Free American Hunger by Richard Wright Page A

hardly daring to believe that our secret would be kept. We were so anxious that we did not know whether to curse or laugh. Another doctor came.
    “Give me A-Z rabbit number 14.”
    “Yes, sir,” I said.
    I brought him the rabbit and he took it upstairs to the operating room. We waited for repercussions. None came.
    All that afternoon the doctors came and went. I would run intothe room—stealing a few seconds from my step scrubbing—and ask what progress was being made and would learn that the doctors had detected nothing. At quitting time we felt triumphant.
    “They won’t never know,” Cooke boasted in a whisper.
    I saw Brand stiffen. I knew that he was aching to dispute Cooke’s optimism, but the memory of the fight he had just had was so fresh in his mind that he could not speak.
    Another day went by and nothing happened. Then another day. The doctors examined the animals and wrote in their little black books, in their big black books, and continued to trace red and black lines upon the charts.
    A week passed and we felt out of danger. Not one question had been asked.
    Of course, we four black men were much too modest to make our contribution known, but we often wondered what went on in the laboratories after that secret disaster. Was some scientific hypothesis, well on its way to validation and ultimate public use, discarded because of unexpected findings on that cold winter day? Was some tested principle given a new and strange refinement because of fresh, remarkable evidence? Did some brooding research worker—those who held stop watches and slopped their feet carelessly in the water of the steps I tried so hard to keep clean—get a wild, if brief, glimpse of a new scientific truth? Well, we never heard …
    I brooded, of course, upon whether I should have gone to the director’s office and told him what had happened, but each time I thought of it I remembered that the director had been the man who had ordered the boy to stand over me while I was working and time my movements with a stop watch. He did not regard me as a human being. I did not share his world. I earned thirteen dollars a week and I had to support four people with it, and should I risk that thirteen dollars by acting idealistically? Brand andCooke would have hated me and would have eventually driven me from the job had I “told” on them. The hospital kept us four Negroes, as though we were close kin to the animals we tended, huddled together down in the underworld corridors of the hospital, separated by a vast psychological distance from the significant processes of the rest of the hospital—just as America had kept us locked in the dark underworld of American life for three hundred years—and we had made our own code of ethics, values, loyalty.

Chapter IV
    O NE Thursday night I received an invitation from a group of white boys I had known in the post office to meet in a South Side hotel and argue the state of the world. About ten of us gathered and ate salami sandwiches, drank beer, and talked. I was amazed to discover that many of them had joined the Communist party. I challenged them by reciting the antics of the Negro Communists I had seen in the parks, and I was told that those antics were “tactics” and were all right. I was dubious.
    Then one Thursday night Sol, a Jewish chap, startled us by announcing that he had had a short story accepted by a little magazine called the
Anvil,
edited by Jack Conroy, and that he had joined a revolutionary artists’ organization, the John Reed Club. Sol repeatedly begged me to attend the meetings of the club, but I always found an easy excuse for refusing.
    “You’d like them,” Sol said.
    “I don’t want to be organized,” I said.
    “They can help you to write,” he said.
    “Nobody can tell me how or what to write,” I said.
    “Come and see,” he urged. “What have you to lose?”
    I felt that Communists could not possibly have a sincere interest in Negroes. I was cynical and I