Lonely Crusade

by Chester B Himes

  “If it was for myself, I would not even have my job. I would have a husband who supported me—”

  “Well, get one then! Go get him now!”

  “You probably wish I would go out and get some man to add to your support,” she said, employing her sex to the full to hurt him where his inherent chivalry would not allow him to strike back.

  “That is a rotten lie!”

  “Why do you object to that? I couldn’t be any more of a prostitute for you if I did go out and sell my body.” And now it was his honor she sought to despoil: “You couldn’t be any more of a pimp.”

  “Aw, Ruth, damn! Other women work too—”

  “And you admire them for it!”

  “I didn’t say I admired them. I just said they worked too. You aren’t the only woman who ever worked.”

  “Lee, do you have some uncontrollable desire for white women?” she asked conversationally. “If you do, just tell me and I will go out of your life and let you have all the cheap white women you want.”

  “Aw, Ruth—”

  “If you want a white woman, go get one. Try to get one to support you like I have done—”

  “I haven’t asked you to support me. If you haven’t wanted to work why didn’t you quit?”

  “I would have if you could have kept any of your jobs. If you thought about me as much as you do about every little white tramp who comes along, you’d have accepted the job that Mr. Foster offered you—”

  “All I said was that other women work,” he said, cutting her off. “And that started all this argument? Does that make their men pimps too?”

  “If you were just one half as much a man as the lowest white bum—” and now it was his manhood she defiled—“you wouldn’t put a white prostitute above your wife. That’s why white men rule the world today.”

  His tight, thin face resigned itself to torment as he turned his eyes away. And now he groped for the words to tell her how it should be, or how it might have been, if she had ever considered her job in the light of a partnership instead of an individual enterprise. But he did not have any words that he had not already used in vain. So he said: “I’m going to bed.”

  She arose and began taking bedding from the linen closet. “I’m going to sleep on the davenport,” she said.

  He began undressing, cursing to himself.

  At first she simply hated him, but finally the awful terror came again. For now that it had finally happened, she did not see how she could live without him. But God knows she could live with no man unfaithful to her for some white bitch.

  Chapter 23

  WHEN JACKIE FORKS was informed of her expulsion from the union by an anonymous telephone call shortly after the meeting had adjourned, her first reaction was utter shock. She had known that a victim would be offered, both to acquit Luther and quell the ugly talk of treachery, and from the first she had supported the necessity of such a move. Though her heart had been opposed to Bart’s suggestion that she persuade Lee Gordon to denounce Lester McKinley as the traitor, as a good party member she had readily consented.

  But that they would dare offer her as the victim had been unthinkable. For not only had she thought herself inviolable within the party, but sacrosanct within the world. Unlike the others who sought to escape racial and religious persecutions, she did not have to be a Communist. She was the kind of American whom even Hitler would have welcomed—fair, Aryan, and a pure-blooded gentile—and certainly she had nothing to fear in America. Even people as fanatical as the Communists could not believe they had anything special to offer her.

  But it was not so much gratitude she had demanded from them as recognition, and her white gentile soul was utterly outraged that they would sacrifice her to save a nigger’s reputation. She was outraged above her loudest claim to Marxist ideology, beyond her greatest sympathy for the oppressed, stronger than her most honest hatred of the oppressors.

  In white anger she called Communist Party headquarters, and receiving no reply, called Bart at his home. Receiving her call shortly before Lee’s arrival, Bart disclaimed all knowledge of her expulsion and refused to discuss it with her.

  “You will regret this!” she said threateningly as she hung up.

  Then she began calling acquaintances high up in the Communist hierarchy. But they were either out, engaged, or knew nothing. Even the subtle warning contained in this did not lessen her blazing urge for vengeance. Nor did the later warning contained in her roommate’s failure to call, which broke a rigid rule between them.

  Alone with her unendurable outrage, she was mocked by the picture of Bart and Luther framing her just because she was white and they hated white people. She even entertained the idea of Lee’s being involved with them. Was that why he had called, breaking off with her? The nigger! The goddamned nigger!

  And as the seconds flowed like sand, her hatred for Negroes climbed like a blazing pyre. At first she hated three individual Negroes because of race, and then she hated the Negro race because of three individual Negroes. She hated their color, their souls, their minds, their character, their lips, teeth, eyes, and hair—hated them with an attention to physiological detail she could not have ascertained had she made love to all the adult Negroes, male and female, in the world. In this pathological hatred, the Negro became the bugaboo of Southern legend, the beast of Klanist propaganda, a distorted, monstrous, despicable object of her rage. And as her hatred rose, burning up all that was good within her, she became just so much rife white flesh, of common value on the prostitution market, good only in America for getting some Negro lynched.

  And now when she recalled that she had gone to bed with one, and let him hold her white naked body in his black naked arms, her tautly strung, screaming nerves presented a threat to sanity. She felt as if she had consummated some self-pollution and imagined her body filthy, odorous, and contaminated by his touch. She arose and showered, scrubbed her teeth, brushed her hair, manicured and polished her nails, lotioned her body, and cold-creamed her face, as if to destroy by physical cleanliness not only the signs, but the fact of her debasement.

  Now she was able to analyze with a degree of sanity what had happened to her. She had simply been sacrificed to the ultimate aim, which was pure and simple Marxism as she had learned it from the first. As a consequence she had no right to object since the logic of any other position would have been untenable. But even now her Marxist schooling could not lessen her sense of racial violation. She would not have minded being sacrificed to any other cause than the preservation of a Negro’s reputation, she attempted to convince herself. But this she could not accept.

  She went into the kitchen and made coffee; and drinking it, began to plan. Until then she had not realized how involved her life had become with the activity of the Communist Party. She had lived with Communists, talked their language, and thought their thoughts for almost three years. She had grown to be dependent on the party for all the decisions of her private life. And she had enjoyed it; she could not imagine life away from it. But now she found it difficult to think alone.

  She did not want to be expelled from the party also, which she knew was inexorable unless she acted swiftly. Thinking it possible to force a retraction of the charges by mobilizing the support of the white gentile membership in a purely racial stand, she remained home the next day, telephoning white persons whom she thought important in party circles—motion-picture executives, producers, directors, city officeholders, business men, local politicians. And afterward she visited a number of them. But none would discuss the incident with her. Most denied membership in the party. Others denied knowledge of all party tactics. But many of them were willing to have an affair with her.

  Before that day was over she had learned that though there were definite racial caste lines within the Communist Party, above them was Communism, the essence of which was fear. It was not so much a lack of sympathy which she met in the blank, rejecting stares at the first mention of the party, as fear of reprisal should they ta
ke her part. They had too much to lose to become objects of Communist attack, the first salvo of which they feared might be the sly accusation that they also were Communists.

  Discovering on her return home that her roommate had moved, Jackie knew that all hope of retraction was gone. Now the only course open to her, she thought, would be to make a full confession involving Foster and perhaps Lee and throw herself on the mercy of the committee. But she would have to enlist some executive of the party to introduce the idea and convince the committee of its political expediency or it would do no good.

  For this she chose a Jew, not so much with a cold-blooded deliberation, as with an inherent conviction that a Jew would always take the part of a gentile against Negroes. So she called Maud Himmelstein at party headquarters, catching her as she was about to leave.

  “Maud, this is Jackie Forks.”

  “Yes, Jackie,” Maud replied with a sympathetic cordiality in her usually rasping voice.

  “Maud, I’d like an interview with you. It’s terribly important.”

  “Is it about your—” the stub of her missing arm jerked spasmodically as she sought for the unobjectionable word—“trouble?”

  “Yes, it is,” Jackie admitted, not defensively, but inclusively, since in her thoughts all Jews, like Negroes, were guilty from the start.

  But Maud experienced a sense of gratification over Jackie’s coming to her, for she had bitterly opposed Jackie’s sacrifice for Luther and wanted her to know at least one white woman was on her side. So she asked Jackie to call at her home that evening, giving the address in Boyle’s Heights.

  It was Maud’s intention to befriend Jackie, perhaps offer to carry her case to the national committee over Bart’s head. Secretly she hated Bart, as she did all Negroes, and it galled her to be in a position subordinate to his.

  But Jackie’s first words cut her to the quick, alienated her sympathy, and dispelled her good will. And this was the one thing Jackie intended to avoid, but the words poured from her involuntarily: “From the point of pure political expediency, Maud, you should not sacrifice a white woman to save a Negro. I’m not just thinking of myself; I’m thinking of the future of the party. You can’t just have a party of Negroes and Jews.” This was the way she thought.

  Maud shriveled up inside, struck by a terrible hurt, for all the things she envied and desired and wanted to be were embodied in this young, personable, gentile girl whom she wanted to befriend, but who scorned her with these words. However she gave no sign of it as she asked with composure: “But do you think we could have a Communist Party without the Negroes and the Jews?”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean Jews—” Jackie hastened to amend, realizing too late her mistake.

  But already she had bared her real emotions, and Maud accepted their reality with a blunt stoicism, forcing herself to say: “If you mean Negroes, you mean Jews also—and that includes myself,” which was not an easy thing for her to do.

  For out of all the many hatreds growing from her infirm body and oppressed spirit, the hatred of her own Jewishness was the most intense. She hated all Jews and all things Jewish with an uncontrollable passion, as an escape from which she had become a Communist. And yet she was as Jewish in appearance as the Jewish stereotype.

  “But, Maud, you know yourself,” Jackie argued earnestly, “with Bart at the head of the party it’s getting so a white person is subject to any persecution.”

  “Now what is it you’re trying to say, Jackie?” Maud asked in her rasping voice. “Are you accusing Bart on racial grounds of some attack on you?”

  “You know it was Bart who had me framed—” Jackie began, but Maud cut her off.

  “A white woman made the charges.”

  “At Bart’s direction—and she was Jewish, anyway.”

  And even though Maud had braced herself against such racial slander, she winced again, and the stub of her missing arm jerked spasmodically. “I see you are determined to draw the difference,” she said.

  “You’re making me do it,” Jackie said. “You’re trying to imply that white people are responsible for this when I know no white person would do such a thing to me.”

  “Is that why you committed this treachery?” for the first time accusing her of it. “Did you think you would not be disciplined because, as you say, you are ‘white’?”

  “You know I didn’t do it, Maud, you know it!” Jackie sobbed.

  “You know I’m being persecuted by all these vicious Negroes—”

  “Lee Gordon came to your defense,” Maud told her levelly. “He stood on the floor at the union meeting and claimed that you were innocent—and he’s a Negro.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Jackie gasped, shocked out of her urge to cry. For if this was right, then everything was wrong. “I don’t believe it!” she repeated harshly, as outraged at being defended by a Negro as persecuted by one. “You’re just trying to confuse me, to hurt me more—”

  “By informing you that your lover came to your defense?”

  “He is not my lover,” Jackie said, blushing furiously. “I would not have a Negro as a lover.”

  “I was under the impression you had volunteered to recruit him—”

  “By other means. I helped him with his problems and he always did just what I asked—”

  “Because you are ‘white’?”

  “Yes, if you must know.”

  “Are you Protestant also?”

  “No, I am Communist.”

  “Were your parents Protestant?”

  “Yes, but what has that to do with it?”

  “It is stylish now for a certain type of woman to say to Negro men with whom they are having an affair, that they are American, white, gentile, and Protestant, which makes them the greatest women in all the world. Is that what you said to Gordon to make him do what you always asked?”

  “I hate you!” Jackie cried, bursting into tears as she rose suddenly to her feet. Turning, she fled rapidly from the house.

  But Maud did not even move to close the door. Her hard, mannish features were set in hurting lines, with her eyes closed tightly against the tears. For a one-armed, dirty Jew, as she knew this girl thought of her, she had scored a singular victory. Yet, of the two of them, she was more deeply hurt.

  The day following, the party paper reported the story of the union meeting with a front-page spread containing two column pictures of Jackie Forks, “The Traitor,” and Jane Weaver, “The Exposer.” Not only had Jackie Forks accepted the bribe to sell out the union and the Communist Party, the story explained, but in so doing had endeavored to cast suspicion upon a loyal, militant, entirely dependable party member whose name would not be mentioned out of respect to his feelings. As a consequence she had been expelled from the Communist Party “…for gross violation of party discipline and active opposition to the political line and leadership of our party, and for betraying the principles of Marxism-Leninism, accepting money for such betrayal, and deserting to the side of the class enemy, American monopoly capitalism.”

  Thousands of copies of the paper were printed and distributed by a score of party workers at the gates of the plant. The story dropped a bombshell among the workers, many of whom had no interest in the union heretofore. On the whole, the members of the union were embarrassed by the story, and many did not believe it. Lee Gordon was blindly furious, but Joe Ptak went about his business as usual, his hard, uncompromising demeanor giving no hint of his inner thoughts.

  But the Communists were jubilant. For they considered their victory threefold. Not only had they cleared Luther of Lee’s charges and blown into the open the “truth of the treachery,” but they felt assured that they had accomplished a political coup d’e’tat. For now they had established their position of leadership in the union’s organizational campaign.

  And this day Jackie returned to work, resolved to brazen it out despite the finger of accusation. For she was free, white, and twenty-one. But the other office workers made her job unbearable, even though
Foster encouraged her to remain. For though he enjoyed to the full the whole incredible story as he reflected with broad amusement upon the union’s embarrassment, the women with whom Jackie had to work manifested the instinctive American antipathy toward a traitor. They avoided her, refused to speak to her, and when she approached drew away from her as from someone filthy. So at the end of the day she quit.

  In all the city she had not one friend. Dreading the return to her empty, haunted rooms, she stopped in a Hollywood motion-picture theater. Afterwards she ate dinner in a little restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard and walked herself to weariness. But once at home, showered, and in bed, she could not sleep. She tried to read, but though her eyes transmitted the words, her brain gave them no meaning.

  For all of her consciousness was consumed with the thought of three black men—one who had persecuted her, one for whom she had been persecuted, and one who had defended her. And she hated all three of them indiscriminately, she told herself. But this was as far as she could get. Because this was a contradiction—if she hated the persecutor, she could not hate the defender. But she did, she told herself. She hated him because he was a nigger, too. And if this was wrong, then everything she had ever known was wrong and there was no meaning in anything.

  And there was no meaning.

  She had to get out! It was imperative that she get out! Out of such confusing, condemning, tormenting thoughts. Out of the city, the state, the world. She could not bear it! she told herself. Because if there was a contradiction in three black men—if one was brutal and one evil and one good—then she was wrong and her race was wrong and she was nobody. But she was white—white! And now it was urgent that she go where black was always evil and only white was good. But where could she go that the three black men wouldn’t follow?—Death?—No! No! she cried to herself. Was it all so wrong and false she had to die when faced with what she’d been taught was never true? Wasn’t being white enough to withstand any truth—enough to support her in the face of any contradiction?