Lonely Crusade

by Chester B Himes

  “Oh, Lee, you’re so tight. Can I fix you some dinner?”

  “All you can do is kiss me,” he said, roughly taking her in his arms. For to him in that moment of seeing her eyes go disappointed came the necessity for taking her as a woman, shorn of race, brutally if required, or ever be denied his physical masculinity.

  His lips sought hers, searching, feverishly demanding, until he could feel all of her flowing up to him. And she could not stop herself. She became like a river running up a hill, spreading her ardor on the warm plateau of his passion. He shook her then, to the core of her reserve, struck her loose in a strange, remote, terrifying wilderness of sensuality. Now she became a woman in all of the contradictions it entailed. Her body cried out to him for love while her mind whirled in racial chaos. But once, before the breath had left them both, she closed her mind and was lost in the great black interdiction. And when she opened it, their mouths were apart, gasping, while their bodies clung and she trembled from head to foot.

  “Ill make coffee,” she said, tearing herself from him. But so weak had she become she could scarcely make the distance to the kitchen.

  Lee went over and sat on the divan, stretching out his legs toward the cold fireplace. Well, he had finally scratched her cool, white surface, he thought, and it was disillusioning to discover that she was just another woman underneath. And now he knew without having to go any further that whatever it was he was looking for, she didn’t have it either. In a way he wished he hadn’t come.

  By the time she had made coffee she had regained an outer composure although inside she still tingled with an unceasing warmth. And when she appeared with the two steaming cups, she said: “I love you, darling,” soulfully, coming over to sit beside him on the divan.

  Although that night before as they had lain naked in each others arms she had said the same: “I love you, I love you, I love you,” reaching the culmination of ardor, her saying it now as she stood in the light and fully robed startled him—not the words, for the words were trite. It wasn’t the proclamation of an emotion, for this he did not believe, but her naive assumption that the knowledge that he was loved by a white woman should be of so much help.

  He gave an abrupt burst of laughter.

  It shocked her but it did not hurt her, for she was white enough to take it. That he was rejecting her race would never occur to her, and that at this time he would repulse her body was no less inconceivable. She attributed it to his distraught condition further aggravated by his desire for her, and was actually sincere in wanting to help him.

  “Tell me what happened, Lee.”

  “Haven’t you heard? I thought all the Communists would know by now that I’ve been maligning their favorite comrade.”

  “There has been a little talk, of course—” The telephone wires had buzzed and telegrams had gone from coast to coast and every party member knew all there was to know concerning Lee’s accusation against Luther and were waiting breathlessly for instructions from the national committee—“But I haven’t heard your side.”

  “Why hear my story, Jackie? You know the truth—you and Bart and all the rest of you,” he said. “You knew the other night when we sat here and you fronted me off to—”

  “No, Lee darling,” she interrupted. “Don’t say it, please.” She put her palm across his mouth. “You’re so confused, Lee darling, don’t make it any worse.”

  He removed her hand and held it in his own as he continued: “You knew then while you were offering me on a platter to your fellow traitors as the Judas to put Lester McKinley on the spot. And you thought that because—”

  “You know I wouldn’t do that to you, Lee. You know I wouldn’t—” The sound of the tears in her voice drawing his gaze to the pure, open innocence of her eyes. “You know I wouldn’t, Lee, you know it!”

  “Why wouldn’t you?” he asked, and from this she should have known that he had changed.

  But she said: “Because I love you, Lee,” as ardently as ever, and reached up and drew him down to the full benediction of her lips. It was not the same as before but she did not know it, and rising in her glory she stood looking down at him.

  “I believe Luther accepted the money from Foster, darling,” she conceded. “But you are giving the incident a bourgeois interpretation, and it was conceived with Marxist intent. You see—” And now as to a little child. “—we don’t have the same set of ethics as the bourgeoisie, or rather, we do most of our fighting with the ethics of the upper class, and in a bourgeois society these are denied the working class. Honesty to the employer, for instance, is in no way like the kind of honesty he demands from his employee. You know that, darling—”

  “Jackie baby, you have a wonderful body but your ankles are too thick,” he taunted.

  She swirled with a motion of frustration, blushing furiously. “You go to hell!”

  It was then that Mollie knocked. Taking one look at Jackie’s blushing fury and Lee’s hurt cynicism, she began laughing. “The course of true love is overrun with ashes, as the poets say.”

  “Do you have your car?” Jackie asked tensely.

  “Yes, dear,” Mollie said. “I shall take other means to prove my militant communistic zeal than walking myself to death.”

  “Then you can take Lee with you.”

  “No, dear. You would only lather yourself to frustration and wouldn’t sleep a wink. And you would curse me all night for it.”

  “You are a dirty bitch!” Jackie said with insulting deliberation.

  “Of course,” Mollie said, laughingly. “But I’m not drowning myself with warm douches every night.”

  Jackie gave her one last furious look and went into the kitchen. Crossing the room to sit beside Lee on the divan, Mollie laid her hand caressingly on his knee.

  “What’s all this between you and my ardent Caliban?”

  “He’s just a rat, that’s all.”

  “Of course he’s a rat,” she said. “And aren’t we all?”

  “At least I’m not the kind of a rat who sells his buddies out.”

  “Now, Lee darling, that doesn’t sound like you. Leave the nobility to the Hearst editorial writers.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m tired of talking about it. If Luther sent you, go back and tell him I say he’s a rat and always will be a rat.”

  “No one in the Communist Party believes Luther took a bribe from Foster,” Mollie said.

  “What do I care? I know he took it. He wouldn’t have stood up there and lied like that.”

  “You don’t know Luther, darling. He’d do anything to save his skin.”

  “I was there and I know he wasn’t lying.”

  “Don’t be silly, darling.” She caressed his leg. “If Luther needed five hundred dollars he wouldn’t have to sell out the union; he could always get that much from me.”

  “He’s probably got that much from you anyway—”

  “Of course.”

  “But I still say he sold out the union.”

  “Oh, don’t be so damn honest,” she snapped. “You know Luther took the money and I know he took it. He’s just a black incorrigible rascal, and what’re you going to do about it? The party is going to back him and you can’t beat the party—why don’t you make him divide it with you,” she suggested.

  “Why don’t you?”

  “I have tried, darling; don’t think I haven’t.”

  From the kitchen doorway, Jackie said: “You are the most unscrupulous, disloyal, despicable bitch I’ve ever seen! I suppose it makes no difference to you what sort of person you sleep with.”

  “If he isn’t tired. I’m past the stage of warm baths and sleepless nights for virtue’s sake. Why don’t you get married, dear? Your nerves are shot.”

  “An Arizona wedding like yours?”

  Mollie began laughing again. “What’s a wedding to a Communist? All ceremony is performed in bed.”

  “I’m sure Lee doesn’t appreciate your vulgarity.”

  “
Oh, Lee is nursing his honor now.” She squeezed Lee’s thigh. “But I bet he isn’t tired.”

  “I appreciate neither your corny wit nor Luther’s dirty advice,” Lee said.

  Mollie arose and prepared to leave. “The Communists liked you, Lee. They thought you and Luther made a good pair.” Laughingly she added: “Two big strong dark men of purpose.” At the door she turned and smiled toward Jackie. “You’ll sleep well tonight, I’m sure. Then you’ll see what I mean.”

  For a perceptible time after Mollie had closed the door behind her, Jackie was too embarrassed to look at Lee. But Lee was lost in brooding again. Even an old lecherous bitch like Mollie had to feel sorry for him, he thought. He was tired of it. Tired of everyone taking him for a sniveling brat—a lying, vicious weakling. Even his own wife—

  When Jackie finally looked at him, she saw the change and crossed quickly to his side. “What’s the matter, darling?”

  Slowly he rose to his feet. “Jackie,” he said, looking down at her, “once you mentioned that we were no good for each other.” Now there was again that slow falter in his speech.

  “But we hardly knew each other then, darling,” she said softly. “You know I don’t think so now.”

  “Well—we’re not,” Lee Gordon said, and turning away without seeing the pity that came instantly into her face, went unhesitatingly across the room, out of the apartment, down the stairs, into the night. At least he felt a satisfaction.

  Chapter 22

  BART SAT behind his battered desk, his broad, muscular shoulders drooping, and his tired, black face set in solid melancholy. It was late. Save for himself, the offices of the Communist Party were deserted. There was no longer any need for him to pretend, and his emotions had seeped through his mask.

  Deep, disturbing thoughts were settling slowly over the hard crust of communistic rationale, and doubts flared momentarily in the dark blind line of obedience. Before him lay the directive from the national committee ordering the state committee to kill the rumors of betrayal at Comstock and issue a memorandum concerning Luther’s innocence. He knew fully the implication of this order and what it entailed. In the Soviet Union someone would be taken out and shot. Here they executed in another way.

  Bart had been thinking of this business since the incident occurred. And he had known the irrefutable answer before the directive had been received. There was only this answer to know, for to the politically initiate the logic of such a position was elementary Marxism.

  And Bart was a good Marxist. He fully understood that in a revolutionary movement the objective must be attained by any means. As set forth in the Communist Manifesto, “In this struggle—a veritable civil war—are united and developed all the elements necessary for a coming battle.”

  Therefore guilt and innocence were inapplicable in the moral sense. Revolutionary tactics were not to be interpreted in the light of bourgeois concepts, or defined by bourgeois terminology, but considered only in terms of preparation for the coming battle.

  Did not Marx write: “Law, morality, religion, are…so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.”

  The guilty were those who hindered, obstructed, opposed, or were indifferent to the rise of the proletariat. In revolutionary terminology there was no such thing as neutrality. Those who were not for, were against. And those were also guilty who had to be spent, for in this continuous warfare of the proletariat no individual was beyond sacrifice for the ultimate aim. Had not the Soviets often found it necessary to execute the most loyal Communist to achieve an objective? he reminded himself. And this was as it should be, for materialism was a fact, and loyalty simply a virtue. Materialism embodied loyalty but did not rely on it, for revolution was the order of the day and would ripen like the grain in the field, because this was the rise of the proletariat and could not be stopped.

  And yet there were times such as this when he was more Negro than Communist, and his American instincts were diametrically opposed to the ruthless nonconformity of revolutionary maneuvering; when the long list of his acts as an executive of the Communist Party judged themselves in the light of Christian reason; when the voice of his Baptist mother could be heard in the night of his soul; when virtues such as honesty, loyalty, courage, and kindness, charity, and fair play had meaning and value; when his mind rebelled and could not follow the merciless contradictions of reality; when he no longer wanted to face the fact of his own inferiority in a bourgeois world, but just wanted to be a nigger and forget about it.

  At these times he did not admire himself. He felt no pride in the things he had done. For he had done so many things against his innate convictions. His Protestant, puritanical, Negro inheritance rose to torture him. And that severe division deep in his mind between right and wrong, vice and virtue, complicated his adherence to revolutionary tactics and made it extremely difficult for him to rationalize what seemed at first to be political contradictions.

  He had found it hard to follow the Soviets in their pact with Nazi Germany, and harder still to follow the American Communist Party line through its rejection of minority-group problems and into its coalition with capitalism.

  Vivid in his memory, even then, was that classic thesis in the May 21, 1940, issue of New Masses: “Mr. President: This Is Not Our War—An Open Letter.” And those burning lines: “New Masses calls for the organization of this peace party. The trade unions must be the backbone of this movement and John L. Lewis has pointed the way by suggesting a conference of representatives of labor, the farmers, the youth movement, the Negro people, and the old-age pension groups…” For he had believed it. “To the mothers and sons of America living under the shadow of a terrible fear we bring the vision of a different life…” had been written on his mind.

  As a consequence, it was increasingly necessary for him to return to the Marxist conception of materialistic reality to revive his faith. Just as he had often faced the necessity of convincing himself that there was no such thing as integrity, he now had to convince himself of the reality of this move. It was not that the Communist Party lacked integrity; it simply did not recognize it. For integrity was the virtue imposed by the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat to stabilize oppression. And materialism not only embodied flexibility, but in itself was change, breaking the bonds of all oppression. The field where once gay picnickers lounged in laughing leisure would tomorrow be planted to wheat. And where once there were rock mountains, now there were sand pits. The world changed, moved, progressed. “Motion is the mode of existence of matter,” he quoted in his thoughts. Nothing could stop this. The minds of people, which were but the reflections of matter, reflected this change and were changed by their own reflections. As distances became smaller, ideas became larger. Where once there was religion, now there was reality. Mysticism became lost in materialism. Emotions retained no permanent formation but were shaped by historical necessity.

  By such a process he had arrived at the conclusion that Luther was indispensable long before the national committee had. It was not that Luther was a Marxist—for he was not—or even a believer in communism. What made him so valuable to a revolutionary movement was his simple antagonism toward authority and his deep vicious hatred of white people. He would be a rebel in a socialist state also, Bart knew. Here in America, during what Lenin once described as a “historical development of such magnitude twenty years are no more than a day,” Luther would often embarrass the party, Bart firmly believed. But, ‘later,” as Marx wrote to Engels, “there may come days in which twenty years are concentrated.” And it was for such days that such men as Luther would be needed.

  Yet even as he arrived at this conclusion, Bart knew that it had not been his power of reasoning—which was but memory of his Marxist studies—but his ability to dissemble that had formulated it for him. Just as it had taken him far up the ladder in the Communist Party. This was his racial compensation in a nation where he had known but an inferior role.

  For within Bar
t, as within many Negroes, there had developed a defense mechanism similar to a sixth sense whereby he could reach agreement with his masters with greater accuracy and rapidity than by logic—for delay or disagreement would bring the blow, the kick, the curse. As a dog trotting along in front of his master will instinctively choose the right path at the fork, such Negroes divine the right way to turn in an argument. Thus Bart had risen in the party more rapidly than any intellectual, for while the intellectual was plodding the devious paths of logic, Bart had made the short cut of instinct, leaping to the decision before it had been reached by others, giving color to the legend of his brilliance as a leader.

  But self-revulsion was often the price he paid—such as now. For he knew what he had to do. And the following day he did it. Calling a special meeting of the state committee, he read the directive and pointed out that a sacrifice must be made.

  Then he offered the name of Jackie Forks. Though she had served as a spy for both the party and the union, her service was not indispensable. The party had another spy in the offices of Corn-stock, Vera Slagel, confidential secretary to the company’s president and assistant to the secretary of the board of directors. Unknown to the union organizers, she kept in direct contact only with party executives. Therefore the loss of Jackie would be no great hindrance to the movement.

  On the other hand, the shop workers would be more prone to believe an office worker was the traitor than another shop worker whom they might know. Many shop workers had an innate antagonism toward office workers that would make the discovery of Jackie as a traitor a matter of jubilation. Also of importance was the fact that Jackie had no influential friends within the party, and she did not know any party secrets with which she could oppose her sacrifice.

  But most important of all, Bart pointed out, was her friendship with Lee Gordon. The very fact of her exposure as the traitor would destroy any lingering credence given to Lee’s accusation of Luther and instead cast suspicion on Lee.