American Hunger Read online

  This “gambling” method of remuneration was practiced by some of the burial companies because of the tremendous “turnover” in policyholders, and the companies had to have a constant stream of new business to keep afloat. Whenever a black family moved or suffered a slight reverse in fortune, it usually let its policy lapse and later bought another policy from some other company.

  Each day now I saw how the Negro in Chicago lived, for I visited hundreds of dingy flats filled with rickety furniture and ill-clad children. Most of the policyholders were illiterate and did not know that their policies carried clauses severely restricting their benefit payments, and, as an insurance agent, it was not my duty to tell them.

  After tramping the streets and pounding on doors to collect premiums, I was dry, strained, too tired to read or write. I hungered for relief and, as a salesman of insurance to many young black girls, I found it. There were many comely black housewives who, trying desperately to keep up their insurance payments, were willing to make bargains to escape paying a ten-cent premium each week. She was an illiterate black child with a baby whose father she did not know. During the entire period of my relationship with her, she had but one demand to make of me: She wanted me to take her to a circus. Just what significance circuses had for her, I was never able to learn.

  After I had been with her one morning—in exchange for the dime premium—I sat on the sofa in the front room and began to read a book I had with me. She came over shyly.

  “Lemme see that,” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “That book,” she said.

  I gave her the book; she looked at it intently. I saw that she was holding it upside down.

  “What’s in here you keep reading?” she asked.

  “Can’t you really read?” I asked.

  “Naw,” she giggled. “You know I can’t read.”

  “You can read some, “ I said.

  “Naw,” she said.

  I stared at her and wondered just what a life like hers meant in the scheme of things, and I came to the conclusion that it meant absolutely nothing. And neither did my life mean anything.

  “How come you looking at me that way for?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You don’t talk much.”

  “There isn’t much to say.”

  “I wished Jim was here,” she sighed.

  “Who’s Jim?” I asked, jealous. I knew that she had other men, but I resented her mentioning them in my presence.

  “Just a friend,” she said.

  I hated her then, then hated myself for coming to her.

  “Do you like Jim better than you like me?” I asked.

  “Naw. Jim just likes to talk.”

  “Then why do you be with me, if you like Jim better?” I asked, trying to make an issue and feeling a wave of disgust because I wanted to.

  “You all right,” she said, giggling. “I like you.”

  “I could kill you,” I said.

  “What?” she exclaimed.

  “Nothing,” I said, ashamed.

  “Kill me, you said? You crazy, man,” she said.

  “Maybe I am,” I muttered, angry that I was sitting beside a human being to whom I could not talk, angry with myself for coming to her, hating my wild and restless loneliness.

  “You oughta go home and sleep,” she said. “You tired.”

  “What do you ever think about?” I demanded harshly.

  “Lotta things.”

  “What, for example?”

  “You,” she said, smiling.

  “You know I mean just one dime to you each week,” I said.

  “Naw, I thinka lotta you.”

  “Then what do you think?”

  “’Bout how you talk when you talk. I wished I could talk like you,” she said seriously.

  “Why?” I taunted her.

  “When you gonna take me to a circus?” she demanded suddenly.

  “You ought to be in a circus,” I said.

  “I’d like it,” she said, her eyes shining.

  I wanted to laugh, but her words sounded so sincere that I could not laugh.

  “There’s no circus in town,” I said.

  “I bet there is and you won’t tell me ‘cause you don’t wanna take me,” she said, pouting.

  “But there’s no circus in town, I tell you!”

  “When will one come?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can’t you read it in the papers?” she asked.

  “There’s nothing in the papers about a circus.”

  “There is,” she said. “If I could read, I’d find it.”

  I laughed and she was hurt.

  “There is a circus in town,” she said stoutly.

  “There’s no circus in town,” I said. “But if you want to learn to read, then I’ll teach you.”

  She nestled at my side, giggling.

  “See that word?” I said, pointing.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s an ‘and,’ “ I said.

  She doubled, giggling.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  She rolled on the floor, giggling.

  “What’s so funny?” I demanded.

  “You,” she giggled. “You so funny.”

  I rose.

  “The hell with you,” I said.

  “Don’t you go and cuss me now,” she said. “I don’t cuss you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  I got my hat and went to the door.

  “I’ll see you next week?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  When I was on the sidewalk, she called to me from a window.

  “You promised to take me to a circus, remember?”

  “Yes.” I walked close to the window. “What is it you like about a circus?”

  “The animals,” she said simply.

  I felt that there was a hidden meaning, perhaps, in what she had said; but I could not find it. She laughed and slammed the window shut.

  Each time I left her I resolved not to visit her again. I could not talk to her; I merely listened to her passionate desire to see a circus. She was not calculating; if she liked a man, she just liked him. Sex relations were the only relations she had ever had; no others were possible with her, so limited was her intelligence.

  Most of the other agents also had their bought girls and they were extremely anxious to keep other agents from tampering with them. One day a new section of the South Side was given to me as a part of my collection area and the agent from whom the territory had been taken suddenly became very friendly with me.

  “Say, Wright,” he asked, “did you collect from Ewing at—Champlain Avenue yet?”

  “Yes,” I answered, after consulting my book.

  “How did you like her?” he asked, staring at me.

  “She’s a good-looking number,” I said.

  “You had anything to do with her yet?” he asked.

  “No, but I’d like to,” I said, laughing.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m a friend of yours.”

  “Since when?” I countered.

  “No, I’m really a friend,” he said.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Listen, that gal’s sick,” he said seriously.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s got the clap,” he said. “Keep away from her. She’ll lay with anybody.”

  “Gee, I’m glad you told me,” I said.

  “You had your eye on her, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes, I did,” I said.

  “Leave her alone,” he said. “She’ll get you down.”

  That night I told my cousin what the agent had said about Miss Ewing. My cousin laughed.

  “That gal’s all right,” he said. “That agent’s been fooling around with her. He told you she had a disease so that you’d be scared to bother her. He was protecting her from you.”

  That was the way the black women were regarded by the black a
gents. Some of the agents were vicious; if they had claims to pay to a sick black woman and if the woman was able to have sex relations with them, they would insist upon it, using the claim money as a bribe. If the woman refused, they would report to the office that the woman was a malingerer. The average black woman would submit because she needed the money badly.

  As an insurance agent, it was necessary for me to take part in one swindle. It appears that the burial society had originally issued a policy that was—from their point of view—too liberal in its provisions, and the officials decided to exchange the policies then in the hands of their clients for other policies carrying stricter clauses; of course, this had to be done in a manner that would not allow the policyholder to know that his policy was being switched, that he was being swindled. I did not like it, but there was only one thing I could do to keep from being a party to it: I could quit and starve. But I did not feel that being honest was worth the price of starvation.

  The swindle worked in this way. In my visits to the homes of policyholders to collect premiums, I was accompanied by the superintendent who claimed to the policyholder that he was making a routine inspection. The policyholder, usually an illiterate black woman, would dig up her policy from the bottom of a trunk or a chest and hand it to the superintendent. Meanwhile I would be marking the woman’s premium book, an act which would distract her from what the superintendent was doing. The superintendent would exchange the old policy for a new one which was identical in color, serial number, and beneficiary, but which carried much smaller payments. It was dirty work and I wondered how I could stop it. And when I could think of no safe way I would curse myself and the victims and forget about it. (The black owners of the burial societies were leaders in the Negro communities and were respected by whites.)

  As I went from house to house collecting money, I saw black men mounted upon soapboxes at street corners, bellowing about bread, rights, and revolution. I liked their courage, but I doubted their wisdom. The speakers claimed that Negroes were angry, that they were about to rise and join their white fellow workers to make a revolution. I was in and out of many Negro homes each day and I knew that the Negroes were lost, ignorant, sick in mind and body. I saw that a vast distance separated the agitators from the masses, a distance so vast that the agitators did not know how to appeal to the people they sought to lead.

  Some mornings I found leaflets on my steps telling of China, Russia, and Germany; on some days I witnessed as many as five thousand jobless Negroes, led by Communists, surging through the streets. I would watch them with an aching heart, firmly convinced that they were being duped; but if I had been asked to give them another solution for their problems, I would not have known how.

  It became a habit of mine to visit Washington Park of an afternoon after collecting a part of my premiums, and I would wander through crowds of unemployed Negroes, pausing here and there to sample the dialectic or indignation of Communist speakers. What I heard and saw baffled and angered me. The Negro Communists were deliberately careless in their personal appearance, wearing their shirt collars turned in to make V’s at their throats, wearing their caps—they wore caps because Lenin had worn caps–with the visors turned backward, tilted upward at the nape of their necks. Many of their mannerisms, pronunciations, and turns of speech had been consciously copied from white Communists whom they had recently met. While engaged in conversation, they stuck their thumbs in their suspenders or put their left hands into their shirt bosoms or hooked their thumbs into their back pockets as they had seen Lenin or Stalin do in photographs. Though they did not know it, they were naively practicing magic; they thought that if they acted like the men who had overthrown the czar, then surely they ought to be able to win their freedom in America.

  In speaking they rolled their “r’s” in Continental style, pronouncing “party” as “parrrtee,” stressing the last syllable, having picked up the habit from white Communists. “Comrades” became “cumrrrades,” and “distribute,” which they had known how to pronounce all their lives, was twisted into “distrrribuuute,” with the accent on the last instead of the second syllable, a mannerism which they copied from Polish Communist immigrants who did not know how to pronounce the word. Many sensitive Negroes agreed with the Communist program but refused to join their ranks because of the shabby quality of those Negroes whom the Communists had already admitted to membership.

  When speaking from the platform, the Negro Communists, eschewing the traditional gestures of the Negro preacher—as though they did not possess the strength to develop their own style of Communist preaching–stood straight, threw back their heads, brought the edge of the right palm down hammerlike into the outstretched left palm in a series of jerky motions to pound their points home, a mannerism that characterized Lenin’s method of speaking. When they walked, their stride quickened; all the peasant hesitancy of their speech vanished as their voices became clipped, terse. In debate they interrupted their opponents in a tone of voice that was an octave higher, and if their opponents raised their voices to be heard, the Communists raised theirs still higher until shouts rang out over the park. Hence, the only truth that prevailed was that which could be shouted and quickly understood.

  Their emotional certainty seemed buttressed by access to a fund of knowledge denied to ordinary men, but a day’s observation of their activities was sufficient to reveal all their thought processes. An hour’s listening disclosed the fanatical intolerance of minds sealed against new ideas, new facts, new feelings, new attitudes, new hints at ways to live. They denounced books they had never read, people they had never known, ideas they could never understand, and doctrines whose names they could not pronounce. Communism, instead of making them leap forward with fire in their hearts to become masters of ideas and life, had frozen them at an even lower level of ignorance than had been theirs before they met Communism.

  When Hoover threatened to drive the bonus marchers from Washington, one Negro Communist speaker said:

  “If he drives the bonus marchers out of Washington, the people will rise up and make a revolution!”

  I went to him, determined to get at what he really meant.

  “You know that even if the United States army actually kills the bonus marchers, there’ll be no revolution,” I said.

  “You don’t know the indignation of the masses!” he exploded.

  “But you don’t seem to know what it takes to make a revolution,” I explained. “Revolutions are rare occurrences.”

  “You underestimate the masses,” he told me.

  “No, I know the masses of Negroes very well,” I said. “But I don’t believe that a revolution is pending. Revolutions come through concrete historical processes …”

  “You’re an intellectual,” he said, smiling disdainfully.

  A few days later, after Hoover had had the bonus marchers driven from Washington at the point of bayonets, I accosted him:

  “What about that revolution you predicted if the bonus marchers were driven out?” I asked.

  “The prerequisite conditions did not exist,” he muttered, and shrugged.

  I left him, wondering why he felt it necessary to make so many ridiculous overstatements. I could not refute the general Communist analysis of the world; the only drawback was that their world was just too simple for belief. I liked their readiness to act, but they seemed lost in folly, wandering in a fantasy. For them there was no yesterday or tomorrow, only the living moment of today; their only task was to annihilate the enemy that confronted them in any manner possible.

  At times their speeches, glowing with rebellions, were downright offensive to lowly, hungry Negroes. Once a Negro Communist speaker, inveighing against religion, said:

  “There ain’t no goddamn God! If there is, I hereby challenge Him to strike me dead!”

  He paused dramatically before his vast black audience for God to act, but God declined. He then pulled out his watch.

  “Maybe God didn’t hear me!” he yelled. “I’l
l give Him two more minutes!” Then, with sarcasm: “Mister God, kill me!”

  He waited, looking mockingly at his watch. The audience laughed uneasily.

  “I’ll tell you where to find God,” the speaker went on in a hard, ranting voice. “When it rains at midnight, take your hat, turn it upside down on a floor in a dark room, and you’ll have God!”

  I had to admit that I had never heard atheism of so militant a nature; but the Communist speaker seemed to be amusing and frightening the people more than he was convincing them.

  “If there is a God up there in that empty sky,” the speaker roared on, “I’ll reach up there and grab Him by his beard and jerk Him down here on this hungry earth and cut His throat!” He wagged his head. “Now, let God dare me!”

  The audience was shocked into silence for a moment, then it yelled with delight. I shook my head and walked away. That was not the way to destroy people’s outworn beliefs … They were acting like irresponsible children …

  I was now convinced that they did not know the complex nature of Negro life, did not know how great was the task to which they had set themselves. They had rejected the state of things as they were, and that seemed to me to be the first step toward embracing a creative attitude toward life. I felt that it was not until one wanted the world to be different that one could look at the world with will and emotion. But these men had rejected what was before their eyes without quite knowing what they had rejected and why.

  I felt that the Negro could not live a full, human life under the conditions imposed upon him by America; and I felt, too, that America, for different reasons, could not live a full, human life. It seemed to me, then, that if the Negro solved his problem, he would be solving infinitely more than his problem alone. I felt certain that the Negro could never solve his problem until the deeper problem of American civilization had been faced and solved. And because the Negro was the most cast-out of all the outcast people in America, I felt that no other group in America could tackle this problem of what our American lives meant so well as the Negro could.