Lonely Crusade (7 page)

“Oh, nothing,” Ruth replied.

“I thought you were arguing with that man.”

“No, it wasn’t anything.”

But he had seen and heard it all. He could have reprimanded the man then. But he accepted her dismissal of the incident. He could not enjoy the show and sat there fuming. When they had returned to their room he brought it up again.

“I thought I heard you arguing with that white fellow.”

“Oh, he just didn’t want to move his hat.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“He got up as if he was going to slap me but when he saw you he sat down.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Oh, Lee, it wasn’t worth starting any trouble.”

“I’m your husband, don’t you know that? You don’t have to take insults from anyone, don’t you know that?”

“But, Lee—”

“If a white man’s wife had been insulted she’d expect her husband to protect her.”

“Oh, Lee, a white man, yes—”

He slapped her.

Thus each night he renewed his will so upon rising the following morning he could assume the role that he played throughout the day, that of swaggering with feigned courage through the ever-present knowledge that beyond the black ghetto he was without defense or appeal.

In the fall of 1937 he got a job as research assistant on WPA. During the lunch hour, a couple of weeks later, a Jewish girl told him: “When I first saw you, I said to myself: What’s this guy doing on his muscle? What have we done to him?’”

“I didn’t know I was,” he said.

She shook her head. “You needn’t say. I know.”

The hurt of all these things he took home to Ruth. And for as long as she could, she healed them.

In 1939 he took an examination for postal clerk and was employed. The job did wonders for Lee—gave him self-assurance, poise, and even friends. He loved Ruth then as he first had but was able to express it in many more ways. He became tender, ardent, considerate; and a pleasantness ran through the ardor of their passion.

They concentrated on a house to hold this first-born happiness, and the following spring went to live in a little white stucco bungalow on West 39th Place that was their own. The houses on the street were white in the sunshine with red-tiled roofs, and the lawns were a green velvet background to the pageantry of flowers. No day was ever long enough.

Ruth’s mother came to spend a two-weeks’ visit and stayed the summer long, and they were the first happy family Lee had ever known. Afterward, Ruth’s younger brother Ronnie, a struggling young dentist in the footsteps of his father, and his wife spent a fleeting week with them, and gaiety had filled the little house.

Ruth admired Lee then. Even later when the white Southern migrants began taking over the post office, imposing their traditions on the others, and Lee began bringing home his hurt to take it out on her again, she still had faith. At least Lee didn’t let it trample him as it had before.

When a Louisianian was appointed superintendent and publically announced his opposition to the employment of Negro clerks, Lee adjusted to it by calling him “Hitler.”

“Hitler jumped Lou today. You should have seen Lou; he got so mad he turned ashy.”

“If that old man ever heard you calling him ‘Hitler,’ he wouldn’t like it, I am sure.”

“He’d probably just outrage away.”

“He’d probably want to fire you.”

“He probably would. But there’s a difference between wanting and doing. I’m on civil service, baby doll—remember?”

Nevertheless, he joined the embryo union then taking shape in his department. He could not afford to lose this job.

That summer a new cause for fear came in the form of Selective Service. Before Lee was finally classified III-A, both had developed what they called the “mail-box qualms.”

War was in the air, and it affected everyone. There was no escape for the black or the white. The split in convictions between isolationism and interventionism touched deeply into homes. Lee’s was not passed over.

Using the union as a lever, the Communists pried into his family life to recruit him into the ranks of isolationism. They first came uninvited, two men and a woman from his department, to ask him to head a committee to protest against the discrimination in hiring Negroes and Jews. But Lee was loath to take the leadership in such a move. He thanked them for the honor of considering him but declined.

They did not give up, however. Soon afterwards they called again. This time they requested that he join a committee to fight the discharge of a Negro clerk who had been accused of opening mail. Lee knew of the case and had thought at the time the clerk got off easily, considering the offense.

“If the guy’s really guilty what do you want to do?” he asked.

“He’s no more guilty than you,” the woman replied.

“Then why doesn’t he take his case to the Civil Service Commission?”

“They’ll put him in the army,” one of the men said.

“I don’t see how they could do that. It’s up to his draft board.”

All of them shouted at him. From out of the clamor he distinguished bits of sentences. “…practically impregnable to attack from the Atlantic or Pacific…Wall Street’s dollar empire in Europe and Asia…Negro in a capitalist democracy…blood and agony the people would find a warless world…”

“I don’t get it!” he was finally able to say.

More lucidly, speaking one at a time, they explained that the time had come for all minority groups to join in the fight against discrimination and the other evils of a capitalist society. This war was but a repetition of the former World War, they claimed, instigated by capitalism for the “fool’s gold” of war profits. The Negro should not be hoodwinked by it. President Roosevelt had sold out to Wall Street, betraying the trust the people had put in him to keep them out of war.

“We have a war here at home more important than the petty quarrels of the power-mad nations of Europe,” the woman told him with an inclusive smile. “A war against poverty and insecurity, against the present barbarism that has blotted out civilized living for two thirds of the population. You should consider yourself a soldier in this war.”

“Come, Gordon, let us fight this thing together,” one of the men said as if overcome with emotion. “Let us stand side by side and fight the forces of injustice, intolerance, and prejudice. You Negroes have never had a break.”

Lee was moved against his will. “Well—you know I’m for anything that’s against discrimination. But I think we ought to be sure about Willie Gibson. It’s just possible that he might be guilty—even if he is a Negro.”

“We’ll form a permanent committee to fight all cases of discrimination,” the woman said. “We’ll meet for weekly discussions.”

“Well—all right,” Lee said, “put me down as a member.”

He attended the first few meetings with Ruth. But most of the discussions concerned politics. American capitalism and British Imperialism were denounced more than Nazism. The
Nation
and
New Republic
were cited to show “the pattern of liberal betrayal of liberalism in wartime.” The words of Eugene Debs were recalled: “I hate, I loathe, I despise Junkers and Junkerdom. I have no earthly use for the Junkers of Germany, and not one particle more use for the Junkers in the United States.” They were more concerned about the Hitlers in the United States than the Hitler in Germany.

Lee and Ruth found the meetings boring and quit attending. Although the committee grew in numbers and importance, and came to exert a certain political influence in the post office, no cases of discrimination were protested by it.

After June 1941, when Germany attacked Russia, it was disbanded. The Committee to Aid Russia took its place. The ones who had led the fight against the discrimination of minorities in America now called for unity in an all-out effort to defeat Nazism. They urged that petty racial differences and factional fights be forgotten until the Soviet Union emerged victorious over Germany. Their isolationism had changed overnight to rabid interventionism.

War seemed inevitable that summer. Huge new defense industries began mushrooming all over the city. Migrants poured into the city from the East, North, and South, each group bringing the culture of its section. Racial tensions rose and racial prejudices ran rampant.

In the departments where they composed the majority, white Southerners made life miserable for the Negro employees. Seemingly they had the encouragement and support of the superintendent. Flagrant cases of discrimination were now in evidence.

When Lee called upon the anti-discrimination committee for action, he learned to his amazement that it had been disbanded. He had not been notified, and it had not occurred to him that the Communists would change their position concerning racial discrimination. Now he urged the re-forming of the committee. The former members advised him to let it drop. They pointed out the necessity for unity. But they informed him that shortly there would be a shakeup in the Civil Service Commission, and all practices of discrimination in the post-office system would be abolished.

Lee accepted their counsel. He had no intention of protesting singly; he did not wish to become a martyr.

Then Pearl Harbor happened. Lee found the immediate effect in the post office to be startling. Fear and a blood-red hatred of all dark skin showed in the faces of all the white employees. Frightened and constrained by a tremendous sense of insecurity, Lee withdrew into silence. He began bringing his lunch and eating it on his bench alone. No longer did he loiter in the rest room for his ten minutes’ smoke for fear of being challenged by some race baiter. He avoided crowds, and every time he heard the oft-repeated epithet, “yeller-bellied bastards!” he winced. He made every effort to escape a racial crisis. When the first week had passed without incident he thought to himself: “I made it!”

And then on Thursday of the second week the superintendent strode angrily into the department and stopped behind Lee’s bench.

“How long does it take you to learn a scheme, Gordon?”

Lee went rigid and for a moment could not breathe. But he managed to control his voice: “I’ve known my scheme since the first month I went to work.”

“Then you must be sleeping on the job.”

“I thought I was doing fine; I haven’t made any mistakes.”

“Then I’m a liar?”

“No, sir. If you say I’ve made mistakes, I’ve made mistakes.”

“So now you admit it, eh? I’m warning you, Gordon, this is an essential war agency and I’ll have no incompetent employees here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lee was so relieved by his escape that as soon as he thought the superintendent beyond hearing he muttered to himself: “I surrender, Mr. Hitler.”

The superintendent turned and came back. “You called me ‘Hitler,” he said.

“No, sir, I wasn’t talking about you. It’s just an expression we have.”

“I heard you! You called me ‘Hitler.’”

“No, sir, I wasn’t talking to you.”

But the superintendent returned to his office and suspended Lee for thirty days. And the Civil Service Commission discharged him. Lee telephoned the members of the former committee and demanded that they help him now. They flatly refused to have anything to do with it. No one showed him any sympathy. The woman who had called at his house told him bluntly that it served him right for agitating. He felt a subtle undercurrent of antagonism in the manner of them all.

“Never again will I have business with a Communist,” he told himself. But he was more bewildered than hurt; he could not see the logic of their turning against the Negro. In the end he and Ruth laughed about it.

“Now I can believe everything Pegler says,” he remarked.

Neither he nor Ruth were worried. Times had changed. It was not like the depression years when a post-office job was the pinnacle. Almost any job would pay him more than the eighty cents an hour he had earned.

But soon he was to learn that the new industries were not accepting Negroes in any capacity other than labor, and most of them were not employing Negroes at all. At first he would not accept a job as laborer because he thought he could do better. He resolved that if they had no better jobs than common labor for a college graduate, then he would walk the streets until they did. But as the months passed, January into February then March, worry settled over him, and the fear began tightening him up again.

He began citing Executive Order 8802, President Roosevelt’s directive for fair employment, to the recalcitrant personnel directors of war industries. They laughed in his face.

By late spring of 1942 there was an acute labor shortage in the city. War plants had sent out a frantic cry for help. Great numbers of workers were being imported from every part of the country. There was something so romantic about this new growth of industry and this great influx of migrant workers that a motion-picture studio made an epic picture of it. But Lee had not yet found a job.

His savings began to run out. Each succeeding month he found it more difficult to meet the monthly payments on his house.

Then one night planes flew in from the Pacific. Shore batteries sent up a furious barrage, shaking the ground and lighting the western sky. Lee and Ruth ran out into their yard to watch. They saw the red flashes of the guns toward Santa Monica, the white lines of the tracer bullets against the black night.

“They’re here!” Lee cried exultantly. “They’re here! Oh, Goddammit, they’re coming! Come on, you little bad bastards! Come on and take this city!”

In his excitement he expressed a secret admiration for Japan that had been slowly mounting in him over the months of his futile search for work. It was as if he reached the conviction that if Americans did not want him the Japanese did. He wanted them to come so he could join them and lead them on to victory: even though he himself knew that this was only the wishful yearning of the disinherited.

But the white residents went craven. The power was cut off and a complete blackout hid the city in darkness. Transportation was halted. Motorists were ordered to put out their lights and park on the spot until daybreak. Thousands sought air-raid shelters. Other thousands roamed the streets.