Lonely Crusade (52 page)

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

A
FTER 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—”

“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 progressive 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.