Procession and Succession

10-24-36

Laid before all our eyes was the roaming, roosting innards of The Workers' Refuge. The Versailles of leftist activity in these 'United' States of America. Beams of twilight scoured in through the windowsills, illuminating the warehouse expanse and lighting the way for the night's beady-eyed party members who poured in along with us. It was crucial that we could see where we're going, too, since there was a red stampede afoot! The four of us sidled close as the mob of armbands waved over us. The Syndies were a sea of unrelenting zeal that hoped to falter the steady sails of the current social order. And there were plenty of sharp rocks along the way: their shoulders pricked at us, the sting of their pride bashing against us. Till we kept at the edges, sheltering for cover.

"Keep your distance, assholes!"

Jake had his crowbar on standby, if we ever needed to remind our free-thinking friends about personal space.

Temporary bruises aside, our journalistic escapade was well up and running as we ventured into the Refuge's depths. Across the floor a tide of foot-marks and boot-jabs aplenty created a cacophony of sound to complement the chatter swerving in. Eyes drifting from group to group, it quickly became apparent that Syndicalist fashion was an ode to metropolitan variety: from the soot-laden trousers of the steelworkers to the ashen shirts of the electricians; the battered cufflinks of security guards to the beaten sleeves of construction workers. They were an inchoate band, this working class, so fragmented by the multiplicity of their trades. Yet in the constant peddling of their footsteps there brimmed the heart of the collective. Thousands of little human interactions coming together to form something whole, orbiting around the crimson star that was Jack Reed's visage. 

David's eyes drifted across the warehouse, a hand perched on his chin.

"A confluence of humanity, eh? Reed's rabble-rousing tactics may be iron-fisted, but I suppose nothing less could wrangle together a mob like this."

"It ain't just Reed, Dave.

Nothing unites folks like empty pockets. Pennies talk, y'know," Jake barked back.

"Not as much as Reed. Do well to remember that."

Their bickering fell into the background while I strolled about the various concessions stands and makeshift storefronts that lined the entrance. It was a bazaar of Syndicalist activity that deluged the senses. The acrid scent of hotdogs filled the nostrils. T-shirts and soiled pant-leggings from the Garment District were scrawled red all over—the Syndie insignia of a golden hammer and sickle splayed before the fabric. There were guitarists and singers set on the sides of the walkway, crooning La Marseillaise with as much panache as their comrades in Paris: comrades who had already secured the means of production by their own tricolor arms. Aspiring writers too creaked across the Refuge landscape, some expats from the French Riviera and others New World-born idealists, their minds scintillating with the sights and sounds of the revolution from either side of Atlantic shore. 

"Reed's really wrangled up every class, color, and creed this side of the Hudson, huh."

I turned back to the three, gauging if their reactions to the Refuge were as starry-eyed as mine. But it wasn't a gleam I saw in Jason's eyes. Rather, a pallor on his pupils, dark but not unexpected, given their subject.

"Every last one, Rick. Whether they wanna be here or not."

I followed his gaze, immediately understanding the malaise behind his words. Off in the left corner of the warehouse, I spotted a culture within the culture, a nation within a nation. The socialist black caucus of New York City.

"For them, this ain't some party. Ain't your ordinary rally. It's a business opportunity, Rick, and they know it."

I kneaded my hands together, nodding over. For this segment of black America in the Big Apple—journalists, novelists, jazz performers, artists, craftsmen and unionists alike—there were layered emotions to be found. Under the swill tune of saxes and bass thrills, they sensed the piercing eyes of their white 'comrades' who frolicked at the other side of the Refuge. Sure, there were smiles and laughs to go around in this caucus; the richness of their cultural milieu was not to dull out easily. But the beads of hope their faces betrayed weren't for Reed, I felt, or his party, but for them gambling on themselves. Staking their place here, because Reed wouldn't be inviting them otherwise.

A tap fell on my shoulder.

"Hey, wait—Rick. I can see Earl over there. Looks like he wasn't gonna miss out on this for the world."

That name exerted a pull on my memory, causing my eyes to squint, grasping for the past image now present. Earl, Earl...how could I forget.

His glove clasped the bill of his cap as it arched ever so slightly upward. The ebony shade of his jacket pitted against the beige of his shirt, and his ascot flayed outward at the tips. Not frills. Jagged points.

Even from this distance, I could feel the authority flowing from his mouth. Never loud, never high, but pinpointed words that strapped themselves to parts of my psyche. He was talking to a few colleagues, I gathered, and I smirked back to Jase.

"Hasn't changed."

Not in 365 days. Not in the whisk of my eyes. Earl Jackson: our mentor and galvanizing presence.

Starting out, Jason and I were the biggest no-names in the New York press. We did each have our connections to different outlets—the Times and Daily Post scoped me out during my time at Princeton, and Jase had come from a lineage of black journalists himself—but the rawness of our talent couldn't match the portents of our journalistic heritage. We needed a sculptor of young minds to help shape ourselves into who we wanted to be. And Earl was the Michelangelo of the broadsheet.

He ran The Daily Polaris, one of the most popular black-owned papers in the city, even as the economy's plunge drove down subscriptions citywide. In a time when the scarcity of demand made hires all the more cutthroat, Earl had a knack for seeing beneath the cloudy composure of a writer's work, to grasp at the heart of his style. Or her style; as rare as it was, in our newsroom, sex nor race saw formal persecution from the boss himself. As much as he could ensure, anyway, given the fickleness of our limitations.

Whomever the person, Earl demanded excellence, and it was his exacting, excoriating expectations that helped ensure we reached our potential.

"Cut the fluff outta there, Rick. You ain't Faulkner, you're the junior staff writer," he always used to tell me, puffing away smoke from his cigar, as if the clouds of tobacco were clearer than my plays on words. (He was right, by God!)

In time, the two of us rose the ranks. And I rose as a person, all the same; even as the ascent of artistic success so rarely matches the climb of human character. Far from my Princeton puff pieces or fantastical short stories, there was a worldliness to the Polaris that allowed me to view New York uncut. Boiled down to its base components, the glimmering streets of our great city started to darken during the Depression. And yet it was the shadows of economic turmoil that made the stories of humanity gleam ever brighter: these crackles of bliss amid a firestorm of pandemonium. 

The fervency of this paper, unfettered by business ties or social expectations, opened my eyes to the glory of journalism. These people couldn't rely on Uncle Sam alone to rid them out of the Depression, a depression whose burden they carried hardest, from second-class citizens in a booming economy to being left to die in a deplorable one. Earl embodied that tenacity.

Eventually, we left the nest and started our own independent fieldwork. But Earl's didactic baritone never left our ears. His teachings lived with us, and flowed from our pens to our peers.

"Right in the thick of things, just like always," Jason had a tight smile.

I didn't think he expected much from Reed, old Earl. Union culture was rife with segregationist sentiments from the mid-19th century onward, after all, with the blue-collar kingpins of New York not willing to let a shade of black slither into union ranks. Race riots had crackled up since even before the Depression's start, as the golden age of Harlem was tainted by the blood of white fury. Unions, conveniently enough, happened to be the bedrock of Reed's support as a candidate.

But Reed had a gamble here. Upending the capitalist system wasn't just about economic liberation, but the destruction of the social order as we knew it. To brand himself as the messiah of a new age of liberty, with rival Huey Long's party stoking the fires of antiblack sentiment north and south, he tried to offer an olive branch to the black community. Meeting with black labor leaders like A. Philip Randolph and Harry Haywood, he knew it wasn't only a moral obligation but a political gambit to expand his electorate, and augment his power base.

"Not the first promises we've been dangled, 'course," Jason mused, clamping up his notebook for the time being.

"Won't be the last. But hey, Earl's doing his damndest here, regardless. I bet his stare alone will make Reed think twice about bailing on the struggle."

Jase hesitated to nod, and I could only nod back as we continued our march across the Refuge.

But our shoes couldn't get far. A booming voice halted our journey.

"Rick, Jase, stop loafin' your asses around, we've got a job to do." Jake pointed towards the epicenter of the warehouse, where the flock of Syndies were starting to arrive.

"Reed's party-men are massaging the crowd. Unless we want some early fireworks, let's get going, quick." 

Peering up from his notebook, Jason spotted Reed's in-famed Instigators: Syndicalist Party devotees who were most likely born suckling at the teats of Marxist teachings. Their all-black uniforms were marred by a streak of red at the chest, zagging diagonally from shoulder to hip, and even as they sweetly guided the crowd towards Reed's podium, it wasn't like their grey nightsticks were easing anyone's spirits.

While David shrugged off the piercing looks his patchwork attire implored from the crowd, we scurried forth to the heat of the action. Blazing red like the fires of Hades, a ruby-tinted banner rimmed around the podium. Well, if a giant, unremarkable slab of concrete a foot deep could be called a "podium." I bet Reed had a streak of meekness in his design of the place, trying to appease the minimalist sympathies of the proletariat. Even still, its surface had a sort of mundane glisten to it, like a break from the torrent of Syndicalist rhetoric we braved through on the way up here.

Dave stopped his hunchback façade and peered upwards, awe lighting his eyes.

"Behold the grandeur of the Syndicalist insignia, men."

His deep tone was fitting. The flag of the Combined Syndicates of America—Jack Reed's socialist dream for the USA—shone down from the rafters with its towering form. A striking black-and-red complexion swarmed over the canvas, with but a thin white slant across the middle separating the smoke and blood from seeping against each other. And at the center, a trio of stars orbited a wireframe of the globe, with the initials "C S A" standing high above the world.

It was the banner of a hundred years' worth of sweat and toil for American socialists that had finally captured a political vehicle. A vehicle more powerful than the blast of a howitzer, yet suaver than the whisk of Manhattan wind.

John Silas "Jack" Reed—the first Socialist Party member elected to the United States Senate, and in the Empire State no-less—was the vessel of the American left. You couldn't see it from his strut; you could only gape at it from his veins, percolating as he strode along a pathway towards the podium. Below the fabric that flew overhead, his blonde strays of hair swayed with every step, limning a stony face that could rival the statues of Maecenas. A three-piece set emanated off his body, the sable of his suitjacket lined against the snowy descent of his shirt—and with tie dyed burgundy to top the look. 

Throngs of Instigators blocked off the podium from the crowd's lunges, hands waving out towards a Reed setting his hands atop the oratorical cement. Unlike other candidates who wished to create a veil of connection between voter and power, ogling at the electorate and grasping hands and glomming their lips on babies' foreheads, Reed was content with an air of distance. Perhaps to elevate the stature of his persona, cleaving the flaws of man from his flesh, the blots of the skin that one can only fully behold face-to-face. He had a posture that demanded fire and servility both from his apostles.

"BLEED FOR REED! BLEED FOR REED!"

A chime sundered in. All synchronized, like a symphony.

"C S A ! C S A ! C S A !"

It was like they were spouting combination numbers to open a safe; to unlock the untapped vigor of America's masses.

"They don't get the irony, do they," David watched on in disbelief, peering on to Reed as he cleared his throat.

"Save the mulling for later, Dave. Speech's about to cut loose." Jake's cloth-garbled mitts held tight to his crowbar.

With the four of us huddled in the front of the crowd's red ocean, we looked towards the stage, the senator's searing brown eyes pacing through the souls of the men and women of his parish.

"Try not to cave in to Reed's spell," Jason whispered in my ear, his hand patting my shoulder. I nodded back, the eagerness on my face souring some, stoifying amid this seminal moment in my life. To observe the workings of a genius at play, a cataclysm of politics. He was all articulation and manipulation, now, and I wasn't to forget it.

Then, the strike of a polished shoe against concrete stilled a thousand voices, the sound the progeny of a silent whirlwind. Only the rustle of oxygen out our lungs could be heard, now. 

Jack Reed held the most forceful aura I ever saw.

"C o m r a d e s."

As he opened his mouth, the letters of that singular word fluttered out across the Refuge. A sanctimonious slowness it was, where each gesture of the hand or quirking of the eye could quake the hearts of humanity.

The only question was how many beats we had in us till the night shuddered away into stardust.