Fate's Interviews with Antonio Ulises Jones

Fate’s interviews with Antonio Ulises Jones turn a chance meeting into a record of political persistence and historical memory. Jones, an elderly Communist in Brooklyn, speaks about the dwindling membership of his organization, his judgments of Marx and other revolutionary figures, and the reasons he continues to maintain a party cell when almost everyone else has disappeared. For Fate, the encounter is both a piece of reporting that advances his career and a relationship whose unfinished meaning returns in a dream years later.

An Encounter and Its Setting

Fate first meets Jones by chance while working on a story for Black Dawn, after three earlier pieces have been rejected. Jones is about eighty and lives in a two-room apartment in one of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods. The apartment’s living room contains a table and more than fifteen folding wooden stools, alongside piles of books and copies of the Communist Manifesto that Jones has published himself. Its objects suggest a political organization reduced to a single household, but still arranged to receive visitors and sustain conversation.

A photograph on the wall gives the room another kind of history. It shows a very large city maintenance worker receiving a diploma from a boy who looks directly at the camera. Jones identifies the boy as himself and the worker as Robert Martillo Smith, a Brooklyn sewer specialist known for confronting alligators in the city’s sewers. The anecdote places Jones within a local world of labor and memory before the interviews widen toward the fate of Communism and the history of the Black community.

Jones is known in the neighborhood by several nicknames, most often Scottsboro Boy, because he repeatedly discusses the Scottsboro trials and the Black men who nearly faced lynching there. The people he talks about are not remembered by his younger neighbors, so his political storytelling also serves as an effort to keep an endangered history in circulation. The interview is not simply an exchange about ideology: its subject is a man trying to preserve people and struggles that his surroundings are already forgetting.

Political Arguments and Historical Accounting

Across three conversations, Fate asks Jones about Stalin, Lenin, and Marx. Jones condemns Stalin and Lenin, but responds warmly when Fate turns to Marx, whom he calls a wonderful man. He identifies Marx’s temper as the one thing he dislikes and attributes it to poverty, which he sees as a source not only of illness and resentment but also of bad temper. The answers resist a simple division between a faithful party militant and an unquestioning defender of its historical leaders: Jones distinguishes among figures and offers a material explanation for a personal failing.

Asked about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of socialist regimes, Jones says that he had predicted the outcome 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 seems to have been made especially for Black people. Fate admits that he has never considered it that way. The moment makes the interview’s political argument musical and communal: an international workers’ song becomes, in Jones’s telling, a possible expression of a particular history of racial exclusion and struggle.

Jones supplies a precise, diminishing account of Communist life in Brooklyn. The movement numbered more than a thousand during World War II and rose to thirteen hundred afterward. At the beginning of McCarthyism, it had fallen to about seven hundred; by the time that period ended, scarcely two hundred remained. In the 1960s, membership was roughly half that number, and by the 1970s no more than thirty people were scattered among five resilient cells. Ten remained at the decade’s end, and four by the start of the 1980s.

The four did not hold together. Two died of cancer, while another vanished without telling anyone. Jones can only speculate about the missing member: perhaps he went on a trip and died along the way, or perhaps he moved to Florida to live with his daughter. By 1987, Jones says, only one Communist remained. His history of the organization is therefore also an inventory of deaths and absences, punctuated by what cannot be known about the person who simply never returned.

The Last Cell and an Unusual Gift

When Fate asks why he remains, Jones pauses before answering, “Because someone has to keep the cell operative.” The sentence makes his continued membership less a claim of political victory than an obligation maintained in the face of isolation. He has no contact with other Communists in the United States or abroad, apart from occasional correspondence with a retired UCLA professor, Dr. Minski. Jones says he had belonged to the Third International until fifteen years earlier, when Minski persuaded him to join the Fourth.

Jones also tells Fate that he is going to give him a book that will be of great use. Fate expects the Communist Manifesto, which seems plausible given the self-published copies around the apartment. Instead, Jones hands him Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade, a thick volume that Fate initially refuses to take because it appears to be Jones’s only copy. Jones says it cost him cunning rather than money. Fate infers that the book may have been stolen, though he is uncertain how Jones could have managed it or whether someone at the bookstore helped him.

The gift does not immediately become a shared point of agreement. Later, Fate discovers that the author is a white Englishman who had taught at Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy, and puts the book aside without reading it. The encounter thus leaves an object in Fate’s possession but no settled interpretation of what Jones intended by giving it to him. Only later, while traveling, does Fate buy the same book himself and begin reading it.

Publication, Distance, and Return

The interview brings a positive response from readers and helps Fate become a staff writer. His colleagues, however, regard the article as little more than an excursion into what they see as an African-American curiosity: an eccentric preacher, former jazz musician, and last member of Brooklyn’s Communist Party (Fourth International). Their reception exposes the distance between Jones’s account of political and racial history and the institution that packages his story as a sociological oddity. The work succeeds professionally, but that success does not mean the interview’s deeper concerns have been understood.

Fate never sees Jones again. When Fate later dreams of him while sleeping, he recalls that Jones has been dead for several years. At an airport in Detroit, waiting for a flight to Tucson, he asks himself what Jones might have died of and imagines old age: Jones becoming tired on a Brooklyn street, sitting down, and ceasing to exist a moment later. Fate briefly wonders whether his own mother might have died that way, but knows deep down that the explanation does not fit her. The dream reconnects the interview to Fate’s bereavement without resolving it; Jones returns not as a living source who can answer further questions, but as a remembered voice whose disappearance leaves both political and personal histories incomplete.

The relationship is shaped by several layers of telling. Fate’s article began with an accidental encounter, the interview itself preserves Jones’s recollections, and the later dream reopens those conversations after Jones’s death. Jones’s figures and anecdotes make a diminishing political movement legible, while the uncertain fate of the vanished comrade and the unresolved meaning of the gifted book resist a complete account. The interviews therefore hold together testimony and its limits: they record what Jones can remember, what Fate chooses to publish, and what remains beyond either man’s ability to confirm.