Fate interviews Antonio Jones

Fate’s interview with Antonio Ulises Jones turns an assignment into a record of political memory on the edge of disappearance. Across three conversations, the elderly Brooklyn Communist recalls the history of his dwindling organization and challenges Fate’s assumptions about race, socialism, and what deserves to be remembered. The interview helps make Fate a staff writer, yet the two men never meet again; Jones’s testimony survives in a story whose later recollection is entangled with another report about deaths and erasure.

The Encounter and Its Frame

Fate first meets Jones by chance in a two-room apartment in one of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods. Jones is about eighty and, though he belongs to a Communist Party that has nearly vanished from the borough, still keeps its cell operative. His neighbors call him Scottsboro Boy, a name tied to his repeated references to the Scottsboro trials and the Black men nearly lynched there—people his neighborhood no longer remembers. They also call him Old Freak, Bones, or Skin.

The apartment’s crowded living room makes the interview’s setting part of its history: a table stands among more than fifteen old folding wooden bar stools, and a photograph shows Jones receiving a diploma from Robert Martillo Smith, a huge Brooklyn city maintenance worker who specialized in going down into sewers. Jones identifies himself in the photograph. The image connects his own account to a local past that might otherwise be lost, much as his stories about Scottsboro keep an older public violence present in conversation.

The book presents the interview through a later dream. As a television report shows a mother mourning a missing girl in the Sonora border region, Fate dreams of Jones, the first subject he wrote about for Black Dawn after three other pieces had been rejected. This shift places the remembered Brooklyn conversations beside a contemporary report of women killed or missing in Santa Teresa, without claiming the stories are the same. The juxtaposition makes the acts of reporting, remembering, and failing to see especially consequential.

Political Testimony

In their three conversations, Fate asks Jones about Stalin, Lenin, and Marx, at times intending to provoke his conscience. Jones calls Stalin and Lenin sons of bitches, but welcomes the question about Marx and speaks of him warmly. His qualification is personal and material: the one thing he dislikes about Marx is his temper, which Jones attributes to poverty. In his account, poverty produces not only illness and resentment but bad temper as well.

Asked about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of real-world socialist regimes, Jones says he had predicted the outcome ten years earlier. He then opens a window and sings the first lines of the “Internationale” in a deep voice. Afterward, he asks whether it sounds like an anthem made especially for Black people. Fate admits he has never thought of it that way. The exchange does not resolve the song’s meaning; it shows Jones placing a familiar political inheritance into a racial frame that Fate had not considered.

Jones also gives Fate a measured history of Brooklyn’s Communists. There were more than a thousand during World War II, and the number rose to thirteen hundred after the war. During McCarthyism it fell to about seven hundred; by the movement’s end, scarcely two hundred remained. In the 1960s there were half as many, and in the 1970s no more than thirty, spread across five cells. Ten remained at the end of that decade, then four by the beginning of the 1980s. Two died of cancer, and another disappeared. By 1987, Jones says, he was the only one left.

His answer to Fate’s question about why he stays turns the statistics into an individual act of persistence: “And here I still am,” Jones says. The account offers no triumphant recovery of the organization. Instead, its dwindling numbers and missing members make the continued existence of its last Brooklyn member both a political fact and a fragile form of testimony.

Publication, Reception, and Afterlife

Fate’s story about Jones is the first of his pieces published in Black Dawn. The interview draws a mixed response from colleagues: most regard it as a venture into the African-American picturesque, reducing Jones to a series of sociological curiosities—a preacher, former jazz musician, and last member of the Brooklyn Communist Party (Fourth International). Yet they like the story, and soon afterward Fate becomes a staff writer. The professional consequence is clear even as the reception exposes the limits of the frame through which his subject is viewed.

Fate later sees a copy of The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas, a white Englishman who had also been a professor at Sandhurst. Jones says he obtained the expensive book through cunning rather than money. Fate infers that Jones stole it, though he doubts the elderly man could have done so unaided and imagines only as a possibility that someone at the bookstore might have helped. The book unsettles Fate’s assumptions about its author: learning that Thomas was white, he sets it aside and does not read it. Hours later, while looking through the book in his apartment, he recalls that the interview with Jones had made him a staff writer.

Fate never sees Jones again, just as he expects he will never see Barry Seaman again. That absence limits what the interview can confirm about Jones’s later life, while giving the published story the shape of an encounter that cannot be repeated. The dream in which Jones returns does not restore the man; it brings his testimony back at a moment when another report depicts a family’s grief and the deaths of women in Santa Teresa. The interview’s lasting force lies in this conjunction: a disappearing political community is remembered through one surviving voice, while the act of recording remains shadowed by other lives that may go unclaimed or unheard.