Lonely Crusade

by Chester B Himes

  COURT: Was that lit up that night?

  J.: No, sir, I don’t think it was.

  COURT: It has been closed for a year.

  MR. B.: When did you see Lieutenant Gregory that evening for the first time?

  J.: I saw Lieutenant and this young lady lying on the ground.

  MR. B.: What was he doing?

  J.: Well, he was on top of her, and I came near walked on them and I jumped back. Because it is a pass there.

  MR. LOESSER: What is that?

  COURT: There is none on the picture here.

  J.: On the picture right in the back over there if you would go out to the space out there you can see it. There is numerous passes between those bushes six and seven and eight foot wide.

  MR. B.: Your Honor, I submit there is.

  COURT: Not where he is showing, no.

  J.: In the back over here, Your Honor.

  COURT: That is not on the picture.

  MR. B.: No, if the Court pleases I submit that is—

  COURT: That is not on the picture. I am talking about the picture.

  MR. B.: I think we ought to be fair.

  COURT: Show me on the picture. Show me the path on the picture.

  J.: I can’t see the pass on the picture.

  COURT: No, that is what I am saying. There is no path on the picture.

  J.: That is full of passes all through the bushes. There is passes enough to drive a truck through.

  MR. B.: How do you know that?

  J.: Because I worked out there in the park.

  COURT: When?

  J.: I worked out in the park in 1936. I worked on WPA.

  COURT: That shovel-leaners’ paradise! So you’re an expert now—working for the government. How long have you lived in San Francisco?

  J.: I came here in 1923.

  MR. B.: Tell the court in your own words what happened.

  J.: When I walked up and I saw him, I stepped back and he jumped up and pulled his trousers up. He said to me: “Why don’t you get out of this park where you belong, nigger?” I looked at him and I said: “I think I got as much right in this park as you have.” I told him: “I am minding my own business.” He said: “Do you know who I am?” I told him: “I don’t know who you are and I don’t care.” He says: “Why, I am a lieutenant in the U. S. Army Air Corps.” I told him: “That don’t make any difference to me.” I said: “I am just a poor fellow minding my own business.” He said to me: “Do you know what they do to you, to guys like you, where I come from?” I said: “That don’t make no difference.” He takes a poke at me and, I struck him and knocked him down. When I knocked him down he hollered for this other guy, and the girl started yelling and hollering for the other guy. And then they both got me down and started kicking me. Then they took me by my arms and twisted my arms up and carried me about one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet away and jumped on me again. When they carried me to the police station, Lieutenant Gregory told the police officers there that I held him up and attempted to rape his girl.

  MR. LOESSER: When you came home you changed from the old rusty boots to these here?

  J.: No, I did not.

  MR. B.: If the Court pleases, I object to the manner of examining the witness, holding a paper in front of the jury.

  MR. L.: Of course, you know as well as I that I can’t call his wife as a witness against him. I have got a statement from the wife where she said he had an old rusty pair of boots on that laced up the front when he came home—

  MR. B.: Just a moment. I object to that and I assign it as a prejudicial misconduct on the part of the District Attorney. He knows he can’t prove indirectly what he can’t prove directly.

  COURT: You have to have two suits on to work?

  J.: Yes, sir. A pair of extra trousers—and every tree topper out there wears the same. You can send a man out there and investigate the project.

  COURT: I don’t care about the project at all. I want to know why you were sneaking around with boots and rubbers on and two suits of clothes.

  J.: I wasn’t sneaking. I was walking.

  MR. B.: I object to that question as improper. There is nothing in the evidence that he was sneaking around.

  COURT: There certainly is—All right, we will take out the word “sneaking”…

  COURT: (instructing the jury) This has been a short case, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. We started it yesterday and we heard the testimony—This is a case in which the witnesses on one side, five of them, testify one way, and the defendant testifies another way. It is for you to determine on which side lies the truth, and who has reason not to tell the truth…

  (Foreman and jury come back for further instructions)

  Foreman: Is there any difference between attempted rape and rape, whatever it is?

  COURT: Yes, two different offenses.

  FOREMAN: And the bill of information calls for what charge?

  COURT: Rape, yes…

  Rasmus Henry Johnson was found guilty of rape, robbery, and violating section 288A of the California Penal Code.

  After the verdict and before the sentence, Judge Gleason told representatives of the N.A.A.C.P. that he would drop the rape charge if Johnson would plead guilty to robbery and not ask to appeal the case. Johnson said he would rather serve ten thousand years than plead guilty to something he did not do…

  For further information relative to the case of Rasmus Henry Johnson, write to:

  MRS. MARY EMMERSON, SECRETARY, LOS ANGELES JOHNSON DEFENSE COMMITTEE.

  When Lee Gordon came to the end he did not want to stop, for now he would have to determine the reason Jackie had given him this, and he did not feel up to hating anyone that morning. He felt only a sickening dread, akin to nausea, and the tremendous, overwhelming desire to be safely in Ruth’s arms.

  So engrossed had he become that he had ridden to the end of the line at Pershing Square, and wearily he alighted. For a time he sat slumped on a park bench in the early morning fog. Aside from the usual coterie of homeless bums, the square was deserted so early on a Sunday morning, and Lee did not see the bums. He felt lost, alone, the one remaining inhabitant of a lost world with only this conviction that he had to reach—was it a threat or a warning?

  His mind kept rebeling against the thought that she would threaten him, although it would be just like a Communist to employ revolutionary propaganda as a personal means of threatening. But if she did not mean it as a threat, why should she feel impelled to warn him, and against what? Did she think he ran about the city attacking white women at will? Or was she just trying to illustrate for his own benefit how easily the case of Rasmus Johnson might have become the case of Lee Gordon, had she screamed?

  Could this be what Jackie was trying to tell him by the document, that only her pity for him had saved him from a prison sentence, to impress him with the quality of her soul? If she was being noble at his expense, he told himself, he would hate her just as much as for the other.

  Whatever had been her motive, she had succeeded only in frightening him, he reflected as he started doggedly for home. Could this then be what she had intended after all?

  Chapter 10

  SHE WAS sitting on the top step when she saw him turn into the walk. Her heart gave one great leap of pure relief and the cold wet air gushed into her lungs. And as suddenly it sank again. He looked so bowed and beaten. Everything down inside of her began to cry.

  “Lee!” It was a prayer.

  At the sound of her voice he saw her. He had not seen her before and now he stopped and did not move. Every fiber of his being went defensive.

  “Well, say what you got to say and get it over with!” he said.

  “Is it that bad?” she asked gently.

  “Is what that bad? What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing, Lee.” Now only despondency was in her voice.

  For a moment longer he stood with his lips slightly parted. Inside of him were all these things he wanted her to know—the whole abhorrent sto
ry of the evening—dammed at the very tip of his tongue by the fear she wouldn’t understand. He felt like crying over this, for once they could have laughed at everything, at least discussed it, even the episode at Jackie’s. For together they had seen the nude white women in the burlesque shows on Main Street, holding nothing back. His curiosity had been no secret then, and often, with her knowledge, an aphrodisiac. Now with the conviction that this would never be again, he closed his mouth and went inside the house and shut the door behind him. After a moment of dull regret he began undressing.

  She came in and asked him quietly: “Do you want breakfast now?”

  “No.”

  “Coffee? It’s already made.”

  “Nothing.”

  “I think I will have some coffee,” she said and went into the kitchen.

  He put on his robe and came out and stood in the kitchen doorway. A place was set for him but he did not take it. Finally he said: “Everybody got drunk and just kept staying, that’s all.”

  She did not reply and nervously he lit a cigarette. If she had made the opening then, he would have told her all. It was bursting in his heart to tell her. And if she had known that this was so, she would have made the opening if it killed her. For at this moment, more than anything in all the world, she wanted him to talk to her, lean on her, confide in her, as once he had always done. For in his distress she was his haven, wouldn’t he remember that? For to be his haven gave her the strength to be his slave, and that was what he wanted, wasn’t it? And that was the road to happiness again, she knew. But like Lee, she did not know the words to make the opening, and there they stopped, two people with the one desire separated by perhaps no more than a single little gesture.

  As the silence ran on, weighted with this yearning, he could not stand it. “Goddamnit, what are you mad about?” he said defensively. “You stay out all hours of night on your job.”

  “I’m not angry, Lee.” She too was defensive. “I was just worried.”

  “Worried about what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. About everything. I thought maybe something had happened to you.”

  “What could happen to me at a party of Jewish Communists?”

  “I thought maybe you had been run over by an automobile, or had been arrested, or gotten beaten up or something.” Her face contained an odd expression of guilt, as if she had committed a sin by worrying. “I can’t help but worry when you stay out like that.”

  Now his defensiveness ran out into soft contrition. “You shouldn’t worry like that, Ruth. Nothing’s going to happen to me. Damn! I just went to a party.”

  And then he thought of Jackie and his breath caught up short.

  “I know it sounds silly,” she said, “but I can’t help it. You worry too. Just worrying—about anything, everything!” She took a sighing breath. “I never know, Lee. I just can’t ever tell—anything might happen. I don’t want to worry, but with you keyed up and tense all the time—” And suddenly she was crying; tears streamed down her face into her coffee and her quivering lips looked swollen.

  She touched him then. He went over and put his arm about her shoulder. “I’m sorry, baby doll.”

  She buried her face against his stomach and beneath his hand her body shook with sobbing. “I suppose there’re a lot of people afraid in the world, but I don’t want to be afraid.” She beat her clenched fists spasmodically on the table top. “I don’t want to be afraid! I don’t want ever to be afraid, Lee.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid, baby doll,” he said, trying to console her.

  “I’m always afraid,” she sobbed. “You make me afraid, Lee.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve just always been afraid with you and I wasn’t afraid before.” She sobbed hysterically. “I don’t want to be afraid, Lee.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Nothing, Lee; it’s nothing you do, it’s nothing at all. It’s just me, it’s all in me.”

  “Are you afraid without me?”

  “I’m not afraid on my job.” And she looked up as if in wonder. “No, I’m not. And when I’m around other people, I’m not afraid. What is it, Lee? What’s wrong with us?”

  He took a long, deep breath to steady the hurt in him, and when he spoke there was only the lie in his voice: “I don’t know, Ruth.” Because he knew what was wrong with them was only what was wrong with himself.

  “I don’t want to be such a cry baby.” Her voice came muffled through his robe. “But I get so scared, Lee. And when you’re scared too I can tell it, and that makes me worse. I never told you, Lee, but I didn’t sleep a wink all the time we stayed at old man Harding’s. Remember how we both used to get—you did too, I knew—just that sort of crazy trepidation. I feel that always now with you.”

  “Don’t cry, baby doll, don’t cry,” he said. The sobbing of her body beneath his hand was like his own requiem. “Don’t cry.” After a silence he added: “I didn’t sleep either.”

  “What is it, Lee? Do you know?”

  “I wish I did,” Lee said, gone now down the bitter road of memory.

  They had gone to live in old man Harding’s house the second year of their marriage before he began work on WPA. The old man had been one of several dishwashers at a hotel where he was bussing dishes. At the first tray of dishes he had lugged in from the dining-room, the old man had snapped at him: “Don’t put those dishes there!”

  He had put down the tray and from it picked a heavy salt-cellar. “If you say another word to me, I’ll knock out your brains!” he had threatened.

  Several days later old man Harding had reproached him, “You shouldn’t talk to an old man like you did, son.”

  “Well, let an old man tend to his own business.”

  “You don’t like this work?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I didn’t like it either when I first started. I’m a watchmaker by profession,” he had added proudly.

  “Why aren’t you working at it?”

  “My hands.” The old man had spread his gnarled and twisted fingers. “Oh, I don’t mind it now. As soon as I get enough money, I’m going home to see my boy.”

  From that had grown a strange friendship. Between trays they had talked a little, and Lee had told him of his hopes and ambitions and had listened to the old man talk of the man he once had been. After a week they had begun eating together in the dining-room for the help off from the kitchen, and Lee had told the old man of his wonderful wife and the places where they had had to live.

  Old man Harding had felt sorry for him, but he did not discover it until Harding was about to leave for Altoona, Pennsylvania, to visit his son. He had offered Lee the use of his house while he was gone.

  “Leastways, you and your wife can have a place of your own till I get back.”

  “Your home?”

  “It’s not much, but it’s mine.”

  “Well—” Lee had not known just how to thank him.

  But the old man had not wanted thanks. “Young married people ought to have a place to themselves,” was the way he had put it.

  Lee had never thought of the old man as being white—probably because he had been a dishwasher—until he and Ruth moved into the old man’s house and felt lost in a strange neighborhood, fifteen minutes from the streetcar line, an hour and a half from downtown, and cut off from the black world.

  It was a run-down, unpainted shack overgrown with crawling Jose vines, weeds, and wild geraniums, located in City Terrace, far out in the northeast section of the city. Outside, the underbrush teemed with garter snakes, gophers, lizards, and lice, and inside through the dry, faded wallpaper, cracked and peeling from the walls, and in and out the crumbling cupboards and dilapidated furnishings, rats played a slithering cacophony.

  In his twenty years of ownership, old man Harding had never installed gas or electricity and had depended for water on a spigot in the backyard. There was a small coal stove in the kitchen and a tumble-down outhouse i
n the weeds at the back of the lot.

  On both sides were vacant lots also overgrown with weeds. Beyond, going up the hill toward the reservoir, lived Mexicans, and going down toward City Terrace Drive, lived Jews. Several families of white Southern migrants lived on the cutoff circling down behind.

  Ruth had hated the place on sight—the filth and the lack of sanitation and modern conveniences, and all the hard, drudging work that had to be done to make it livable. But they could save rent, she had reasoned, and the cheap Jewish markets were near by, so they had prepared to make the best of it.

  At first it had been the creaking, ghostly noises in the middle of the night, the slithering of lizards across the roof, the horrible gnawing of rats as if any minute they would come through the walls and devour them both alive.

  Then she had almost stepped on a snake on the back porch that first Monday morning. After that she had refused to venture through the dense undergrowth as far as the backhouse, and before they could find a diaper pot she had contracted constipation.

  The second night one of the white women who lived behind them had frightened Ruth terribly by picking her way down the front walk with a flashlight. Ruth had seen the light and had come screaming to him: “Somebody’s coming! Somebody’s coming!”

  The woman had heard her. “It’s only me, a neighbor,” she had called.

  Lee had welcomed her in, but Ruth, in the reaction from her fright, had been hostile. But the woman had merely called, she said, to warn them that the Jewish people down below were trying to get the white people to drive them from the neighborhood.

  “That Mrs. Friedman called to tell me some colored people had moved in here and if we didn’t get ‘em out the price of our property would go down. I told her: ‘So what, the price of our property ain’t worth nothing nohow and the colored people got to live somewhere.’”

  Then Tuesday afternoon before Lee had returned from work, Mrs. Finklestein had caught Ruth alone and had warned her that the white people in back were planning to do something to them.

  That night they lay awake as they had lain awake the night before. Now in addition to their fear of the dark and the noises, the rats and the snakes, had come the fear of white people scheming against them. But they did not want each other to know they were awake—lying there in a dry sweat, each simulating sleep, lying rigid until their bodies ached. At the slightest sound carefully raising their heads on aching necks to free both ears for listening, their breath catching in their lungs, hurting in their diaphragms.