American Hunger by Richard Wright Page B

that my motives were already being questioned; and no doubt my rash words did not help any.
    “You’ve heard of Trotsky, haven’t you?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Do you know what happened to him?”
    “He was banished from the Soviet Union,” I said.
    “Do you know why?”
    “Well,” I stammered, trying not to reveal my ignorance of politics, for I had not followed the details of Trotsky’s fight against the Communist party of the Soviet Union, “it seems that after a decision had been made, he broke that decision by organizing against the party.”
    “It was for counterrevolutionary activity,” he snapped impatiently; I learned afterwards that my answer had not been satisfactory, had not been couched in the acceptable phrases of bitter, anti-Trotsky denunciation.
    “I understand,” I said. “But I’ve never read Trotsky. What’s his stand on minorities?”
    “Why ask me?” he asked. “I don’t read Trotsky.”
    “Look,” I asked, “if you found me reading Trotsky, what would that mean to you?”
    “You have no need to read Trotsky,” he said.
    “Don’t you think I can read Trotsky and not be influenced to follow him?” I asked.
    “Comrade, you don’t understand,” he said in an annoyed tone.
    That ended the conversation. But that was not the last time I was to hear the phrase: “Comrade, you don’t understand.” I had not been aware of holding wrong ideas. I had not read any of Trotsky’s works; indeed, the very opposite had been true. It had been Stalin’s
The National and Colonial Question
that had captured my interest.
    Stalin’s book showed how diverse minorities could be weldedinto unity, and I regarded it as a most politically sensitive volume that revealed a new way of looking upon lost and beaten peoples. Of all the developments in the Soviet Union, the method by which scores of backward peoples had been led to unity on a national scale was what had enthralled me. I had read with awe how the Communists had sent phonetic experts into the vast regions of Russia to listen to the stammering dialects of peoples oppressed for centuries by the czars. I had made the first total emotional commitment of my life when I read how the phonetic experts had given these tongueless people a language, newspapers, institutions. I had read how these forgotten folk had been encouraged to keep their old cultures, to see in their ancient customs meanings and satisfactions as deep as those contained in supposedly superior ways of living. And I had exclaimed to myself how different this was from the way in which Negroes were sneered at in America.
    Then what was the meaning of the warning I had received from the black Communist? Why was it that I was a suspected man because I wanted to reveal the vast physical and spiritual ravages of Negro life, the profundity latent in these rejected people, the dramas as old as man and the sun and the mountains and the seas that were transpiring in the poverty of black America? What was the danger in showing the kinship between the sufferings of the Negro and the sufferings of other people?
    I sat one morning in Ross’s home with his wife and child. I was scribbling furiously upon my yellow sheets of paper. The doorbell rang and Ross’s wife admitted a black Communist, one Ed Green. He was tall, taciturn, soldierly, square-shouldered. I was introduced to him and he nodded stiffly.
    “What’s happening here?” he asked bluntly.
    Ross explained my project to him, and as Ross talked I could see Ed Green’s face darken. He had not sat down and when Ross’swife offered him a chair, he did not hear her.
    “What’re you going to do with these notes?” he asked me.
    “I hope to weave them into stories,” I said.
    “What’re you asking the party members?”
    “About their lives in general.”
    “Who suggested this to you?” he asked.
    “Nobody. I thought of it myself.”
    “Were you ever a member of any other political group?”
    “I worked with the