The Outsider (28 page)

“Where do you work?” the young clerk asked.

“Machine Tools Company, in Brooklyn.”

“What's the address?”

“I don't know the number, not exactly, Mister. But you take the Fulton Street bus and ride—”

“Can that,” the old clerk said. “You were born in Newark, you are sure of that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Wait, Jack. He ought to know something about his job,” the young clerk said. “Say, boy, what's your boss's name?”

Cross stared in blank amazement, then he shook his head as though trying to avoid the worst trap of a black man's life.

“Mister, I don't ask white folks their personal business,” he told them.

The clerks shouted their laughter.

“Where were you born in Newark?” the young clerk asked.

Cross blinked again, then looked up brightly, as though his memory had returned, and said: “In the Third Ward.” He pointed elaborately in the direction.

“Whereabouts in the Third Ward?”

“Over the hill—Why, Mister, everybody knows where that is.”

The two clerks howled with laughter. The young clerk asked: “What street were you born on ‘over the hill', as you call it? And on what date were you born? And what's your name? You got a name, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir. They gave me a name,” he said, falling silent.

“Well, what in hell is it?”

“But you know,” Cross said, amazement showing on his face. “They say you got all the names here.”

The two clerks bent double with mirth. And as he stood there masterfully manipulating their responses, Cross knew exactly what kind of man he would pretend to be in order to allay suspicions if he ever got into trouble. In his role of an ignorant, frightened Negro, each white man—except those few who were free from the race bias of their group—he would encounter would leap to supply him with a background and an identity; each white man would project out upon him his own conception of the Negro and he could safely hide behind it.

“All right, boy,” the young clerk agreed. “We'll give you your certificate if we can find your record. But we've got to have your name and the year of your birth. We're pretty smart here, I admit. But we're not so smart that we can guess your name.”

“They call me Lionel,” Cross admitted at last.

“Lionel what?”

“What Lionel what?” Cross asked stupidly.

“What kind of work do you do at Machine Tools?”

“I load up trucks.”

“Do you carry anything upstairs in your head?”

“In my head?” Cross repeated. “I ain't got nothing in my head. What you mean?”

Laughter spilled out of the clerks.

“Boy, if your brains were baggage, you could ship them by air freight for nothing,” the older clerk said.

“I ain't got nothing to ship nowhere,” Cross defended himself.

“Now, look, everybody's got a first name and a last name, see? Now, for God's sake, tell us your
last
name—”

“Lane,” Cross responded promptly.

“Why didn't you say that in the first place?”

“'Cause you didn't ask me.”

The clerks threw up their hands in mock despair. People in the line behind Cross, all of whom were white, had begun to join in the merriment. Cross wondered who was laughing at whom.

“In what year were you born?”

“My mama told me it was in 1924; the 29th of June.”

“Give us a dollar and we'll mail you a duplicate certificate,” the young clerk said.

“But my boss told me to bring it in the morning, or I ain't got no job,” Cross complained, whining a bit.

“Okay. Sit down over there on that bench. We'll see what we can do. We'll look it up,” the older clerk said resignedly.

Two hours later Cross had the duplicate birth certificate of Lionel Lane and had left in the minds of the clerks a picture of a Negro whom the nation loved and of whom the clerks would speak in the future with contemptuous affection. Maybe some day I could rule this nation with means like this, Cross mused as he rode back to New York. All you have to do is give the people what they want…He knew that deep in their hearts those two white clerks knew that no human being on earth was as dense as he had made himself out to be, but they wanted, needed to believe such of Negroes and it helped them to feel racially superior. They were pretending, just as he had been pretending. But maybe men sometimes pretended for much bigger and graver stakes?

Cross was now as solidly identified as he felt he could be for the time being, and the first desire that sprang into his mind was to try to redress, to some extent, the unintentional wrong he had done to that waiter, Bob
Hunter, whom he had met in the dining car more than two weeks ago. He fished in his pocket for the address, made his way to Harlem, and found the grim tenement where Hunter lived. Climbing six flights of rickety stairs, he squinted in shadows from doorway to doorway until he came to a white card whose printed legend read:

MR. & MRS. ROBERT HUNTER

He pushed the bell and a moment later he was staring into Bob Hunter's brown and nervous face. The man was in his shirt sleeves and held a pamphlet with a yellow and red back in his left hand.

“Remember me?” Cross asked.

“Man, where in hell have you been?” Bob exclaimed, his face breaking in a broad grin. “I've been looking for you everywhere! Come in.”

Cross walked into a large, clean, rather bare apartment and Bob led him into the living room.

“You
are
Mr. Jordan, ain't you?” Bob asked to make sure.

“How are you, Bob?” Cross asked, ignoring the question.

“Sit down, man,” Bob said. “I ain't complaining, though I got a lot I
could
complain about.” Bob's eyes were fixed intently upon Cross's face and the lips held a nervous smile.

Cross felt that he could not deceive the man any longer.

“Bob, I suppose you wondered about me, hunh?” Cross asked.

“Well, I sure needed you, man…I went to that address you gave me, but it was a funeral parlor and nobody knew you there. Is your name really Jordan?” Bob asked in an appealing yet venturesome tone of voice.

Cross placed his right hand reassuringly upon Bob's shoulder. “Take it easy, Bob. I'll explain everything. Say, how did you make out in that little trouble you had on the train?”

“Hunh? What trouble?” Bob asked.

Cross knew that Bob was pretending that he had not understood. He's trying to save face…

“Did that woman on the train make any trouble for you?” Cross asked.

Bob shrugged his shoulders and laughed, but there was no mirth in his voice. “
Trouble
? Hell, man, I got
fired
! I lost my goddamn job, that's all.” Bob's eyes were evasive but he could not hide that he felt that Cross had betrayed him unpardonably. “I ain't blaming you none, man. After all, you did jump up and stop that bitch from hitting me with that water pitcher, didn't you? And if you gave me a bum steer 'bout your name and address—Well, you know your own business.”

“But didn't the union help you?” Cross asked.

“Man, I'm too goddamn militant for my union,” Bob explained. “I had a hell of a fight with 'em. My union's got a left wing, and I'm with the left. When the company brought me up on charges, the rightists piled in on me, and I was out. Man, only
you
, an eyewitness, could have saved me. How come you fooled me like that? You could've said you didn't want to help me—Maybe I could've found some other witnesses. But I didn't look for any 'til it was too late. I was counting on you…”

Bob related how the white woman had sued the company, how the company had charged him with carelessness, how the leftists in the union had tried to defend him, and how, in the end, because he could not get a single witness to establish independent corroboration of his version of the accident, he had lost.

“But what about that priest?” Cross asked.

“I went to see 'im,” Bob said. “Told me he didn't want to get mixed up in it. Said his job was saving souls and stuff like that. Then he went off to Rome to see the Pope—”

“I'm sorry, Bob.”

“Hell, man, it's nothing,” Bob said defiantly. “Me and Sarah's making out.”

“Are you working now? I can let you have a loan—”

“Man,” Bob's face spread in a wide, glad grin, “I'm working for the biggest outfit in the world!”

“What's that?”

“The Party, man.”

“What party?”

“Hell, man! There ain't but
one
Party and that's the Communist Party,” Bob explained proudly.

“What are you doing for them?”

“Organizing! What the hell do you think?”

“Do you like it?”

“I'm just crazy 'bout it,” Bob confessed with a smile. “I'm going to be a professional revolutionary, working twenty-four hours a day beating these rich white bastards. It makes me feel
good
!”

Bob went into the kitchen and brought out two bottles of cold beer and, opening them, sat them on the table.

“Listen, Bob,” Cross began, “I don't trust many people in this world—”

“I know
that
!” Bob agreed. “You lied to me on that train so smooth that I would have died trusting your word. Man, you can
lie
!” Bob's howl of laughter was so infectious that Cross was forced to join in.

“Bob, I'm going to trust you as far as I
dare—
”

“Man, I'm black like you and you can trust me till death. Race means a lot to me. I love and trust my own,” Bob swore his fidelity.

“Bob, my name's not Addison Jordan,” Cross said.

“Hell, I found
that
out,” Bob said, exploding with laughter. “But what is it? You don't have to tell me 'less you want to.”

“Lionel Lane,” Cross lied.

Bob looked at Cross with skeptical eyes and grinned, a light of admiration showing in his face. “You telling the truth now?”

“Well,” Cross hedged, feeling that it was impossible to really fool Bob now. “I'm Lionel Lane for the moment.” Cross could not help laughing at himself. “But it's the name I'm giving to everybody from now on.”

“You did something to the white folks and they're looking for you, hunh?”

Cross looked away, chagrined. His life had become a vast system of pretense; one act of bad faith necessitated another, and in order to prove the sincerity of a new lie he had to fall back upon lying still further. Bob was asking him if he had committed some act of racial heroism against whites, and the only people he had wronged thus far had been black.

“Something like that, Bob,” Cross lied vaguely with an embarrassed mumble.

“Brother!” Bob exclaimed seizing hold of Cross's hand and pumping it vigorously in fraternal friendship. “I'm with you till the curtain comes down.”

Cross's teeth felt on edge, but he managed to say: “I feel I made you lose your job. Bob, I want to help you—”

“Just be my friend, man; that's all the help I want,” Bob's voice rang with hope, his words pouring out in a gush of forgiving generosity. “Now,
I'll
tell you something, see? I ain't no American, I'm British, see? But I'm black, like you…I came to this goddamn country from Trinidad ten years ago…Had to run off; was an
organizer and they were after me…So I got to be careful too.”

“Your secret's safe with me, Bob,” Cross told him; he now understood why Bob's accent had seemed strange to him on the train.

“Now, tell me what you did,” Bob asked.

“Bob, you'll just have to trust me. I can't tell you…”

“You ain't no
spy
?”

“If I was, do you think I'd tell you?”

They laughed. Bob was overcome with wonder. Cross's secret loomed in his mind more important and intriguing than any concrete crime.

“You were Mr. Jordan on the train, and now you're Mr. Lane,” Bob mused, laughing. “That's all right with me.” His eyes narrowed and he stared silently for a moment in deep thought. “Man, the Party could
use
you—”

“Really? Why do you say that?”

“You can be so
many
things at once—”

“Maybe I'm
too
many things,” Cross said quickly.

“Lionel,” Bob said, his mind working fast, “I'm sorry my wife, Sarah, ain't here to meet you. You'll like her, man. She's down to earth and takes nothing off nobody; she's militant…Say, we're having some folks over to dinner tonight. Why don't you come over 'bout nine-thirty and eat with us?”

Cross knew that Bob was trying to recruit him. He had no desire whatsoever to join the Communist Party, but he knew that he would feel somewhat at home with Communists, for they, like he, were outsiders. Would not Communism be the best temporary camouflage behind which he could hide from the law? Would not his secret past make Communists think that he was anxious for their help? To be with them was not at all a bad way of ending his isolation and loneliness…

“Who's going to be there?”

Bob's face beamed with a look akin to worship.

“Man, you talk just
like
the Party folks! I
declare
you do!” Bob laughed uproariously, delighted and amused.

“Why do you say that?”

“You're so
suspicious—
You don't want to take a step without knowing
where
you're going…” Bob sobered. “They're Party folks who's coming.”

“Who are they?”

Bob shook his head with an air of deep approval. “Man, you're sure careful,” Bob commended him. “There's gonna be Gil and Eva Blount, friends of mine. Gil's a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. A damn nice guy. Man, he's sharp, cold as ice. You'll like him; he's a lot like you—And there's gonna be my goddamn organizer, Jack Hilton. Then there's me and Sarah, that's all. And you, if you'll come.”