So the new recruitment was to be among the class of which I was an inconsequential representative. The Communists were determined not to make the same mistake twice. Equality, Land and Freedom: A Program for Negro Liberation, issued by the League of Struggle for Negro Rights in 1933, put it this way: “The task that confronts the ... Party in organizing the Negro workers and rallying them for the daily class struggle ... side by side with the white workers is no light one.... The Negro evinces no militant opposition towards Communism, but he wants to know how it can improve his social status, what bearing does it have on the common practice of lynching, political disfranchisement, segregation, industrial discrimination.... The Negro is revolutionary enough in a racial sense....” In short, he is race-conscious, and this was enough to concentrate on. In the late 1920’s and the early 1930’s, the Communists got some good advice from somewhere. They also took advantage of two circumstances.
The Angelo Herndon case was still bubbling and boiling and the Scottsboro case was just reaching another of its vociferous climaxes in 1933. The International Labor Defense was formed in those days, and I met William L. Patterson, its secretary. Next to James D. Ford, the Communist Party’s Vice-Presidential nominee in 1932, Patterson held the highest rank of any Negro in the Party. But I was not impressed by him. He seemed of small intellectual caliber, though very ambitious and bold. I was more impressed by a well-known and engaging Negro journalist. He had just returned from Russia (and, I suppose, a period of indoctrination) when I met him backstage at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, where Stevedore was playing. I can remember his saying to me, “We Negro writers have a great opportunity and an inflexible duty to promote the revolution that will extirpate caste, class and race.” How flattering! “We Negro writers—” to lump me in with Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher, Countee Cullen and himself, all of them talented, all of them well known. He could not possibly have heard of me—I had written and published professionally only one story at that time. But the Negro art and literary “renaissance” had not waned enough for those close to it to see that it was fading, and now and then, a completely unknown student, I basked in that artificial light like a homeless beggar keeping himself warm over a sidewalk grating.
But Communism gave off a light of a different quality. It had no comfort in it. As harsh and as revealing as the light in a surgical operating room, it cast no cozy shadow into which one could slip for those moments of quiet reflection which seemed as necessary to me as food and drink. Communism did not allow for the play of individual thought and initiative. It had no warmth in it. Or perhaps it is untrue to say this, since intense heat and intense cold produce the same primary reaction—a shriveling up, a drying out, until the living thing loses its own identity and becomes one with the heat or the cold. I saw something of this reaction in New York and I was appalled by it. Or perhaps this too is untrue. Perhaps what appalled me was the realization that there were people who felt themselves so helplessly cast out of American society and democratic reckoning that they could suck with voracious hunger at the cold breast of Communism. One of the things I could not understand was the unquestioning submission to control.
I do not mean to give the impression that I met many avowed Negro Communists. I did not—not more than a half dozen in all. But with one of them I had nearly seven months of close association. He had a room next to mine in the place where I was living and we shared a bath. He was a thief. He did not make his living in this way. He had to do with the stock and delivery room of a garment making firm, he told me, and he was a minor official in a local union of either truckers or garment makers, I do not know which. He was a thief solely for the benefit of the Party. That was his Party work and his duty and he served it blindly. It was a strange work. At more or less regular intervals he stole bolts of cloth—“suitings” was his word—and kept them in his room until someone, seldom the same person twice, identifying himself by some prearranged means, made contact and relieved him of the goods. He never knew what happened to them ultimately.
Curiously enough this was almost the only information about himself Clark (we will call him) ever volunteered, and of course I did not know this at first. What I did know about Clark—but only after probing—was that he came originally from Pennsylvania and had been graduated from a high school in one of the towns in that state. When the CCC agency was organized, he applied for admission to one of the work groups, but was rejected because high school was supposed to have given him a vocation by means of which he could earn a living. Caught in the depression, without money and, I gathered, without stable family connections, he drifted for a while—to Pittsburgh, to Philadelphia and finally to New York. He was a rugged-looking, stiff-faced young man of twenty-four or twenty-five. One would never suspect from his appearance or from his unimpassioned manner of speaking what a steady flame of fanaticism burned in him. He did not talk well. His voice was coarse, his tongue slightly thick, and he had a very limited command of the language. He spoke of this one day after we had got to know each other fairly well.
“I wish I could talk—like you,” he said. I was about to protest that I was no model, when he added, “Or like James Ford.” This was a complete letdown for me. I had both seen and heard James Ford when he was stumping the Eastern seaboard for the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and I did not think much of him. He seemed basically ignorant, like a parrot fluently repeating phrases he had been carefully taught. His manner seemed gross.
“James Ford?”
“If I could talk like him, maybe I could be where he is now,” Clark said.
“And where is he?” I genuinely wanted to know. I had heard nothing of him since his farcical campaign as the Communist Party’s Vice-Presidential candidate.
“I don’t know, but I think he’s in Russia,” Clark said.