Free American Hunger by Richard Wright Page B

would rather have heard a white man say that he hated Negroes, which I could have readily believed, than to have heard him say that he respected Negroes, which would have made me doubt him. I did not think that thereexisted many whites who, through intellectual effort, could lift themselves out of the traditions of their times and see the Negro objectively.
    One Saturday night, sitting home idle, not caring to visit the girls I had met on my former insurance route, bored with reading, I decided to appear at the John Reed Club in the capacity of an amused spectator. I rode to the Loop and found the number. A dark stairway led upwards; it did not look welcoming. What on earth of importance could transpire in so dingy a place? Through the windows above me I saw vague murals along the walls. I mounted the stairs to a door that was lettered:
    The Chicago John Reed Club
    I opened it and stepped into the strangest room I had ever seen. Paper and cigarette butts lay on the floor. A few benches ran along the walls, above which were vivid colors depicting colossal figures of workers carrying streaming banners. The mouths of the workers gaped in wild cries; their legs were sprawled over cities.
    “Hello.”
    I turned and saw a white man smiling at me.
    “A friend of mine, who’s a member of this club, asked me to visit here. His name is Sol—,” I told him.
    “You’re welcome here,” the white man said. “We’re not having an affair tonight. We’re holding an editorial meeting. Do you paint?” He was slightly gray and he had a mustache.
    “No,” I said. “I try to write.”
    “Then sit in on the editorial meeting of our magazine,
Left Front, “
he suggested.
    “I know nothing of editing,” I said.
    “You can learn,” he said.
    I stared at him, doubting.
    “I don’t want to be in the way here,” I said.
    “My name’s Grimm,” he said.
    I told him my name and we shook hands. He went to a closet and returned with an armful of magazines.
    “Here are some back issues of the
Masses, “
he said. “Have you ever read it?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Some of the best writers in America publish in it,” he explained. He also gave me copies of a magazine called
International Literature.
“There’s stuff here from Gide, Gorky …”
    I assured him that I would read them. He took me to an office and introduced me to a Jewish boy who was to become one of the nation’s leading painters, to a chap who was to become one of the eminent composers of his day, to a writer who was to create some of the best novels of his generation, to a young Jewish boy who was destined to film the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. I was meeting men and women whom I would know for decades to come, who were to form the first sustained relationships in my life.
    I sat in a corner and listened while they discussed their magazine,
Left Front
Were they treating me courteously because I was a Negro? I must let cold reason guide me with these people, I told myself. I was asked to contribute something to the magazine, and I said vaguely that I would consider it. After the meeting I met an Irish girl who worked for an advertising agency, a girl who did social work, a schoolteacher, and the wife of a prominent university professor. I had once worked as a servant for people like these and I was skeptical. I tried to fathom their motives, but I could detect no condescension in them.
    I went home full of reflection, probing the sincerity of the strange white people I had met, wondering how they
really
regarded Negroes. I lay on my bed and read the magazines and was amazed to find that there did exist in this world an organized search for the truth of the lives of the oppressed and the isolated. When I had begged bread from the officials, I had wondereddimly if the outcasts could become united in action, thought, and feeling. Now I knew. It was being done in one-sixth of the earth already. The revolutionary words leaped from the printed page and struck me