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ARTISAN REVIEW
My senior year in high school was the most socially active period I
had ever known. It also nearly led to trouble for years to come, as it did
for many of my classmates, who happily joined clubs that later turned
out to be Communist fronts.
"American Youth for Democracy" was one of the more exciting
groups. The food at its parties was plentiful, the girls were pretty, and
the cars its members drove were luxurious. I was invited to one of its
parties by a friend, who later wished he had taken my advice and not
signed his name to the guest list. I had been alerted not to get too
involved by Mose, an old man in the neighborhood who told all the
young Negro boys that we would live to regret ever getting mixed up
with those white folks . He'd talked to my mother, too, and she had
warned me about going off with "that gang." I was torn: I was
eighteen; I did whatever I wanted to. But this time I gave in and
stopped going with the crowd.
Some of my friends didn't. Some of them forgot that we were, as
we used to say, "colored." One young man got so involved with one of
the girls that he wanted to marry her. When her parents sent her away,
he flipped his wig. To this day he hasn't completely found himsel£
During the McCarthy era, my friends' membership in these "liberal"
groups came home to roost. Many were unable to get jobs in teaching
or government. I had felt somewhat ashamed at not having signed my
real name at any of the parties: now I saw that I had, at least, saved my–
self a lot of trouble. In any case, I hadn't wholly approved of what went
on there. I was always a little squeamish about white girls kissing black
guys and playing around in dark corners.
Were the groups really Communist? I remember one day when we
were sitting out in front of our building, a car pulled up at the Borkins'
store. Two men got out. They called for Mr. Borkin. Mrs. Borkin
started screaming at them, calling them fascists, so they took her, too.
Her daughter was crying and trying to hold on to her mother. I later
learned that the Borkins belonged to a Communist group; it was the
daughter who did the recruiting for the parties and picnics we studs fre–
quented on weekends.
That's all in the past. Willie the vegetable man, who now drives a
taxi, stopped me in the street one day recently. "Cureton, Cureton," he
yelled, and ran over and hugged me. He is a defeated man. He lost his
Sara some years ago to some man with money; his son Larry is in India.
As he put it, he has only the past to comfort him in his old age. He told
me that he longed for the old days. "Not me," I said. "Remember, we
were poor." He laughed, trying to point out to me the safety of the
neighborhood at that time. He showed me the scars he had acquired
from young punks trying to mug him. He was saved from death once by
