Lonely Crusade

by Chester B Himes

  She thought of returning to her home. But what good would that do? she asked herself. As she faced the I-told-you-so’s of her staid and conventional parents, the three black men would mock her from the shadows. And she could not tell her parents of them, for her parents would only see two in reality and the third one in her own disgrace. Then she would have them to herself, in the stagnant pool of days, and they would rise from the dreariness and consume her brain. No!—Not home!—Now more than at any time she needed the excitement and physical freedom of communistic life and nothing less would do.

  She thought of dressing and going out and picking up a date. But she was afraid of all white men now because of what she had been to one Negro man—and what he had been to her. To the soldiers and the sailors she’d be but another lay—and she was more than this—dear God, she was more than this. And yet she would not think his name.

  Slowly in the terrible loneliness her body grew rigid as her mind willed that someone call her on the phone, and her heart cried out for just one word from anyone. And when midnight passed and that word had not come, she turned over and lay face downward and cried into the lonely night.

  But daylight brought the hard, unyielding necessity of getting up and living. Now friendless and out of work in a hard hostile city, she was faced with the inexorability of human activity. The past was closed and the present moved and there was only the haunted future. What to do?

  The formal notice of her dismissal from the Communist Party arrived in the morning’s mail. She did not open it. When the house became unbearable, she dressed and went out, wandering—a stranger in a strange city. In the faces of the people in the street she saw the hard indifference of their eyes, the remoteness of their souls. She felt forsaken by humanity and terribly afraid.

  At first she shuddered at sight of every passing Negro, little realizing their kinship of emotion. But as the hours dragged through her terrible hurt, within her grew a sense of affinity to these Negroes whom she shunned—for they were always terribly hurt. With some strange strength that this afforded, she went home to wait. For what, at first she did not know. And then she did.

  For in the end her thoughts came back to Lee Gordon who had defended her, and she thought of him as having defended her, and the confusion left and the contradiction became the truth—there were these three black men side by side, and one was brutal, and one was evil, and one was good. For this was the truth, and knowing it for the truth, she wanted Lee Gordon that moment to hold her in his arms and pity her. And Jackie Forks, the greatest woman in all the world, was beaten. Yet she knew that it was better so.

  The hours of the afternoon were spent in wonder at her emotions concerning him. And finally she could think the words: “In a way he’s such a wonderful guy—and a man, yes, a man!”

  It was then that she began to cry—crying out the horror and the strangeness of the world—“Oh, God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” The final refuge of anyone of any race. And it was as if she had been released from hell and with God’s blessing was human once again.

  And it was thus that Lee Gordon found her.

  Chapter 24

  THAT NIGHT ALONE, since Ruth had not returned to bed with him, Lee Gordon dreamed an involved and painful fantasy. But on awakening all he could recall was but the single line: “Thy immortal woman will hold thy hand.”

  He was assailed by such a sense of poignancy he all but cried aloud. All that morning he was haunted by the line. The tearing, hurting, exciting implication, pulled at his mind, and its simple melody sounded in his soul, stirring up those deep, hidden dreams of how it should be, of how he’d always hoped it would be, and how it never was.

  “Well—yes,” Lee Gordon said aloud, and took the road to Jackie’s.

  By the still, damp tear stains on her cheeks, the softly moist lashes, giving to her features the charm of feminine despair, Lee Gordon could tell that she had been crying and had suddenly dried her eyes when he rang the bell.

  He did not wait. It made no difference that they stood in the open doorway for anyone in the hall to see, because this was the world and they were the people and now was the discovery of their sexes. She came into his open arms, and for a moment longer he held her lips from his while he looked into her eyes and at the finely sculptured lines of her face and at the slight quiver of her mouth as if to etch it forever on his mind, and then with urgency they kissed. He could feel her lips trembling and breaking up softly beneath his. And he could feel her body trembling in his arms—And taste her tongue—And smell her hair. And the long, full moment lingered in the desperation of their embrace and would never end. In their awful urgency there was no end.

  It was as if they had never had each other—had never had anyone—had waited for this moment to consummate their gender. The door was shut and neither knew who shut it. They groped across the room in a trance, never taking their eyes from one another’s. Their fingers were stiff, unable to cope with the maddening intricacy of buttons, and they broke them off and tore their clothing in haste—now blinding and consuming, as if to make the earth anew and people it this instant.

  It had been early afternoon when he had arrived, and now it was dark and she switched on the light and got up and closed the Venetian blinds. He got up and went to her and kissed her eyes and hair and mouth. They went into the bath and showered together, staring at each other as the first man and woman.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said, not tritely or amorously, but with all the homage in the world.

  After a moment she looked up into his face and murmured: “I am?” slightly questioning, the corners of her mouth quirking in beginning laughter.

  Now barefooted and nude and dripping, leaving footprints across the floor, they went into the kitchen and scrambled eggs and cooked hamburger patties rare with brown sugar sprinkled on them. She split a loaf of French sour-dough bread, rubbed it with garlic, spread butter on it, and put it in the oven so the butter would melt. He washed and sliced onions and found mustard and green peppers. They put their chairs together so their legs could touch, and ate garlic bread, scrambled eggs, and rare hamburger patties sprinkled with brown sugar and spread with mustard and onion and peppers, and drank sour claret wine. And it tasted more delicious than anything they’d ever eaten in all their lives. From each other’s mouths they took the food like children, and to each it tasted the same. In their five senses, in their sex and emotion, they had achieved a oneness in which their colors blended.

  It was in their minds that the difference lay. In their inherent thinking to which they had been born and raised, that color made the difference. It was something they could not help, could not overcome. But yet they thought they had. And to each it gave a story of that afternoon—a different story.

  To Lee Gordon, that afternoon became one more step toward the consummation of his destiny. Out of all the white women he might have or would want, this was the one who had meaning, the one who brought change. Finding it was Jackie who now needed comforting re-created the image of all white women in his mind and changed completely the structure of his own emotions. He pitied her, and to be able to pity this white girl gave him equality in this white world. With the equality of his pity for her he could now love her; and he did. He loved her desperately, violently, and completely.

  And to Jackie Forks, that afternoon was the discovery of the world and the people thereof and the purpose of the people of the world. For to her came the knowledge that manhood was a many-colored thing and hers to serve the color of her heart’s selection. And it was his, and he was hers, and she was of no race and of no color but only of the people of the world. For this was the way God made it, and now she knew it was the way He wanted it to be. And still there was deep within her the consciousness of race, covered over for the time by the consciousness of truth.

  And thus they started up the ladder to the way it might have been. “Why were you angry at me?” she asked. “You mean when I left? I wasn’t angry with you.”

&n
bsp; “You sounded hurt. Is that why you did it—to hurt me back?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, his eyes on hers, and after a moment added as if thinking aloud: “To get something, I guess.”

  She waited so long he thought she would not reply, then she asked: “Did you?”

  “Can’t you tell? It makes now possible.”

  “I’m glad,” she said, and after a moment added: “It seems like a thousand years ago, in another life, and I was very foolish then.”

  “You were never very foolish.”

  “I was always foolish, because I wanted you afraid of me.”

  “I was afraid,” he said. “That’s partly why I did it.”

  “Darling, why did you let me make you so afraid of me?”

  “Of myself, too. Of how I might feel about you in the end.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. And now tomorrow. And now always.”

  “I love you now.”

  “Oh, darling, darling, darling—”

  And then they kissed again and got up and left the food because they could not eat anymore. They did not turn out the kitchen light or turn on the bedroom light in their urgency. And then it was after midnight and they showered again.

  “You don’t feel badly about me?” she asked.

  “Why should I?”

  “About what happened to me?”

  “Of course I feel badly about what they did to you. I’d like to kill the dirty bastards!”

  She had such a tired, warm, lovely, luxurious, satisfied feeling clinging lazily to him in the lukewarm bath that her emotions were diffused and the Communist Party seemed very far away.

  “You shouldn’t, darling. I’m not angry at them myself anymore. If it hadn’t been me it would have been someone else.”

  “Why couldn’t it have been Luther?”

  “You should know why not, Lee. For the same reason the party hasn’t framed you. They hate you—or do you know it?”

  “I know it.”

  “But as long as you’re a Negro, they’re not going to touch you.”

  “For a long time then,” he said and laughed, and it was not a bitter laugh. Then after a moment he added: “Rotten bastards!”

  “Darling, you’re hurting me,” she said. “You’re pulling my hair and water’s getting in my eyes. And this is hardly the place for a political discussion anyway. Or the time.”

  “You’re sweet,” he said, and kissed her in the water.

  “I’m sleepy, darling.”

  But when they had returned to bed she could not go to sleep. “You know, now that I am out of it, I wonder how I ever was a Communist.”

  “You were just playing at it. I could tell that when I first saw you.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I was serious. I believed in it. And yet I’ve always known what they were like.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “I mean more than you could get to know if you were not a member. They wanted me to make you frame McKinley.”

  “I know. You should have gotten out then.”

  “I didn’t think that they would do this thing to me.”

  “Why not you, baby? What was your claim to immunity from a Communist like Bart?”

  “I—You know how everyone is, darling. You never expect anything to happen to yourself.” After a moment she added as if it troubled her: “I talked to Maud Himmelstein trying to get back.”

  “The one-armed woman? What did she have to say?”

  “It was a funny thing. At the time I thought she was only trying to hurt me. But after I had left her I had a funny feeling that maybe she wanted to help.”

  “I doubt it—” And then: “Jackie—”

  “Yes, Lee?”

  “Did you put the thing about the Rasmus Johnson case in my pocket?” Now he could ask.

  And suddenly she was crying again. “Oh, Lee! Oh, darling! I don’t know why I did it!”

  The taste of tears; the feel of sobbing in his arms—

  “But now it’s different, isn’t it?”

  “You know it’s different! You know it, darling! You know it!”

  “And you are mine?”

  “Oh, Lee! I am forever yours.”

  “Without regret?”

  “Yes, yes, without regret, I am yours—”

  Lost—

  Gasping, choking, now breathing again. Now cooling. Tears drying. Talking again—

  “I’m going to see Foster tomorrow.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “I could get a statement and send it to the dailies.”

  “They wouldn’t use it.”

  “They would if I put enough dirt in it about the party.”

  “But you’d have to name me. You’d be in it, too. It’d become so involved. I can’t go through all that again, darling.”

  “You want to hurt them, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes—No—I don’t know what I want to do. All I want right now is for you to love me, darling.”

  “Baby—”

  “Not like that. Not now. Not again. I mean in your heart.”

  “I do love you in my heart.”

  “I want you to love me like that, too. Oh yes, I want you to, darling. But I’m not used to so much at one time.”

  “Nor am I.”

  “But you’ve had a lot of practice.”

  “Not for you. There never was any practice for you.”

  “You overwhelm me, darling.” But after a moment: “And there’s your wife you have to think about, too, Lee. The papers would put our names together.”

  Now in the softly running silence: “Jackie—”

  “Yes, Lee?”

  “I’m going to leave Ruth.”

  “No, darling.”

  “But I want to.”

  “No, darling. That isn’t the answer either.”

  “But I must.”

  “No, Lee. That would hurt her terribly.”

  “She wouldn’t care,” he said bitterly. “She wouldn’t give a damn.”

  And now they let the silence run again.

  “Jackie, don’t you see? This is it! This is all of it! Nothing else will ever matter!”

  “Oh, Lee, I don’t want to hurt anybody. I’ve been hurt so badly myself I can’t bear to see anyone else hurt.”

  “Did they hurt you so much, baby?”

  “Hold me, Lee. Hold me tight, darling.”

  Then she was crying again—

  “The bastards! The dirty, rotten, lousy bastards!”

  Now the sound of sobbing and the shaking of her body in his arms—

  “You know that night you played the symphony when I was going home—I had the strangest feeling that the earth was being lost and only heaven would be left, and I wanted so much to be in love with you I ached with it.”

  “If I could be that,” she whispered as if in awe. “If I could be heaven and always have you in my heart.”

  After that nothing was real. It was fantasy, ecstasy, dread, and apprehension. And it was glory. They did not need a thing—neither people nor food nor sleep nor the world. There was too much of each other within the hours that they would never have. And the hours passed through this enchanted unreality, wired together and meteoric.

  One of them he spent with Smitty in his office, tendering his resignation—thinking at the time: “I’ve always been a fool.”—Because he had to give her something.

  Smitty would not accept his resignation. ‘Take a few days off, Lee. You’re upset.”

  “Yes, I am upset, Smitty,” he said. “But after what the union did to Jackie Forks I am through with it.”

  “Lee, as I’ve said to you before, the union of workers is a bigger proposition than any one person, whoever that person may be.”

  “That may be true, Smitty, but you can not crucify people and expect to have a union.”

  “We don’t have the union, Lee; the union is the workers.”

  “Or expect
to have the workers—to have their confidence in order to build a union.”

  “We must have the workers’ confidence, Lee. You know that. But if some one gets hurt, inadvertently, accidentally, or deliberately, the union will go on, Lee, and have the workers’ confidence. No matter how much we might hate the fact of some on getting hurt—”

  “Crucified! Framed-up—”

  “Crucified, then. No matter how much we may hate it, we have to keep working for the union, keep our confidence in it, and keep building up the confidence of others. Unionization is a fact of salvation for the working class. The only fact. There’ll be more and more people working toward that end. If not you or me, someone else. Only, I hope it will also be you, Lee. I like you, man.”

  “I don’t have anything personal against you, Smitty. But I’m through with this union.”

  “Well, think it over, Lee. I’ll wait.”

  “You don’t have to wait, Smitty. I’ve already thought it over.”

  And later Jackie cried: “If our being together is going to hurt you, darling, then we shouldn’t be together.”

  “Do you really mean that, Jackie?”

  “Oh, darling, you know I don’t mean that. But I don’t want to hurt anybody. Not you, darling! Not you! I want it to be the best of everything for you.”

  “It is the best of everything.”

  “But you quit your job.”

  “Jackie, you don’t understand. I had to.”

  “Why, Lee? Because of me?”

  “Because of you.”

  “I ought to go away and leave you.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “But what about your wife?” For at some moment within each hour Ruth was there between them.

  And then she was crying again—She cried in his arms—at the beginning and at the end and even afterwards as they lay in each other’s arms, spent—spent but not finished, not done, not through. They cried out for a leveling, a fusing, a meeting, a togetherness of spirit, and a communion of soul—a fulfillment of themselves in each other.

  They sought for it in music, confessing their emotions as the records played.

  And they sought for it in words. At sundown she read him love poems with the bruised, splashed sunset in the window framing her hair in a flaming aureole, while he lay on the davenport watching the motion of her lips and the expression of her eyes. They laughed at a Shakespearean sally: “If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! if to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned: if to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved…”