“But if she were outside it, I was outside it too, and I kept thinking that Honey had some ulterior motive and that she was trying to realize it at too high a price. I knew that she wanted me to have sex relations with her and I knew also that I would not, could not, dared not. I do not think she tempted me at all, really; she just frightened me. I did not see how anyone could go to such a length to obtain a result that in the long run could have almost no importance. Certainly I cannot think myself _that_ important to the Communists. And suppose this were not her reason? Then what? Just sex. I cannot trust a white woman that way. No matter how willingly a white woman gives herself to a colored man, if she is found out, she will yell rape. Last night I pictured newspaper headlines such as I have seen many times and I thought of them referring to me: BLACK BRUTE. I did the right thing last night, though maybe I did it for all the wrong reasons.” I fled. Though I knew I had done the right thing, I was ashamed to see Honey and Philip again, for I convinced myself that I had been naïf and cowardly. I did not go back to the little restaurant at the bottom of the hill. Once I had a note from Philip, and once he—or someone very like him—inquired of me from my landlady, but I did not see him, nor Honey, nor any of the people I used to see in the cell. I am certain that Honey, laughing with strident insolence, spoke of me as one of Philip’s “untouchable unteachables,” and pretty quickly forgot me. 9 But I did not forget Communism, then or later. In New York the next year, 1933, the Party was quite fashionable among my acquaintances, some of whom took it seriously. One could be sure that among the guests at Harlem’s middle and upper-class social gatherings would be white people and that these were admitted Communists or fellow travelers at least. Some of them were said to be well known in _avant-garde_ and esoteric circles and in the theater but I had never heard of most of them, and I am inclined to think that the reputations they were given in Harlem were a kind of defense in depth against the allegation that the only whites Negroes could mingle with socially were peripheral people, nobodies, tramps. The white people I met at such parties seemed average intellectual types. I was struck by the fact that they did not talk Communism, but gave the impression of living on a higher and freer level than American democracy afforded. The atmosphere they created was easy and sophisticated, with a high sexual content of which, it was said, nearly everyone took advantage. No one bothered to whisper the stories of liaisons between white women and Negro men and Negro women and white men. They were accepted without shock, and the actors in these little dramas seemed to play their roles with a lack of embarrassment and even a natural grace that fascinated me.