Lonely Crusade Read Online Free PDF

Southerners by their speech.
    At the last, some one said in a softly modulated voice: “I, too, would like to join the union.”
    Lee glanced up to see a dark-brown, scholarly appearing man of middle-age, dressed in khaki coveralls and wearing a miner’s cap. His features had the taut-skinned, high-cheekboned structure of an Indian’s, but his eyes were a soft, limpid brown. So many contradictions were apparent in the man that Lee looked startled.
    “You are accepting Negro members, are you not?” the man asked in a precise, persistent tone.
    “Oh, indeed!” Lee shouted in embarrassment. “Sure, that’s why I’m here. We’re certainly glad to have you. Now what is your name—and let me have your address, too.”
    “Lester McKinley,” the man replied, giving him an address on the West Side.
    When Lee had finished writing, he extended his hand. “My name’s Lee Gordon. I’m an organizer here.”
    “I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Gordon,” McKinley said soberly shaking his hand. “If you require any assistance at any time, please don’t be hesitant in calling on me.”
    “Why, thank you,” Lee replied gratefully.
    “ Labor omnia vincit ,” McKinley quoted. “Labor conquers all things.” A smile flickered across his somber features, then he turned, and without looking at any of the others, leisurely left the room.
    “Well…scholar or mountebank?” Lee Gordon asked himself.
    And then a white voice cut across his consciousness: “…naw, not there, I was in niggertown.” There was no malice in the voice, only the forgetfulness of a Negro’s presence. But it put Lee right back where he had been with Todd.
    For a long moment he sat rigid in recurring torture, afraid that if he looked up he’d see a white man’s grinning face. Then he decided to appear as if he had not heard. From the literature on the table he selected a tiny booklet: Your Union at Work . He turned the page and read: “We, the Workers, realize that the struggle to better our working and living conditions is in vain unless we are united to protect ourselves collectively against the organized forces of the employers…We, the Workers, form an organization which unites all workers in our industry on an industrial basis and rank-and-file control, regardless of craft, age, sex, nationality, race—”
    At the word race, his mind left the printed page so that now only his eyes were perceiving the words. His mind was lost in the black, senseless, depthless morass of race—gone!
    “You ever work in a steel mill?”
    The question jerked Lee out of it. Joe waited for his reply.
    “No, I never did,” Lee said.
    The day-shift volunteers had gone; they were the only two left.
    Joe held up his left hand. “I lost these in a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio.”
    Lee looked at the two-fingered hand, then at Joe’s granite-hard face. As it had been with Smitty, again he felt the compulsion to adjust his personality, somewhat in the manner of a foil, to Joe’s; to say the thing that was expected of him. He didn’t know what to say.
    “I didn’t get a cent,” Joe grated. “I got fired. The shop wasn’t organized.”
    “That was tough,” Lee sympathized inanely.
    Joe gave him a look, and a fire lit up in his slate-gray eyes. “A lot of these punks drawing union pay don’t even know what a union is.”
    Lee winced. But Joe was not referring to him; for the moment he had forgotten Lee’s presence.
    “They could-a had ‘em all organized, if they’d organized the unemployed,” he went on. It seemed to rankle deep inside of him. “They could-a organized ‘em then. They could-a organized ‘em on WPA. Now they got to do it the hard way. So who do they send but me?”
    “Oh, you’re from out of town?” Lee again spoke foolishly just to fill the silence with sound.
    This time Joe saw him. “Let’s get some beer,” he said abruptly.
    “I’ll settle for coffee,” Lee said with a smile.
    The rain had stopped. But the gray murkiness of