By the time February of 1937 rolled around, our family, particularly Loretta and the children, were in a very good place. Loretta was engrossed in her work teaching, painting, and traveling around the country to show her newest pieces, and the children and I were closer than ever. When I wasn’t teaching, I was tutoring them and watching them develop into young scholars. Both were fluent in Russian now and had plenty of friends.
Of course I spent moments thinking about the conversations Bobby and I had had about him becoming an ambassador or senator, and I longed to be by his side helping him rise through the ranks. I remembered his promise to keep fighting for social change and him telling me I was playing a solid role in it all. But now I wasn’t affecting Negro life at all. Joining the CPUSA seemed like the only way to do such, but Bobby had told me early on, “Whatever you do, do not join the Communist Party. It will make it difficult, if not impossible, for me to ever rehire you.”
So, for the foreseeable future, I just had to hold down a job. And I found myself beginning to feel a bit militant. I was channeling the anger and frustration I imagined my brothers and sisters feeling back home, for even though I was a respected man in Moscow, I walked around as if I were still back in America. It’s who I was. I found myself ruminating about this thought all of the time: The Negro’s problem is that he always finds himself wanting and needing to work full-time at creating a free society, but he is faced with the reality of having to work a full-time regular job, one given to him by none other than his oppressor just to stay alive. Quite the dichotomy!
I tried my best, however, not to let all of this completely consume me. I needed to embrace my circumstances, to enjoy Moscow life. My good colored comrades, Robert Robinson and Homer Smith, came by our apartment regularly, especially when Loretta was traveling. On February 15, 1937, they, along with the colored actor, Wayland Rudd, were visiting for dinner, and the issue of NKVD arrests came up.
“Where is that gorgeous wife of yours?” said Homer. “You’re lucky my friend Langston Hughes isn’t here to try to do another film. He was quite the ladies’ man on his last Moscow visit. I’m sure he’d have a hard time refraining from flirting with her.”
“Just stop, Homer,” said the Jamaican-born Robert, adjusting his dark-rimmed eyeglasses.
“Yes,” said Wayland, “you need to quit.”
“It’s fine, Wayland,” I said, refilling my wineglass. “I know she’s gorgeous. She’s in Stalingrad.”
“She’s no safer down there than she is up here,” said Robert. “I can’t tell you how many of my coworkers have disappeared from the tool factory.”
“Maybe they’re criminals,” I said. “Maybe they’re Trotskyists. Maybe they miss the czars.”
“You must be joking,” said Homer. “My editors back in America are begging me to investigate deeper into these ever-growing arrests of foreign workers, and if I didn’t have to split my time between being a reporter and working at the post office, I’d probably be able to give them more. And apparently the State Department back home is mum on the entire issue, not giving New York reporters a thing. So, my bosses want me to dig. But there’s also a side of me that’s worried about saying too much. Hell, they might arrest me if I go poking around trying to find out who’s been arrested and where they’ve been sent. And NKVD men are lurking outside of the U.S. Embassy just waiting to see who’s trying to get out of the Soviet Union.”
“You should keep your mouth shut, Homer,” said Robert. “Write about something else. I can only speak for myself when I say I’m becoming terrified that I may be arrested for some fabricated crime. A white American comrade of mine from the factory went to the U.S. Embassy looking to find out what happened to his brother, who’d gone missing, and Ambassador Davies was of no help.”
“Not surprising,” said Homer.
“Maybe his brother did something wrong,” I said.
“And,” said Robert, ignoring me, “when my comrade exited the embassy, NKVD scared the hell out of him, telling him to never be seen there again. Like Homer said, they have all of the embassies blanketed, looking for counterrevolutionaries. Don’t ever try to report someone missing! If they go missing, it’s not our problem! And these show trials are frightening, too. Important Russians are being tried and convicted left and right. Look at what happened to that splendid writer at Izvestia, Karl Radek. Don’t you see what’s happening, Prescott?”
“Yeah, Prescott,” said Homer. “These trials are disturbing. I’ve attended many at the House of the Unions myself.”
“Did you see any niggas on trial?” I sarcastically said, taking a drink of wine.
Homer looked at me crossways.
“I think it’s more complicated than we realize,” I said. “Yes, people are being arrested, but just as Premier Molotov once told me, people get arrested in New York City, too. There’s a battle for the soul of the Soviet Union going on here, the old hands versus the new.”
“Two years ago,” said Homer, sipping his wine, “you sounded like this man I knew named Prescott Sweet. Now you sound like your wife.”
“Well,” I said, “she’s a lot smarter than me, and this country has done nothing but treat my colored wife like a queen, my colored children as human beings, and my colored behind as something more than a nigger, so I guess I’m guilty of being blind, naïve, foolish, ignorant, and maybe even unsympathetic to men and women who are being arrested for committing crimes against a State that knows far more than I about people’s loyalties.”
“Looks like you’ve done found a certain mood,” said Wayland, crossing his legs.
“I’m tired of not being selfish,” I said. “The white man built our country, America, off of being nothing but just that—selfish. At least here I can have the audacity to be selfish and not get lynched for it. And to your point, Robert, do you ever stop to ask yourself why your black ass is still making tools and going home at night to a warm bed? And make no mistake, when you pull back the curtain in your bedroom, you won’t see any burning crosses or white men in sheets on horses yelling, ‘You uppity coon! How dare you order other toolmakers around and talk to our white women at the bars! How dare you act smart! You ain’t no educated engineer! You’re an abomination! Go back to Africa!’”
“Hell,” said Homer, raising his eyebrows, “the only thing you have left to say, Prescott, is, ‘Can a brutha get an amen?’ ”
The four of us laughed hesitantly, breaking a bit of the tension.
“Thank you, Homer,” I said, looking at my watch, realizing the children had now been asleep for two hours. “Did all of that jive with you, Robert?”
“Yes, I guess. But I don’t go to bars.”
Homer, Wayland, and I looked at him and wanted to laugh. Robert was ever the engineer, only taking in the facts and calculating them accordingly. I loved him.
“Where did you find this nice furniture, Prescott?” said Wayland, looking around. “It certainly doesn’t look like anything sold off by some wealthy Russian of yesteryear.”
“No,” I said, looking at our empty plates, the fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and carrots I’d cooked completely devoured. “My friend Dorene Ellington has a particular passion for interior design. She considered it her pet project to furnish this place. All of it was shipped in from London and Paris. The Ellingtons are in Argentina now, but when they were living in Moscow, they spent at least two days a week here, so she certainly got to enjoy it.”