I do not mean to give the impression that I met many avowed Negro Communists. I did not—not more than a half dozen in all. But with one of them I had nearly seven months of close association. He had a room next to mine in the place where I was living and we shared a bath. He was a thief. He did not make his living in this way. He had to do with the stock and delivery room of a garment making firm, he told me, and he was a minor official in a local union of either truckers or garment makers, I do not know which. He was a thief solely for the benefit of the Party. That was his Party work and his duty and he served it blindly. It was a strange work. At more or less regular intervals he stole bolts of cloth—“suitings” was his word—and kept them in his room until someone, seldom the same person twice, identifying himself by some prearranged means, made contact and relieved him of the goods. He never knew what happened to them ultimately. Curiously enough this was almost the only information about himself Clark (we will call him) ever volunteered, and of course I did not know this at first. What I did know about Clark—but only after probing—was that he came originally from Pennsylvania and had been graduated from a high school in one of the towns in that state. When the CCC agency was organized, he applied for admission to one of the work groups, but was rejected because high school was supposed to have given him a vocation by means of which he could earn a living. Caught in the depression, without money and, I gathered, without stable family connections, he drifted for a while—to Pittsburgh, to Philadelphia and finally to New York. He was a rugged-looking, stiff-faced young man of twenty-four or twenty-five. One would never suspect from his appearance or from his unimpassioned manner of speaking what a steady flame of fanaticism burned in him. He did not talk well. His voice was coarse, his tongue slightly thick, and he had a very limited command of the language. He spoke of this one day after we had got to know each other fairly well. “I wish I could talk—like you,” he said. I was about to protest that I was no model, when he added, “Or like James Ford.” This was a complete letdown for me. I had both seen and heard James Ford when he was stumping the Eastern seaboard for the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and I did not think much of him. He seemed basically ignorant, like a parrot fluently repeating phrases he had been carefully taught. His manner seemed gross. “James Ford?” “If I could talk like him, maybe I could be where he is now,” Clark said. “And where is he?” I genuinely wanted to know. I had heard nothing of him since his farcical campaign as the Communist Party’s Vice-Presidential candidate. “I don’t know, but I think he’s in Russia,” Clark said. “You want to go to Russia? But why?”