Lonely Crusade (47 page)

Not “we” now, Lee, she thought; it’s not “we” any more.

Seeing another bus come to a stop, she boarded it and rode to the ocean and stood on the concrete embankment for a long time, looking at the waves. The sharp-tongued shimmer of molten waves, red in the late sun, was like a sea of blood beckoning to oblivion. But she only bowed her head and turned and came back to the city. At twilight she stood on the Sixth Street bridge over the Los Angeles River valley, looking down at the railroad tracks. Darkness came and she still stood, and then she found herself walking aimlessly through the streets again. Men spoke to her, cars pulled up and slowed, but she did not notice.

It was late when she opened the door and walked back into her house. For a long time she stood staring at the bichloride of mercury solution, berating herself because she could not drink it. Then she would be dead and this awful torture inside of her would be stilled forever.

“Oh Lee! Oh Lee! Oh Lee!” she cried aloud. Her voice was dry and cracked, but she could not cry.

After a time she lay across the bed and finally from exhaustion dozed off in a nightmarish sleep. The doorbell awakened her and brought her abruptly to a sitting position—nerves jangling, muscles quivering, mouth opening to scream. Then from some buried but still-living wish came the notion it was Lee, and she staggered groggily to the door to let him in. Outside it was gray dawn.

Two bulky white men entered and one said: “We’re from the homicide bureau. Are you Mrs. Lee Gordon?”

“Has something happened?” she asked breathlessly, her hand flying up in a defensive gesture.

“Your husband has been shot.”

Dull-witted and top-heavy, already at the end of physical endurance, she found the sudden shock of anxiety more than she could bear. As she fell, fainting, one of the detectives caught her and eased her into a chair. The other went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Noticing the bichloride of mercury solution, he sniffed it, then filled a glass and returned, forcing it between her lips.

When she came to, her eyes were pools of pure terror. “Is he—is he dead?” she gasped.

“No, ma’am,” the officer quickly said. “He’s not hurt seriously. We didn’t mean to alarm you.”

“May I go to him, please.”

“Oh, of course. That’s why we came, to take you to him.” Smiling down at her, he added: “We’re sorry we alarmed you, Mrs. Gordon,” and assisted her to stand.

When she went into the bedroom to prepare herself to leave, the one who had brought the water thumbed the other toward the kitchen. Turning casually to her as she reappeared, he asked:

“Did he appear worried about anything when he left home last night?”

“Oh!”—She gave a slight start—“are you speaking to me?”

“Yes, I was asking if your husband appeared worried when he left home last night.”

“Oh, he wasn’t home at all last night,” she replied involuntarily, the sound of sobbing in her voice.

Returning from the kitchen with the glass of poison concealed in a handkerchief at his side, the second detective winked. Neither questioned her further until they had escorted her to the police car. Then before starting the motor, the first detective asked: “Wasn’t your husband the young fellow who claimed he was assaulted by deputy sheriffs a short time ago?”

“Oh, that was what started everything,” she sobbed. “He was beaten awfully.”

“Never was anything done about it, was there?”

“He couldn’t prove anything, but he knew who did it.”

“Yes, that’s it,” the other detective said musingly. “A thing like that can start a man to brooding, especially when he feels he’s the victim of an injustice.”

“Oh, it was awful,” she related. “It changed his whole attitude.”

“You mean affected his mind?”

“Not so much his mind. It seemed to take the run out of him. No one could do anything and then the man with him lied about it. He didn’t seem to care about anything after that—” The sobbing suddenly overwhelmed her and she cried: “Oh, Lee!—Won’t you please take me to him now?” she begged.

They drove out Exposition in the early sunrise, and the detective in back with her continued softly: “It’s too bad he got mixed up with those Communists. That won’t do him any good.”

“Oh, what has he done? What was he shot about?”

“We don’t know yet. He turned up at the hospital with a bullet in his shoulder, and we haven’t got him to say who shot him yet.”

“She shot him! I told him she would try to hurt him!”

“You mean the white girl?”

“She didn’t want him! She never wanted him! All she wanted was just to use him. Oh, Lee, you’re such a fool,” she said, sobbing.

“Is that what you and him were arguing about?”

“We didn’t argue. He wasn’t at home.” She began crying as if her heart was breaking all over again. “He’d gone back to her.”

“Did his buddy Luther tell you where he was?”

“Oh, Luther wasn’t his friend. He hated Luther.”

“Almost as much as he hated the deputies who beat him up, eh?”

“Oh, he didn’t want to kill Luther. He just despised him.”

“But he sure would have killed those deputy sheriffs who sapped up on him?”

“Oh, he didn’t really want to hurt them. He was just so torn up all inside.”

“So he got Luther to help him?”

She turned her tear-filled eyes on him in a puzzled look. “Luther?”

“Then when he came home and asked you to help him get away, you didn’t know about his deal with Luther?”

“Deal with Luther—”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“Oh, I haven’t seen him since I went after him.”

“At the white girl’s?”

“He came out and took me home.”

“That was when he pulled his knife on you?”

“Oh, no! We didn’t fight. We were both too upset to fight.”

“He told you then?”

“He said he loved her. But I knew he didn’t mean it. He was so upset he didn’t know what he was saying.”

“He tell you what he was planning to do?”

“No, but I knew he was going back to her. I knew he was going to get hurt—Oh, Lee!”

“I see, that was night before last.”

“Night before last—” she said. It seemed a million years in the past.

“Then it was last night he came and asked you to help him get away?”

“He didn’t come home at all last night.”

“But you didn’t help him, did you? You told him to go back to the white woman and get her to help him, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t see him at all last night.”

“You knew she was going to turn him in, didn’t you? You knew that when you sent him back to her, didn’t you? It was just as if you’d turned him in yourself, wasn’t it?”

“Turned him in? Oh!” From the engulfing terror, her voice was smaller than a whisper. “What did he do?”

“He told you what he did,” the voice went on relentlessly.

“You’re confusing me!” she cried. “Oh, please, please tell me what has happened!”

“And you sent him to his death as surely as if you’d turned him in yourself.”

“Please!—please!—” she begged, as the world began to turn, drowning her in tears.

“Then after you did it, you couldn’t bear to think of what you’d done. So you tried to kill yourself.”

“Please!—”

“You’ve been afraid ever since they beat him that he’d kill one of them.”

And now the world was gone in sudden nausea.

When she came to, she was lying on a cot in the prison infirmary. The detectives and a policewoman stood about her.

“Mrs. Gordon, we are going to give you a chance to help your husband,” one of the detectives began again. “As you know, extenuating circumstances tending to prove temporary insanity do a lot of good in a murder defense.”

But now, even through her terror and exhaustion and the blind white headache burning out her mind, she realized that she had already talked too much. She made no reply.

“We want you to give a detailed account of your husband’s activity from the time he was attacked by unknown persons on the highway until last night.”

“But he didn’t come home at all last night,” she said, beginning again to sob.

“We know all about last night, Mrs. Gordon. What we are interested in now is what he did before last night.”

She closed her eyes and refused to answer.

“Do you want to help your husband?”

If they would only go away and give her time to think—

“So you still want to send him to his death?”

“Oh, no!”

“Then tell us what he did after these people beat him. After all, Mrs. Gordon, it’s not unnatural for a man to want vengeance.”

“Please give me a little time to think,” she begged.

“The boy goes up for arraignment in a few minutes, lady. There isn’t any time. Either you want to help him or you don’t want to help him. There’s nothing to think about.”

“I won’t make any statement until I’ve had time to think,” she whispered.

“Then we will hold you as an accomplice,” the detective said threateningly.

If it was only what you could do to me, she thought, it would not matter—

When it became apparent that she did not intend to speak, one of the detectives nodded to the policewoman, and with the other one left the room. Ruth was booked as a material witness and taken to a cell.

Chapter 29

S
MITTY HAD NOT
given up on Lee, nor had he taken Lee’s name from the payroll. For this he ran the risk of censure from the executive committee, but the risk was incidental—it was Lee who worried him.

Deep down Smitty felt a sense of responsibility for Lee Gordon. He liked Lee also, and to a great extent understood him. There was little he did not know of Lee Gordon’s likes and dislikes, resentments and enthusiasms, antagonisms and admirations, his sudden animosities and just as sudden altruisms, and their sources and compulsions. As he had tried to tell Lee once, he did not find the Negro as strange as he did disturbing.

His sympathy for Lee had no bounds. Just to watch Lee’s groping confusion tortured him, and many times Lee’s behavior caused him actual pain. When circumstances forced him to deny understanding of Lee’s attitude, when he fully understood but could not sanction it, he suffered a depressing sense of guilt.

As it happened at the time he had refused to take Lee’s side against Luther, when he had believed Lee’s story implicitly from the first. Watching the slow build-up of Lee’s distrust of him following that incident was one of the tragedies of his life. But, goddamnit, Lee knew the Communists as well as he—how they were trying to get control of the union and fighting him underhandedly every step of the way. Lee must have been completely aware of the expediency of his stand. And yet he knew that Lee had condemned him for it.

Later, he had watched this distrust blossom into full contempt, simply because he had refused to commit political suicide by fighting down the line for Jackie Forks. Of course, he had known, as had everyone, that she was innocent. But Lee had singled him out as her defender, and in his mind demanded that he die for her. And when he had refused to do so nonsensical and impolitic a thing, Lee had gone to her defense himself, knowing full well there was nothing he could do.

He could understand Lee’s infatuation for the girl. He knew many white men with the same sexual curiosity concerning Negro women. But to these men it was simply a matter of going to bed with a Negro woman; while to Lee it seemed a matter of great importance—so much so that he had quit his job and deserted his wife for her. Nor did Smitty believe it was just because Lee loved the girl. No, it was the way that Lee must have her—not as just going to bed with a white woman, but as a mate, as the woman of his preference, with pride and honor and without shame, or not at all. And therefore he had felt compelled to defend her, even to the destruction of himself. Yet Smitty knew that it would be himself, Smitty, whom Lee Gordon would condemn in the end.

He was more puzzled than annoyed. What did Lee expect of people—that they take a stand and die at every minor crisis? But no sensible man could expect for one to make the stand alone and die without even beginning to accomplish that for which he died. Not even a Communist—an American Communist at that—would pick out a single millionaire, for instance, and condemn him for not giving up his millions while none other even contemplated doing so. Nor would it be of any benefit.

Yet, at every minor crisis, when a person failed to take a stand and make the supreme sacrifice, Lee quickly rejected them. It did not make good goddamn sense! No man would do it. Not even Lee himself—or would he?

These were the things about Lee that puzzled him: his seemingly headstrong bent for self-destruction against all reason and his blind revolt against injustice, yet as blind rejection of people working to rectify it. He could not understand how an intelligent Negro could reject and scorn and hold in contempt those who fought the Negro cause just because they did not die for it; or if they did die for it, how could he reject their memory because in some slight manner they had failed to live by it?

For example, there was the time when Lee had tried so hard to explain why the Negro worker must be given extraordinary privileges in order for him to attain ordinary equality. It was not so much that he had missed the point—he had seen quite clearly how this could be. But that a Negro, underprivileged to start, should ask in all sincerity to become overprivileged, seemed ridiculous, since they both knew that the attainment of simple equality and no more was itself an impossible goal.

And this was what he could not understand: a man fighting so blindly and desperately and dangerously toward a goal, and yet rejecting, denouncing, condemning each hand lifted to help him on his way—damning each slow step because he could not make it in one. That was it: if he couldn’t have it all and at once, then to hell with any part of it. But to a man who was himself free, white, and over twenty-one, intelligent, and in an executive position, who seldom got anything he wanted and almost always had to put up with halfway measures, such an attitude was thoroughly bewildering.

What Smitty failed to realize was if he had been a Negro, without any other change, he would himself have lived in a raging fury. He simply did not have the imagination to put himself, a white man, in a Negro’s place.