Lonely Crusade

by Chester B Himes

  “I’ll settle for some whisky and some aspirins,” Lee said,—“no doctor though.”

  “Whisky and aspirin it is! Now you take a hot bath and get in that bed while I am gone.”

  Standing there watching Rosie’s fat, frog-shaped body go carefully down the stairs, Lee felt the joy come back into living. The man must set his watch by God, he thought wonderingly.

  He changed into his bathrobe and went down the hall to the bath. Rosie was sitting in the single straight-backed chair, having a drink and smoking a cigar, when Lee returned.

  “No ‘Nigger Hair’?” Lee laughed.

  “No ‘Nigger Hair.’ I broke a tooth on the pipestem and had to give up smoking pipes. I look more like a Jew this way.”

  “You must have had some rugged thoughts to make you break a tooth,” Lee said, climbing into bed.

  “Accidentally I read a Hearst editorial one day. Now do you want the aspirin and some water and then the whisky?”

  “Four aspirins and a fourth of a glass of water and a half a glass of whisky.”

  “Won’t that make you drunk?”

  “If it doesn’t, I’ll take another half a glass.”

  “That, too, is accountable,” Rosie said as he prepared the tonic. “But you should be at home.”

  “I have no home. I had a home but I destroyed it.”

  “It is not given man to destroy that which he once has had. He may go away from it or it may go away from him. But destroy—it is not within his power.”

  “I went away from it. By the way, how did you find me?”

  “Your wife. You have a wonderful wife, Lee. She is a good woman.”

  “That is one of the things you learn.”

  “Yes, love you know because you experience it. Perhaps because you can not escape experiencing it. But values you must learn.”

  “The hard way.”

  “No, with that I don’t agree. The difficulty of such process is variable, relative to its empirical immediacy.”

  “Whatever that may mean.”

  “It may mean many things to you. What I mean is the learning of values is dependent upon their impact on you. You might never have learned the importance of being a Negro had not you suffered from it.”

  “So you think being a Negro is important?”

  “To me? I do not mean to me. I mean to you, because you are a Negro, just as I am a Jew, and being what you are is as important to you as being what I am is important to me. If it were not so then we would be something else. The importance is not of your making, only of your learning. The importance derives from the whole, from the indisputable fact of existence. Food is important because it is food. It does not follow that it establishes its own importance; it is important because of its position in necessity, which is a component of existence. People are important not because of what they do but because of what they are. The fact of being people is important. Therefore it holds that being Negroes who are people is indivisibly important. People may be divided and races may be divided and nations may be divided, but the fact of their existence and the importance of the fact, are indivisible.

  “But be that as it may. I didn’t come here to lecture you on Rosenberg’s evaluations of the principles of Marxism; I came to visit with you, to be of whatever help an unsuccessful Jewish philosopher may be to you at this time.”

  “You are a great help, Rosie,” Lee said, taking another swallow of the whisky. The slow, warm, wonderful feeling of drunkenness was seeping through his blood, and he began seeing Rosie not as a Jew, but as a savior. “Just being here. I was getting pretty discouraged.”

  “The trouble? Is it over?”

  “Well—no. It’s just hanging. Smitty and the union attorney Hannegan got me out on a writ.”

  “I read in the newspaper.”

  “But you know the police are not going to let the death of Dixon go like that. There’s nothing being said right now but you know they’re working on it.”

  Rosie nodded. “And what do you do? Are you still with the union?”

  “Not still, but back. I quit once.”

  “Not because of Luther?”

  “No, after that.” Finishing his drink, he asked: “Pour me another, will you?”

  Rosie saw the sudden shadow that passed across Lee’s face and knew intuitively it was Jackie that was the key he had sought to all the rest. Of course, of course, he reviewed to himself. Interracial premises must always be applied to the solution, or at least to the understanding, of purely personal Negro problems, since within the pattern of oppression all causation stemmed from the oppressors and it was merely the reflection that caused the personal problems of the oppressed.

  “I recall now,” Rosie said. “At the time I was so involved with my own minor tragedy that I did not give it the attention I should have. And since, it slipped my mind. You defended Forks.”

  -Well—yes. That started it.”

  “With all our Freudian repressions and penalized sex, it never needs more than a start to result in stark tragedy.” Which many people did not realize, he thought. No self-respecting Negro man could have a white woman at below the value she placed upon herself. But to have all that she thought herself to be, and not only that part she considered expendable to sex, he would naturally build her up to more than what she was—which was where the tragedy began.

  “Well—yes. But you were speaking of your own tragedy.”

  “It is of no importance.”

  “What is of importance to you, Rosie—the Communist Party?”

  “Yes, the Communist Party is important to me.”

  “By the way, what was the outcome of your intercession for me? That was the last time I saw you too. And I left in a huff. But I wasn’t angry at you.”

  “I know you weren’t, Lee.”

  “I knew you were trying to help me. And I want to thank you for it.”

  “I was trying to help justice more than you.”

  “What did they do about it? Did you go before the state committee?”

  “Yes, I went and stated my charges.”

  “It led to nothing, eh?”

  “Yes, it led to my expulsion from the Communist Party.”

  “Oh! I didn’t know. I’m truly sorry, Rosie. I know how much the Communist Party means to you.”

  “Yes, it was a tragedy, I thought then. I never knew how much of a Communist I was until I was expelled from the party.”

  “I am really sorry, Rosie. Please believe me.” For now added to the list of all the others whom he had hurt was this little Jew who did nothing but try to help him.

  “For what?” Rosie asked. “Sorry I am no longer a member of the Communist Party? But I am a member. That’s what I discovered. I am a member for as long as I live and can never be expelled. They can prohibit me from attending meetings and taking part officially in Communist Party activities. But they can not restrain me from being a Communist and affiliated by ideology to all the Communist Parties in the world.”

  “Well, yes, that’s because you believe in communism. But I am sorry you were expelled from the organization.”

  “Lee, I deeply appreciate your sympathy. But it is misplaced. I tell you, my expulsion is of no importance. Nor in fact is my belief in communism. Whether I have a belief in communism is of no great consequence, not even to myself, since communism is not a religious faith. It is the fact of communism as a way of life superior to all other ways of life previously in existence that is important—and my ability to see my own identification with this important fact. I do not believe in the absoluteness of communism, no!; nor in communism as the millennium, but as a movement in the profound progression of materialism.”

  “Then, Rosie, what do you believe in if you do not believe in communism?”

  “What I am trying to say is that I do not accept the absoluteness of communism—just as I do not accept the conclusiveness of any existence, or of any ideology, or of any theory. For nothing is static, final, absolute—all is progressi
ve movement, in which ideologies, theories, philosophies are but steps, or rather facets, shades, parts of continuous change.”

  “You are preaching dialectics now.”

  “Dialectics, yes, but not preaching. More to the point, all that I am saying is embraced by the absoluteness of dialectical materialism, which is itself relative, and proven by the immemorial movement of matter.”

  “That may all be so, but it is a more comforting assumption that it is man who progresses and that the movement of matter is a result of this progress.”

  “Yes, I am forgetting that you were educated in America.”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “I was educated in reality, which is a difference.”

  “Then you say there’s no realism in America? That, I must dispute. You are looking at the illustration.”

  “No, I do not say there is no realism in America. I say there is a great discrepancy between American education and realism. I say that American education views realism as poverty and oppression, as a static condition of the masses. I say that this is spurious, for realism is the appreciation of truth, and truth is knowledge of the phases of change. I say that American education teaches a great contempt for what it dubs ‘realism,’ and the masses who reflect true realism acquire a great distrust for American education. But what I despise American education most for is its great contempt for knowledge. We live in a capitalistic state where what is called ‘knowledge’ must conform with bourgeois ideology; therefore education is maintained at a fixed standard of ignorance. But among the educators themselves it seems that intellectual curiosity would lead them to an examination of knowledge, or at least to entice the capitalist to look upon his own coffin.”

  “‘I agree with your hypothesis’ to borrow a phrase from my onetime sociology professor. Of course I wish that education would broaden to embrace some measure of the truth—the racial truth, at any rate. But you’re too rigid in your judgment. Why should the successful white American accept the Marxian dialectic?—he’s satisfied.”

  “No, you misunderstand. Not that capital should accept it, but that you, Lee Gordon, should understand it.”

  “Why should I understand it more than anyone else?”

  “Because it will make you strong beyond your wildest dreams. Listen, this is no fragile dream, no sacred cow—this is what Lenin calls ‘the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful, omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge.’ For dialectics ‘alone furnishes the key to the “self-movement” of everything in existence; it alone furnishes the key to the “leaps,” to the “break in continuity,” to the “transformation into the opposite,” to the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new.’

  “Listen, matter progresses and man reflects that progress in the living brain. That is not only indisputable but beautiful. No—no, listen!

  “Any capable geologist can cite with absolute authority a time when this planet was uninhabitable. He can name the geological ages when the first small areas of the earth’s surface became habitable, when ninety-nine per cent of the earth’s resources now available were unavailable.

  “Man, in his vast conceit, thinks that he has harnessed matter. But it has been matter that has progressed and reflected in man the measure of its progress. Do you think man invents the elements? He discovers them as they are made. Gravity was not conceived by Newton, it is a law of matter recorded by him. Did man invent the process of combustion, which is the basis of this industrial age? Or could he have even conceived of the modern engine without the material reality of coal, petroleum, gas, reflecting their potentiality within his mind? He learns scientific truths, he does not make them.

  “‘With me,’ Marx wrote, ‘the idea is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought.’

  “Listen, even with my limited ability to reason, I see the reflection of materialistic progress in every historical period of man’s existence. I see it in the development of civilization from necessity. I see the reflection of mineral ore in great paintings, and hear the sound of trees in every symphony. I see the change on the face of the earth and hear its song in the culture of man. I see the necessity for all theory and ideology and experience in the absoluteness of the earth. I see our present industrial civilization reflecting the astounding release of materialistic resources.

  “Listen, this is what I want to say to you: that matter is not a a static substance, but the infinity of change. And communism but the present reflection of a movement of this change. Make no mistake about this, Lee. Time, and the profound progression of materialistic change, will make all men communists—and then make them more. Within this movement, a tiny part of it, more symbolic than representative, more indicative than causative, is the socialist state of Russia and the small communistic movements throughout the world.

  “It is not so much that communism is ideal as inevitable in this historical pivot of change. So what if it seems too rigid for the human factors of existence? It will be—and then something more. The profound proof is that progress has taken place and the people have not been able to escape it.

  “Luther was a murderer, yes, but he was a Communist, too. Maud is an anarchist, but she is a Communist, too. Harry, a boy I know, is an anti-semitic, Negro-hating Southern gentile, but he is a Communist, too. It is of no special significance that now among the Communist Party are great hordes of rats and heels, but that they be people of revolutionary zeal. For at this pivot of change they are the people who reflect the change, and are now more important historically than all your Morgans and Rockefellers and Vanderbilts.

  “That’s why you are important, Lee. You are a Negro of revolutionary potential.”

  Rosie paused to get his breath and Lee lay admiring him.

  “Rosie, I like to listen to you. You have the ability to make me feel important in the world. But frankly, my potential points more toward execution than revolution. I didn’t tell you everything, but I am still on the spot.” His position had been turning over in his mind as he listened to Rosie and now he brought it out for reassurance. “You’ve been reading of the rally?”

  “How could I miss it with the smears all over everywhere?”

  “Well, if we don’t win the election, the union is going to withdraw its support from me.”

  “Why? I don’t understand? Are you being held responsible for the whole campaign?”

  “It’s not that.” Lee took a breath. “You see, I sold the union out.”

  “No! I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s true, though. At least I tried to sell them out.”

  “And they discovered it?”

  “I told them. I had to. When I was—well, explaining about the murder.”

  “I see. And you are afraid that Smitty means this?”

  “I don’t blame him. I think Smitty is truly my friend. But I am certain that he means it.”

  “I do not want to know any more than you want to tell me. But can you be convicted for this murder?”

  “Rosie, I don’t know. That’s what worries me. Without union support I don’t have any defense. It depends on how far Foster pushes it.”

  Rosie was so long in replying that Lee was forced to ask: “What do you think?”

  “Are you asking for the truth, Lee—for what I really think? Or do you want comfort?”

  “I want the truth of what you think. I’ll take another drink, too.”

  “I am an old hand at this business of rallies and elections,” Rosie said, pouring him another drink. “If the rally is successful and the union wins the election, Foster is not apt to do anything. There will be no point—that is, unless they have concrete evidence against you. But if the rally is a failure and the union loses the election, he might make trouble, because your conviction would insure the company against the union for some little time.”

  “Maybe I’d better not go out there tomorrow.”

  “No, you can’t dodge Foster by st
aying away. You have to see it through.”

  “Foster is a vindictive man. If he saw me in that parade he’d never forget it.”

  “Yes, Foster—he exerts great influence on the workers, doesn’t he?”

  “Tremendous.”

  “But he will pass. Men such as Foster are passing now. Just as the rugged individualist of the last generation has passed, the capitalist maneuverer of human destiny under the guise of political liberalism will also pass. As far as men may determine their own destiny, it will soon go back to the people.”

  “That won’t help me tomorrow morning.”

  “No, Lee, nothing will help you tomorrow morning. If you were with Luther when Dixon was murdered, you will feel Foster’s power.”

  “What if nothing can be proved connecting me with the murder?”

  “Then you will not be prosecuted. But as a Negro you will be persecuted. As a Negro you will face your darkest days in the near future. When the war is over, reaction will set in. There will be no peace, for those who can establish even a temporary peace do not expect or want peace. There will be only the beginning of another war. And minorities will be crushed. For it will be capital’s last stand and it will be a bloody bitter stand. But the handwriting is already on the wall. This is change, Lee, and out of the rivers of blood will come a different world.”

  “Rosie, I have a great respect for your historical interpretations. But as one individual Negro afraid of being framed for a murder rap, they do not encourage me.”

  “No, Lee, you must face it, friend. You may die for the murder of Paul Dixon. But once you resolve your indecision toward life and embrace your own reality, you will not be afraid to die.”

  “I think I have done that, Rosie.”

  “Then you will not be afraid. All people die—that is a little thing.”

  “I am still afraid, Rosie.”

  “You will not be when the time comes. Death will be but another change in the infinity of change. You will return from the reflection of matter to the matter you reflect. But the movement of which you have become a part in your resolution will go on. Lee, it is not that you are with the labor movement, but that you are a part of it; not that you support a cause, but that you are the cause. That is what makes you important, Lee.”