Lonely Crusade (29 page)

Who’s high off’n gage

Like the swift of the breeze

Knockin’ down gorillas

An’ bringing giraffes to their knees.

Now he ran up on the Elephant

Under an old shady tree.

He says up you big motherforyou,

It’s either you or me.

But the Elephant just rolled over

An’ looked out the sides of his eyes.

He said you better go on

You little motherforyou

An’ mess with somebody yo’ own shrimp size.

Just then the Lion made a pass:

That’s when he tore his ass.

The Elephant kicked him in the face,

Broke his two front legs,

An’ knocked his eyesight out of place.

Now they fit all that night

An’ half the next day,

An’ I can’t see how in the hell

That Lion got away,

Now dragging through the jungles

Mo’ dead than alive.

That’s when the ol’ Monkey

Started his signify in’ jive.

He said Oh Oh Oh Leo,

You have sure caught hell.

That Elephant have whipped yo’ ass

To a form frazzle-well.

Now you say you’re the king of the jungles.

Ain’t you a bitch?

Why yo’ face looks like you done broke out

With the seven year’s itch.

Now every morning when I’m trying

To sleep just a wee bit mo’,

Here you come with some of that who-shot-Joe.

Now you big motherforyou,

Don’t you dast ro’

‘Cause I’ll get down horn this tree

An’ whip yo’ ass some mo’.

So the Monkey got frantic

An’ began jumpin up an’ down.

He broke off the limb

An’ come tumblin’ to the groun’.

It was like a streak of lightnin’

And a bolt of white heat

That Lion was on ‘im

With his las’ two feet.

But the Monkey lay there

With tears in his eyes.

He says Oh King Leo,

I apologize.

Leo says no you little motherforyou,

Don’t you dass shed a tear,

‘Cause right here is where

I’m gonna end yo’ jungle signifyin’ career.

Now the Monkey pleaded and he pleaded

Until he got hisself free

And he jumped right back

Into that same coconut tree.

He says now you big motherforyou.

You needn’t get so so’

‘Cause I’ll go get that Elephant

An’ have him whip yo’ ass some mo’.

So the Lion walked off

With tears in his eyes.

He said I’d rather be dead

Than alive

So I wouldn’t have to lissen to

That ol’ Monkey’s signifyin’ jive.

Luther looked at his audience with a grin. “Thass me,” he said. “Man, thass you, ain’t it?” Play Safe echoed, roaring with laughter.

“Thass me, man.”

“Got that ol’ lion cryin’ out his eyes.”

“Mos’ beat to death.”

Despite the fact that the suspicions of these workers seemed momentarily allayed, Lee continued to worry. At home he was restless, uneasy, disturbed by a sense of negligence. If he had reported McKinley’s charges to Smitty, perhaps all of this could have been averted. Finally he called Smitty at the union council hall, but Smitty had heard nothing of the rumor and attached no significance to it.

“Take a drink and forget it,” he advised. “By tomorrow it will have blown over.”

But while they slept the rumor spread like an insidious plague. It moved down the assembly lines, hovered in the latrines, found voice at the lunch hours. Possessed of no actual facts, it fed on the instinctive fear of double cross and was kept alive by minds escaping the realities of war, change, and strangeness in a strange land. And during the dull, endless hours before dawn when foremen and workers alike were wont to “ride the dog,” it flourished and became fantastic. By noon of the next day it had touched them all, leaving its imprint of anger, apprehension, and resentment.

When Lee finally came upon Joe Ptak in the union shack he found him in an angry mood.

“If it made any goddamn sense we could refute it easily,” Joe said angrily. “But it’s one of those things without reason. And that’s where we’re at fault.”

“How so?” Lee wanted to know.

“If we had really sold the union, a crazy lie like this would make no difference.”

“There must be something we can do.”

“If I knew it, I’d have done it. I’m an organizer, not a goddamned mealy-mouthed evangelist! That’s what’s needed here. Give me something definite to work on, a strike or a raise, and I’ll organize anybody. But this goddamn campaign is driving me nuts! What the hell do these goddamned sharecropping patriots want with a union? All they want is to make a little money and go back to the farm and starve to death. They ain’t never been able to see from one goddamned crop to another, so how the hell do you expect them to see a couple or so years ahead!”

But he called a conference for that night. Marvin Todd, Benny Stone, Joe Ptak, Smitty, and Lee were present. Now how could a rumor be stopped that the workers were willing to believe? If the workers had confidence in the organizers’ integrity there would be no rumor. And if they could be made to listen to reason they would have listened to the reason of themselves.

Plain words of refutation would be of no avail, they knew. A concrete plan was needed—something visual, actual, a sign, a token, some definite symbol of good faith, if not more credible than the rumor, at least more exciting to believe. Marvin Todd, with the gristly humor of a Montressor drawing a trowel from beneath his robe, suggested that they frame someone and put the blame on him. Lee violently objected to this with his deep abhorrence of any form of lynching, and the two almost came to blows.

“Men! Men!” Smitty exclaimed. “We came here to achieve unity.”

Benny Stone then suggested that they pay someone to confess and vanish. “You can get one of these Okies to take a rap like that and never be seen again,” he said, looking obliquely at Todd.

“Men! Men!” Smitty exclaimed again.

Lee suggested offering a reward for information pointing out the traitor, but Joe was opposed to that. “The instant we give any credence to the goddamn rumor, these scatterbrained workers will begin suspecting everyone.”

Nothing was accomplished but ill will and a vague suspicion of each other. So again Lee tried to see McKinley.

“Do you think you should keep bothering him?” Mrs. McKinley asked.

“Why, it’s about the union,” Lee replied, perplexed.

“Well—” she hesitated. “You come back again and maybe he will see you.” And she closed the door gently in his face.

Now Lee was positive that Lester knew the truth, and he became increasingly fearful of the traitor’s being Smitty or Joe. Why then would Lester hesitate to reveal the truth to him? It was as if he was slowly becoming embroiled in some sinister conspiracy of which he knew nothing. He felt the need of someone sympathetic to get another point of view. The night before, Ruth had been solicitious, trying to draw his confidence, but he had repulsed her, his pride still rankling from the hurt she had inflicted. Now it was to Jackie he turned again.

“I was hoping you would call,” she said. “Can you come up?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Of course.” And then: “I love you.”

“I want you to.”

It was not the answer he had expected and it left a funny taste. So he bought the daily papers to read on the bus to rid himself of the feeling of always being a fool. And reading them, he learned of the growing racial tensions throughout the city—A Negro had cut a white worker’s throat in a dice game at another of the aircraft companies and was being held without bail; and a white woman in a shipyard had accused a Negro worker of raping her. A group of white sailors had stripped a Mexican lad of his zoot suit on Main Street before a host of male and female onlookers. Mistaken for Japanese, a Chinese girl had been slapped on a crowded streetcar by a white mother whose son had been killed in the Pacific. And down on the bottom of page thirteen there was a one-line filler, “Negro Kills Self. Charles Bolden, known to intimates as ‘Fatso,’ an unemployed diemaker, took his life this morning by slashing his wrists with a razor.”

Well—yes, Lee Gordon thought and laid the paper down. A Negro called “Fatso” could have hurts too that would make life unendurable—

Arriving at Jackie’s, he found that Luther and Mollie had preceded him. But before he could ascertain the purpose of their presence, Jackie admitted another caller, “Oh, come right in, Bart, we’re waiting for you,” fawning upon him with a deference only befitting a district commissar.

To Lee’s surprise even Luther jumped to his feet, although there seemed to be a pretense in his effusiveness; but when Mollie replaced her sardonic attitude with a polite attentiveness, Lee turned again to view the man.

Elderly, his heavy-set body clad in a dark-blue suit, he had coal-black, African features and a longish head as smooth as a billiard ball. “Good evening, comrades,” he greeted in a high, precise voice, startling from a man of so stolid an appearance.

Lee had often heard the name even as far back as when he had attended the meetings of the antidiscrimination committee during his employment in the post office. But this was the first he had seen of the man who was West Coast Chairman of the Communist Party. He was amazed to find him so blatantly a worker and so black.

Selecting the most comfortable chair, which was conveniently vacant at the time, Bart surveyed each of his sycophants in turn, then addressed himself to Lee, his cold, brown eyes devoid of all emotion.

“How do you like the job of selling people a democratic ideology, Gordon?”

“The job’s okay.”

“It has its compensations.”

“That’s true.”

“And it also presents its challenges.”

“Well—yes,” Lee replied uncertainly, resentful at being grilled by this Communist official.

“Don’t become discouraged, Gordon,” Bart propounded in his high, colorless voice. “For twenty-seven years, three months, and thirteen days, I worked in a fertilizer factory. I started off at eight dollars a week and when I quit I was making twenty-two. Somewhere something was wrong, I knew. But I did not set out to solve it by myself. I reasoned that there must be others who knew that something was wrong. So I set out to find them. The problem of humanity is indivisible. That is why you find a bourgeois nation such as ours fighting on the side of the Russian proletariat. Do you read John Pittman in the People’s World?” he asked abruptly.

“No, I don’t,” Lee replied defiantly.

Bart dismissed him without another glance. “Well, Jackie, how do you like Los Angeles by this time?”

“Oh, I like it fine.”

“Since you’ve been working?”

“Yes. The job gives me a chance to do something. I don’t like to sit around and watch the others do all the work.”

“There must be followers too.”

“I don’t mind following but I want to help too.”

“You are of great help in the job you now have.”

“I hope so.”

Now he turned to Mollie. “You’re looking in fit condition.”

She broke suddenly into laughter. “I am fit as a fiddle, Bart—as Heifetz’s fiddle.”

“It would naturally be a bourgeois fiddle,” he commented dryly. “Is Luther making you a good husband?”

She laughed again. “From anyone else that would be impertinence.”

“To ask about your husband?”

“To ask about his excellence.”

“Have you been working for a second front? Or is that impertinence also?”

“I love you, Bart,” she laughed.

“It is more important that you love the people.”

“I love the people too.”

Finally he asked Luther: “What’s this about the union?”

“Foster bought a boy,” Luther drawled laconically.

Lee looked up with quick concentration, his mouth opening to ask a question but Bart was the first to speak.

“Is this just a rumor?”

“If it is it sho got feet,” Luther declared.

Now Bart turned again to Jackie. “Is this what you discovered, too?”

“I found a memo of a payment for five hundred dollars in the file marked ‘Miscellaneous’ which was not accounted for,” she told him.

“Is that unusual—such payments?” Bart asked.

“No,” she said. “But this is of a recent date.”

“Did you tell this also to Smitty?”

“I didn’t think it wise before I talked to you.”

So she was a spy for both the union and the party, Lee Gordon learned to his surprise, and his regard for her became unsettled, hung between approbation and disgust.

“And you can not discover who wears the feet?” Bart turned back to Luther.

“It ain’t a matter of discovering,” Luther said slowly. “We know who it is—”

“Who?” Lee interrupted.

“Wait, darling,” Jackie said gently. “Let’s hear what Bart has to say.”

Lee jerked a look of reproof at her, not only resenting her giving Bart precedence in matters of the union, but annoyed by her use of the affectionate term in public. However, his emotion was quickly lost in the deep-brown candor of her eyes.

But Bart continued with his interrogation as if he had not been interrupted. “You have some evidence?”

“Oh, sure,” Luther said. “Benny’s been working on it right ‘long with Jackie.”

“Don’t you know how to take care of such a thing?” Bart remonstrated more than asked. “An old organizer like you should need no help of me.”

“You know how Joe Ptak and Smitty are,” Luther pointed out. “Even if we took ‘em the proof wrapped and sealed, they wouldn’t wanna use it if it came from us.”

“I see,” Bart said. And now as if in accord all turned to look at Lee. “You want to know if Gordon will co-operate with the Communist Party to expose this evil traitor?”

Feeling obliged to say yes and impelled to say no, Lee hesitated on the answer and Jackie spoke for him, “I’m sure that Lee will co-operate where the union is concerned. If you give him the proof he will present it to Joe and Smitty.”

“I—” he began, looking quickly to Jackie again for some sign of reassurance. But she gave him only a level uncompromising glance and released him from her vision to give his answer without promise of future favor or regard. “Well—” His mind rebelled against believing that she would front him for a fool, for then he would have to accept that this was all that she had ever wanted of it, but caution restrained him from stepping onto the stand. “If you know the person who’s selling out the union and you have the proof,” he finally said, “I don’t see why Smitty and Joe wouldn’t accept it from you as well as from me.”