So he forced himself to call on several of the swing-shift workers who had once joined the union. But from each he received the same cold reception. All had read of his arrest for murder and were distrustful of him, suspicious, and antagonistic.
“What you trying to do, get us all in trouble, man?” was the way one of them expressed it.
Nor would they listen to talk about the union. Mr. Foster was the Negroes’ friend, they said. He was giving them a better break at Comstock than Negro workers were getting at any other plant in the city.
“We’d be damn fools to agitate the man. And that’s all the union’s going to do.”
And this was true. “These were the words that Moses heard,” Lee Gordon knew. But he would not lose hope, for losing that, Lee Gordon was lost.
If the press ran the story of his martyrdom, that would at least give him a conversational toe hold, he thought. Although all the papers had reported his arrest, only one reported his release; and that was in a paragraph on page nine stating that Lee Gordon, union organizer, held for suspicion in connection with the murder of deputy sheriff, Paul Dixon, had been released on a writ of habeas corpus.
And though the Negro weekly newspapers, which had carried banner stories on his arrest, planned to carry the full text of Smitty’s statement, the next issues would not be published until after the labor board’s election.
More than he realized, Lee had depended on the press to vindicate him, and now his disappointment was heavy in his mind. The inexorable curtain of circumstances seemed closing down upon him.
Until late that night he was awake, trying to devise some special appeal that might capture the Negro workers’ fancy. But Foster had beat him to the punch. And he could think of no counter-stratagem.
Now his loneliness was his grave and he was dust within it. It was as if everything was dead and gone and was nothing, and had never been anything and would never be anything but a room of gray futility in an unpeopled world. It was as if the people going from the room had gone from memory too and had taken all reason with them, leaving only the steady hammer of remorse in the endless desolation. After that, sleep came like some horrible Medusa, and he was drowning in a sea of blood—blood!—the goddamn blood is spurting from his neck!—
But the next morning he was up and trying again. It was discouraging, heartbreaking, thankless, as if pleading to painted faces on a wall—trying to sell a people Utopia when they already had Paradise. He was endeavoring to align Negro workers with poor white unionists when the rich white folks were “more than looking out for them.” And Lee Gordon did not blame them for their refusal to listen. If he had been a worker at Comstock, he would not have listened himself. But he kept trying. There was this hole that had to be filled, and this was the only way to fill it.
By evening, with the pre-election union meeting three days off, he had secured the promise of two Negro workers to attend—two out of three thousand. Now he must not only face the desolation in his lonely room, but the certainty of failure.
Every fiber in his body cried out for him to quit. But he could not quit, because in this world men never can quit. Sitting there in the silence of his thoughts, he recalled the lines from the farewell speech of Lieutenant Colonel Noel F. Parrish to the Negro officers of the 99th Pursuit Squadron, which Jackie had read to him their first night together, a million years ago:
No one can ask more than that you acquit yourselves like men. Each of you, and all of us, must prove first of all that we are capable of the dignity and nobility of manhood; that we can, when the occasion calls for it, fight and die for a cause that is greater than any one life, or any one man, or any one group of men.
If Jackie had given him nothing else, she had given him the memory of this. For this was what he had to do: to acquit himself like a man. But how? What could he do that he had not already done?
The next day it was the same. It was not so much that he was failing as that he could not get a start. One such worker as Lester McKinley might have made the difference—or even some such outside helper as Luther McGregor had been.
Slowly it dawned on him that even the Communists were opposing him. This he could understand. With the shooting of Luther McGregor had gone their chances of gaining control of the local. So now they would fight desperately to make the campaign fail. For to them unionism was not a matter of relativity, but a materialistic certainty—the important thing was that they control it. And though this was an added weight, it did not break him down.
That afternoon the weekly issue of the union paper came out with the story of his martyrdom. But the quick hope that this brought was soon dead. Though he had known of the control white employers can exert on Negro workers, never before had he been confronted with it. Now this fact, more than the abstract theory, confounded him. At last he could understand the full importance of the Negro worker to the union movement. For if the industrialist won them first, they were a hammer in his hand.
Late that night, until it was long past the hour for visiting on any pretext, he continued to call on workers. Few let him in, none welcomed him, and several slammed the door in his face. Now that Foster had put the union in bad repute, his prestige as an organizer was also gone. The predatory women no longer had an eye for him. It was dead end and he knew it.
Back in his room with its four blank walls of loneliness, he thought of Ruth. With his body crying for the comfort of her arms, he thought of her—with his sagging spirit crying for her love’s support. There were the aching need for sexual consummation and the bitter obligation to make amends. Out from the endless desolation came her eyes to torture him, and in the dim light her body walked in a thousand different moods. It required a singular effort to keep from telephoning her—to refrain from seeking the consolation of her voice. But he had only failure to offer, and on top of all the things he had done to her, he could not offer this. He’d sweat it out alone. He had made it and it was his, and if he had made it hard, then he would have to soften it.
Early Saturday morning it began to rain. By the time of awakening, the city was caught in a cold, gray storm. With the pre-election meeting of the union to be held that night, it seemed portentous. For a long time after awakening, Lee lay there watching the rivulets run down the dirty panes, then he arose and went out into the rain. At eight o’clock that night he entered the union hall and took his seat in the assembly room.
Since the very beginning of the campaign, both Joe Ptak and Smitty had been trying desperately to get national officers to take part, but most of them had been tied down by heavy duties and their own union problems. Finally one official had been persuaded to come from Detroit. He appeared this night and found a truly disappointing audience. Lee was the only Negro present. There were only a few whites, fewer than at the very first meeting which Lee had attended.
The official addressed the group. But it was like talking to a corpse. Smitty was glum and morose. Joe Ptak’s face was a stolid, impassive mask. Fear and defeat hung like a pall over the stage, and it was communicable. Those who had attended were the worse for having done so.
Throughout the meeting Lee sat silent and alone. No one spoke to him or nodded in his direction. After the meeting the union officials went out in a body, withdrawn and untalkative. Lee got up and went out alone. He had hoped for a word from Smitty, and it was with a depressing sense of letdown that he stood in the dismal rain, waiting for his streetcar.
Back in his hotel room, he sat on the side of the bed in his wet clothes and stared at the floor. After a time his thoughts returned to Jackie.
But he did not hate her now. He felt sorry for her. For she too was caught in this dirty hell of race, he suddenly realized. And it made her into what she was when she allowed it to, as it made him into what he was when he allowed it to—as it did all the people of the world caught in its values. He felt suddenly sorry for all of its victims—the white oppressors as for the black oppressed, the lynchers as well as for the lynched, the Nazis as well as f
or the Jews. They were all victims alike of this rotten racial hell—victims of others and victims of themselves. He just wished naively and wistfully that it wasn’t so.
Finally he stretched out on the bed in his wet clothing, and as the cold virus seeped through his blood, it brought a fitful sleep. Heavy knocking on the door awakened him. Someone was calling him to the hall telephone. Smitty was on the wire and wanted him to come to the union hall. He took two aspirins and went back into the rain.
The others had left and Smitty was alone. He told Lee of their plan to stage a victory rally the morning of the election. It would not be a work stoppage. They would simply distribute banners and buttons among the day-shift workers, and employ a sound truck to urge them to parade for twenty minutes before the change of shift. The graveyard shift would vote on the way out, but if they could win the day shift, they would rally again with the swing shift.
Lee’s assignment was to assemble a group of Negroes from the community, a hundred or more if possible, to parade with them at the beginning. Students, housewives, workers from other plants—it made no difference as long as they carried the union banner.
“Lee, I’m depending on you.”
“Smitty, I’ll do my best. But I doubt very much if it can be done.”
“I told you before, Lee, and I’m telling you again: I won’t accept failure.”
“Well—okay.”
Downstairs in the hallway he began telephoning Negro ministers. Three of the nine he called gave him appointments for early the next morning. One hung up at his announcement that he was calling for the union. The wives of the others informed him that their husbands were occupied with their sermons and could not be disturbed.
But the minister whom Lee particularly wanted to contact could not be located at that hour. Pastor of a large, unaffiliated church, Reverend Wilkins had inaugurated a progressive program of civic and community endeavor for his congregation, and Lee felt assured of his aid.
Then he telephoned the publishers of two weekly Negro newspapers. One would have nothing to do with the union, but the other, an elderly woman whose paper was reputedly financed and controlled by the Communist party, requested that he call at her apartment immediately.
Knowing that the Communists despised him as a person and were sabotaging his endeavor as a matter of politics, it was-singularly galling to meet their satellites at every turn in the road. But he could not enlist any aid in the Negro community without coming back to them in the end, for all persons and groups in the community sympathetic to labor had been reached by the Communists first. As he sat on the streetcar through the rainy night, he prepared himself to swallow this bitter pill.
But Mrs. Jenkins had not requested his presence to humiliate him. Without comment she listened to his request that she run a special edition on Monday urging the Negro community to support the union campaign. He had the feeling that she had already known of the union’s plan for a rally when she requested that he call.
Now she said: “I like to see our people take an active interest in the labor movement. That’s our salvation. We’re laborers—that’s all we are and all we’ll ever be—and we got to support labor for our own benefit.”
“I knew that you would appreciate the necessity of our supporting the union, Mrs. Jenkins.”
“I encourage our people at every opportunity to support labor. You know, I could get a lot of money if I was the kind to sell my people out. Big politicians from downtown are always out here offering me fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars to support their campaigns, and all I would have to do to be rich is just accept their money. But the welfare of my people is worth more than money to me. I want to know what they’re going to do for the Negro, and what they’re going to do for labor. And if I am not convinced of their political development, I fight them. But it costs money to run a newspaper.”
“That I can understand,” Lee said.
“Do you have someone to prepare the material?”
“We can send you the copy already typed up.”
“Can you furnish the mats? Pictures of the union officials and group pictures?”
“I don’t know about the group pictures. We can send you mats for all the officials.”
“I think I have enough group pictures on file. If not, I can send a boy down to the Times’s morgue—they always have good union pictures they never use.”
“That’ll be excellent,” Lee said. “Do you think you could get the edition on the street by noon Monday?”
“We’ll have to work all day tomorrow but I think we can. We’ll need about fifteen hundred dollars, and anything we spend over that I’ll contribute out of my pocket.”
Of course, Lee thought. He’d been a fool not to have realized that this would cost. And he knew the union had no money. But he had gone this far and had to play it through.
“I’d better call my boss,” he said.
She led him to the telephone. He called Smitty at his home.
“Lee, you know we don’t have that kind of money now. We’ve already overspent our budget.”
“Can you spend anything, say for some leaflets to be passed out on the streets?”
“We can print our own leaflets, Lee. And we can’t do that, anyway. We’d get into trouble distributing leaflets down in the Negro community. The military would have us on the carpet for subversive action. No, we can’t do it. But if you can persuade Mrs. Jenkins to run an edition on her own account, it would be of tremendous help.”
“I’ll try.”
But when he explained that the union could not afford to pay, Mrs. Jenkins said: “I would like to do it, Mr. Gordon, but I barely make expenses as it is.”
“Well—thanks, anyway,” Lee Gordon said.
Early the next morning he called on the three ministers with whom he had appointments. After listening to his request that they urge their congregations to support the union campaign, two said that they did not think it in the province of the church to support labor organizations. The third asked bluntly: “Are you a Communist, young man?”
From there Lee went to see Reverend Wilkins. Despite the fact that he had often heard that Reverend Wilkins was a member of the Communist Party and that Marxist scholars wrote his sermons, Lee had depended on his help. Leading a group of his members in a union parade seemed just the type of thing that Reverend Wilkins liked to do.
But after waiting for an hour, Lee received the note: “I am cognizant of the union’s plans and am doing all in my power to help achieve a successful culmination. May God be with you and comfort you. Nathaniel Wilkins.”
Now again having failed in all else, Lee went back to the workers. But it was Sunday. They were resting, drinking, or having fun. They refused to listen and resented his calling; they were tired of the sight of him. They taunted him and poked fun at the union and made asides about “white folks’ niggers.” But he did not stop. It was late when he returned to the hotel. He was low and discouraged. Finally he went to sleep.
As if by collusion, that Monday morning all of the daily newspapers blasted at the union. They reported that Communists were planning a rally at the gates of Comstock Aircraft Corporation in defiance of a military ruling against crowds. Editorials urged the workers to take no part in what might easily develop into a bloody riot. The police commissioner and sheriff were quoted as saying they would dispatch special details to guard company property. The general of the command, it was reported, had sent a warning to the union.
After reading the papers, Lee telephoned Smitty. “Are you going ahead with it?”
“We’re going ahead.”
So next Lee sought the aid of local executives of two national Negro welfare agencies. But the stories in the papers had frightened them off. They would have nothing to do with anything promoted by the Communists.
And now at the last, as at the first, Lee went back to the workers. After all, it was for their benefit, he thought.
At six it began to rain. He kept on through the
rain. His head cold had become so tight he could scarcely talk. He knew that what he was doing was of no use, and that it served only to aggravate his condition and torture his mind. But he could not stop. Finally, exhaustion drove him back to the hotel. He sat on the side of his bed, dripping wet, and stared into nothing.
What he wanted most of all was to get stinking drunk. But he had no money to buy one drink. After a while he would get up and go down to the corner drugstore and get a package of aspirin, he decided. But for the moment he wanted just to sit.
Chapter 31
AFTER A WHILE Lee Gordon’s wet clothes warmed and the head cold settled over him like a blanket of indifference. It was pleasant not to care.
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord not bother…
Just before he sank into a stupor, a knock sounded and he staggered to the door and opened it.
“You are sick, man! Get off your clothes while I go call a doctor,” Abe Rosenberg said.
“I am not sick,” Lee replied. “I only have a cold.”
“Definitive logic and instinctive disputation! You are ill, man, sick, in any terminology. And I am going to call a doctor. Because if you die you will be as dead theologically as materialistically.”
For the first time in many days Lee laughed. “Rosie! Old Rosie! You are a doctor yourself, old man.”
He gripped Rosie’s hand as if he would never let it go. Rosie was touched. Even the hard shell of his insouciance was penetrated by emotion.
“Lee, boy! I came the minute I heard. I was in Sacramento attending business and read it in the Daily World. That Luther! That bastard!”
“Was a bastard. But what about him?”
“Tell me nothing, man! Do you have to tell me what I know! When I read it in the paper I said, ‘That Luther, by hook or crook, has got my friend in serious trouble.’ May his bones grow grain for Southern bigots! But don’t talk about it!” He hushed Lee’s quick denial. “Now you go to bed while I go—”
Lonely Crusade Page 41
