Been Down That Darkness (part 2)

Words come not forcefully to impale your hope, but there's a kind of tired, disinterest about them as if the speakers merely repeat a routine and the disinterest in their eyes does not vary, does not return the connection that you feel when you look into their black face in every Afrikan counsellor that you visit.  You're not of my tribe, their eyes say when they ask, "Why do you want to go to my country?  Do you know anyone in my country?  What will you do there?"

"I want to be part of the revolution there."  Couldn't they see in my face, hear in my voice, know that we're one people as were the Europeans when they came with their powerful cultures, taking over country after country of culturally backward people?  They knew what you did not before arriving that you, not being a communist and there via the underground, cannot leave except some other country accept you.  Some revolutionaries they were, not willing to help a brother.  You were wasting your time with them.

Then word comes to you from a communist committee.  They were some nine or ten men and women sitting at two long collapsible tan tables..  You sit in a tan tin chair facing them some fifteen feet away.  They smile when one of the women asks, her voice beaming, "How would you like to be with our soldiers fighting for the revolution in another country?"
"No," you answer without hesitating, thinking, You don't identify with them, they don't identify with you.  It's their war, let them fight and die for their cause.  You imagine them having plotted:  'Take him on the battlefield, kill him there, make him an inspiration, a martyr for the anti-American blacks among the Yankees in his country.'  Headlines had probably already been prepared, 'Afrikan American Revolutionary Dies In Battle'.  You're trapped in the darkness of anti-American communism -- another word for slavery -- and your master is an irrefutable one-man communist dictator of every meek conformist in his nation.  But in that darkness you are awakened by a belief that is your light:  "When any  man is enslaved, if he does not try to escape he deserves to be enslaved."  And that light becomes your way out.
                                        mwisho