I am an integrationist. I have been for a long time. It is not a principle that I arrived at through intellection. Until the past few years, I did not bring to bear on it whatever intelligence I have. I felt my way to it, just as some men, in spite of obstructing experience, feel their way to ideals of honesty, sobriety and continence. Nor was the feeling of my way wholly conscious. It was rather like the action of one who kicks and splashes frantically to save himself from drowning and suddenly finds that he has reached a shelf on which he can stand in the river bed. His objective was not the shelf, but just to be saved. I kicked and splashed in all directions, and suddenly there I was.

I was an integrationist when the Communists camped almost nightly on my trail in the early 1930’s and lighted beckoning bright fires in the frightening dark of that time. I did not believe then (any more than now) that the moment the bars of segregation are lifted all the white women of the South will fall into the arms of Negro mates. Many of my acquaintances gleefully professed to believe this and would just as gleefully declare that Negroes lynched for rape had been only unlucky in being caught with their always-willing white paramours. They found substance for this opinion in both fact and fiction, which too loudly proclaimed the revulsive feeling of the white female for the Negro and the inviolable purity of white womanhood. My acquaintances believed that Southern whites protested too much.

And so, it seems, did the Communists. Or perhaps they did not. It could have been just a line and the carrying out of explicit directives on “How to Recruit Negroes in the Eastern States.” It could have been that they played expertly on what they thought were the secret dreams of a young, green, mixed-up and lonely man.

I suppose all people suffer from these maladies, and especially from youth, in early adulthood; but I had more besides. I had a severe case of “Negrophophilia” which alternately wrenched my heart with hate and love. I was confused about the direction of my life and extremely doubtful (as I sometimes am today) of life’s purpose. Whether naturally or through learning, I shrank from all but a handful of people, and some of these were a disappointment to me, and I have no doubt that I was a sore trial to them. I lacked social accommodation. I have never thought tolerance admirable as a principle either of adjustment or feeling, and I rejected it entirely for my friends. Dogs were to be tolerated, and crying babies, and strangers with whom one did not have to become acquainted. My friends were constantly not living up to my foolish expectations; my judgments were severe. I was continually breaking with and rejoining them, but with no increase in understanding.

I do not think I would have become a Communist even had these deficiencies not been in me. But, certainly, except for them, the Communists would have had an easier time assailing my weak position on the extreme left flank of democracy. The wrong scouts came to reconnoiter, and they took the wrong approach.

The first who came was a moist, sleazy fellow, fat and asthmatic. I had often seen him in the little restaurant where I took dinner. Frequently he would be there in low-voiced conversation with various people—men and women—when I entered. He always sat at the round, family table back in the corner at an angle from the door, and my glance would fall there first. There would be beer before him (it was just legal again) and a dish of olives and olive pits and a plate of fried potatoes which he ate with his fingers. Though I did not think he was aware of me, no one could be unaware of him. Even from my table by the window and with my back squarely toward him, I was conscious of his presence. In lulls of dish rattling and conversation, his wheeze could be heard all over the tiny restaurant.

One evening when I went there later than usual, because I had waited for a cold rain to stop, and took my place, Eric, the German waiter, told me that “Philip” wanted to talk to me. He indicated the fat man at the big table. There was little possibility of Eric’s having made a mistake. The restaurant had only a dozen tables and it catered to a limited and steady patronage of unimportant executives, clerks and apprentices from the jewelry manufacturies and a few plebeian graduate students like myself. I do not remember ever seeing another Negro there. Even though Eric had made no mistake, I was sure that I did not want to talk to “Philip.” But before I could put my thoughts into words and summon the courage to utter them, Philip was standing there. He looked at me expressionlessly as he pulled the chair far out—to allow for his pendulous belly—and sat down.

“This rain. My friends are all late tonight,” he said. “You’ll excuse me.” There was nothing questioning, or tentative, or apologetic in the way he spoke. I was acutely embarrassed. He took a piece of potato out of the dish he had brought with him and carried it to his mouth. It was a small, full-lipped mouth. His hands, too, I noticed, were small and very white, though the nails and the knuckles were dirty, in contrast to his moist, flushed face.

“What does the ‘J’ in your name represent?” he asked. I was taken by surprise and must have shown it, for he blew out an indulgent laugh. “You wouldn’t think I would know your name.” This was not a question either. “I do.” And he spoke it.

The sound of it coming from a complete stranger seemed to establish some kind of power over me. I felt a twinge of fright even, as if I were suddenly vulnerable in ways I knew not of.

“How do you know?”

He swung his head from side to side and his face smiled at me. “I know. And I know more,” he said. He called off items of biographical fact as if he were reading from a file card—the year and place of my birth, my father’s name, my brother’s name, my schooling, an attack of scarlet fever I had had. Momentarily I half expected him to go into an account of monstrous crimes I had committed in some other and unremembered character. It seems silly now, for I know that to get such information as he had was an easy matter, but then I felt that for some dark purpose I could not guess a million pairs of eyes had followed me since birth.

I do not wish to play up this episode nor to dramatize my reaction to it, for what followed was ridiculous emotional anticlimax. Through the next talk Philip had with me a week or so later, his efforts to get on terms of easy familiarity dissipated my sense of being mysteriously overpowered and exposed. I did not respond to the first-name camaraderie. Not knowing his last name, I avoided calling him anything. I think my formal civility frustrated him, and I think this is why, in a kind of desperation during the third or fourth meeting, he pulled out a folder of very detailed obscene photographs and handed them to me. He laughed when he asked in pretended casualness (for I could feel him watching me sharply) whether I had seen anything like them before. And weren’t they the most amusing things, and one in particular, because he knew the girl in it—a student at the art school. He had some “delicious” friends, he said, and he would like me to meet them. He said that there was one “bonnie brunette especially, from ‘way down in Georgia—but completely, and I mean completely, emancipated” and without prejudice. They lined up fast enough once they were really free, he said, and it only went to show what would happen to the race problem all over the country were it not for the strength and pressure of reaction. “There just wouldn’t be any if it were left to the women.”

I think Philip was running ’way ahead of his timetable. Or, to change the figure, he had cast his net on the wrong tide. There was not enough weight to it in any case. I knew later that there was quite a potential catch of assorted fish, including a young college student who wore very thick glasses, a French-descended politician who had considerable power in local labor circles, and a very wealthy widow in her late thirties. Even then the widow was contributing generously to the cell, and some years later she became nationally known as pro-Communist. There were others too, but I do not know how they had been approached, nor how many were caught. Perhaps Philip and those who joined him in subsequent weeks fumbled the assignment badly. At least this one got away. The approach to my intellect is not through my gonads.

One approach perhaps is through my curiosity, and it was curiosity that teased me into going here and there with Philip. I wanted to see what kind of people these were. I had listened to soapbox Communists on the streets of New York, but they had aroused nothing in me save vague speculations over such questions as were bruited about in those days. What was wrong with our government? Did the rich and powerful think only to gain more power and reap more benefits from the exploitation of the working class? What should the government do? What could it do? What was Hoover doing that he should not do, and vice versa? I felt a certain shallow contempt for the emotionalism, the unreasoning bitterness and the actless anger of the soapbox radicals.

I do not know whether it was because they were a cohesive motley of white Americans, Negroes, Italians, Portuguese and French, but I liked better the brazen self-interest of the radical workers whom I had seen milling about the shut-down (what an ominous word that was!) blank-walled factories in southwest Providence. But I could not identify myself with them either. They talked of violence and did violence (as once when the police tried to scatter them) in an implacable, matter-of-fact way that repelled me. I have never believed in violence. I have heard Negroes advocate it. I once knew of a group of Negroes who organized to kill a white man every time a Negro was lynched. They called themselves the Kwick Kure Klub, Inc., in grim parody of the Ku Klux Klan. They were to have branches in every principal city of the South. Though it was rumored, and is still widely believed among Negroes, that the violent and unsolved murder of a constable in Greene County, Missouri, in the 1930’s was the work of the black KKK, I think the organization never really got started.

Nor could I identify myself in more than a superficial way with the campus group of intellectual radicals with whom a common interest in writing brought me into contact. They were enthusiastic and wellmeaning, but quite innocent and harmless. They knew considerably more about John Reed, Heywood Broun and H. L. Mencken than about Marx, Lenin and the deviationism of Trotsky. They knew something about Nietzsche too, and they were learning, goggle-eyed, something about Freud. But the German philosopher’s “will to power” was not translated into political terms, and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, which had only recently appeared in this country, was simply a yardstick by which they measured their imaginary personal gripes against smugness and conservatism. Theirs was the rebellion of youth. They talked a lot, but what they said was mostly brilliant nonsense which had no more relation to the actual destruction of the bridges over which their parents had passed than a pyrotechnic display on a moonless night. Only one of them became a writer—a humorist, and a good one. His latest book now lies before me. Sensitive, talented, some of them wealthy, they turned out to be thoroughly conservative college professors, investment brokers and lawyers who had no trouble making a peace with things as they are.

My problems were different from theirs. The drives—self-preservation, anxiety, vanity, sex, the “complete discharge of strength” Nietzsche speaks of—were considerably modified by my Negroness. Such an admission is embarrassing to make, but I recognized its truth even then. Self-preservation, for instance, was not a galvanic drive in me, nor in other Negroes I knew. I have written elsewhere that five of my closest acquaintances committed suicide in a span of six red and terrible years. Pride and vanity were excessive. Since Negroes were assumed to be sexually immoderate, I made a show of strict asceticism, chastising the flesh in a way most unnatural to youth. What I did not recognize was that I was being forced into the narrowest egocentrism; into an involvement with self that was morbid beyond reason and that only the lucky are able to sublimate—and this only partially—into group concern and, with extreme luck, wider social concern. It need not be said, and certainly not in the way of apology, that this is not altogether the fault of the Negro. It is the fault also of the American life-situation—neither quite an accidental wickedness nor a complex of impersonal coercions—over which both the individual and the group control of minority people is limited.

The campus group of intellectual radicals broadened me. They stimulated my reading, my imagination, my sympathies. To the reading of James, Santayana and DeUnamuno, to whom Professor Ducasse had introduced me, I added Nietzsche (especially Thus Spake Zarathustra) and Marx and much else that I would not have come across in the ordinary routine of my graduate study.

But I was not broadened enough to take what Philip and his circle offered. Had their offerings stayed on the level of the first parties I attended with Philip, matters might have been different. I can take any amount of talk, and there ran through their rapid-fire conversations phrases that, exploding like firecrackers, drew my attention: “the political state” (as distinct from the economic and social state—they were drawing such distinctions then); “the omnicompetent state”; “responsibility in areas of cultural autonomy.” Of course I had ideas as to meanings, but nothing they said really coalesced into concepts. I was not moved either to agreement or disagreement. I simply heard.

In later meetings, however, I began to listen and to understand, but not what it was expected I would understand. Rather the opposite. I began to comprehend that they talked like people who had a vested interest in a democratic catastrophe. It was not Communism’s strength and validity, its constructive and health-seeking activities on which they based their arguments: it was democracy’s weaknesses. They rejoiced in the economic depression because they saw in it the beginning of democracy’s total collapse. The ideal, they said, was security and freedom (and I agreed with this), but under “your system”—they were talking directly to me and to Hakely, a young but grizzled silversmith apprentice—“there is neither.” They were too smart actually to make capitalism and democracy synonymous, so I could judge only that this equating one with the other was a deliberate effort to confuse.

And I was confused, and I showed it in childish exasperation at the way in which they pointed out, with a kind of glib, cold fervor, every weakness, every failure, every instance of corruption and discrimination and injustice, and how these affected one personally, and especially the Negro. The inference was plain that in the “omnicompetent state,” the “service state” (which were equated), these things would not be. But when I pressed for proof of their inferences, Philip and the intellectual leaders of the cell withdrew into taunts and challenges and were not percipient enough to see how dangerously they threatened my self-esteem. The idea of democracy was itself not particularly dear to me then, but I resented the doubts cast on my inherited assumptions about it. If anything, I resented democracy for leaving me and itself so defenseless; but I hated Communism for putting me on the defensive. My anger and frustration carried over from one meeting to the next, for though their arguments were basically weak, I had no answers to them. After the fifth meeting, I was certain that I was through with the Communists and all their works.

But I did not figure on the proselyting passion of Philip and Honey. This latter was one of the five women in the cell whom I had seen regularly at meetings. “Honey” was a cell nickname, and it suited only her physical appearance. Among her colleagues at the city hospital, where she told me she worked as a technician, she was known as Branca. I never learned her last name. Of foreign extraction—Austrian or Czech, I judged—she had soft honey-blond hair, worn in a long bob, so that when she turned or lowered her head a wave of hair fell across her face. It was a good face, not pretty and decorated, but well-structured and strong, with pale yellow eyes set under square brows. She talked a great deal in a rather strident and insolent tone, and she laughed a lot, insolently too. Both her laughter and her talk seemed to come from very near the surface. Yet one felt that she had depths. Sometimes one was as hard put to follow the erratic train of her thought as to follow her restless, vital movements.

Philip and Honey came to my lodginghouse one night after I had twice failed to show up at meetings. It was embarrassing to have them come there, for my landlady, though she had been born and had lived all her life in New England and though she thought that this was in itself some sort of victory or credit for a Negro—my landlady was only less suspicious of white people than she was of Negroes who consorted with them. Even had they desired it, my visitors could not have come in, so I went with them to the two untidy rooms which Honey occupied over a delicatessen in the oldest and a-step-from-genteel section of the city. There were just the three of us, and over a bottle of very sour wine, which was called dago red, they questioned me about my absences. I told them that I had been preparing for midyear examinations, which was true, and anyway was I to consider myself obligated to be present at every cell meeting?

They looked at each other for a moment. Then Honey laughed deliciously and said, “Of course not,” and Philip laboriously wheezed an echo of this. In cell meetings Philip was the center, but here Honey had complete charge. She led the talk into all sorts of trivial channels. Shifting restlessly in her chair, tossing her head, crossing and uncrossing her legs, Honey talked and talked. Her vitality and the wine were exhilarating. She was profane and final in her judgments of people. She jokingly accused Philip of trying to bring into the cell some “profound asses,” some “absolutely untouchable unteachables,” like a certain Sidney she mentioned, who was positively, she said, a “reconditioned pervert.” Oh, she was sure of it! And Faye Hariston (this was the wealthy widow), who “every day jumped into a barrel of peroxide,” and who, for all her efforts at femininity, showed that she was a “conditioned hermaphrodite.” Laughing gaily, Honey wanted to know what Philip was doing, recruiting people for his own pleasure? Was that what he was making of the cell, a circle of Lesbians and libertines?

Unembarrassed and unsmiling, Philip only shook his head, and after a time Honey went on to something else. The atmosphere was very casual, very friendly, and I was sorry when Philip announced that he must leave. It was my cue to go too, and I got up.

There was a moment’s hesitation before Philip said, “Oh, but I’ll be back! You wait for me here.” I looked at Honey, but she was already reclaiming the hat I had picked up. I thought she smiled mockingly at Philip.

What Honey and I talked about after Philip’s departure, I do not know. In my notebook the next day I wrote exactly what follows.

“I wish I could make out a case of moral rectitude for myself, but I cannot. What I kept thinking of last night was all the possible consequences. When Honey came and sat on the couch too close to me, I remembered all I had heard about ‘parlor whores’—that they were bold and brazen and without discrimination, and that they were bound to be diseased. I had never had more than a dozen words with her until last night, so there was no affection for me. There was only passion, and even this may not have been genuine. I half wished it were, or that I could think it so. My feeling was that her object was to arouse passion in me while she kept herself out of it and under control. She shivered and rolled her head against my shoulder and dug her nails into my thigh, but I think that it was all faked. I do not know what we talked about between times, or whether we talked about anything.

“But if she were outside it, I was outside it too, and I kept thinking that Honey had some ulterior motive and that she was trying to realize it at too high a price. I knew that she wanted me to have sex relations with her and I knew also that I would not, could not, dared not. I do not think she tempted me at all, really; she just frightened me. I did not see how anyone could go to such a length to obtain a result that in the long run could have almost no importance. Certainly I cannot think myself that important to the Communists. And suppose this were not her reason? Then what? Just sex. I cannot trust a white woman that way. No matter how willingly a white woman gives herself to a colored man, if she is found out, she will yell rape. Last night I pictured newspaper headlines such as I have seen many times and I thought of them referring to me: Black Brute. I did the right thing last night, though maybe I did it for all the wrong reasons.”

I fled. Though I knew I had done the right thing, I was ashamed to see Honey and Philip again, for I convinced myself that I had been naÏf and cowardly. I did not go back to the little restaurant at the bottom of the hill. Once I had a note from Philip, and once he—or someone very like him—inquired of me from my landlady, but I did not see him, nor Honey, nor any of the people I used to see in the cell. I am certain that Honey, laughing with strident insolence, spoke of me as one of Philip’s “untouchable unteachables,” and pretty quickly forgot me.