Lonely Crusade

by Chester B Himes

  But still he didn’t want the money. Only now he was able to realize that he would need it.

  And now again without awareness of his direction, he had come to Jackie’s door. But this time he knew what hidden impulse had brought him here: Luther’s talk of his white folks. So this was his, Lee Gordon’s, white folks—in the singular—one white woman who had gone to bed with him one day and put him out the next.

  Well, why not? he asked himself, since now he had another presentation to catch her passing fancy—Lee Gordon, the murderer, the living example of what she had made of him. So he went in and walked up and rang her bell.

  “Who is it?”

  “Lee.”

  “Oh!—Lee!—Lee, what do you want now?”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “Haven’t we said everything, Lee?”

  “Open the door. I’m in trouble.”

  “Oh!”

  She let him in as he had known she must—as any white woman would have to do for a Negro man in trouble with whom she had slept. But when she saw the fear in him, she wished to heaven she had not.

  “What is it now, Lee?” she asked, hastening to close the door behind him. “Have you been righting your wife?”

  He went into the kitchen and looked about. Finding no liquor, he returned and sat on the davenport, beginning to tremble again.

  “I’m going to stay here tonight,” he said.

  “You can’t, Lee! You know you can’t!”

  “I have to!”

  “Haven’t you got any place to stay?” Her hands made nervous gestures as she stood looking down at him, distaste etched in the fine-drawn lines of her face. “Have you left home, Lee?”

  “It isn’t that. I need an alibi.”

  A shudder passed over her body as she cried: “Oh, God, Lee. Have you hurt your wife? Have you killed her?”

  “I—I—” He took a breath and said: “I saw a man killed tonight.” And now he was crying, cravenly, abjectly, despairingly.

  She fell to her knees beside him and shook him violently, furiously, scarcely restraining the impulse to beat him in the face. “Lee! Lee!” she screamed at him, her white face drawn in ugliness. “Lee! Lee! Goddamn you! Oh, goddamn you! What did you do now?”

  And now the words came, pouring from him, overflowing, surging from his lips. He told her everything that had happened to him from the time he had left her house: of his dejection, humiliation, chagrin, of his scene with Ruth, of his despondency, of seeing Foster, and Foster’s words, of Luther’s visit, and Luther’s words, the ride to Paul’s, and Paul’s words, and the words that Paul had said when he fell dying. He told her everything but what Luther had said to him at the very last. He did not know as he was telling her why he should tell her this—only that he had to share it, for it was more than he could carry. Someone had to help him with it, if no more than to listen. And now in the end, as at the beginning, he had come to acknowledge her supremacy, but of this he was unaware. Nor did she in her fear recognize it as an acknowledgment. Now their fear together was a solid thing, unbearable to them both.

  “Goddamn you, Lee!” she cried, jumping to her feet. “I can’t let you stay here!”

  “I’m going to stay anyway,” he said without moving or looking up at her. “And you’re going to say I’ve been here all the time.”

  Out of sheer desperation she struck a sympathetic pose. “I want to, Lee. You know I want to. But I can’t. Don’t you understand?”

  “This is one time you won’t get out of it,” he said dully.

  “You hate me now, don’t you?” she said softly, with tears in her voice.

  “Well—yes, I think I do hate you,” he replied honestly.

  “Oh, Lee, please don’t hate me!” she cried, for she was genuinely hurt.

  “If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t be in this trouble now,” he said accusingly.

  “But I didn’t force you into it, Lee. I begged you to go back to Ruth. Oh, God, Lee, I didn’t want you to quit your job. Don’t you remember?”

  “But you played with me,” he went on relentlessly, for now it didn’t matter. “And then you kicked me out.”

  “I didn’t know you’d quit your job, Lee, and break off with your wife. Honestly, I didn’t. I didn’t want you to. Please believe me, Lee.”

  “But you could have known it, Jackie, knowing how I felt. It was just because you didn’t give a damn that you didn’t know it.”

  The grinding nonchalance of his accusations brought tears into her eyes. “Please don’t say that, Lee, please,” she begged. For she had not wanted to hurt him so! God knows she hadn’t!

  “I say it because it’s true,” he said in his dull, impassioned voice. “But I don’t give a damn now, Jackie. You be whatever kind of bitch you want to be. But tonight you’re going to alibi me.”

  “Lee, please believe me. Please, Lee,” she said, sobbing and falling to her knees before him and raising her tear-stained face. “Look at me, Lee. Please look at me and say you believe me. I’m not bad. Not really bad. I’ve been mixed up and excited and have done a lot of things I wouldn’t have. But I’m not really bad. I’m not the kind of person you think I am. If I hadn’t been so all mixed up and hurt I never would have let you live with me. I never would have even gone to bed with you if I hadn’t been a Communist. Please don’t hurt me, Lee. I never meant to hurt you.”

  “But you did hurt me,” he said, looking deep into her tear-filled eyes. “That’s the difference, Jackie.”

  “Please don’t, Lee!” she cried, clutching him by the trouser legs. “Please let’s talk about it. If you really didn’t have anything to do with Luther’s m-m-murdering the man, go to the police and tell them the truth.”

  “You know what they would do to me, Jackie.”

  “They’d believe you, Lee. They’d have to.”

  “You know they wouldn’t, Jackie. You know why they wouldn’t. You know I’m a nigger, Jackie. That’s why you put me out.”

  She flinched as if he had struck at her. “Please don’t say that, Lee.”

  “It’s the truth, Jackie. And you may as well face the truth: I’m a nigger. And nobody will believe anything I say. But if you say I’ve been here all the time, they might believe you—because you’re white.”

  “Please don’t do this to me, Lee. Please!”

  “Face it, Jackie! Face it! Goddammit, I had to face it!”

  Slowly, in resignation, she arose. “You’re making me do this against my will, Lee,” she finally said, “and I will always hate you for it.”

  Before she turned her eyes away, Lee Gordon stopped her, because now he had to know. “Jackie, I’d like to ask you something. What could I have done that would have made it different?”

  Now the tears welled up again. “It couldn’t have been any different, Lee. You know it couldn’t have been.”

  “There was nothing I could have done—”

  “Nothing, Lee.”

  “Then what did you expect from me?”

  “Lee, please go. Please, Lee.”

  “I will go if you tell me this. Was there any way for me to have made you love me?”

  “Lee, please. You’re making me hate you now.”

  “You hate me anyway, Jackie, so hate me still,” he said, and stretched out on the davenport.

  Later, from sheer exhaustion, he dozed. She called the police. When they came for him she let them in before he was aware of what was happening. Thin-lipped and tight-faced, with the harsh determination ravaging the beauty of her features, she told them the story he had told her of Paul’s murder. She told it precisely, coldly, and unhesitatingly, without once looking at him.

  And as he sat on the davenport, listening, looking at the harshness of her face, he wondered how he had ever thought he loved her. He did not see her acute suffering beneath her ruthless shell, and he never knew how much it hurt her to do what she had done. He saw only this thing she was doing to him and he hated her for it. But now at las
t he realized that she would no more have given him an alibi than she would have appeared at a divorce trial against his Negro wife; that no matter what she might do in private, publicly she would always support the legend of her superiority—because in the end she would always find race her strongest emotion.

  Without a word he arose and went out with two of the officers, while the third remained to bring her down to sign a statement. At police headquarters he was grilled for hours. But not once did he open his mouth to speak. It did not matter what they did to him, for all there was of him that could be hurt was already dead. Finally he was beaten with leaded hose into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 28

  FOR THE FIRST hour following Lee’s departure, Ruth soothed her screaming nerves in a lukewarm bath. Then she went into the bedroom and lay uncovered in the cool darkness, telling herself over and over and over that she would not worry, would not think about it. He had returned to Jackie’s but he would never be happy there. He would never be happy anywhere for what he had done to her. And someday soon when the novelty wore off, Jackie would tire of him and put him out. And that was the end of Lee Gordon as far as she was concerned, she told herself. For she would never take him back, no matter how he came. No matter if he came crawling down the street on his naked belly, with his bleeding heart held out before him in atonement, she would not take him back. Never!

  He had not done this thing to her out of any feeling that she deserved it, but instead had offered it as a sacrifice before the shrine of this white slut. All of her highest hopes and ambitions and aims, and his own—whatever they were or ever hoped to be—and eight years of actual marriage, of those sacred peaks of happiness, caught and remembered, and those moments of togetherness, of themselves worth being born, had been sacrificed to lust. In the end, it was not so much the fact of fornication with this white woman, but what he had been willing and felt constrained to pay—not only of himself, but of herself, of racial evaluation itself, as homage to her white skin, making of a casual sexual fancy more than the highest honor, verily, a religious rite. And for this he would wear sackcloth and ashes the remainder of his days. For he would come back to her, she told herself. When the white scent had turned putrid in his nostrils and the scales had fallen from his eyes and he would see and smell the rottenness and falseness of the idol he had worshipped, he would come crawling back to beg for her forgiveness. But she would never take him back. Never!

  But as the unsleeping hours beat at the iron of her control, it softened and wore away. For what did it matter that he had swapped all she had to offer for just six nights in a white woman’s bed? What did it matter if he put every white woman who walked the streets above herself? What did it matter that in the end he had turned out to be a horrible, vicious thing whom she could not pity, but only despise? She loved him!—and could not live without him. In all her life she had never known another man. Once she had been so proud of having brought this to their bridal bed, but now she was ashamed that he had ever had it. But that did not change the fact: she had loved him in the beginning, and now at the end she still loved him. This, she could not help.

  Dressing, she walked through the noonday sun to the corner drugstore and purchased a bottle of bichloride of mercury tablets and a bottle of sleeping tablets. She did not want to commit suicide. She just did not want to live any more and did not know of any way to do it otherwise. Back in the house, she made a solution of the bichloride of mercury tablets, but at the last moment was restrained from drinking it by the thought of how her suicide would affect Lee. She did not want to hurt him now. She had hurt him as much, and more, than it was in her heart to do. And he would hurt himself much more than she ever could.

  But she had to go away, if only for a little while. The brief walk in the hot sun had begun a headache, already grinding down on her nerves. And her misery and despair had rooted in her brain. She had to get away, just had to. So she made a solution of all the sleeping tablets in the bottle and drank that, hoping that she would sleep for a long, long time.

  She did not sleep. Instead she entered into a twilight stage of mental anguish. Her torture became part of her metabolism, paralyzing her body and corroding her mind. She lay writhing on the floor for several hours, gasping for breath. But it passed, and she arose, alarmingly weak, hanging on the border line of sanity, right back where she had started, hoping she could die. Neither thirsty nor hungry, but now moved by a nervous despair, she prowled about the house, from room to room, from door to window, lacerating her misery with the uncontrollable memory of her vision and cutting her heart to pieces with her undead hope. It was then she knew she had to die, now not because she wanted to, but because now she could no longer live.

  But she could not go leaving Lee the slightest doubt but that she had always loved him. In her bedroom she sat down and wrote:

  DEAR LEE:

  My love for you is the same as it was when I first held you in my arms but time has changed and we with it and I find I cannot bear to live without you any more. I love you even now so much I cannot stand it and I am glad you loved me too one time.

  I think God will understand why I can’t live any more. Please put me away very quietly. Do not come to see me put away unless you regret every detail of your affair. Do not grieve for me, Lee. I died last night. Today I would not change one day of my life until a week ago. Loving you has been life for me. The silly little job was unreality, only you were ever real. Oh, my dear, it is death before I die to leave you whom I love more than life. It is not pride or vanity but the feeling that you do not love me any more.

  God bless you and keep you and if I can help you after death only my love will do so.

  Your wife, RUTH.

  Inserting the letter in an envelope addressed to Lee Gordon, she placed it on the dresser and went out into the street again, intending to throw herself beneath a truck. Blinded by her headache, she moved with a vague, doped jerkiness, tensing and un-tensing with the waxing and waning of her determination.

  Once an elderly white woman stopped her and asked if she was sick. The calmness of her own voice startled her. “No, thank you, I feel quite well.”

  After that she caught a bus, and when she could no longer bear the motion of the ride, got off. Out near the end of Slauson, unaware of where she was, uncaring, she found herself suddenly thinking of Lee again. It was as if he were beside her again, and she was stifled momentarily with an overwhelming desire to see him, to feel his arms about her, and hear his voice again. And as she went west in trancelike movement, eyes glued to the burning walk, the words came to her ears: “We’ll make it, baby doll. We always have and we always will.”

  Not “we” now, Lee, she thought; it’s not “we” any more.

  Seeing another bus come to a stop, she boarded it and rode to the ocean and stood on the concrete embankment for a long time, looking at the waves. The sharp-tongued shimmer of molten waves, red in the late sun, was like a sea of blood beckoning to oblivion. But she only bowed her head and turned and came back to the city. At twilight she stood on the Sixth Street bridge over the Los Angeles River valley, looking down at the railroad tracks. Darkness came and she still stood, and then she found herself walking aimlessly through the streets again. Men spoke to her, cars pulled up and slowed, but she did not notice.

  It was late when she opened the door and walked back into her house. For a long time she stood staring at the bichloride of mercury solution, berating herself because she could not drink it. Then she would be dead and this awful torture inside of her would be stilled forever.

  “Oh Lee! Oh Lee! Oh Lee!” she cried aloud. Her voice was dry and cracked, but she could not cry.

  After a time she lay across the bed and finally from exhaustion dozed off in a nightmarish sleep. The doorbell awakened her and brought her abruptly to a sitting position—nerves jangling, muscles quivering, mouth opening to scream. Then from some buried but still-living wish came the notion it was Lee, and she staggered groggily to the door t
o let him in. Outside it was gray dawn.

  Two bulky white men entered and one said: “We’re from the homicide bureau. Are you Mrs. Lee Gordon?”

  “Has something happened?” she asked breathlessly, her hand flying up in a defensive gesture.

  “Your husband has been shot.”

  Dull-witted and top-heavy, already at the end of physical endurance, she found the sudden shock of anxiety more than she could bear. As she fell, fainting, one of the detectives caught her and eased her into a chair. The other went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Noticing the bichloride of mercury solution, he sniffed it, then filled a glass and returned, forcing it between her lips.

  When she came to, her eyes were pools of pure terror. “Is he—is he dead?” she gasped.

  “No, ma’am,” the officer quickly said. “He’s not hurt seriously. We didn’t mean to alarm you.”

  “May I go to him, please.”

  “Oh, of course. That’s why we came, to take you to him.” Smiling down at her, he added: “We’re sorry we alarmed you, Mrs. Gordon,” and assisted her to stand.

  When she went into the bedroom to prepare herself to leave, the one who had brought the water thumbed the other toward the kitchen. Turning casually to her as she reappeared, he asked:

  “Did he appear worried about anything when he left home last night?”

  “Oh!”—She gave a slight start—“are you speaking to me?”

  “Yes, I was asking if your husband appeared worried when he left home last night.”