Chapter II: Part 2

I am an integrationist. I have been for a long time. It is not a principle that I arrived at through intellection. Until the past few years, I did not bring to bear on it whatever intelligence I have. I felt my way to it, just as some men, in spite of obstructing experience, feel their way to ideals of honesty, sobriety and continence. Nor was the feeling of my way wholly conscious. It was rather like the action of one who kicks and splashes frantically to save himself from drowning and suddenly finds that he has reached a shelf on which he can stand in the river bed. His objective was not the shelf, but just to be saved. I kicked and splashed in all directions, and suddenly there I was.

I was an integrationist when the Communists camped almost nightly on my trail in the early 1930’s and lighted beckoning bright fires in the frightening dark of that time. I did not believe then (any more than now) that the moment the bars of segregation are lifted all the white women of the South will fall into the arms of Negro mates. Many of my acquaintances gleefully professed to believe this and would just as gleefully declare that Negroes lynched for rape had been only unlucky in being caught with their always-willing white paramours. They found substance for this opinion in both fact and fiction, which too loudly proclaimed the revulsive feeling of the white female for the Negro and the inviolable purity of white womanhood. My acquaintances believed that Southern whites protested too much.

And so, it seems, did the Communists. Or perhaps they did not. It could have been just a line and the carrying out of explicit directives on “How to Recruit Negroes in the Eastern States.” It could have been that they played expertly on what they thought were the secret dreams of a young, green, mixed-up and lonely man.

I suppose all people suffer from these maladies, and especially from youth, in early adulthood; but I had more besides. I had a severe case of “Negrophophilia” which alternately wrenched my heart with hate and love. I was confused about the direction of my life and extremely doubtful (as I sometimes am today) of life’s purpose. Whether naturally or through learning, I shrank from all but a handful of people, and some of these were a disappointment to me, and I have no doubt that I was a sore trial to them. I lacked social accommodation. I have never thought tolerance admirable as a principle either of adjustment or feeling, and I rejected it entirely for my friends. Dogs were to be tolerated, and crying babies, and strangers with whom one did not have to become acquainted. My friends were constantly not living up to my foolish expectations; my judgments were severe. I was continually breaking with and rejoining them, but with no increase in understanding.

I do not think I would have become a Communist even had these deficiencies not been in me. But, certainly, except for them, the Communists would have had an easier time assailing my weak position on the extreme left flank of democracy. The wrong scouts came to reconnoiter, and they took the wrong approach.

The first who came was a moist, sleazy fellow, fat and asthmatic. I had often seen him in the little restaurant where I took dinner. Frequently he would be there in low-voiced conversation with various people—men and women—when I entered. He always sat at the round, family table back in the corner at an angle from the door, and my glance would fall there first. There would be beer before him (it was just legal again) and a dish of olives and olive pits and a plate of fried potatoes which he ate with his fingers. Though I did not think he was aware of me, no one could be unaware of him. Even from my table by the window and with my back squarely toward him, I was conscious of his presence. In lulls of dish rattling and conversation, his wheeze could be heard all over the tiny restaurant.

One evening when I went there later than usual, because I had waited for a cold rain to stop, and took my place, Eric, the German waiter, told me that “Philip” wanted to talk to me. He indicated the fat man at the big table. There was little possibility of Eric’s having made a mistake. The restaurant had only a dozen tables and it catered to a limited and steady patronage of unimportant executives, clerks and apprentices from the jewelry manufacturies and a few plebeian graduate students like myself. I do not remember ever seeing another Negro there. Even though Eric had made no mistake, I was sure that I did not want to talk to “Philip.” But before I could put my thoughts into words and summon the courage to utter them, Philip was standing there. He looked at me expressionlessly as he pulled the chair far out—to allow for his pendulous belly—and sat down.

“This rain. My friends are all late tonight,” he said. “You’ll excuse me.” There was nothing questioning, or tentative, or apologetic in the way he spoke. I was acutely embarrassed. He took a piece of potato out of the dish he had brought with him and carried it to his mouth. It was a small, full-lipped mouth. His hands, too, I noticed, were small and very white, though the nails and the knuckles were dirty, in contrast to his moist, flushed face.

“What does the ‘J’ in your name represent?” he asked. I was taken by surprise and must have shown it, for he blew out an indulgent laugh. “You wouldn’t think I would know your name.” This was not a question either. “I do.” And he spoke it.

The sound of it coming from a complete stranger seemed to establish some kind of power over me. I felt a twinge of fright even, as if I were suddenly vulnerable in ways I knew not of.

“How do you know?”

He swung his head from side to side and his face smiled at me. “I know. And I know more,” he said. He called off items of biographical fact as if he were reading from a file card—the year and place of my birth, my father’s name, my brother’s name, my schooling, an attack of scarlet fever I had had. Momentarily I half expected him to go into an account of monstrous crimes I had committed in some other and unremembered character. It seems silly now, for I know that to get such information as he had was an easy matter, but then I felt that for some dark purpose I could not guess a million pairs of eyes had followed me since birth.

I do not wish to play up this episode nor to dramatize my reaction to it, for what followed was ridiculous emotional anticlimax. Through the next talk Philip had with me a week or so later, his efforts to get on terms of easy familiarity dissipated my sense of being mysteriously overpowered and exposed. I did not respond to the first-name camaraderie. Not knowing his last name, I avoided calling him anything. I think my formal civility frustrated him, and I think this is why, in a kind of desperation during the third or fourth meeting, he pulled out a folder of very detailed obscene photographs and handed them to me. He laughed when he asked in pretended casualness (for I could feel him watching me sharply) whether I had seen anything like them before. And weren’t they the most amusing things, and one in particular, because he knew the girl in it—a student at the art school. He had some “delicious” friends, he said, and he would like me to meet them. He said that there was one “bonnie brunette especially, from ‘way down in Georgia—but completely, and I mean completely, emancipated” and without prejudice. They lined up fast enough once they were really free, he said, and it only went to show what would happen to the race problem all over the country were it not for the strength and pressure of reaction. “There just wouldn’t be any if it were left to the women.”

I think Philip was running ’way ahead of his timetable. Or, to change the figure, he had cast his net on the wrong tide. There was not enough weight to it in any case. I knew later that there was quite a potential catch of assorted fish, including a young college student who wore very thick glasses, a French-descended politician who had considerable power in local labor circles, and a very wealthy widow in her late thirties. Even then the widow was contributing generously to the cell, and some years later she became nationally known as pro-Communist. There were others too, but I do not know how they had been approached, nor how many were caught. Perhaps Philip and those who joined him in subsequent weeks fumbled the assignment badly. At least this one got away. The approach to my intellect is not through my gonads.

One approach perhaps is through my curiosity, and it was curiosity that teased me into going here and there with Philip. I wanted to see what kind of people these were. I had listened to soapbox Communists on the streets of New York, but they had aroused nothing in me save vague speculations over such questions as were bruited about in those days. What was wrong with our government? Did the rich and powerful think only to gain more power and reap more benefits from the exploitation of the working class? What should the government do? What could it do? What was Hoover doing that he should not do, and vice versa? I felt a certain shallow contempt for the emotionalism, the unreasoning bitterness and the actless anger of the soapbox radicals.

I do not know whether it was because they were a cohesive motley of white Americans, Negroes, Italians, Portuguese and French, but I liked better the brazen self-interest of the radical workers whom I had seen milling about the shut-down (what an ominous word that was!) blank-walled factories in southwest Providence. But I could not identify myself with them either. They talked of violence and did violence (as once when the police tried to scatter them) in an implacable, matter-of-fact way that repelled me. I have never believed in violence. I have heard Negroes advocate it. I once knew of a group of Negroes who organized to kill a white man every time a Negro was lynched. They called themselves the Kwick Kure Klub, Inc., in grim parody of the Ku Klux Klan. They were to have branches in every principal city of the South. Though it was rumored, and is still widely believed among Negroes, that the violent and unsolved murder of a constable in Greene County, Missouri, in the 1930’s was the work of the black KKK, I think the organization never really got started.

Nor could I identify myself in more than a superficial way with the campus group of intellectual radicals with whom a common interest in writing brought me into contact. They were enthusiastic and wellmeaning, but quite innocent and harmless. They knew considerably more about John Reed, Heywood Broun and H. L. Mencken than about Marx, Lenin and the deviationism of Trotsky. They knew something about Nietzsche too, and they were learning, goggle-eyed, something about Freud. But the German philosopher’s “will to power” was not translated into political terms, and Freud’s _Civilization and Its Discontents_, which had only recently appeared in this country, was simply a yardstick by which they measured their imaginary personal gripes against smugness and conservatism. Theirs was the rebellion of youth. They talked a lot, but what they said was mostly brilliant nonsense which had no more relation to the actual destruction of the bridges over which their parents had passed than a pyrotechnic display on a moonless night. Only one of them became a writer—a humorist, and a good one. His latest book now lies before me. Sensitive, talented, some of them wealthy, they turned out to be thoroughly conservative college professors, investment brokers and lawyers who had no trouble making a peace with things as they are.

My problems were different from theirs. The drives—self-preservation, anxiety, vanity, sex, the “complete discharge of strength” Nietzsche speaks of—were considerably modified by my Negroness. Such an admission is embarrassing to make, but I recognized its truth even then. Self-preservation, for instance, was not a galvanic drive in me, nor in other Negroes I knew. I have written elsewhere that five of my closest acquaintances committed suicide in a span of six red and terrible years. Pride and vanity were excessive. Since Negroes were assumed to be sexually immoderate, I made a show of strict asceticism, chastising the flesh in a way most unnatural to youth. What I did not recognize was that I was being forced into the narrowest egocentrism; into an involvement with self that was morbid beyond reason and that only the lucky are able to sublimate—and this only partially—into group concern and, with extreme luck, wider social concern. It need not be said, and certainly not in the way of apology, that this is not altogether the fault of the Negro. It is the fault also of the American life-situation—neither quite an accidental wickedness nor a complex of impersonal coercions—over which both the individual and the group control of minority people is limited.

The campus group of intellectual radicals broadened me. They stimulated my reading, my imagination, my sympathies. To the reading of James, Santayana and DeUnamuno, to whom Professor Ducasse had introduced me, I added Nietzsche (especially _Thus Spake Zarathustra_) and Marx and much else that I would not have come across in the ordinary routine of my graduate study.

But I was not broadened enough to take what Philip and his circle offered. Had their offerings stayed on the level of the first parties I attended with Philip, matters might have been different. I can take any amount of talk, and there ran through their rapid-fire conversations phrases that, exploding like firecrackers, drew my attention: “the political state” (as distinct from the economic and social state—they were drawing such distinctions then); “the omnicompetent state”; “responsibility in areas of cultural autonomy.” Of course I had ideas as to meanings, but nothing they said really coalesced into concepts. I was not moved either to agreement or disagreement. I simply heard.

In later meetings, however, I began to listen and to understand, but not what it was expected I would understand. Rather the opposite. I began to comprehend that they talked like people who had a vested interest in a democratic catastrophe. It was not Communism’s strength and validity, its constructive and health-seeking activities on which they based their arguments: it was democracy’s weaknesses. They rejoiced in the economic depression because they saw in it the beginning of democracy’s total collapse. The ideal, they said, was security _and_ freedom (and I agreed with this), but under “your system”—they were talking directly to me and to Hakely, a young but grizzled silversmith apprentice—“there is neither.” They were too smart actually to make capitalism and democracy synonymous, so I could judge only that this equating one with the other was a deliberate effort to confuse.

And I was confused, and I showed it in childish exasperation at the way in which they pointed out, with a kind of glib, cold fervor, every weakness, every failure, every instance of corruption and discrimination and injustice, and how these affected one personally, and especially the Negro. The inference was plain that in the “omnicompetent state,” the “service state” (which were equated), these things would not be. But when I pressed for proof of their inferences, Philip and the intellectual leaders of the cell withdrew into taunts and challenges and were not percipient enough to see how dangerously they threatened my self-esteem. The idea of democracy was itself not particularly dear to me then, but I resented the doubts cast on my inherited assumptions about it. If anything, I resented democracy for leaving me and itself so defenseless; but I hated Communism for putting me on the defensive. My anger and frustration carried over from one meeting to the next, for though their arguments were basically weak, I had no answers to them. After the fifth meeting, I was certain that I was through with the Communists and all their works.

But I did not figure on the proselyting passion of Philip and Honey. This latter was one of the five women in the cell whom I had seen regularly at meetings. “Honey” was a cell nickname, and it suited only her physical appearance. Among her colleagues at the city hospital, where she told me she worked as a technician, she was known as Branca. I never learned her last name. Of foreign extraction—Austrian or Czech, I judged—she had soft honey-blond hair, worn in a long bob, so that when she turned or lowered her head a wave of hair fell across her face. It was a good face, not pretty and decorated, but well-structured and strong, with pale yellow eyes set under square brows. She talked a great deal in a rather strident and insolent tone, and she laughed a lot, insolently too. Both her laughter and her talk seemed to come from very near the surface. Yet one felt that she had depths. Sometimes one was as hard put to follow the erratic train of her thought as to follow her restless, vital movements.

Philip and Honey came to my lodginghouse one night after I had twice failed to show up at meetings. It was embarrassing to have them come there, for my landlady, though she had been born and had lived all her life in New England and though she thought that this was in itself some sort of victory or credit for a Negro—my landlady was only less suspicious of white people than she was of Negroes who consorted with them. Even had they desired it, my visitors could not have come in, so I went with them to the two untidy rooms which Honey occupied over a delicatessen in the oldest and a-step-from-genteel section of the city. There were just the three of us, and over a bottle of very sour wine, which was called dago red, they questioned me about my absences. I told them that I had been preparing for midyear examinations, which was true, and anyway was I to consider myself obligated to be present at every cell meeting?

They looked at each other for a moment. Then Honey laughed deliciously and said, “Of course not,” and Philip laboriously wheezed an echo of this. In cell meetings Philip was the center, but here Honey had complete charge. She led the talk into all sorts of trivial channels. Shifting restlessly in her chair, tossing her head, crossing and uncrossing her legs, Honey talked and talked. Her vitality and the wine were exhilarating. She was profane and final in her judgments of people. She jokingly accused Philip of trying to bring into the cell some “profound asses,” some “absolutely untouchable unteachables,” like a certain Sidney she mentioned, who was positively, she said, a “reconditioned pervert.” Oh, she was sure of it! And Faye Hariston (this was the wealthy widow), who “every day jumped into a barrel of peroxide,” and who, for all her efforts at femininity, showed that she was a “conditioned hermaphrodite.” Laughing gaily, Honey wanted to know what Philip was doing, recruiting people for his own pleasure? Was that what he was making of the cell, a circle of Lesbians and libertines?

Unembarrassed and unsmiling, Philip only shook his head, and after a time Honey went on to something else. The atmosphere was very casual, very friendly, and I was sorry when Philip announced that he must leave. It was my cue to go too, and I got up.

There was a moment’s hesitation before Philip said, “Oh, but I’ll be back! You wait for me here.” I looked at Honey, but she was already reclaiming the hat I had picked up. I thought she smiled mockingly at Philip.

What Honey and I talked about after Philip’s departure, I do not know. In my notebook the next day I wrote exactly what follows.

“I wish I could make out a case of moral rectitude for myself, but I cannot. What I kept thinking of last night was all the possible consequences. When Honey came and sat on the couch too close to me, I remembered all I had heard about ‘parlor whores’—that they were bold and brazen and without discrimination, and that they were bound to be diseased. I had never had more than a dozen words with her until last night, so there was no affection for me. There was only passion, and even this may not have been genuine. I half wished it were, or that I could think it so. My feeling was that her object was to arouse passion in me while she kept herself out of it and under control. She shivered and rolled her head against my shoulder and dug her nails into my thigh, but I think that it was all faked. I do not know what we talked about between times, or whether we talked about anything.

“But if she were outside it, I was outside it too, and I kept thinking that Honey had some ulterior motive and that she was trying to realize it at too high a price. I knew that she wanted me to have sex relations with her and I knew also that I would not, could not, dared not. I do not think she tempted me at all, really; she just frightened me. I did not see how anyone could go to such a length to obtain a result that in the long run could have almost no importance. Certainly I cannot think myself _that_ important to the Communists. And suppose this were not her reason? Then what? Just sex. I cannot trust a white woman that way. No matter how willingly a white woman gives herself to a colored man, if she is found out, she will yell rape. Last night I pictured newspaper headlines such as I have seen many times and I thought of them referring to me: BLACK BRUTE. I did the right thing last night, though maybe I did it for all the wrong reasons.”

I fled. Though I knew I had done the right thing, I was ashamed to see Honey and Philip again, for I convinced myself that I had been naïf and cowardly. I did not go back to the little restaurant at the bottom of the hill. Once I had a note from Philip, and once he—or someone very like him—inquired of me from my landlady, but I did not see him, nor Honey, nor any of the people I used to see in the cell. I am certain that Honey, laughing with strident insolence, spoke of me as one of Philip’s “untouchable unteachables,” and pretty quickly forgot me.

9

But I did not forget Communism, then or later. In New York the next year, 1933, the Party was quite fashionable among my acquaintances, some of whom took it seriously. One could be sure that among the guests at Harlem’s middle and upper-class social gatherings would be white people and that these were admitted Communists or fellow travelers at least. Some of them were said to be well known in _avant-garde_ and esoteric circles and in the theater but I had never heard of most of them, and I am inclined to think that the reputations they were given in Harlem were a kind of defense in depth against the allegation that the only whites Negroes could mingle with socially were peripheral people, nobodies, tramps. The white people I met at such parties seemed average intellectual types. I was struck by the fact that they did not talk Communism, but gave the impression of living on a higher and freer level than American democracy afforded. The atmosphere they created was easy and sophisticated, with a high sexual content of which, it was said, nearly everyone took advantage. No one bothered to whisper the stories of liaisons between white women and Negro men and Negro women and white men. They were accepted without shock, and the actors in these little dramas seemed to play their roles with a lack of embarrassment and even a natural grace that fascinated me.

I do not think any of the Communists I met in these circumstances were seriously political-minded. Certainly they were not Party workers. They did not make speeches from flag-draped stepladders wedged against curbings, as so many Communists were doing daily in front of the Home Relief stations scattered over the city. They did not rustle up meetings, nor belong to instructional cells, nor try to indoctrinate anyone. They were not of the “soiled shirt, sinkers and coffee brigade.” My Negro acquaintances would not have had them in their homes if they had been. Communism was merely the rose under which they pursued more pleasurable activities.

There were a good many hastily printed Communist leaflets being passed out in those days. I seemed to get them all; I also read them. They were slanted for the middle-class Negro—the professional, the intellectual, the student. With only half an eye one could see that the Party was conducting a campaign to recruit a potential, educated Negro leadership. The labor masses had been a disappointment to the Communists who, anyway, employed the wrong methods to enlist them. Negro labor was far from ready for the proletarian revolution. It was not class struggle but race struggle that interested them. What the Negro labor masses wanted was to be treated as a special case first. They wanted job security. They wanted to be brought up to the level of white workers before they could march in the ranks with them toward the bigger Communist goal. Equality first, and then integration. Besides, Negro labor had the same suspicion of Communism that it had of socialism and trade-unionism—a suspicion of being used rather than helped, and used for the establishment of an order of things that was not quite clear.

So the new recruitment was to be among the class of which I was an inconsequential representative. The Communists were determined not to make the same mistake twice. _Equality, Land and Freedom: A Program for Negro Liberation_, issued by the League of Struggle for Negro Rights in 1933, put it this way: “The task that confronts the ... Party in organizing the Negro workers and rallying them for the daily class struggle ... side by side with the white workers is no light one.... The Negro evinces no militant opposition towards Communism, but he wants to know how it can improve his social status, what bearing does it have on the common practice of lynching, political disfranchisement, segregation, industrial discrimination.... The Negro is revolutionary enough in a racial sense....” In short, he is race-conscious, and this was enough to concentrate on. In the late 1920’s and the early 1930’s, the Communists got some good advice from somewhere. They also took advantage of two circumstances.

The Angelo Herndon case was still bubbling and boiling and the Scottsboro case was just reaching another of its vociferous climaxes in 1933. The International Labor Defense was formed in those days, and I met William L. Patterson, its secretary. Next to James D. Ford, the Communist Party’s Vice-Presidential nominee in 1932, Patterson held the highest rank of any Negro in the Party. But I was not impressed by him. He seemed of small intellectual caliber, though very ambitious and bold. I was more impressed by a well-known and engaging Negro journalist. He had just returned from Russia (and, I suppose, a period of indoctrination) when I met him backstage at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, where _Stevedore_ was playing. I can remember his saying to me, “We Negro writers have a great opportunity and an inflexible duty to promote the revolution that will extirpate caste, class and race.” How flattering! “We Negro writers—” to lump me in with Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher, Countee Cullen and himself, all of them talented, all of them well known. He could not possibly have heard of me—I had written and published professionally only one story at that time. But the Negro art and literary “renaissance” had not waned enough for those close to it to see that it was fading, and now and then, a completely unknown student, I basked in that artificial light like a homeless beggar keeping himself warm over a sidewalk grating.

But Communism gave off a light of a different quality. It had no comfort in it. As harsh and as revealing as the light in a surgical operating room, it cast no cozy shadow into which one could slip for those moments of quiet reflection which seemed as necessary to me as food and drink. Communism did not allow for the play of individual thought and initiative. It had no warmth in it. Or perhaps it is untrue to say this, since intense heat and intense cold produce the same primary reaction—a shriveling up, a drying out, until the living thing loses its own identity and becomes one with the heat or the cold. I saw something of this reaction in New York and I was appalled by it. Or perhaps this too is untrue. Perhaps what appalled me was the realization that there were people who felt themselves so helplessly cast out of American society and democratic reckoning that they could suck with voracious hunger at the cold breast of Communism. One of the things I could not understand was the unquestioning submission to control.

I do not mean to give the impression that I met many avowed Negro Communists. I did not—not more than a half dozen in all. But with one of them I had nearly seven months of close association. He had a room next to mine in the place where I was living and we shared a bath. He was a thief. He did not make his living in this way. He had to do with the stock and delivery room of a garment making firm, he told me, and he was a minor official in a local union of either truckers or garment makers, I do not know which. He was a thief solely for the benefit of the Party. That was his Party work and his duty and he served it blindly. It was a strange work. At more or less regular intervals he stole bolts of cloth—“suitings” was his word—and kept them in his room until someone, seldom the same person twice, identifying himself by some prearranged means, made contact and relieved him of the goods. He never knew what happened to them ultimately.

Curiously enough this was almost the only information about himself Clark (we will call him) ever volunteered, and of course I did not know this at first. What I did know about Clark—but only after probing—was that he came originally from Pennsylvania and had been graduated from a high school in one of the towns in that state. When the CCC agency was organized, he applied for admission to one of the work groups, but was rejected because high school was supposed to have given him a vocation by means of which he could earn a living. Caught in the depression, without money and, I gathered, without stable family connections, he drifted for a while—to Pittsburgh, to Philadelphia and finally to New York. He was a rugged-looking, stiff-faced young man of twenty-four or twenty-five. One would never suspect from his appearance or from his unimpassioned manner of speaking what a steady flame of fanaticism burned in him. He did not talk well. His voice was coarse, his tongue slightly thick, and he had a very limited command of the language. He spoke of this one day after we had got to know each other fairly well.

“I wish I could talk—like you,” he said. I was about to protest that I was no model, when he added, “Or like James Ford.” This was a complete letdown for me. I had both seen and heard James Ford when he was stumping the Eastern seaboard for the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and I did not think much of him. He seemed basically ignorant, like a parrot fluently repeating phrases he had been carefully taught. His manner seemed gross.

“James Ford?”

“If I could talk like him, maybe I could be where he is now,” Clark said.

“And where is he?” I genuinely wanted to know. I had heard nothing of him since his farcical campaign as the Communist Party’s Vice-Presidential candidate.

“I don’t know, but I think he’s in Russia,” Clark said.

“You want to go to Russia? But why?”

“What’s this country ever done for me? What am I here?” he asked impassively. “A nigger anybody can spit on. In Russia I could be a man.” This too came without anger or bitterness, and I could understand it. He was giving idiomatic expression to a simple wish for dignity and self-respect. One heard it so often among Negroes that one was likely to forget the deep wound of denial which it covered like a scab.

“I know a fellow who went to Russia,” I said brightly. “Apparently he likes it. He’s never come back.”

“He’s got the right idea. I wouldn’t come back neither, if I ever went.”

“It doesn’t appeal to me,” I said. “You’ve been listening to the guys on the stepladder, the Reds, across the street.”

Clark gave me then a long, slow look, but there was nothing in it that I could detect—no quickening either of speculation or resentment. “I’m a Communist,” he said.

I laughed with surprise and embarrassment and, still with his passive eyes on me, he said again, “I’m a Communist,” bluntly.

There was nothing to say and so I kept silent, and to keep silent with Clark was like nothing so much as expecting to be talked to by a wall. He went to his own room shortly. The next day when we met, I felt a little twinge of embarrassment, but he seemed not to, and the feeling soon passed.

Though I did not know it then, I talked to Clark for next to the last time less than a month later. He came to my room one night, as he often did, but this time he announced phlegmatically that he was in trouble. He neither looked nor sounded like a man in trouble and I could think only that he was in trouble with a girl—though girls had never been a subject of conversation between us.

“What kind of trouble?” I inquired.

I suppose Clark lacked a certain sensitiveness, though I would not have called him callous. I do not think it was because he did not care: it was just that he could not estimate the effect his words had upon others.

“I’m a thief and I think they suspicion me,” he said.

I must have said something like “Oh, go on,” or “Quit kidding,” but I knew he had no sense of humor and was quite incapable of kidding. I looked at him. He seemed to think I had not heard him. “I’m a thief and I think they suspicion me,” he repeated. And when he took me to his room and showed me a flat-top trunk half full of bolts of cloth, I believed him.

“But what are you going to do with this stuff? If they suspect you and come——”

“I’m going to get shut of it,” he said stoically. “I’m going to get shut of it now in a few minutes.” He was stuffing the bolts of cloth into two battered valises.

“What are you going to do? How are you going to get rid of it?”

This time he did not answer, but swung the valises off the bed, brushed past me and went down the hall.

The next time (and the last time) I talked with Clark was in the Ninth Precinct jail. He was arrested on a Saturday. On Sunday a newspaper reporter who covered the precinct telephoned me, saying that Clark wanted to see me. I did not like it. I was vexed by the fear of somehow becoming involved in his trouble. I went with reluctance. The desk sergeant, I thought, eyed me suspiciously when I asked for Clark, but perhaps it was just my nervousness, for he called another officer who, taking a key, led me through some doors and along a tier of empty cells. Clark was in the last cell on the tier and he must have heard us coming, for I found him standing expectantly. He smiled stiffly when he saw me, but waited until the policeman had gone before he spoke.

“They got me,” he said.

My mood was not pleasant, I’m afraid, nor talkative. I had no wish to draw him out. If he had anything to say to me, I thought, then he would damned well say it without help from me. He was still smiling stiffly.

“They got me,” he said again.

“So I see,” I said. “Now what?”

They were holding him for a preliminary hearing on Monday, he said. Then, as if it were something which did not concern him—as if he were speaking of someone else who was altogether a stranger to him—he told me of his work for the Communists as I have related it above. I could not understand it. I stared at him, for what he was saying sounded crazy, especially to be coming in so calm and uninflected a voice.

“But why?” I wanted to know.

“It was my job,” he said, as if that explained it truly and entirely; as if it completely satisfied the demands of my question.

“What did you send for me for? I can’t do anything for you,” I said. “Somebody’s made a fool of you. Let them look out for you.”

“You got it all wrong,” he said, shaking his head slowly.

“You’ve got it all wrong. You’re in jail,” I said bitingly.

“But I ain’t no fool, unless doing things for a good point is one. And I don’t want nobody to look out for me.”

“Well, if you did, somebody else would have to do it.”

“What could they do? You want me to get them in trouble?”

“You mean the Communists?”

“My action group,” he said. “They can’t do nothing. They ain’t supposed to do nothing.”

I stared at him with even greater intensity. “They know and they won’t even go bail for you or get you a lawyer?” My outraged credulity was as lost on him as my vexation had been.

“I told you,” he said.

“You mean it’s supposed to be this way? You knew that if something like this happened, your action group wouldn’t do anything?”

“I ain’t going to drag nobody else in,” he said doggedly.

“They shouldn’t have to be dragged in,” I said, and I think I raised my voice in exasperation. “They ought to come in.”

“You wrong,” he said.

“But you’re the one who’s in jail.”

I could not believe that what was happening to him could happen. Of course I had heard stories of strict Party discipline, of orders being given to Party members to do what no one in his right mind would do, but I had not believed such stories, though they were common and though they were also congruous with the newspaper accounts of the purges that were then taking place in Russia. I had kept my reservations. But this business with Clark was real. He was someone I knew, and this was happening to him.

“Look,” I said, “why don’t you be sensible? Why don’t you——”

He was shaking his head before I could finish. There seemed to be nothing I could say to arouse him to a true recognition of the fix he was in. Perhaps at bottom he had a martyr complex, but I could not see in him any of the things I associated with martyrdom. There was none of the fire, none of the dignity and nobility I thought of as belonging in the picture. There were not even defiance and rebellion in him—or if they were, Clark kept them hidden beneath layers of stony reserve that could not be penetrated. Besides, it seemed to me that to _have_ to suffer alone for a principle made the principle suspect.

And he suffered alone. I did not go to see him in the Tombs where he was remanded after the preliminary hearing, and on the day of his trial I searched four papers before I found in one of them a short notice: NEGRO CONVICTED OF THEFT.

I saw him again at the trial. It lasted less than twenty minutes. Clark, in the same rumpled brown suit he had worn in jail, was led in. He looked slightly drawn, but I think I was the only one of the twenty or thirty spectators who could have known this. No one seemed to take any interest in this fourth case on the docket. The charge was read. The court-appointed lawyer pleaded guilty. A short, stocky man was sworn in and gave testimony to the effect that so-many and so-many bolts of cloth were missing over a period of months; that company detectives were put on the trail of them, and that finally in March they had found “their man.” Then a private detective testified; then a stock clerk. There were no other witnesses. Clark was ordered to stand. The judge pronounced sentence—five years in prison. Clark looked around at the spectators then, but I could see no change in his expression. He was nudged away. I left the courtroom.

10

Like the capacity for thought and the desire for knowledge, the instincts for personal liberty and, within reason, power over one’s destiny are attributes of the human mind. They are stronger in some than in others. Where they have been weakened by catastrophe—say long-continued planned violence, as in war; or widespread social disorganization, as in times of great economic crises—the instincts can be perverted, or even totally destroyed. There was danger of this perversion (which actually developed in some countries in Europe) during America’s great depression, when the feeling grew that only Franklin D. Roosevelt had answers and that everything depended on him. The American people were all but ripe to surrender their minds and the control of their destiny.

It was the distortion or atrophy of this instinct that the Communists hoped to find in the American Negro. They had good reason for such hopes, and they were not loath to express it: “The especially intense exploitation and heavy oppression to which the millions of Negroes in America are subject make it imperative for _the Party to devote its best energies and its maximum resources towards becoming the recognized leader and champion ... of Negroes_.”[7] (Italics mine.) The intense exploitation and heavy oppression were true enough. But there was something that the Communists did not take into account; something psychical and perhaps unworldly which even the people whom they hoped to inveigle did not think about. It was not the Negro’s vaunted resiliency, though this was something. Rather it was what I can think of only as the spiritual cohesion of democracy. This cohesion is organic to the delicately balanced ideological structure that democracy is, and it is the attribute which makes it impossible to separate the destiny of America from the destiny of democracy itself.

For democracy is less a form of government than it is a way of life, and the principles—freedom, equality, justice—on which this way of life is founded have an appeal as universal as the idea of God. And what I am saying is that in spite of “heavy oppression” and “intense exploitation,” the American Negro believed in the principles. It was this belief in the principles and the impossibility of ever dissociating them in the Negro’s mind from democracy and America that stymied the Communists, who could not understand why the colored people’s hatred of discrimination, segregation and all the inequities did not lead naturally to a hatred of democracy. But it was like expecting them to hate God because preachers are sometimes rascals.

Nor do I think that this is as abstruse and metaphysical as it sounds. Or if it is, then it is well to remember that American democracy is itself a metaphysic, blending as it does subjective truth (“the inalienable rights of man”) with moral abstractions (“liberty and justice for all”) and mystical concepts (“the will of the people”) which admittedly cannot be achieved by all the institutions ever created by man. It is, this democracy, “impractical.” It was this that the Communists took cognizance of and figured on. They did it three times between 1918 and 1942, and each time in crisis, when they thought the material values which they wished to substitute as the goal of struggle were enhanced by their very absence. The terms they used were purely materialistic too, and they applied them in a context that was unbounded by the American continent—and this was another mistake. “The American Communist Negroes,” the Communists said, “are the historical leaders of their comrades in Africa and to fit them for dealing the most telling blows to world imperialism as allies of the world’s working class is enough to justify all the time and energy that the Workers (Communist) Party must devote to the mobilization for the revolutionary struggle of the Negro workers in American industry.”[8]

Then they tried to extirpate the spiritual values of democracy by extirpating Christianity. They did not carry on a full-scale campaign of godlessness among American Negroes, but the Negro poet Langston Hughes, who went to visit Russia as a Guest of the State, came back apparently spiritually callous and published the poem “Goodbye, Christ,” and the appalling fact was lost on no one. By and large, Negroes did not feel that Christ and religion were ready for the discard, certainly not before they had been tried. Indeed, their egalitarian aspirations had their roots in Biblical injunction. So the purge of the priests, the smashing of ikons, and the tearing down of the churches, which Negroes read about in the American press, were factors in the failure of the Communist Party to win the support of the black masses.

Add to this one other matter, and the whole story (though oversimplified) of that failure is told. Add patriotism. In some sophisticated Negro circles it is a matter for amused laughter that no Negro has ever been a traitor to the United States. But the laughter does not abrogate the fact. More perhaps than other American minorities, Negroes have had inducements to treachery. Clark expressed it: “What has this country ever done for me?” And of course Negroes before and since have asked the same question. It is purely rhetorical. Clark did not realize it, but America, its ideals, its direction, its basic spirit (for we must again deal with abstractions) had given him a belief in the individual worth and dignity of himself as a man. DuBois, I think, was right when, back in his young, good days, he said, “First, this is our country: we have worked for it, we have suffered for it, we have fought for it ... we have reached in this land our highest modern development and nothing, humanly speaking, can prevent us from eventually reaching here the full stature of our manhood.... Our wrongs are still wrong [but] we will not bargain with our loyalty.”

I am just cynical enough to add a sour note. This loyalty comes in part from a fear of expulsion. It is a historic fear, stemming back to the colonization movement in the seventeenth century. Recently Negroes have seen another minority in other countries expelled, and they know it can be done. But American Negroes have no Palestine.

I will not say that Negroes saw democracy as the highest, final product of man’s political development, nor that they saw enough differences between Communism and democracy to reassure them of the worth of the latter. They did not come to that stage of intellection—and neither did I until much later. I do not think that even the Negro Communists, so recently in the news, with all their reputation for mental acumen, have thought much about the real differences. For actually, of course, the Communist doctrine, like the dogma of the most fundamental religious sect, does not encourage thought. If it did, there probably would be less than a villageful of Communists in the whole Western world, for it would be seen that Communism is a falling away from the idea that the Western world has lived by since the Middle Ages—the idea that _man_ is the end of all human endeavor, and that mere “survival and security” are not enough for man. But this distinction is only gross enough to explain why Communism is the ideology of crisis; why it must seize its chance to win men’s minds when their highest hope is only to stave off death. No, even the intellectuals seem not to have seen this; and the other distinctions are subtler, finer. But they are also fundamental.

First of all, Communism is revolution, a rupture of order, a break in the evolution of Western civilization. Democracy, on the other hand, is a way of conducting affairs so that there is some kind of harmonious continuity in the direction of society. There may be errors and blunders, and there are certainly lags, but the people in a democracy are themselves so sensitive that they automatically exert a corrective force in the way a ship’s gyroscope does. This sensitiveness is the strength of democracy. Communism must operate within a relatively simple but rigid structure (like the “classless society”) with a narrow philosophic base and narrowly defined aims, so that the prestige of authority can be enhanced to tyrannical proportions and so that the decrees of authority can be immediately and continuously checked. There is no margin either for error or disagreement. Democracy is a complex way of life, lacking the utter concentration of energy in any one direction (save in time of national emergency) that marks Communism and that makes no allowance for opposing points of view. Communism must drastically curtail man’s freedom in the first place, prescribe his rights and privileges in the second, and finally it must stand constantly ready to alienate those rights—by force, if necessary, or by the show of force, or by the implication of force. Democracy seeks a constant enlargement of man’s freedom. Because in modern times Communism has seemed able to establish itself only by violence, it seems reasonable to assume that violence is necessary to its perpetuation, while at the same time it is more susceptible to disintegration through violence. Under Communism, man is the slave of the state. Under democracy, the state is the servant of man.

If all this editorializing sounds somewhat beside the point, since only peripherally does it have to do with my Negroness, then I can only plead that it seems to me a description of the sober facts, and that it is by way of being an explanation to the Communists of my anti-Communism. I should have given it to them ten years ago. They should have had it back in 1942 when, after a ten-year layoff, the Communists came at me again and made it necessary for me to try to achieve a certain degree of clarity about these issues.

I had written a book called _No Day of Triumph_, and the Communists saw advance copies of it. They liked it, though I am still puzzled why. Perhaps it was because I did not actually condemn Communism, but, as a matter of fact, expressed sympathy for one Mike Chowan who had long been a Communist and who had fought with the Lincoln Battalion in Spain. Whatever the reason, _New Masses_ first published an excerpt from my book, without, as I remember, getting either my permission or that of the publisher. Soon after the _New Masses_ excerpt appeared and several weeks before publication, I began to get letters from Communists all over the country. Some of these came from bookstore managers who told me that they were going to push the book and who invited me to teas and to hold autograph parties. I accepted only one of these invitations—to speak to a group in Washington, where I had to go on other business anyway. Later I was asked to appear on a radio program with Ella Winters in Philadelphia, but a previous commitment interfered.