But I did not forget Communism, then or later. In New York the next year, 1933, the Party was quite fashionable among my acquaintances, some of whom took it seriously. One could be sure that among the guests at Harlem’s middle and upper-class social gatherings would be white people and that these were admitted Communists or fellow travelers at least. Some of them were said to be well known in avant-garde and esoteric circles and in the theater but I had never heard of most of them, and I am inclined to think that the reputations they were given in Harlem were a kind of defense in depth against the allegation that the only whites Negroes could mingle with socially were peripheral people, nobodies, tramps. The white people I met at such parties seemed average intellectual types. I was struck by the fact that they did not talk Communism, but gave the impression of living on a higher and freer level than American democracy afforded. The atmosphere they created was easy and sophisticated, with a high sexual content of which, it was said, nearly everyone took advantage. No one bothered to whisper the stories of liaisons between white women and Negro men and Negro women and white men. They were accepted without shock, and the actors in these little dramas seemed to play their roles with a lack of embarrassment and even a natural grace that fascinated me.

I do not think any of the Communists I met in these circumstances were seriously political-minded. Certainly they were not Party workers. They did not make speeches from flag-draped stepladders wedged against curbings, as so many Communists were doing daily in front of the Home Relief stations scattered over the city. They did not rustle up meetings, nor belong to instructional cells, nor try to indoctrinate anyone. They were not of the “soiled shirt, sinkers and coffee brigade.” My Negro acquaintances would not have had them in their homes if they had been. Communism was merely the rose under which they pursued more pleasurable activities.

There were a good many hastily printed Communist leaflets being passed out in those days. I seemed to get them all; I also read them. They were slanted for the middle-class Negro—the professional, the intellectual, the student. With only half an eye one could see that the Party was conducting a campaign to recruit a potential, educated Negro leadership. The labor masses had been a disappointment to the Communists who, anyway, employed the wrong methods to enlist them. Negro labor was far from ready for the proletarian revolution. It was not class struggle but race struggle that interested them. What the Negro labor masses wanted was to be treated as a special case first. They wanted job security. They wanted to be brought up to the level of white workers before they could march in the ranks with them toward the bigger Communist goal. Equality first, and then integration. Besides, Negro labor had the same suspicion of Communism that it had of socialism and trade-unionism—a suspicion of being used rather than helped, and used for the establishment of an order of things that was not quite clear.

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.

“You want to go to Russia? But why?”

“What’s this country ever done for me? What am I here?” he asked impassively. “A nigger anybody can spit on. In Russia I could be a man.” This too came without anger or bitterness, and I could understand it. He was giving idiomatic expression to a simple wish for dignity and self-respect. One heard it so often among Negroes that one was likely to forget the deep wound of denial which it covered like a scab.

“I know a fellow who went to Russia,” I said brightly. “Apparently he likes it. He’s never come back.”

“He’s got the right idea. I wouldn’t come back neither, if I ever went.”

“It doesn’t appeal to me,” I said. “You’ve been listening to the guys on the stepladder, the Reds, across the street.”

Clark gave me then a long, slow look, but there was nothing in it that I could detect—no quickening either of speculation or resentment. “I’m a Communist,” he said.

I laughed with surprise and embarrassment and, still with his passive eyes on me, he said again, “I’m a Communist,” bluntly.

There was nothing to say and so I kept silent, and to keep silent with Clark was like nothing so much as expecting to be talked to by a wall. He went to his own room shortly. The next day when we met, I felt a little twinge of embarrassment, but he seemed not to, and the feeling soon passed.

Though I did not know it then, I talked to Clark for next to the last time less than a month later. He came to my room one night, as he often did, but this time he announced phlegmatically that he was in trouble. He neither looked nor sounded like a man in trouble and I could think only that he was in trouble with a girl—though girls had never been a subject of conversation between us.

“What kind of trouble?” I inquired.

I suppose Clark lacked a certain sensitiveness, though I would not have called him callous. I do not think it was because he did not care: it was just that he could not estimate the effect his words had upon others.

“I’m a thief and I think they suspicion me,” he said.

I must have said something like “Oh, go on,” or “Quit kidding,” but I knew he had no sense of humor and was quite incapable of kidding. I looked at him. He seemed to think I had not heard him. “I’m a thief and I think they suspicion me,” he repeated. And when he took me to his room and showed me a flat-top trunk half full of bolts of cloth, I believed him.

“But what are you going to do with this stuff? If they suspect you and come——”

“I’m going to get shut of it,” he said stoically. “I’m going to get shut of it now in a few minutes.” He was stuffing the bolts of cloth into two battered valises.

“What are you going to do? How are you going to get rid of it?”

This time he did not answer, but swung the valises off the bed, brushed past me and went down the hall.

The next time (and the last time) I talked with Clark was in the Ninth Precinct jail. He was arrested on a Saturday. On Sunday a newspaper reporter who covered the precinct telephoned me, saying that Clark wanted to see me. I did not like it. I was vexed by the fear of somehow becoming involved in his trouble. I went with reluctance. The desk sergeant, I thought, eyed me suspiciously when I asked for Clark, but perhaps it was just my nervousness, for he called another officer who, taking a key, led me through some doors and along a tier of empty cells. Clark was in the last cell on the tier and he must have heard us coming, for I found him standing expectantly. He smiled stiffly when he saw me, but waited until the policeman had gone before he spoke.

“They got me,” he said.

My mood was not pleasant, I’m afraid, nor talkative. I had no wish to draw him out. If he had anything to say to me, I thought, then he would damned well say it without help from me. He was still smiling stiffly.

“They got me,” he said again.

“So I see,” I said. “Now what?”

They were holding him for a preliminary hearing on Monday, he said. Then, as if it were something which did not concern him—as if he were speaking of someone else who was altogether a stranger to him—he told me of his work for the Communists as I have related it above. I could not understand it. I stared at him, for what he was saying sounded crazy, especially to be coming in so calm and uninflected a voice.

“But why?” I wanted to know.

“It was my job,” he said, as if that explained it truly and entirely; as if it completely satisfied the demands of my question.

“What did you send for me for? I can’t do anything for you,” I said. “Somebody’s made a fool of you. Let them look out for you.”

“You got it all wrong,” he said, shaking his head slowly.

“You’ve got it all wrong. You’re in jail,” I said bitingly.

“But I ain’t no fool, unless doing things for a good point is one. And I don’t want nobody to look out for me.”

“Well, if you did, somebody else would have to do it.”

“What could they do? You want me to get them in trouble?”

“You mean the Communists?”

“My action group,” he said. “They can’t do nothing. They ain’t supposed to do nothing.”

I stared at him with even greater intensity. “They know and they won’t even go bail for you or get you a lawyer?” My outraged credulity was as lost on him as my vexation had been.

“I told you,” he said.

“You mean it’s supposed to be this way? You knew that if something like this happened, your action group wouldn’t do anything?”

“I ain’t going to drag nobody else in,” he said doggedly.

“They shouldn’t have to be dragged in,” I said, and I think I raised my voice in exasperation. “They ought to come in.”

“You wrong,” he said.

“But you’re the one who’s in jail.”

I could not believe that what was happening to him could happen. Of course I had heard stories of strict Party discipline, of orders being given to Party members to do what no one in his right mind would do, but I had not believed such stories, though they were common and though they were also congruous with the newspaper accounts of the purges that were then taking place in Russia. I had kept my reservations. But this business with Clark was real. He was someone I knew, and this was happening to him.

“Look,” I said, “why don’t you be sensible? Why don’t you——”

He was shaking his head before I could finish. There seemed to be nothing I could say to arouse him to a true recognition of the fix he was in. Perhaps at bottom he had a martyr complex, but I could not see in him any of the things I associated with martyrdom. There was none of the fire, none of the dignity and nobility I thought of as belonging in the picture. There were not even defiance and rebellion in him—or if they were, Clark kept them hidden beneath layers of stony reserve that could not be penetrated. Besides, it seemed to me that to have to suffer alone for a principle made the principle suspect.

And he suffered alone. I did not go to see him in the Tombs where he was remanded after the preliminary hearing, and on the day of his trial I searched four papers before I found in one of them a short notice: Negro Convicted of Theft.

I saw him again at the trial. It lasted less than twenty minutes. Clark, in the same rumpled brown suit he had worn in jail, was led in. He looked slightly drawn, but I think I was the only one of the twenty or thirty spectators who could have known this. No one seemed to take any interest in this fourth case on the docket. The charge was read. The court-appointed lawyer pleaded guilty. A short, stocky man was sworn in and gave testimony to the effect that so-many and so-many bolts of cloth were missing over a period of months; that company detectives were put on the trail of them, and that finally in March they had found “their man.” Then a private detective testified; then a stock clerk. There were no other witnesses. Clark was ordered to stand. The judge pronounced sentence—five years in prison. Clark looked around at the spectators then, but I could see no change in his expression. He was nudged away. I left the courtroom.