“I was taught Marxist doctrine, however. I became a devout follower of Marx’s principles. As he laid them down, not as they were practiced in Russia. I joined the party, but it didn’t take me long to find out that I wasn’t going to rise very high in it. I’d always have to take the back seat and do the janitoring, as it were.
“I would have tried the army, but blacks were always sent to Siberia to guard the Chinese frontier. The Politburo didn’t want any of us stationed on the western front. We’d have caused attention, and investigation would have revealed that we were kept down. That would’ve looked bad for the Soviets, since they were always pointing out the inequality of blacks in America. So they kept everything under a lid.
“I did very well in school, even though our schools were inferior to the whites’. I had a driving ambition to rise to the top, but that wasn’t my only motive. I wanted to learn, to know everything. I read far more than required; I did especially well in languages. That was one of the things that attracted me to you, you know. Your mastery of so many languages.
“The bigshots heard of me mainly because they were looking for blacks they could send as agitators and infiltrators to the States. They asked me to volunteer my services, and I did. Not too eagerly on the surface, of course. I didn’t want them to think that I only wanted to go so I could disappear in Harlem. As a matter of fact, I had no intention of betraying them. I knew what they were and how they looked on me, but I was a Russian Marxist and I loathed capitalism.
“One of the things I fully realized, though, was that Marx’s dream of the withering of the state when the proletariat had gained control of the-world just was not possible. I’d have rather believed in the second coming of Christ; that, at least, could possibly happen, though it’s highly improbable. Once a ruling class has the power in its hands, it won’t ever let go. Not until revolutionists take the power from them, and then the new rulers try to make sure they keep in power. The natural withering away of the state, no laws or police force or regulations or bureaucracy, everybody governing himself with love and pure kindness of heart and unselfishness, that’s a crock of bullshit. Nobody really believed in it, but the party members pretended they did.
“Nobody pushed that dogma too much, though. If you got enthusiastic about it, you’d be marked down as a fool or a counterrevolutionary.”
Williams had slipped off a Polish freighter and into the wilds of Harlem. There he worked his F&A (Fomenting and Agitating) among various black and white liberal groups. But three weeks after he landed he got gonorrhea.
“That was my first but by no means last dose. The Fates were against me. No sooner was I cured of that filthy disease than I caught it again. I was in the U.S. of Gonococcia and no way out. After I got over that second case, I decided to try sexual abstinence. That didn’t work. I was just too horny. So, I told myself, twice bitten, never again. It’s a statistical improbability that I’ll get infected again. But I did.”
His KGB contact found out about his dose, reported it to his superior, and relayed a message to Williams. Your social diseases are interfering with your security and efficiency. Stay away from women and dirty toilet seats or else!
After that, every time Williams’ contact met him, he asked him if he had gonorrhea. Williams, who was avoiding women and so getting a reputation as a homosexual, could truthfully tell the contact that he did not have the clap. Fortunately, the contact did not ask him if he had syphilis. Williams, at that time, was suffering from the onslaught of the dread Spirochaeta pallida.
“I’ll swear I don’t now where or from whom I got it. I’d been as chaste as Robinson Crusoe—up to the time he met Friday. I don’t know. Some people are accident-prone. Could I be one of those rare and unfortunate persons, cursed by the Fates or by Dialectic Materialism, who could be infected by bacteria borne on the breeze, slipping through the keyhole? Was I VD-prone? The lone sexual ranger destined to stumble onto bandits, the Jesse Jameses of Germs? I do know one thing. I sure wasn’t getting much spying, fomenting and agitating done. I was spending too much time in doctors’ offices.”
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