Antonio Ulises Jones

Antonio Ulises Jones is an elderly Brooklyn Communist whose insistence on maintaining a political cell after its other members have died or vanished gives his brief appearance in Oscar Fate’s story a force beyond eccentricity. Fate first encounters him by chance, writes about him for Black Dawn, and then loses sight of him; years later, a dream and a book bring Jones back into view as a figure of political persistence, historical memory, and the limits of the attention granted to marginal lives.

Identity and Introduction

Jones lives in a two-room apartment in one of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods. Children in the area call him Scottsboro Boy, Old Freak, Bones, or Skin, but Scottsboro Boy is the name most commonly used. The nickname points to his repeated talk of the Scottsboro trials and of the Black men who were nearly lynched there—people, he observes, whom nobody in his neighborhood remembers. His political identity is therefore bound to an act of remembrance: he keeps an event alive in speech after its victims have slipped from local memory.

When Fate visits, Jones’s living room is crowded with more than fifteen chairs: old folding wooden bar stools with long legs and low backs. On the wall hangs a photograph of an enormous worker, well over six feet tall, receiving a diploma from a smiling boy. Jones identifies himself as the boy and the giant as Robert Martillo Smith, a Brooklyn city maintenance worker who specialized in descending into sewers and wrestling with thirty-foot alligators. The image makes the apartment a place of stories as well as political discussion, and it introduces the scale and strangeness of the testimony through which Jones presents his world.

Politics and the Vanishing Cell

Fate’s three conversations with Jones include a series of questions about the political tradition Jones has outlived. Asked about Stalin and Lenin, Jones calls each a son of a bitch. Asked about Marx, he rebukes Fate for not beginning there: Marx, he says, was a wonderful man, although Jones faults his temper and attributes it to poverty. In Jones’s account, poverty produces not only illness and resentment but bad temper. His answers combine conviction with a willingness to distinguish among figures rather than offer a uniform defense of communism.

Asked about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of real-world socialist regimes, Jones replies that the outcome was foreseeable and that he had predicted it ten years earlier. He then opens the window and sings the first lines of the Internationale in a deep voice that surprises Fate. Afterward, he asks whether the anthem does not seem made especially for Black people. Fate has no ready answer. The moment joins the old man’s international political language to a specifically racial reading of it, without resolving the question for his interviewer.

Jones recounts the shrinking number of Brooklyn Communists as a history of attrition. There were more than a thousand during World War II, and thirteen hundred after it; at the beginning of McCarthyism, the number had fallen to about seven hundred, and by its end scarcely two hundred remained. In the 1960s there were half that many, and in the 1970s no more than thirty, scattered among five hardy cells. By the end of the decade, ten remained; at the beginning of the 1980s, four. Two of those four died of cancer, and another disappeared without explanation. Jones speculates that the absent man may have gone on a trip and died along the way, or moved in with his daughter in Florida. By 1987, Jones says, he was the only one left. Asked why he continues, he answers, “Because someone has to keep the cell operative.” The cell survives in the form of a single person’s fidelity to the duty of keeping it alive.

Fate, Books, and the Limits of Recognition

Jones’s connection with Fate is both intimate and brief. During their three conversations, Fate questions him about political history and listens to his recollections; the interview becomes the first story Fate publishes in Black Dawn, after three earlier pieces have been rejected. Jones also gives Fate a book he believes will be useful. Fate expects The Communist Manifesto, since copies Jones published himself are piled around the apartment, but instead receives a thick volume titled The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas.

Fate initially refuses the book because it appears expensive and may be Jones’s only copy. Jones tells him not to worry: it cost cunning, not money. Fate infers that Jones may have stolen it, though he doubts the old man could have done so unaided and imagines the possibility of a young bookstore accomplice who lets him slip a book beneath his jacket. The account leaves the book’s acquisition uncertain. What is clear is that Jones offers a history whose subject exceeds the political texts Fate expects from him.

Hours later, Fate discovers that Thomas is a white Englishman who had been a professor at Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy. His reaction is scornful: he compares the author to a drill sergeant and sets the book aside without reading it. The refusal exposes Fate’s own assumptions even as it sits uneasily beside his earlier expectation that Jones would give him a Communist classic. Later, after leaving Detroit, Fate buys The Slave Trade at the city’s only decent bookstore and begins reading it on the flight to Tucson. The same volume he once rejected becomes something he carries and opens, though the narrative does not say that he finishes it or explain what changes his judgment.

Fate’s published portrayal brings Jones attention, but it also reduces him in the eyes of most of Fate’s colleagues. They regard the story as little more than an excursion into African-American picturesque: a loony preacher, a loony former jazz musician, the loony last member of the Brooklyn Communist Party (Fourth International)—sociological curiosities. They like the story, and Fate soon becomes a staff writer, but professional recognition does not ensure that Jones is understood on his own terms. The account that advances Fate’s career is received as a collection of colorful oddities, while Jones’s political persistence and historical memory risk being filed away as spectacle.

Death and Narrative Return

Fate never sees Jones again. Years later, while waiting at the airport after leaving Detroit, he remembers a dream about him and thinks of Jones as having been dead for several years. Fate wonders what killed him and can think of only old age. He imagines Jones walking down a Brooklyn street, growing tired, sitting on the sidewalk, and a second later ceasing to exist. This is Fate’s conjecture, not a confirmed account of Jones’s death; the book supplies no cause or scene of death beyond the recollection that Jones is dead.

The thought turns toward Fate’s mother, whose death he recognizes as different from the imagined, almost instantaneous end he has pictured for Jones. The contrast makes Jones’s disappearance from Fate’s life part of the book’s wider meditation on memory and loss: the last Communist of his Brooklyn cell is gone, but his phrase about keeping it operative, his singing, and the unexpected book continue to circulate through Fate’s recollection. Jones’s narrative presence is brief, yet it leaves behind a question of what endures when an institution’s members vanish and the surviving witness is remembered chiefly as a curiosity.