Lonely Crusade by Chester B. Himes Read Free Book Online Page B

skin—along with other things, of course—denotes the division of the races.”
    Lee was not answered, but at least he knew that white skin of itself was no advantage.
    Perhaps the difference was in girls, he thought. He had heard sly talk among the white boys that the vaginas of Chinese women extended crosswise. This decided him to hide in the girls’ gym and watch them undress. “They don’t look any different,” he observed. They weren’t even prettier.
    Then he was caught, expelled. His parents were discharged, requested to leave the city. It happened with such sudden devastation, devoid of warning or appeal, that he was terror-stricken. He could not understand what he had done that called for so great a penalty. The year before, a white boy, halfback on the football team, had been caught in the very act with a girl. Though he had been expelled, nothing had happened to his parents, his home had not been destroyed, his family had not been banished from the city overnight. What Lee Gordon could not understand was why his spying on the white girls in the gym was considered so much worse.
    “Were you after one of those little girls?” his mother asked.
    “I just wanted to see them,” he replied fearfully.
    “For why?”
    “Just to see if they were different.”
    For a long moment she simply looked at him. Then she said in a voice of positiveness: “You’re just as good as any white person. Don’t you let nobody tell you no different.”
    “Now all you got to do is prove it,” his father said, whether sincerely or satirically Lee Gordon never learned.
    But his mind would not dismiss it so easily as this. He came to feel that the guilt or innocence of anything he might do would be subject wholly to the whim of white people. It stained his whole existence with a sense of sudden disaster hanging just above his head, and never afterwards could he feel at ease in the company of white people.
    His parents moved to Los Angeles where his father got a job as janitor in a department store while his mother did daywork in Beverly Hills. Lee entered Jefferson High School where the enrollment was almost equally divided between Negroes and whites. Slowly he overcame his constant trepidation, but the harassing sense of deficiency still remained because just the fact of different color didn’t answer it. Nor could he forget what had happened in Pasadena.
    He came to wonder if there was something about white girls which grown-up white people were afraid of a Negro finding out—some secret in their make-up that once discovered would bring them shame. It made him curious about white girls, but filled him with caution too. Sometimes he watched them covertly but never made advances; he did not want to bring disaster down again. At the time of his graduation he had never said more than a dozen words to any white girl in his class.
    Late one night the following summer as his father left the store where he worked, he was mistaken for a burglar by policemen and shot to death. The Negro churches organized a protest demanding that the officer be punished. But the city administration contended that it had been a natural mistake, and nothing was done about it.
    Lee had never loved his father nor greatly respected him and was not deeply grieved by his death, but he felt an actual degradation by the callousness of those responsible. The fact that they called it a “natural mistake,” as if all Negroes resembled criminals, only confirmed what he had learned in Pasadena. But to know that any Negro might be killed at any time a white person judged him to be a criminal filled him with a special sort of terror.
    After that he was afraid to be caught after dark in white neighborhoods. Each time he left the Negro ghetto he felt a sense of imminent danger, as if any moment he might be mistaken for a thief and beaten, imprisoned, or killed. It made just walking down the street, just crossing Main Street into the poor white neighborhood beyond to