American Hunger (8 page)

O
NE Thursday night I received an invitation from a group of white boys I had known in the post office to meet in a South Side hotel and argue the state of the world. About ten of us gathered and ate salami sandwiches, drank beer, and talked. I was amazed to discover that many of them had joined the Communist party. I challenged them by reciting the antics of the Negro Communists I had seen in the parks, and I was told that those antics were “tactics” and were all right. I was dubious.

Then one Thursday night Sol, a Jewish chap, startled us by announcing that he had had a short story accepted by a little magazine called the
Anvil,
edited by Jack Conroy, and that he had joined a revolutionary artists’ organization, the John Reed Club. Sol repeatedly begged me to attend the meetings of the club, but I always found an easy excuse for refusing.

“You’d like them,” Sol said.

“I don’t want to be organized,” I said.

“They can help you to write,” he said.

“Nobody can tell me how or what to write,” I said.

“Come and see,” he urged. “What have you to lose?”

I felt that Communists could not possibly have a sincere interest in Negroes. I was cynical and I would rather have heard a white man say that he hated Negroes, which I could have readily believed, than to have heard him say that he respected Negroes, which would have made me doubt him. I did not think that there
existed many whites who, through intellectual effort, could lift themselves out of the traditions of their times and see the Negro objectively.

One Saturday night, sitting home idle, not caring to visit the girls I had met on my former insurance route, bored with reading, I decided to appear at the John Reed Club in the capacity of an amused spectator. I rode to the Loop and found the number. A dark stairway led upwards; it did not look welcoming. What on earth of importance could transpire in so dingy a place? Through the windows above me I saw vague murals along the walls. I mounted the stairs to a door that was lettered:

The Chicago John Reed Club

I opened it and stepped into the strangest room I had ever seen. Paper and cigarette butts lay on the floor. A few benches ran along the walls, above which were vivid colors depicting colossal figures of workers carrying streaming banners. The mouths of the workers gaped in wild cries; their legs were sprawled over cities.

“Hello.”

I turned and saw a white man smiling at me.

“A friend of mine, who’s a member of this club, asked me to visit here. His name is Sol—,” I told him.

“You’re welcome here,” the white man said. “We’re not having an affair tonight. We’re holding an editorial meeting. Do you paint?” He was slightly gray and he had a mustache.

“No,” I said. “I try to write.”

“Then sit in on the editorial meeting of our magazine,
Left Front, “
he suggested.

“I know nothing of editing,” I said.

“You can learn,” he said.

I stared at him, doubting.

“I don’t want to be in the way here,” I said.

“My name’s Grimm,” he said.

I told him my name and we shook hands. He went to a closet and returned with an armful of magazines.

“Here are some back issues of the
Masses, “
he said. “Have you ever read it?”

“No,” I said.

“Some of the best writers in America publish in it,” he explained. He also gave me copies of a magazine called
International Literature.
“There’s stuff here from Gide, Gorky …”

I assured him that I would read them. He took me to an office and introduced me to a Jewish boy who was to become one of the nation’s leading painters, to a chap who was to become one of the eminent composers of his day, to a writer who was to create some of the best novels of his generation, to a young Jewish boy who was destined to film the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. I was meeting men and women whom I would know for decades to come, who were to form the first sustained relationships in my life.

I sat in a corner and listened while they discussed their magazine,
Left Front
Were they treating me courteously because I was a Negro? I must let cold reason guide me with these people, I told myself. I was asked to contribute something to the magazine, and I said vaguely that I would consider it. After the meeting I met an Irish girl who worked for an advertising agency, a girl who did social work, a schoolteacher, and the wife of a prominent university professor. I had once worked as a servant for people like these and I was skeptical. I tried to fathom their motives, but I could detect no condescension in them.

I went home full of reflection, probing the sincerity of the strange white people I had met, wondering how they
really
regarded Negroes. I lay on my bed and read the magazines and was amazed to find that there did exist in this world an organized search for the truth of the lives of the oppressed and the isolated. When I had begged bread from the officials, I had wondered
dimly if the outcasts could become united in action, thought, and feeling. Now I knew. It was being done in one-sixth of the earth already. The revolutionary words leaped from the printed page and struck me with tremendous force.

It was not the economics of Communism, nor the great power of trade unions, nor the excitement of underground politics that claimed me; my attention was caught by the similarity of the experiences of workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered but kindred peoples into a whole. My cynicism—which had been my protection against an America that had cast me out—slid from me and, timidly, I began to wonder if a solution of unity was possible. My life as a Negro in America had led me to feel–though my helplessness had made me try to hide it from myself–that the problem of human unity was more important than bread, more important than physical living itself; for I felt that without a common bond uniting men, without a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could be no living worthy of being called human.

I hungered to share the dominant assumptions of my time and act upon them. I did not want to feel, like an animal in a jungle, that the whole world was alien and hostile. I did not want to make individual war or individual peace. So far I had managed to keep humanly alive through transfusions from books. In my concrete relations with others I had encountered nothing to encourage me to believe in my feelings. It had been by denying what I saw with my eyes, disputing what I felt with my body, that I had managed to keep my identity intact. But it seemed to me that here at last in the realm of revolutionary expression was where Negro experience could find a home, a functioning value and role. Out of the magazines I read came a passionate call for the experiences of the disinherited, and there were none of the same lispings of the missionary in it. It did not say: “Be like us and we will like you,
maybe.” It said: “If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone.” It urged life to believe in life.

I read on into the night; then, toward dawn, I swung from bed and inserted paper into the typewriter. Feeling for the first time that I could speak to listening ears, I wrote a wild, crude poem in free verse, coining images of black hands playing, working, holding bayonets, stiffening finally in death … I read it and felt that in a clumsy way it linked white life with black, merged two streams of common experience.

I heard someone poking about the kitchen.

“Richard, are you ill?” my mother called.

“No. I’m reading.”

My mother opened the door and stared curiously at the pile of magazines that lay upon my pillow.

“You’re not throwing away money buying those magazines, are you?” she asked.

“No. They were given to me.”

She hobbled to the bed on her crippled legs and picked up a copy of the
Masses
that carried a lurid May Day cartoon. She adjusted her glasses and peered at it for a long time.

“My God in heaven,” she breathed in horror.

“What’s the matter, mama?”

“What is this?” she asked, extending the magazine to me, pointing to the cover. “What’s wrong with that man?”

With my mother standing at my side, lending me her eyes, I stared at a cartoon drawn by a Communist artist; it was the figure of a worker clad in ragged overalls and holding aloft a red banner. The man’s eyes bulged; his mouth gaped as wide as his face; his teeth showed; the muscles of his neck were like ropes. Following the man was a horde of nondescript men, women, and children, waving clubs, stones, and pitchforks.

“What are those people going to do?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know,” I hedged.

“Are these Communist magazines?”

“Yes.”

“And do they want people to act like this?”

“Well …” I hesitated.

My mother’s face showed disgust and moral loathing. She was a gentle woman. Her ideal was Christ upon the cross. How could I tell her that the Communist party wanted her to march in the streets, chanting, singing?

“What do Communists think people are?” she asked.

“They don’t quite mean what you see there,” I said, fumbling with my words.

“Then what do they mean?”

“This is symbolic,” I said.

“Then why don’t they speak out what they mean?”

“Maybe they don’t know how.”

“Then why do they print this stuff?”

“They don’t quite know how to appeal to people yet,” I admitted, wondering whom I could convince of this if I could not convince my mother.

“That picture’s enough to drive a body crazy,” she said, dropping the magazine, turning to leave, then pausing at the door. “You’re not getting mixed up with those people?”

“I’m just reading, mama,” I dodged.

My mother left and I brooded upon the fact that I had not been able to meet her simple challenge. I looked again at the cover of the
Masses
and I knew that the wild cartoon did not reflect the passions of the common people. I reread the magazine and was convinced that much of the expression embodied what the
artists
thought would appeal to others, what they thought would gain recruits. They had a program, an ideal, but they had not yet found a language.

Here, then, was something that I could do, reveal, say. The
Communists, I felt, had oversimplified the experience of those whom they sought to lead. In their efforts to recruit masses, they had missed the meaning of the lives of the masses, had conceived of people in too abstract a manner. I would make voyages, discoveries, explorations with words and try to put some of that meaning back. I would address my words to two groups: I would tell Communists how common people felt, and I would tell common people of the self-sacrifice of Communists who strove for unity among them.

That following Thursday night, when I joined my friends at the hotel for beer, I pulled out my crude verses and laid them on the table. Sol read them.

“This can be published,” he said.

“That’s not the point,” I said. “What do they mean to you?”

“This is the vision of the disinherited,” he said.

“If you’re going to publish these to recruit me into the party, then nothing doing,” I said.

“They’ll be published whether you join or not,” he said.

I told the group of my mother’s reaction to the
Masses
cartoon.

“She’ll have to learn the symbolism of the revolution,” somebody said.

“But why can’t Communism speak a language she understands?” I asked.

There was a lot of argument that went nowhere.

Still suspicious, my eyes watching for the slightest anti-Negro gesture, I attended the next meeting of the club. In the end I had to admit that they were glad to have me with them. But I still doubted their motives. Were they trying to get my head bashed in a picket line so that they could capitalize on the publicity? Or did the discipline of the club demand that they be friendly with me? If that was true, then those who did not want a Negro in the club could resign. But no one made a move to resign. How had these people, denying profit and home and God, made that hurdle
that even the churches of America had not been able to make?

The editor of
Left Front
accepted two of my crude poems for publication, sent two of them to Jack Conroy’s
Anvil,
and sent another to the
New Masses,
the successor of the
Masses.
Doubts still lingered in my mind.

“Don’t send them if you think they’re aren’t good enough,” I said.

“They’re good enough,” he said.

“Are you doing this to get me to join up?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Your poems are crude, but good for us. You see, we’re all new in this. We write articles about Negroes, but we never see any Negroes. We need your stuff.”

I sat through several meetings of the club and was impressed by the scope and seriousness of its activities. The club was demanding that the government create jobs for unemployed artists; it planned and organized art exhibits; it raised funds for the publication of
Left Front;
and it sent scores of speakers to trade-union meetings. The members were fervent, democratic, restless, eager, self-sacrificing. I was convinced, and my response was to set myself the task of making Negroes know what Communists were. While mopping the operating rooms of the medical research institute, I got the notion of writing a series of biographical sketches of Negro Communists. I told no one of my intentions, and I did not know how fantastically naïve my ambition was.

I had attended but a few meetings before I realized that a bitter factional fight was in progress between two groups of members of the club. But when I tried to learn the nature of the fight, no one would tell me anything. Sharp arguments rose at every meeting. I noticed that a small group of painters actually led the club and dominated its policies. The group of writers that centered about
Left Front
resented the leadership of the painters. Being primarily interested in
Left Front,
I sided in simple loyalty with the
writers. Then came a strange development. The
Left Front
group declared that the incumbent leadership did not reflect the wishes of the club. A special meeting was called and a motion was made to reelect an executive secretary. When nominations were made for the office, my name was included. I declined the nomination, telling the members that I was too ignorant of their aims to be seriously considered. The debate lasted all night. A vote was taken in the early hours of morning by a show of hands, and I was elected. I had been a member of the club for less than two months and did not fully understand the purposes of the organization.