I Tried to Be a Communist

9

WITH the John Reed clubs now dissolved, I was free of all party relations. I avoided unit meetings for fear of being subjected to discipline. Occasionally a Negro Communist — defying the code that enjoined him to shun suspect elements — came to my home and informed me of the current charges that Communists were bringing against one another. To my astonishment I heard that Buddy Nealson had branded me a “smuggler of reaction.”

Buddy Nealson was the Negro who had formulated the Communist position for the American Negro; he had made speeches in the Kremlin; he had spoken before Stalin himself.

“Why does Nealson call me that?” I asked.

“He says that you are a petty bourgeois degenerate,” I was told.

“What does that mean?”

“He says that you are corrupting the party with your ideas.”

“How?”

There was no answer. I decided that my relationship with the party was about over; I should have to leave it. The attacks were growing worse, and my refusal to react incited Nealson into coining more absurd phrases. I was termed a “bastard intellectual,” an “incipient Trotskyite”; it was claimed that I possessed an “anti-leadership attitude” and that I was manifesting “seraphim tendencies” — a phrase meaning that one has withdrawn from the struggle of life and considers oneself infallible.

Working all day and writing half the night brought me down with a severe chest ailment. While I was ill, a knock came at my door one morning. My mother admitted Ed Green, the man who had demanded to know what use I planned to make of the material I was collecting from the comrades. I stared at him as I lay abed and I knew that he considered me a clever and sworn enemy of the party. Bitterness welled up in me.

“What do you want ? ” I asked bluntly. “ You see I’m ill.”

“I have a message from the party for you,” he said.

I had not said good day, and he had not offered to say it. He had not smiled, and neither had I. He looked curiously at my bleak room.

“This is the home of a bastard intellectual,” I cut at him.

He stared without blinking. I could not endure his standing there so stone-like. Common decency made me say, “Sit down.”

His shoulders stiffened.

“I’m in a hurry.” He spoke like an army officer.

“What do you want to tell me?”

“Do you know Buddy Nealson?” he asked.

I was suspicious. Was this a political trap?

“What about Buddy Nealson?” I asked, committing myself to nothing until I knew the kind of reality I was grappling with.

“He wants to see you,” Ed Green said.

“What about?” I asked, still suspicious.

“He wants to talk with you about your party work,” he said.

“I’m ill and can’t see him until I’m well,” I said.

Ed Green stood for a fraction of a second, then turned on his heel and marched out of the room.

When my chest healed, I sought an appointment with Buddy Nealson. He was a short, black man with an ever ready smile, thick lips, a furtive manner, and a greasy, sweaty look. His bearing was nervous, self-conscious; he seemed always to be hiding some deep irritation. He spoke in short, jerky sentences, hopping nimbly from thought to thought, as though his mind worked in a free, associational manner. He suffered from asthma and would snort at unexpected intervals. Now and then he would punctuate his flow of words by taking a nip from a bottle of whiskey. He had traveled half around the world and his talk was pitted with vague allusions to European cities. I met him in his apartment, listened to him intently, observed him minutely, for I knew that I was facing one of the leaders of World Communism.

“Hello, Wright,” he snorted. “I’ve heard about you.”

As we shook hands he burst into a loud, seemingly causeless laugh; and as he guffawed I could not tell whether his mirth was directed at me or was meant to hide his uneasiness.

“I hope what you’ve heard about me is good,” I parried.

“Sit down,” he laughed again, waving me to a chair. “Yes, they tell me you write.”

“I try to,” I said.

“You can write,” he snorted. “I read that article you wrote for the New Masses about Joe Louis. Good stuff. First, political treatment of sports we’ve yet had. Ha-ha.”

I waited. I had thought that I should encounter a man of ideas, but he was not that. Then perhaps he was a man of action? But that was not indicated either.

“They tell me that you are a friend of Ross,” he shot at me.

I paused before answering. He had not asked me directly, but had hinted in a neutral, teasing way. Ross, I had been told, was slated for expulsion from the party on the ground that he was “anti-leadership”; and if a member of the Communist International was asking me if I was a friend of a man about to be expelled, he was indirectly asking me if I was loyal or not.

“Ross is not particularly a friend of mine,” I said frankly. “But I know him well; in fact, quite well.”

“If he isn’t your friend, how do you happen to know him so well?” he asked, laughing to soften the hard threat of his question.

“I was writing an account of his life and I know him as well, perhaps, as anybody,” I told him.

“I heard about that,” he said. “Wright. Ha-ha. Say, let me call you Dick, hunh?”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Dick,” he said, “Ross is a nationalist.” He paused to let the weight of his accusation sink in. He meant that Ross’s militancy was extreme. “ We Communists don’t dramatize Negro nationalism,” he said in a voice that laughed, accused, and drawled.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We’re not advertising Ross.” He spoke directly now.

“We’re talking about two different things,” I said. “You seem worried about my making Ross popular because he is your political opponent. But I’m not concerned about Ross’s politics at all. The man struck me as one who typified certain traits of the Negro migrant. I’ve already sold a story based upon an incident in his life.”

Nealson became excited.

“What was the incident?” he asked.

“Some trouble he got into when he was thirteen years old,” I said.

“Oh, I thought it was political,” he said, shrugging.

“But I’m telling you that you are wrong about that,” I explained. “I’m not trying to fight you with my writing. I’ve no political ambitions. You must believe that. I’m trying to depict Negro life.”

“Have you finished writing about Ross?”

“No,” I said. “I dropped the idea. Our party members were suspicious of me and were afraid to talk.” He laughed.

“Dick,” he began, “we’re short of forces. We’re facing a grave crisis.”

“The party’s always facing a crisis,” I said.

His smile left and he stared at me.

“You’re not cynical, are you, Dick?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “But it’s the truth. Each week, each month there’s a crisis.”

“You’re a funny guy,” he said, laughing, snorting again. “But we’ve got a job to do. We’re altering our work. Fascism’s the danger, the danger now to all people.”

“I understand,” I said.

“We’ve got to defeat the Fascists,” he said, snorting from asthma. “We’ve discussed you and know your abilities. We want you to work with us. We’ve got to crash out of our narrow way of working and get our message to the church people, students, club people, professionals, middle class.

“I’ve been called names,” I said softly. “Is that crashing out of the narrow way?”

“Forget that,” he said.

He had not denied the name-calling. That meant that, if I did not obey him, the name-calling would begin again.

“I don’t know if I fit into things,” I said openly.

“We want to trust you with an important assignment,” he said.

“What do you want me to do?”

“We want you to organize a committee against the high cost of living.”

“The high cost of living?” I exclaimed. “What do I know about such things?”

“It’s easy. You can learn,” he said.

I was in the midst of writing a novel and he was calling me from it to tabulate the price of groceries. “He doesn’t think much of what I’m trying to do,” I thought.

“Comrade Nealson,” I said, “a writer who hasn’t written anything worth while is a most doubtful person. Now, I’m in that category. Yet I think I can write. I don’t want to ask for special favors, but I’m in the midst of a book which I hope to complete in six months or so. Let me convince myself that I’m wrong about my hankering to write and then I’ll be with you all the way.”

“Dick,” he said, turning in his chair and waving his hand as though to brush away an insect that was annoying him, “you’ve got to get to the masses of people.”

“You’ve seen some of my work,” I said. “Isn’t it just barely good enough to warrant my being given a chance?”

“The party can’t deal with your feelings,” he said.

“Maybe I don’t belong in the party,” I stated it in full.

“Oh, no! Don’t say that,” he said, snorting. He looked at me. “You’re blunt.”

“I put things the way I feel them,” I said. “I want to start in right with you. I’ve had too damn much crazy trouble in the party.”

He laughed and lit a cigarette.

“Dick,” he said, shaking his head, “the trouble with you is that you’ve been around with those white artists on the North Side too much. You even talk like ‘em. You’ve got to know your own people.”

“I think I know them,” I said, realizing that I could never really talk with him. “I’ve been inside of three fourths of the Negroes’ homes on the South Side.”

“But you’ve got to work with ‘em,” he said.

“I was working with Ross until I was suspected of being a spy,” I said.

“Dick,” he spoke seriously now, “the party has decided that you are to accept this task.”

I was silent. I knew the meaning of what he had said. A decision was the highest injunction that a Communist could receive from his party, and to break a decision was to break the effectiveness of the party’s abilily to act. In principle I heartily agreed with this, for I knew that it was impossible for working people to forge instruments of political power until they had achieved unity of action. Oppressed for centuries, divided, hopeless, corrupted, misled, they were cynical — as I had once been — and the Communist method of unity had been found historically to be the only means of achieving discipline. In short, Nealson had asked me directly if I were a Communist or not. I wanted to be a Communist, but my kind of Communist. I wanted to shape people’s feelings, awaken their hearts. But I could not tell Nealson that; he would only have snorted.

“I’ll organize the committee and turn it over to someone else,” I suggested.

“You don’t want to do this, do you?” he asked.

“No,” I said firmly.

“What would you like to do on the South Side, then?”

“I’d like to organize Negro artists,” I said.

“But the party doesn’t need that now,” he said.

I rose, knowing that he had no intention of letting me go after I had organized the committee. I wanted to tell him that I was through, but I was not ready to bring matters to a head. I went out, angry with myself, angry with him, angry with the party. Well, I had not broken the decision, but neither had I accepted it wholly. I had dodged, trying to save time for writing, time to think.

10

MY TASK consisted in attending meetings until the late hours of the night, taking part in discussions, or lending myself generally along with other Communists in leading the people of the South Side. We debated the housing situation, the best means of forcing the city to authorize open hearings on conditions among Negroes. I gritted my teeth as the daily value of pork chops was tabulated, longing to be at home with my writing.

Nealson was cleverer than I and he confronted me before I had a chance to confront him. I was summoned one night to meet Nealson and a “friend.” When I arrived at a South Side hotel I was introduced to a short, yellow man who carried himself like Napoleon. He wore glasses, kept his full lips pursed as though he were engaged in perpetual thought. He swaggered when he walked. He spoke slowly, precisely, trying to charge each of his words with more meaning than the words were able to carry. He talked of trivial things in lofty tones. He said that his name was Smith, that he was from Washington, that he planned to launch a national organization among Negroes to federalize all existing Negro institutions so as to achieve a broad unity of action. The three of us sat at a table, facing one another. I knew that another and last offer was about to be made to me, and if I did not accept it, there would be open warfare.

“Wright, how would you like to go to Switzerland?” Smith asked with dramatic suddenness.

“I’d like it,” I said. “But I’m tied up with work now.”

“You can drop that,” Nealson said. “This is important.”

“What would I do in Switzerland?” I asked.

“You’ll go as a youth delegate,” Smith said. “From there you can go to the Soviet Union.”

“Much as I’d like to, I’m afraid I can’t make it,”

I said honestly. “I simply cannot drop the writing I’m doing now.”

We sat looking at one another, smoking silently.

“Has Nealson told you how I feel?” I asked Smith.

Smith did not answer. He stared at me a long time, then spat: “Wright, you’re a fool!”

I rose. Smith turned away from me. A breath more of anger and I should have driven my list into his face. Nealson laughed sheepishly, snorting.

“Was that necessary?” I asked, trembling.

I stood recalling how, in my boyhood, I would have fought until blood ran had anyone said anything like that to me. But I was a man now and master of my rage, able to control the surging emotions. I put on my hat and walked to the door. “Keep cool,” I said to myself. “Don’t let this get out of hand.”

“This is good-bye,” I said.

I attended the next unit meeting and asked for a place on the agenda, which was readily granted. Nealson was there. Evans was there. Ed Green was there. When my time came to speak, I said: —

“Comrades, for the past two years I’ve worked daily with most of you. Despite this, I have for some time found myself in a difficult position in the party. What has caused this difficulty is a long story which I do not care to recite now; it would serve no purpose. But I tell you honestly that I think I’ve found a solution of my difficulty. I am proposing here tonight that my membership be dropped from the party rolls. No ideological differences impel me to say this. I simply do not wish to be bound any longer by the party’s decisions. I should like to retain my membership in those organizations in which the party has influence, and I shall comply with the party’s program in those organizations, I hope that my words will be accepted in the spirit in which they are said. Perhaps sometime in the future I can meet and talk with the leaders of the party as to what tasks I can best perform.”

I sat down amid a profound silence. The Negro secretary of the meeting looked frightened, glancing at Nealson, Evans, and Ed Green.

“Is there any discussion on Comrade Wright’s Statement?” the secretary asked finally.

“ I move that discussion on Wright’s statement be deferred,” Nealson said.

A quick vote confirmed Nealson’s motion. I looked about the silent room, then reached for my hot and rose.

“I should like to go now,” I said.

No one said anything. I walked to the door and out into the night and a heavy burden seemed to lift from my shoulders. I was free. And I had done it in a decent and forthright manner. I had not been bitter. I had not raked up a single recrimination. I had attacked no one. I had disavowed nothing.

The next night two Negro Communists called at my home. They pretended to be ignorant of what had happened at the unit meeting. Patiently I explained what had occurred.

“Your story does not agree with what Nealson says,” they said, revealing the motive of their visit.

“And what does Nealson say?” I asked.

“He says that you are in league with a Trotskyite group, and that you made an appeal for other party members to follow you in leaving the party.”

“What?” I gasped. “That’s not true. I asked that my membership be dropped. I raised no political issues.” What did this mean? I sat pondering. “Look, maybe I ought to make my break with the party clean. If Nealson’s going to act this way, I’ll resign.”

“You can’t resign,” they told me.

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

“No one can resign from the Communist Party.”

I looked at them and laughed.

“You’re talking crazy,” I said.

“Nealson would expel you publicly, cut the ground from under your feet if you resigned,” they said. “People would think that something was wrong if someone like you quit here on the South Side.”

I was angry. Was the party so weak and uncertain of itself that it could not accept what I had said at the unit meeting? Who thought up such tactics? Then, suddenly, I understood. These were the secret, underground tactics of the political movement of the Communists under the tsars of Old Russia! The Communist Party felt that it had to assassinate me morally merely because I did not want to be bound by its decisions. I saw now that my comrades were acting out a fantasy that had no relation whatever to the reality of their environment.

“Tell Nealson that if he lights me, then, by God, I’ll fight him,” I said. “ If he leaves this damn thing where it is, then all right. If he thinks I won’t fight him publicly, he’s crazy!”

I was not able to know if my statement reached Nealson. There was no public outcry against me, but in the ranks of the party itself a storm broke loose and I was branded a traitor, an unstable personality, and one whose faith had failed.

My comrades had known me, my family, my friends; they, God knows, had known my aching poverty. But they had never been able to conquer their fear of the individual way in which I acted and lived, an individuality which life had seared into my bones.

11

I WAS transferred by the relief authorities from the South Side Boys’ Club to the Federal Negro Theater to work as a publicity agent. There were days when I was acutely hungry for the incessant analyses that went on among the comrades, but whenever I heard news of the party’s inner life, it was of charges and countercharges, reprisals and counterreprisals.

The Federal Negro Theater, for which I was doing publicity, had run a series of ordinary plays, all of which had been revamped to “Negro style,” with jungle scenes, spirituals, and all. For example, the skinny white woman who directed it, an elderly missionary type, would take a play whose characters were white, whose theme dealt with the Middle Ages, and recast it in terms of Southern Negro life with overtones of African backgrounds. Contemporary plays dealing realistically with Negro life were spurned as being controversial. There were about forty Negro actors and actresses in the theater, lolling about, yearning, disgruntled.

What a waste of talent, I thought. Here was an opportunity for the production of a worth-while Negro drama and no one was aware of it. I studied the situation, then laid the matter before white friends of mine who held influential positions in the Works Progress Administration. I asked them to replace the white woman — including her quaint aesthetic notions — with someone who knew the Negro and the theater. They promised me that they would act.

Within a month the white woman director had been transferred. We moved from the South Side to the Loop and were housed in a first-rate theater. I successfully recommended Charles DeSheim, a talented Jew, as director. DeSheim and I held long talks during which I outlined what I thought could be accomplished. I urged that our first offering should be a bill of three one-act plays, including Paul Green’s Hymn to the Rising Sun, a grim, poetical, powerful one-acter dealing with chain-gang conditions in the South.

I was happy. At last I was in a position to make suggestions and have them acted upon. I was convinced that we had a rare chance to build a genuine Negro theater. I convoked a meeting and introduced DeSheim to the Negro company, telling them that he was a man who knew the theater, who would lead them toward serious dramatics. DeSheim made a speech wherein he said that he was not at the theater to direct it, but to help the Negroes to direct it. He spoke so simply and eloquently that they rose and applauded him.

I then proudly passed out copies of Paul Green’s Hymn to the Rising Sun to all members of the company. DeSheim assigned reading parts. I sat down to enjoy adult Negro dramatics. But something went wrong. The Negroes stammered and faltered in their lines. Finally they stopped reading altogether. DeSheim looked frightened. One of the Negro actors rose.

“Mr. DeSheim,” he began, “we think this play is indecent. We don’t want to act in a play like this before the American public. I don’t think any such conditions exist in the South. I lived in the South and I never saw any chain gangs. Mr. DeSheim, we want a play that will make the public love us.”

“What kind of play do you want?” DeSheim asked them.

They did not know. I went to the office and looked up their records and found that most of them had spent their lives playing cheap vaudeville. I had thought that they played vaudeville because the legitimate theater was barred to them, and now it turned out they wanted none of the legitimate theater, that they were scared spit less at the prospects of appearing in a play that the public might not like, even though they did not understand that public and had no way of determining its likes or dislikes.

I felt - but only temporarily — that perhaps the whites were right, that Negroes were children and would never grow up. DeSheim informed the company that he would produce any play they liked, and they sat like frightened mice, possessing no words to make known their vague desires.

When I arrived at the theater a few mornings later, I was horrified to find that the company had drawn up a petition demanding the ousting of DeSheim. I was asked to sign the petition and I refused.

“Don’t you know your friends?” I asked them.

They glared at me. I called DeSheim to the theater and we went into a frantic conference.

“What must I do?” he asked.

“Take them into your confidence,” I said. “Let them know that it is their right to petition for a redress of their grievances.”

DeSheim thought my advice sound and, accordingly, he assembled the company and told them that they had a right to petition against him if they wanted to, but that he thought any misunderstandings that existed could be settled smoothly.

“Who told you that we were getting up a petition?” a black man demanded.

DeSheim looked at me and stammered wordlessly.

“There’s an Uncle Tom in the theater!” a black girl yelled.

After the meeting a delegation of Negro men came to my office and took out their pocketknives and flashed them in my face.

“You get the hell off this job before we cut your bellybutton out!” they said.

I telephoned my white friends in the Works Progress Administration: “Transfer me at once to another job, or I’ll be murdered.”

Within twenty-four hours DeSheim and I were given our papers. We shook hands and went our separate ways.

I was transferred to a white experimental theatrical company as a publicity agent and I resolved to keep my ideas to myself, or, better, to write them down and not attempt to translate them into reality.

12

ONE evening a group of Negro Communists called at my home and asked to speak to me in strict secrecy. I took them into my room and locked the door.

“Dick,” they began abruptly, “the party wants you to attend a meeting Sunday.”

“Why?” I asked. “I’m no longer a member.”

“That’s all right. They want you to be present,” they said.

“Communists don’t speak to me on the street,” I said. “Now, why do you want me at a meeting?”

They hedged. They did not want to tell me.

“If you can’t tell me, then I can’t come,” I said.

They whispered among themselves and finally decided to take me into their confidence.

“Dick, Ross is going to be tried,” they said.

“For what?”

They recited a long list of political offenses of which they alleged that he was guilty.

“But what has that got to do with me?”

“If you come, you’ll find out,” they said.

“I’m not that naïve,” I said. I was suspicious now. Were they trying to lure me to a trial and expel me? “This trial might turn out to be mine.”

They swore that they had no intention of placing me on trial, that the party merely wanted me to observe Ross’s trial so that I might learn what happened to “enemies of the working class.”

As they talked, my old love of witnessing something new came over me. I wanted to see this trial, but I did not want to risk being placed on trial myself.

“Listen,” I told them. “I’m not guilty of Nealson’s charges. If I showed up at this trial, it would seem that I am.”

“No, it won’t. Please come.”

“All right. But, listen. If I’m tricked, I’ll fight. You hear? I don’t trust Nealson. I’m not a politician and I cannot anticipate all the funny moves of a man who spends his waking hours plotting.”

Ross’s trial took place that following Sunday afternoon. Comrades stood inconspicuously on guard about the meeting hall, at the doors, down the street, and along the hallways. When I appeared, I was ushered in quickly. I was tense. It was a rule that once you had entered a meeting of this kind you could not leave until the meeting was over; it was feared that you might go to the police and denounce them all.

Ross, the accused, sat alone at a table in the front of the hall, his face distraught. I felt sorry for him; yet I could not escape feeling that he enjoyed this. For him, this was perhaps the highlight of an otherwise bleak existence.

In trying to grasp why Communists hated intellectuals, my mind was led back again to the accounts I had read of the Russian Revolution. There had existed in Old Russia millions of poor, ignorant people who were exploited by a few educated, arrogant noblemen, and it became natural for the Russian Communists to associate betrayal with intellectualism. But there existed in the Western world an element that baffled and frightened the Communist Party: the prevalence of self-achieved literacy. Even a Negro, entrapped by ignorance and exploitation, — as I had been, — could, if he had the will and the love for it, learn to read and to understand the world in which he lived. And it was these people that the Communists could not understand.

The trial began in a quiet, informal manner. The comrades acted like a group of neighbors sitting in judgment upon one of their kind who had stolen a chicken. Anybody could ask and get the floor. There was absolute freedom of speech. Yet the meeting had an amazingly formal structure of its own, a structure that went as deep as the desire of men to live together.

A member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party rose and gave a description of the world situation. He spoke without emotion and piled up hard facts. He painted a horrible but masterful picture of Fascism’s aggression in Germany, Italy, and Japan.

I accepted the reason why the trial began in this manner. It was imperative that here be postulated against what or whom Ross’s crimes had been committed. Therefore there had to be established in the minds of all present a vivid picture of mankind under oppression. And it was a true picture. Perhaps no organization on earth, save the Communist Party, possessed so dot ailed a knowledge of how workers lived, for its sources of information stemmed directly from the workers themselves.

The next speaker discussed the role of the Soviet Union as the world’s lone workers’ state — how the Soviet Union was hemmed in by enemies, how the Soviet Union was trying to industrialize itself, what sacrifices it was making to help workers of the world to steer a path toward peace through the idea of collective security.

The facts presented so far were as true as any facts could be in this uncertain world. Yet no one word had been said of the accused, who sat listening like any other member. The time had not yet come to include him and his crimes in this picture of global struggle. An absolute had first to be established in the minds of the comrades so that they could measure the success or failure of their deeds by it.

Finally a speaker came forward and spoke of Chicago’s South Side, its Negro population, their suffering and handicaps, linking all that also to the world struggle. Then still another speaker followed and described the tasks of the Communist Party of the South Side. At last, the world, the national, and the local pictures had been fused into one overwhelming drama of moral struggle in which everybody in the hall was participating. This presentation had lasted for more than three hours, but it bad enthroned a new sense of reality in the hearts of those present, a sense of man on earth. With the exception of the church and its myths and legends, there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist Party.

Toward evening the direct charges against Ross were made, not by the leaders of the party, but by Ross’s friends, those who knew him best! It was crushing. Ross wilted. His emotions could not withstand the weight of the moral pressure. No one was terrorized into giving information against him. They gave it willingly, citing dates, conversations, scenes. The black mass of Ross’s wrongdoing emerged slowly and irrefutably.

The moment came for Ross to defend himself. I had been told that he had arranged for friends to testify in his behalf, but he called upon no one. He stood, trembling; he tried to talk and his words would not come. The hall was as still as death. Guilt was written in every pore of his black skin. His hands shook. He held on to the edge of the table to keep on his feet. His personality, his sense of himself, had been obliterated. Yet he could not have been so humbled unless he had shared and accepted the vision that had crushed him, the common vision that bound us all together.

“ Comrades,” he said in a low, charged voice, “ I’m guilty of all the chargas, all of them.”

His voice broke in a sob. No one prodded him. No one tortured him. No one threatened him. He was free to go out of the hall and never see another Communist. But he did not want to. He could not. The vision of a communal world had sunk down into his soul and it would never leave him until life left him. He talked on, outlining how he had erred, how he would reform.

I knew, as I sat there, that there were many people who thought they knew life who had been skeptical of the Moscow trials. But they could not have been skeptical had they witnessed this astonishing trial. Ross had not been doped; he had been awakened. It was not a fear of the Communist Party that had made him confess, but a fear of the punishment that he would exact of himself that made him tell of his wrongdoings. The Communists had talked to him until they had given him new eyes with which to see his own crime. And then they sat back and listened to him tell how he had erred. He was one with all the members there, regardless of race or color; his heart was theirs and their hearts were his; and when a man reaches that state of kinship with others, that degree of oneness, or when a trial has made him kin after he has been sundered from them by wrongdoing, then he must rise and say, out of a sense of the deepest morality in the world: “I’m guilty. Forgive me.”

This, to me, was a spectacle of glory; and yet, because it had condemned me, because it was blind and ignorant, I felt that it was a spectacle of horror. The blindness of their limited lives — lives truncated and impoverished by the oppression they had suffered long before they had ever heard of Communism— made them think that I was with their enemies. American life had so corrupted their consciousness that they were unable to recognize their friends when they saw them. I knew that if they had held state power I should have been declared guilty of treason and my execution would have followed. And I knew that they felt, with all the strength of their black blindness, that they were right.

I could not stay until the end. I was anxious to get out of the hall and into the streets and shake free from the gigantic tension that had hold of me.

I rose and went to the door; a comrade shook his head, warning me that I could not leave until the trial had ended.

“You can’t leave now,” he said.

“I’m going out of here,” I said, my anger making my voice louder than I intended.

We glared at each other. Another comrade came running up. I stepped forward. The comrade who had rushed up gave the signal for me to be allowed to leave. They did not want violence, and neither did I. They stepped aside.

I went into the dark Chicago streets and walked home through the cold, filled with a sense of sadness. Once again I told myself that I must learn to stand alone. I did not feel so wounded by their rejection of me that I wanted to spend my days bleating about what they had done. Perhaps what I had already learned to feel in my childhood saved me from that futile path. I lay in bed that night and said to myself: “I’ll be for them, even though they are not for me.”

13

FROM the Federal Experimental Theater I was transferred to the Federal Writers’ Project, and I tried to earn my bread by writing guidebooks. Many of the writers on the project were members of the Communist Party and they kept their revolutionary vows that restrained them from speaking to “ traitors of the working class.” I sat beside them in the office, ate next to them in restaurants, and rode up and down in the elevators with them, but they always looked straight ahead, wordlessly.

After working on the project for a few months, I was made acting supervisor of essays and straightway I ran into political difficulties. One morning the administrator of the project called me into his office.

“Wright, who are your friends on this project?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why?”

“Well, you ought to find out soon,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Some people are asking for your removal on the ground that you are incompetent,” he said.

“Who are they?”

He named several of my erst while comrades. Yes, it had come to that. They were trying to take the bread out of my mouth.

“What do you propose to do about their complaints?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, laughing. “I think I understand what’s happening here. I’m not going to let them drive you off this job.”

I thanked him and rose to go to the door. Something in his words had not sounded right. I turned and faced him.

“This job?” I repeated. “What do you mean?”

“You mean to say that you don’t know?” he asked.

“ Know what ? What are you talking about?”

“ Why did you leave the Federal Negro Theater?”

“I had trouble there. They drove me off the job, the Negroes did.”

“And you don’t think that they had any encouragement?” he asked mo ironically.

I sat again. This was deadly. I gaped at him.

“You needn’t fear here,” he said. “You work, write.”

“It’s hard to believe that,” I murmured.

“Forget it,” he said.

But the worst was yet to come. One day at noon I closed my desk and went down in the elevator. When I reached the first floor of the building, I saw a picket line moving to and fro in the streets. Many of the men and women carrying placards were old friends of mine, and they were chanting for higher wages for Works Progress Administration artists and writers. It was not the kind of picket line that one was not supposed to cross, and as I started away from the door I heard my name shouted: —

“There’s Wright, that goddamn Trotskyite!”

“We know you, you-!”

“Wright’s a traitor!”

For a moment it seemed that I ceased to live. I had now reached that point where I was cursed aloud in the busy streets of America’s second-largest city. It shook me as nothing else had.

Days passed. I continued on my job, where I functioned as the shop chairman of the union which I had helped to organize, though my election as shop chairman had been bitterly opposed by the party. In their efforts to nullify my influence in the union, my old comrades were willing to kill the union itself.

As May Day of 1936 approached, it was voted by the union membership that we should march in the public procession. On the morning of May Day I received printed instructions as to the time and place where our union contingent would assemble to join the parade. At noon I hurried to the spot and found that the parade was already in progress. In vain I searched for the banners of my union local. Where were they? I went up and down the streets, asking for the location of my local.

“Oh, that local’s gone fifteen minutes ago,”a Negro told me. “If you’re going to march, you’d better fall in somewhere.”

I thanked him and walked through the milling crowds. Suddenly I heard my name called. I turned. To my left was the Communist Party’s South Side section, lined up and ready to march.

“Come here!” an old party friend called to me.

I walked over to him.

“Aren’t you marching today?” he asked me.

“I missed my union local,” I told him.

44What the hell,” he said. “March with us.”

“I don’t know,” I said, remembering my last visit to the headquarters of the party, and my status as an “enemy.”

“This is May Day,” he said. “Get into the ranks.”

“You know the trouble I’ve had,” I said.

“That’s nothing,” he said. “Everybody’s marching today.”

“I don’t think I’d better,” I said, shaking my head.

“ Are you scared ? ” he asked. “This is May Day.”

He caught my right arm and pulled me into line beside him. I stood talking to him, asking him about his work, about common friends.

“Get out of our ranks!” a voice barked.

I turned. A white Communist, a leader of the district of the Communist Party, Cy Perry, a slender, close-cropped fellow, stood glaring at me.

“I — It’s May Day and I want to march,” I said.

“Get out!” he shouted.

“I was invited here,” I said.

I turned to the Negro Communist who had invited me into the ranks. I did not want public violence. I looked at my friend. He turned his eyes away. He was afraid. I did not know what to do.

“You asked me to march here,” I said to him.

He did not answer.

“Tell him that you did invite me,” I said, pulling his sleeve.

“I’m asking you for the last time to get out of our ranks!” Cy Perry shouted.

I did not move. I had intended to, but I was beset by so many impulses that. I could not act. Another white Communist came to assist Perry. Perry caught hold of my collar and pulled at me. I resisted. They held me fast. I struggled to free myself.

“Turn me loose!” I said.

Hands lifted me bodily from the sidewalk; I felt myself being pitched headlong through the air. I saved myself from landing on my head by clutching a curbstone with my hands. Slowly I rose and stood. Perry and his assistant were glaring at me. The rows of white and black Communists were looking at me with cold eyes of non-recognition. I could not quite believe what had happened, even though my hands were smarting and bleeding. I had sullered a public, physical assault by two white Communists with black Communists looking on. I could not move from the spot. I was empty of any idea about what to do. But I did not feel belligerent. I had outgrown my childhood.

Suddenly, the vast ranks of the Communist Party began to move. Scarlet banners with the hammer and sickle emblem of world revolution were lifted, and they fluttered in the May breeze. Drums beat. Voices were chanting. The tramp of many feet shook the earth. A long line of set-faced men and women, white and black, flowed past me.

I followed the procession to the Loop and went into Grant Park Plaza and sat upon a bench. I was not thinking; I could not think. But an objectivity of vision was being born within me. A surging sweep of many odds and ends came together and formed an attitude, a perspective. “They’re blind,” I said to myself. “Their enemies have blinded them with too much oppression.” I lit a cigarette and I heard a song floating out over the sunlit air: —

I remembered the stories I had written, the stories in which I had assigned a role of honor and glory to the Communist Party, and I was glad that they were down in black and white, were finished. For I knew in my heart that I should never be able to write that way again, should never be able to feel with that simple sharpness about life, should never again express such passionate hope, should never again make so total a commitment of faith.

The procession still passed. Banners still floated. Voices of hope still chanted.

I headed toward home alone, really alone now, telling myself that in all the sprawling immensity of our mighty continent the least-known factor of living was the human heart, the least-sought goal of being was a way to live a human life. Perhaps, I thought, out of my tortured feelings I could fling a spark into this darkness. I would try, not because I wanted to but because I felt that I had to if I were to live at all.

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo; and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.