American Hunger (12 page)

“Why does he 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,” I was told.

“How?”

There was no answer. I decided that my relationship with the party was about over; I would 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an “anti-leadership attitude” and that I was manifesting “seraphim tendencies,” the latter phrase meaning that one has withdrawn from the struggle of life and considers oneself an infallible angel.

I could not dismiss these charges lightly, for a frantic, hysterical hunt was going on in the ranks of the party for Trotskyites. In the Soviet Union men were being shot for Trotskyism. I used to lie awake nights wondering what would happen to me if I lived in the Soviet Union.

Working all day and writing half the night brought me down with a severe chest ailment. I was in constant pain, scarcely able to breathe. I lay reviewing the life I had lived in the party and I found it distasteful. I realized that I had not been objective in my quixotic fight to save the clubs. I had been fighting as much for myself as for them. But was that wrong? Again I resolved to leave the party, for the emotional cost of membership was too high.

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.

“No,” I said. “But I’ve heard of him.”

I was suspicious. Was this a political trap? They had hurled baseless accusations at me and I felt that there could be no ground of trust between us. Was he trying to discover if I knew someone whom, politically, I should not know? But, after all, Buddy Nealson was a member of the Communist International. But what if Buddy Nealson had suddenly been accused of something and Ed Green was here trying to find out if I knew him?

“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.

I breathed easier. I could not meet Communists now without feeling a degree of fear.

“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.

Ought I see Buddy Nealson? He was the man who had formulated the Communist position for the American Negro; he had made speeches in the Kremlin; he had spoken before Stalin himself. Then perhaps he could explain many of the aspects of Communism that had baffled me. Anyway, I resolved to confront him and ask him some direct, simple questions and hear what he had to say.

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 whisky. 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’m trying to reveal the meaning of Negro experience,” I said.

“We need a man like you,” he said flatteringly.

I waited. I had thought that I would encounter a man of ideas, but he was not that. Then perhaps he was a man of action? But that was not indicated either. As we talked, I tried to grasp the frame of reference of his words, so that I would know how to talk to him.

“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. Mentally I prodded myself into remembering that I was speaking to a member of the Communist International. Ross, I had been told, was slated for expulsion on the grounds that he was “anti-leadership"; and if a member of the Communist International was asking me if I were a friend of a man about to be expelled, he was indirectly asking me if I were 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.

His face looked blank for a second, then he laughed.

“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. I’m not trying to hurt or help any particular comrade. You must believe that. I’m trying to depict Negro life.”

“Have you finished writing about Ross?” he asked.

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

He laughed.

“You’ve got to know us better, Dick,” he grinned. “I hold a high position in the party. I’ll straighten out this misunderstanding.

“I’m not looking for a patron,” I said. “I don’t mean that,” he said, grinning, snorting. “Here, Dick, hava drink.”

“No, thank you.”

“Don’t you drink?”

“Sometimes.”

There are men with whom one can drink and there are men with whom one cannot drink. Nealson was one of the men with whom I could not drink. He drank and put the bottle back; he shot me a quick, self-conscious glance. I was tense, but rigidly controlled.

“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.

“You were in New York not long ago,” he said unexpectedly.

“Yes.”

“Did you talk with any of the party leaders?”

“No.”

“You said nothing to anyone about your work here?”

I stared at him. Was he trying to find out whether I had taken up any of his accusations with the national leadership of the party? Was he trying to determine whether I had influential enough political connections to make trouble for him?

“I told you that I have no political ambitions,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “They say that you didn’t want the clubs dissolved.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said truthfully. “I felt that the ground was being cut from under the feet of the party’s best writers.”

“We’ve got to defeat the Fascists,” he said, snorting from asthma, switching his line of thought. “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, laughing.

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.”

“The party can’t wait,” he said. “You’ll find time to write.”

“I work every day for a living,” I said, remembering that he was being paid by the party to talk to me.

“Look, we want to make you a mass leader,” he said.

“But suppose I’m not that kind of material?”

He laughed. Not one word that I had said had been seriously considered by him. Our talk was a game; he was trying to outwit me. The feelings of others meant nothing to him.

“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.

There was silence. The doorbell rang and he admitted his wife, a dark, attractive, European white woman who carried a book under her arm. She came forward with a wide smile. Nealson introduced us.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

“A Dracula mystery story,” she said, eagerly exhibiting her book. “You know, Dick, you and I ought to build Negro culture on the South Side.”

“I’m asking Nealson for that chance right now,” I said, wondering what connection there could be between a Dracula mystery and Negro culture.

“I want him to organize against high prices,” Nealson told his wife. “But he’s writing a book …”

“That oughtn’t interfere with his book,” she said, sliding easily into a verbal solution of my problem.

“I work in the day,” I said.

“Oh, you’ll find time,” she said lightly.

She left the room and there was silence. The next word was due to come from the member of the Communist International.

“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 ability 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.