Lonely Crusade

A GENERATION or so ago the new immigrant and his struggles to overcome obstacles and prejudice formed an important element in American writing. Today two top fiction best-sellers deal with racial problems, the one with anti-Semitism, the other with anti-Negroism.

Chester Himes’s new novel is a study of the American Negro, a brave and courageous probing into the Negro psyche. His diagnosis reveals a racial malady for which there is no immediate remedy. The cure, as he sees it, is centuries of equality and miscegenation. And in the beginning simple equality is not enough. Equality to the Negro means special privileges.

Mr. Himes’s hero, Lee Gordon, is indeed a lonely crusader, seeking justice in a white ocean of prejudice and discrimination. A college graduate, a sensitive Negro of basic honesty and integrity, he comes up against the usual barriers. His college degree cannot get him a white-collar job, and since he refuses to take menial work, he and his devoted wife live in poverty, with the result that Lee Gordon’s sense of manhood and fitness is gradually corroded, and his wife loses faith in him, though not her love for him. This tragedy Lee Gordon blames on the white man.

Lee Gordon’s real troubles begin in the spring of 1943 when, at the age of thirty-one, he gets a job as union organizer of an aircraft plant in Los Angeles. The job is given to him not because he is a professional union organizer — he is not even a member of the union — but because the union needs a Negro organizer. And Lee Gordon takes the job because it is a white-collar job. The next fifty days are a nightmare. His honest efforts are thwarted at every turn, by the plant management and its deputy sheriffs and by the Communist Party, which tries to gain control of the new union. Lee Gordon refuses to sell out to either, and in the end is destroyed by both.

Mr. Himes’s story, for all its hard realism and able writing, reads like a melodrama, with the Communist Party the real villain and the deputy sheriffs the actual murderers. His story also suffers from a form of elephantiasis. He tries to embrace too much and his themes cross and get mixed up, so that in the end Lee Gordon’s tragedy could just as well have been that of a white man. This overzealousness led Mr. Himes into long generalizations and oversimplifications. The usual racial prejudices and discriminations against the Negro are merely catalogued, with the result that large segments of his book read not like a novel but like excerpts from extended social studies.

Mr. Himes has touched upon every phase of the Negro problem and has mercilessly vivisected the American Negro’s personality. We have here clinical revelations of the Negro’s homicidal mania, of his lust for white women, of his pathetic sense of inferiority, of his paradoxical anti-Semitism, of his arrogance and his incurable Uncle Tomism. At times it seems that Mr. Himes is trying to convince us that the whole Negro race in America, as a result of centuries of brutal oppression, is sick at soul.

Hatred reeks through his pages like yellow bile. The Negro hates the Jew and the Gentile and he hates his own Negroness; the Jew hates the Negro and the Gentile and his own Jewishness. The pure Marxist Rosenberg, who hates nobody except the capitalists, is expelled from the Communist Party because of his goodness.

The strict Party-line Communists will not like Mr. Himes’s book and will no doubt denounce it. The Trotskyites wall probably take it to their bosoms, as certainly will all those who believe in unions free of Communist control. As for the Negro problem, it occasionally finds momentary resolution in oversexed white women mixing up Marxism with Negro macrogenitalism.

STOYAN CHRISTOWE