bickering? Did she think he was an idiot, incapable of judgment? But to her he merely said: “Never mind, I’ll go alone,” and went out of the house and left her.

  On the long drive out to Hollywood the fury left but the resentment kept riding him. With a stumbling preoccupation he followed Luther up the stairway over a garage into an incredibly disarranged room of lush, low divans, loud-colored sofas, and oil paintings. In opposite corners sat a black-faced doll with huge red lips and a white-faced doll with golden hair, facing across a white brick fireplace that smoked lazily. Four shaded lamps turned on against the early dusk shed a diffused green light over the Bohemian scene, stirring within Lee’s mind the first faint traces of aversion.

  “Caliban?” A voice throaty with sex greeted them from the kitchen along with the smell of cooking food.

  “Me, baby,” Luther called.

  A middle-aged, horse-faced woman with burning eyes and a thin, wide mouth came into the room.

  “Mollie, Lee,” Luther introduced. “This my old lady, man. Ain’t she fine?”

  In the queer green light her hair was bright orange and her skin an embalmed white. Her short, chubby feet, white on top and blackish on the bottom with purple painted nails, were bare. And her soft, sagging body, which seemingly had reached satiety in years long past, was clad only in dirty green satin pajamas. There was an abandon in both her manner and appearance that was slightly obscene. She looked at Lee and began laughing.

  “So this is Lee?”

  “Oh—you’ve heard of me?” Lee stammered self-consciously.

  “Should I have?” she asked, laughing with her lips while her bright blue eyes appraised him with a predacious stare.

  “Oh, well no, that is—Well, you said: ‘So this is Lee,’ and I thought—”

  Now her laughter came in gales. “It’s the Continental manner.”

  Luther sat on a divan, took off his shoes and sox, and flexed his big, splayed feet which were black on top and whitish on the bottom. “What you got to eat, old lady?” he asked.

  “I call him Caliban,” she said to Lee. “Don’t you think he’s marvelous?”

  “Well, er, I don’t know what—”

  “Oh, don’t bother,” she cut him off.

  “As Marx would say,” Luther said, “a misdirected intent.”

  Laughingly Mollie returned to the kitchen, her buttocks jiggling loosely in the pajamas.

  Kicking a sofa to one side, Luther crossed the room and stacked Sibelius’s First Symphony on the record player. Against the symphonic music, he was grotesque, with his long, black, muscle-roped arms swinging from the white, T-shirted, convex slope of his shoulders like an ape’s. The impulse to laugh welled up in Lee but Luther’s appearance of absorption in the music quelled it.

  “You like that?” Lee asked.

  “I likes it,” Luther replied solemnly. “No culture too high for the proletariat.”

  Lee could not decide whether he was being kidded or not. Luther continued to appear absorbed. Then Mollie returned to the room with a tray of vodka highballs and turned off the record player.

  “Enough culture for one day, my Caliban,” she said, then lifted her glass. “To F. D. R.”

  “To Joe Stalin,” Luther said.

  “To the three component parts of Marxism,” Lee said slyly. He caught the quick glances exchanged between Mollie and Luther and grinned to himself.

  But Mollie only said: “This
calls for another,” and when she had refilled the glasses, moved Lee’s coat and pulled Lee down on the divan beside her.

  “Well, what do you think about it?” she asked brightly, looking him slowly over with a disrobing, half-laughing interest.

  “Er, about what?”

  “Oh, anything. The war, politics, Marx, or Freud.”

  “Oh, well—I’m not distinguished for my thinking.”

  “Nor is my Caliban. But he doesn’t let that stop him from expounding on Marx and other of his gods.”

  “I’m not a parlor pink,” Luther said, giving her a flat, muddy look. “Sucking around the party ‘cause I’m scared there might be a revolution and I’ll lose my little income.”

  “You’re converted,” she jibed.

  “Not converted—convinced! After the war people like you’ll be running back to your fascist friends.”

  “I was a Marxist abroad long before it became popular over here.”

  “You don’t act like it.”

  Sitting erect, she took the pins from her hair, plied her fingers through it, and let it cascade down about her neck and shoulders. Then she cooed: “Come to me, my intellectual Caliban, my strong, black apostle with the pygmy brain; come to me and make love to me, my dark, designing commissar.”

  “Body Marxist!” Luther said, turning his back to her.

  “Then be an American Negro,” she said laughingly, “and refill our glasses while I talk to Lee.”

  “And make love to ‘im too,” he muttered.

  “At least give us time,” she murmured. “Lee might prefer women of his own race.”

  “Well—yes,” he said.

  “Such insolence! Such bourgeois puritanism! Let’s eat and forget it.”

  Holding to an arm of each, she steered them into the kitchen. When they had seated themselves, Luther said to Mollie: “Say the blessing.”