A moment before, her chirping, scurrying voice had called the meeting to order with: “All right, Comrades and kiddies, to work we must go!” And now she was reading the agenda, noting that the “educational” for the evening would be on “Negro Revolts” with an intensity of tone more appropriate to the announcement that a Negro revolt would, in fact, occur that night. As she spoke, her slender torso swiveled steadily on a great swell of hips and legs; often, when she was through, her chair would have moved a full foot away from where it had been.
Her face was round, puffy, and, speaking or not, a bright pink, as if she’d just come out of a steam bath.
Ben disliked her more each time he saw her at one of these weekly branch meetings, disliked her most of all because she made him feel the way he had when he was still outside the movement, addicted to condemning and contemning and thereby lost to the large affirmations of the party. He had joined this Harlem branch of the Communist party only six weeks before.
He felt Betty was always hidden some place among her thoughts while her speech ran off by rote. Only when she was silent—as a few minutes later, the agenda read, business transacted, dues collected, she sat behind a scarred old table awaiting the return of order—did she seem all of a piece. Her thoughts fidgeted with a nude impatience behind her slightly bulging eyes, like a chorus line visible in the wings. But when the room was silent they danced out to the tune of sober folksiness as she prepared to introduce the young Negro girl sitting beside her who was to deliver the “educational.” Betty described the importance of such a discussion at this time when the people were on the march but when the forces of reaction were also girding for battle, when the hour of crisis was fast approaching but when the party and its allies were supplying the necessary leadership— constantly balancing hope and fear, optimism and desperation, to the point where it was hard to know whether the party was on the brink of victory or defeat. She was ending with a final affirmation when the clip-clip of hard leather heels echoed at the empty rear of the hall.
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It was a Negro named Barnett; he was wearing riding boots and jodhpurs so freshly pressed they seemed to spring out elastically from the knee; his white shirt was equally stiff and fresh, but tieless, and the cuffs were folded evenly below the elbow. No one ever questioned this outfit, which he so frequently assumed in the evening; it was not even gossiped about.
Reaching the last row of chairs, he put one foot up on a seat and leaned forward. He let a smile show beneath his closely trimmed mustache and waited, a self-conscious magnet, for the attention of the branch to be pulled inevitably toward him. His face was square and big-featured, but constantly arched with suavity.
It appeared that everyone in the branch but Betty knew there was antagonism between Barnett and her. She just raised her eyes perkily, as if she could not wait to hear what he had to say. The members looked from one to the other, as in one of those cowboy pictures when the marshal and the outlaw meet in a saloon. They all knew that anybody else behaving like Barnett would have been brought up on charges and penalized in some way. An influential union leader, well known as a Communist, he nevertheless seldom came to a branch meeting. He did not always make an entrance like this, but he did generally come late; and he would sit in a conspicuously empty part of the room. Often he’d leave before the meeting was over. (When others left early it was said they were “pulling a Barnett.”) Some thought he was envious at not being organizer; others thought he didn’t want the party to get its hands on his union power—and it was a fact that he had not recruited anyone from the union, with all his prestige. Others felt he was just too much of a ladies’ man. He’d have two or three affairs a year and always with the kind of flashy girl who had no relation to his politics, and at the beginning of each affair he’d drop out of sight for six or seven weeks.
He waited there at the back of the room until a silence had come and begun to wilt under a new stir. Then he said, in the sly, done-for-effect manner he said most everything, this time expressing an indulgent contempt, “Don’t all you serious people know Joe is fightin’ tonight?”
Conversations sprang up anarchically in all parts of the room. Betty’s gaze appeared to leap at every swell of noise. “You bet we do!” she chirped out suddenly.
Barnett dropped his booted leg to the floor with a petulant stamp. “Well, what’cha gonna do about it,” he said, running the words into one another with affected crossness, “sit here like a bunch’a students while life just passes you right by?”
“Got something better to offer, Comrade B?” asked Betty.
“Would I be here if I didn’t? I say you all come up to my place and listen to the fight. I’m havin’ a little beer and pretzel party. I got m’car outside can take five or six of you. The rest can walk, it ain’t far.”
The alternatives were hurriedly rehearsed behind her glazed, inwardly concentrated eyes; suddenly her brows lifted, her mouth flew agape, her head teetered as if joy had struck her a blow. “I say three cheers for Comrade B!” she cried; stuffing her papers into her briefcase, she bounded down the aisle like a panicky kangaroo, caught her arm in Barnett’s and pulled him off.
In the standard student manner, a hum of approval, claps and whistles were set off by Barnett’s offer, and even before Betty bounded off some of the comrades had started moving. Only the prim, diligent-looking girl who was to deliver the “educational” remained seated. She did not seem quite able to believe in what was happening.
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Barnett’s apartment was three dark, poorly furnished rooms in a tenement. Both of them—Barnett in his jodhpurs and his current girl friend, Matty, in her spiked heels, tight low-cut dress of bright blue, and gold earrings so huge they hung like thick braids on her shoulder—seemed out of place. Matty, who was waiting at the apartment when the comrades came, watched them enter with the faintly disgusted curiosity of one who is slumming but not amused. Her greetings were imperceptible. She lolled watchfully in the doorway between the bedroom and living room, to Ben’s eyes so brimmingly sensual that a glance at her seemed one step short of assault. This was perhaps accentuated by the note of hidden, jeering provocation in her stance, at once daring and threatening assault. She looked at the visitors with an unabashed intentness, forcing their stares to back down first. Betty, however, walked straight over to Matty and said, “Wow! That’s some dress, Matty! I’d give my right arm to be able to wear one like it. No wonder we don’t see so much of Comrade B!”
Matty simply stared and Betty gave a little wiggle of appreciation, to indicate its sexiness sent shivers down her spine.
Though in the branch there were twice as many Negroes as whites, at Barnett’s they were about evenly divided, for all the whites had come. The majority of the comrades sat on the floor in small, not completely distinct groups, the conversations separating and flowing together against the background of dance music from the radio. Barnett moved among them, a quart bottle of beer in his fist, swinging the bottle in an elegant, high-swooping arc when he saw an upraised glass; the swoop would come to a timid aim at the bottom of the arc and he would say, in grave basso mimicry, “Use to was I could pour at a distance of twelve inches and make no suds, no suds whatever.” Wherever he stopped the dip of his bottle set off a roll of laughter and rapid words, like the wand of a stage magician.
Ben sat off by himself against a wall. Betty sat opposite him on a sofa, the lower part of her body fleshily molding the arm and balancing the tensely perched upper half. Her eyes were jumping uncontrollably from one conversation to the next as they had during the uproar in the branch. She called out finally, her chirpiness almost breathless this time, “Well, I say Joe is gonna knock that Conn out in the first or second inning! What do you say, Comrade B?”
He was pouring beer with his back to her and he did not turn around. “Well now, Betty,” he said, sucking in his cheeks in a sort of half-smile, “I’d say the first or second round, myself. But I didn’t know you was a fight expert. In fact, I didn’t know you was interested in fightin’ at all.”
“Lots of things you don’t know about me, Comrade B!”
“I believe that! I just thought you was only interested in more . . . uh . . . weighty matters.”
“Well, I’m not interested in boxing in general, just when Joe fights. And that’s a weighty matter!” She now sent her gaze benignly from face to face, prompting discussion from the floor.
“Oh,” he said, facing her, “so you really ain’t no expert.”
“Now don’t tell me you have to be an expert to make predictions. Everybody knows Joe is gonna knock him out real quick. When do you think Joe’s gonna do it, Comrade Jerry?”
So she started it around again, and each moment Ben felt more unbearably compromised by her, felt his whiteness as criminal an evidence of guilt as the striped clothes of a convict. Above all he had to declare his innocence and the only way was to interrupt at one point: “I was thinking Conn would win.”
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The room fell quiet. Someone asked how come the fight was so late in starting, didn’t fights usually start earlier? Several comrades tried hurriedly to answer. But Betty laughed, “What do you think of this traitor here? Imagine a guy in our branch rooting for Conn!”
A blush swept his teary, allergic-eyed blondness. “I did not say I was rooting for Conn,” he articulated with priggish belligerence. “I merely said I thought he would win.”
He had said this mainly for Barnett, he realized, and now he looked to him for support. “Maybe he’s in the wrong branch and don’t know it,” said Barnett. “Or maybe he just don’t know nothin’ about boxin’ ” Just then the fight announcements Game on and Ben’s furious question, “Which do you believe?” was lost under the roar of the arena crowd and the shuffle of attention in the room.
He was not angry simply in disappointment but because Barnett’s remark had hinged on the same conversation that had led him to see Barnett as an ally. . . .
Before his first branch meeting Betty had been introducing him to his new comrades, and when she came to Barnett had thrown one arm around his waist, given a great squeeze and called him the “Romeo of the branch.” He had winked at Ben over her shoulder and arched his brows with a kind of resigned disgust.
Later that evening he had sat down beside Ben and asked, with mock slyness, “Like our organizer?”
“She’s not too bad, I guess.”
“Yeah, not too bad, that’s it. Just sort of a habit she’s got rubbin’ hips like that, like somebody told her forty, fifty years ago throwin’ a little sex around gets results and she been doin’ it ever since. But she means well, and you got to have hard workers like her.” He stopped, stared blandly at Ben with the vaguest glimmer of a smile, and then laughed very loudly. Ben could not make its meaning out, except he felt a certain liberty involved, a hint of freedom-giving insult. “You’re a college boy from upstate, I hear,” he went on. “Mind if I ask how come you come right down here to a Harlem branch? Ain’t there some nice groups over at school?”
“What do you want to know that for? Unless you want my life story.” How could he tell him he had joined this Harlem branch precisely because he had wanted to join a “nice” group at school?
“The good Lord save me from hearing life stories,” he shuddered. “That ain’t what I want. Thing is, sometimes I just get sort of curious about what some of us are doin’ here. Know what I mean?”
Ben shook his head.
“Well, take this. You’d never meet a colored fella hated white people as much as my old man. Line’m up against the wall is all he wants to do. He believes in old Garvey, too. Whenever I come around I kid him about who he’s goin’ to vote for and he always has this routine he goes through. ‘Son,’ he says, ‘what’s the color of this candidate of yours?‘ White,’ I says. Then he says, “What’s the color of a maggot?’ and I say, ‘White.’ So then he says, ‘Then why in hell you want me to vote for a maggot?’”
“I can see your father’s a very logical man,” said Ben. “But I don’t see your point.”
“Well, my point is, I keep thinkin’, ain’t I my daddy’s boy? Ain’t you your daddy’s boy? Ain’t she,” he added, rocking his head toward Betty, “her daddy’s girl? At least partly, anyway, ain’t that so?”
A disconcerting seriousness had sounded in Barnett’s words. “It makes things hard,” Ben said.
“Harder than hard, man,” he laughed, and then he called to someone and abruptly walked away. Ben had seen him only one
other time before the fight, when they had merely said hello.
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Before the fight began Betty suddenly knelt beside Ben and whispered, “There’s more than a fight at stake, you know. If you knew what Louis meant to the Negro masses you wouldn’t have such a high and mighty impartial air.”
“I simply said I thought Conn would win. And anyway, I wasn’t talking to any masses, just to a dozen comrades.”
She appeared to be really seeing him for the first time and unable to make out whether he was an idiot or a scoundrel. “Such opinions should be held privately under the circumstances,” she said. “You don’t have the right simply to utter pronouncements from your objective ivory tower. And even if you aren’t capable of thinking politically—which is something we’ll have to talk about one of these days—you can at least enter into the spirit of the occasion.”
Ben ignored her. When he turned away he saw Matty watching him with undisguised distaste.
Until the ninth or tenth round the listeners weren’t dismayed when Louis failed to knock Conn out and the white boxer went ahead on rounds. They were simply waiting, if a bit solemnly, for the inevitable. Matty was the first to grow nervous. She started pacing between the living room and the bedroom, slapping the door jamb when she passed, the way a cat twitches a stiffened tail. With each turn her long earrings lashed her neck, lay pasted there for a fraction of a second like an exotic necklace. By about the eleventh round she began to call out softly, as if talking to herself but not caring whether anyone heard, “Come on, Joe boy, knock that white man’s head off.” The comrades, rigidly faced toward the radio, pretended not to hear; again excepting Betty; she would call back, “Atta girl, Matty, you tell ‘em!”
Ben sat with his head bent over, trying to give the impression that he was absorbed in the fight and really trying to keep from seeing Betty. He wished that he might get away from her voice as well. As it was, the more it looked like Conn would win, the more alone he felt; the others seemed to be shifting their positions so they would not have to face him. And Barnett no longer worked at his duties as a host, but slumped cross-legged on the floor and slowly stroked his long, shiny boots as though to comfort them.
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The end came suddenly in the thirteenth round, but there was a moment after Conn was hit when the announcer’s voice was covered by the crowd’s roar. Cries in the room sprang back at the roar and Barnett and Matty both rushed to surround the radio as if to bully the good news out of it. When the announcer said Conn was down they clutched each other and when the count reached ten they hugged and Barnett lifted her and twirled her around so quickly her spiked-heel shoes flew into the bedroom.
Ben was for a moment aroused from his outcast state. But then Betty began bounding around the room, kissing everybody. And then Matty, now uncoupled, was staring at him, swaying on her bare feet, almost panting. She suddenly laughed with a wild heartiness that silenced the room and pointed at Ben. “Conn!” she shrieked, snapping her head forward as though the word were a solid object to be flung at his face. From across the room, Barnett, glaring disapproval, stepped toward her, but she waved him away, seeming at once to scorn him and tell him there was nothing to worry about. But then, turning slowly into the bedroom, she stopped and beckoned to Ben. He stood up but did not move right away. Not that he was debating whether to follow her or not; he was just stilled for a moment by his own detachment and the palpable sense of the others’ eyes all nudging at him like a dozen stethoscopes probing his intention. A very broad, square-shouldered boy who invariably caused people to repress a gasp when he turned sideways, being no thicker than a long novel, he walked into the bedroom with stiff strides and followed her to a large two-doored closet. With a quick, almost impassioned spreading of her arms, she opened both doors. Their inner sides were covered from edge to edge with photographs of Barnett with white girls, many of them in various stages of undress.
Ben caught only a glimpse of her look of pride and triumph, for Barnett had run in after them. Slamming the doors, he half threw, half shoved Matty across the bed and turned and grabbed Ben’s forearm with an apologetic viciousness, as if angrier at what he had to do than at Ben himself. For a moment the two men stood that way, motionless. Then Ben wrenched his arm free, spinning Barnett against an end table. It wobbled, took a drunken stance on each of its four legs in succession and finally hit the floor with a terrific crash. There were murmurs in the next room, and a second later Betty bounded in.
The two men were standing close together, simply looking at the strewn floor in a sort of foolish stupor. But Betty charged between them, pushed Barnett back and dragged Ben after her into the other room, as a teacher, at once losing and taking control, no longer caring about her dignity or the other children, will eject an offender from her class. Ben did not struggle, was not even thinking of her but of his action the moment before, that he had never had so vivid and honest a sense of himself, that he had never liked Barnett or himself quite so much. When she turned to face him at the door, he merely gazed at her in numb astonishment; “You damn fool,” she hissed up close against his ear, “you can’t fight with a Negro!”
Ben’s expulsion from the party as a Jim Crow agent provocateur was cut and dried, though he had no inkling of it until he came to the following week’s meeting. The sergeant-at-arms, blocking the doorway, jerked a thumb in his face, like an umpire, as he tried to enter.
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