“What’s this country ever done for me? What am I here?” he asked impassively. “A nigger anybody can spit on. In Russia I could be a man.” This too came without anger or bitterness, and I could understand it. He was giving idiomatic expression to a simple wish for dignity and self-respect. One heard it so often among Negroes that one was likely to forget the deep wound of denial which it covered like a scab. “I know a fellow who went to Russia,” I said brightly. “Apparently he likes it. He’s never come back.” “He’s got the right idea. I wouldn’t come back neither, if I ever went.” “It doesn’t appeal to me,” I said. “You’ve been listening to the guys on the stepladder, the Reds, across the street.” Clark gave me then a long, slow look, but there was nothing in it that I could detect—no quickening either of speculation or resentment. “I’m a Communist,” he said. I laughed with surprise and embarrassment and, still with his passive eyes on me, he said again, “I’m a Communist,” bluntly. There was nothing to say and so I kept silent, and to keep silent with Clark was like nothing so much as expecting to be talked to by a wall. He went to his own room shortly. The next day when we met, I felt a little twinge of embarrassment, but he seemed not to, and the feeling soon passed. Though I did not know it then, I talked to Clark for next to the last time less than a month later. He came to my room one night, as he often did, but this time he announced phlegmatically that he was in trouble. He neither looked nor sounded like a man in trouble and I could think only that he was in trouble with a girl—though girls had never been a subject of conversation between us. “What kind of trouble?” I inquired. I suppose Clark lacked a certain sensitiveness, though I would not have called him callous. I do not think it was because he did not care: it was just that he could not estimate the effect his words had upon others. “I’m a thief and I think they suspicion me,” he said. I must have said something like “Oh, go on,” or “Quit kidding,” but I knew he had no sense of humor and was quite incapable of kidding. I looked at him. He seemed to think I had not heard him. “I’m a thief and I think they suspicion me,” he repeated. And when he took me to his room and showed me a flat-top trunk half full of bolts of cloth, I believed him. “But what are you going to do with this stuff? If they suspect you and come——” “I’m going to get shut of it,” he said stoically. “I’m going to get shut of it now in a few minutes.” He was stuffing the bolts of cloth into two battered valises. “What are you going to do? How are you going to get rid of it?” This time he did not answer, but swung the valises off the bed, brushed past me and went down the hall.