Abrahams slipped his pipe back into his coat pocket. “Everyone wants what’s best for the country. Everyone isn’t always right.” He tried to smile. “Read the fine print, Doug. There’s always fine print.”
“Don’t worry, Nat. Maybe I’m serving T. C., but I can’t rubber-stamp his name. It’s got to be my name affixed to everything. And I always read what I sign.”
“Good enough,” said Abrahams. He saw Dilman stretch and yawn, and he stood up. “First session adjourned, Doug. I’d better get back to poor Sue, and you’d better get what sleep you can.”
“I think that’s best, Nat. I’m bushed. Let me walk you to the elevator.”
Only later, when he was by himself in the elevator, was Nat Abrahams relieved that Sue had not come to dinner. He knew that she would have wept.
Douglass Dilman was alone in the dimly lighted intimacy of the Lincoln Bedroom, in his baggy pajamas, slumped in the Victorian velvet-covered chair, downing the last of his sherry and trying to read the completed Minorities Rehabilitation Program Bill.
It was no use. The long day, the dinner, the Bordeaux, the sherry, had made him heavy-lidded and drowsy. He cast the printed bill on the marble-topped table, placed the sherry glass next to it, and tried to think of what Nat Abrahams had said and what he had said. He was too fatigued to recall exactly. His memory slid off to Wanda, to Julian, to Leroy Poole, to Arthur Eaton, to Sally Watson, to Clay Kemmler and the Cabinet, and then slid past them, searching for respite.
He heaved himself out of the chair, tightened the cord of his pajama trousers, and peered at the Empire clock. It was after midnight. He turned off the lamp, padded in his flopping slippers to turn off two more, pausing once to examine the handwritten copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and then giving up because the words ran together and blurred.
Yawning, he shuffled to the giant rosewood bed, sat on it, kicked off his slippers, stuffed his weary, middle-aged body between the white sheets, and reached over to turn off the last global lamp.
In the welcome darkness he fell back against the pillow.
He knew that sleep was coming swiftly, and his tired mind groped for one noble good-night thought, one lofty sentiment, to commemorate this unique historic occasion, a black President ready to slumber his first night in the white man’s White House.
He tried to evoke something of Abe Lincoln’s wisdom, since he rested in Abe Lincoln’s bed. He sought words . . . noble . . . lofty . . . historic . . . malice toward none . . . charity for all . . . firmness in the right . . . in the right . . . in the right . . . in rights, rights, rights.
It had gone, as sleep suffused him, and what remained was an old Negro jingle chanted among the shanties . . . noble . . . lofty . . . historic . . .
Nigger an’ white man
Playin’ seven-up;
Nigger win de money—
Skeered to pick ’em up.
Sorry . . . Mistah . . . Lincoln . . . ah’s skeered . . . skeered . . . skeered.
He turned on his side, curling beneath the thick white blanket, seeking and nearing the warm encompassing safety of night oblivion. There was one moment’s lucidity before sleep drew nothingness over it.
One moment’s thought: How hard this bed is, how hard and big and white, too hard for a soft man, too big for a small man, yet maybe, maybe, not too white for a black man. Maybe.
Douglass Dilman, President of the United States, slept at last.
IV
The stars and Stripes, whipping from the pole above the White House, was no longer at half-mast.
It had given Douglass Dilman a small shock when Crystal, fifteen minutes ago, had delivered this fact to him with his breakfast tray, in the second-floor Yellow Oval Room. She had proudly described the event as an eyewitness: yesterday, coming to work, she had seen the flag hanging limply midway down the pole; today, coming to work, she had seen it billowing in the wind at the very top of the flagstaff. She had reported the change as if it were a momentous event.
Remembering Crystal’s glowing face now, as he gulped down his coffee, Dilman supposed that she was right. The returning of the nation’s banner to its normal position meant that the thirty-day period of national mourning had ended. On this day, four weeks and two days since he had taken office, the beginning of his second month as President, his fellow countrymen would do an about-face. They would cease looking backward. They would look ahead again, and find him before their eyes. They would begin looking at him, at him and no one else. Not that they hadn’t already done so, he thought wryly.
A vicious editorial, in one of Zeke Miller’s more Southern newspapers, came to mind: “Citizens, keep your Old Glories at half-mast for the rest of Dilman’s term, not in mourning for T. C., but in mourning for the death of our dignity and stature as a nation.” But now Crystal had told him, in effect, that Miller’s advice had not been followed, that this day the flag once more celebrated at full-mast a living President.
Yes, he thought, today it’s official. They would all be looking at him, and he did not like it. He was not ready for their total scrutiny and judgment.
He drank his coffee in haste, knowing that today would be another busy and trying day, even more trying than the ones that had preceded it. When the telephone at his elbow rang genteelly, as befitted its station in the gracious damask room, and then musically rang again, Dilman was not surprised. Lately Edna Foster had been starting off his mornings with these calls from her office because there were more and more messages awaiting his reluctant arrival, acting like so many powerful magnets trying to draw him into a day that he shrank from attending.
With a sigh he gave the saucer back its cup, and answered the telephone before it could begin its third summons.
The caller was Edna Foster.
After assuring her that she had not disturbed him, not at all, that he was dressed and fed and almost prepared to come downstairs, he listened for the inevitable.
“There are several messages, Mr. President—”
“Yes, Miss Foster.”
“Grover Illingsworth called in a terrible panic—I mean for him.”
Dilman enjoyed good humor for the first time this morning. Visualizing Illingsworth in a panic was as difficult as picturing a waxen Prince Albert in Madame Tussaud’s trying to slap a fly off his nose. Ever since Kwame Amboko, the President of Baraza, had arrived two days ago, the tanned, tall patrician Chief of Protocol had been a dominant part of Dilman’s life. Everything about Illingsworth was formidable—he was Back Bay Boston, his English so precise as to sound faintly foreign, his chalk-striped gray suits as impressive as a military uniform, his knowledge of Burke’s Peerage and Almanach de Gotha as thorough as his fluency in French, German, Italian, Spanish was expert—yet he did not make Dilman cower. And this instant, Dilman realized why: because, as Chief of Protocol, Illingsworth regarded all heads of state as equals without regard to their race, religion, or background. When you rode in jet planes or jeeps or on horseback with leaders of millions of people in Ireland, in Spain, in Nigeria, in Iran, in India, in Japan, you charted men by their position in life and not by their color. To Illingsworth, Dilman was one more head of state, like so many black or yellow ones he had known and dealt with, and he was easy and casual with Dilman, and Dilman felt relaxed and natural with him. But this man phoning in a panic? Had Miss Foster taken leave of her senses?
“What is he upset about?” Dilman asked. “Is anything really wrong?”
“Tonight’s State Dinner you are giving for President Amboko. Mr. Illingsworth knows the menu is set, but he just found out Amboko is a vegetarian!”
Dilman laughed. “Is that all? Well, you have the housekeeper prepare a special meal for Amboko. What does a vegetarian eat besides grass?”
“I already asked Mr. Illingsworth. He said he hadn’t had a chance to inquire, but he supposed that a vegetarian could eat anything that, in its original state, would not have bitten back. Anyway, he’s very anxious about this State Dinner, since it’
s your first, and Baraza is such a hot spot, and—”
“Miss Foster, you call Illingsworth right back, and have him get in touch with Amboko’s aide-de-camp at the Barazan Embassy, and have him find out exactly what our guest will or won’t eat. Then have him pass it on to Miss Watson, and she’ll take care of Mrs. Crail and the chef. Put in a call for Illingsworth at the New State Department Building right now—I’ll hold—”
Waiting, Dilman tried to review the two meetings that he had already held with Kwame Amboko. In some childlike way, he had expected that the meetings would be informal, lively, easier than those with his own Cabinet members, because both he and Amboko were black, and that would be enough to bind them in quick understanding and agreement. It had astonished him how wrong he had been.
He had found Amboko a young man, no more than thirty-five, a scholarly and withdrawn young man with woolly black hair, suspicious eyes behind rimless glasses, and a flat nose that seemed to cover his countenance from cheek to cheek. His puncture of a mouth was ringed by flabby lips that revealed a quarter of an inch space between his upper center teeth. While Amboko’s accent was Harvard, and he possessed many agreeable memories of his time in the United States, and had tried to model his newly independent democracy along the lines laid out by the United States Constitution, he had appeared unconvinced that the United States was an entirely trustworthy mentor and friend.
Dilman could see that Kwame Amboko was not impressed by a fellow colored man’s ascension to the Presidency in a mammoth white nation where colored men were a minority. Amboko seemed to be suggesting, without saying so outright, that Dilman was merely a front for an undependable white cabal. The African had implied that Dilman was a puppet repeating white men’s words, and therefore could bring no more understanding to the problems of an all-black nation than could his white masters.
Dilman had been able to discover only one common bond between President Amboko and himself. He and his visitor appeared to be equally sensitive to disregard and disrespect from whites. But even this one bond, which might have drawn them closer, was slack, because their sensitivities were activated by different hurts. Whereas Dilman was sensitive to slights reflecting on his human and democratic rights as a man, Amboko was sensitive about the weakness of his small country and the threats of foreign domination. To Dilman, President Amboko was like a longtime prisoner, paroled at last, uncertain that his freedom is real, constantly glancing over his shoulder at the gray walls that had incarcerated him to make sure that someone more powerful than he is not reaching out to pull him back inside. When Dilman had mentioned this to Sue and Nat Abrahams two nights before, Nat had said, “Yes, I think all newly independent nations are at once paranoid and egocentric—they think everyone is against them, and they have no interest in anyone but themselves. Not so long ago the United States suffered those same adolescent growing pangs.”
Dilman’s policy talks with Amboko had been inconclusive. Dilman had been frank about the necessity for a compromise. He would sign America into the African Unity Pact, which the Senate had ratified, he would guarantee continued economic assistance to help industrialize Baraza, if Amboko would be less repressive toward native Communists and the Soviet Union. Dilman felt that this was the least Amboko could do, in order to help the United States pacify Russia.
Doggedly President Amboko had resisted this compromise. True, the Barazan Communist Party was small. True, there was no evidence of subversive activity by the Soviet Embassy in Baraza. True, there was no conclusive evidence that young Barazan natives on cultural exchanges to Moscow were being indoctrinated with Marxist ideas. Yet, despite this, President Amboko felt that his country, in this transitional period, was a fertile field for the rise of Communism. Because Amboko had abolished rule by chieftains, broken up the ancient social structure (which had scattered warring tribes over the grasslands of the plains and through the dense forests of the mountain ranges), supplanted it with not yet effective elected inter-village councils, there was discontent. Furthermore, the per capita income in Baraza was still only sixty dollars a year, and industrialization had hardly begun. The impoverished and unemployed might easily be turned against democracy.
Above all else, President Amboko did not trust the Soviet Union. He feared that Russia coveted his little nation’s resources—the gold, iron ore, diamonds—and, in a power grab, might try to put his people back into a colonial stockade. He had reminded Dilman of the experience of one of his neighbors, Guinea, with Russia. After the French had left Guinea in 1958, the newly independent nation, tempted by the Soviet Union’s anti-colonial talk and its offer of economic credit, had invited the Russians to help them. Within three years Guinea had been forced to expel the Russians because the Soviet Embassy, it was learned, had been working with native union leaders against the democratically elected government. President Amboko feared that the same Soviet activity might occur, if it was not already taking place, in Baraza, and he wanted to anticipate and thwart it.
Impressed as he was by Amboko’s concern, Dilman had felt that he must not be sidetracked by a small nation’s problems to the detriment of world peace. He had tried to behave as T. C. might have behaved. He had insisted upon the compromise, promising that Montgomery Scott, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, would assign a sufficient number of his agents to Baraza to keep a watchful undercover eye on any subversive activity there. Amboko had agreed to think the matter over further, and to give his final reply to Dilman before returning home. He would be leaving for Baraza, Dilman remembered, after tonight’s State Dinner.
“Mr. President.” It was Edna Foster on the telephone again. “I spoke to Mr. Illingsworth. He’ll take care of everything.”
“Fine.”
“There are two messages from Leroy Poole. He wants to discuss the last chapter of the biography with you. Shall I have Mr. Lucas give him an appointment?”
Dilman tried to interpret Poole’s calls. If there had been only one, the writer might indeed have wished to discuss the book. But two messages indicated something more urgent. Dilman suspected that it was the Turnerite business, still. For one who had insisted that he was not a member of that avowed direct-action group, Poole’s interest in the organization was unaccountable. Three weeks ago he had agitated Julian into fighting with his father. A week ago he had cornered poor Nat Abrahams in the Mayflower lobby, without success. Now, no doubt, because of the Hattiesburg sentence rendered by Judge Gage, he was trying to get to Dilman once more.
While Judge Gage’s verdict of “guilty” in the Mississippi trial had probably been technically exact, his sentence had been unduly harsh and vindictive. Two days before, in his Southern courtroom, he had sentenced all the Turnerite pickets, including the blinded one, to the maximum ten years’ imprisonment in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, under State Criminal Code Section 2011. While the Crispus Society had agreed to review the legalities of the case with an eye to an appeal, the Turnerites were too outraged to be patient. The Jeff Hurley statement to the press yesterday had been an uncomfortable threat, understandable, yet imprudent. “We are told this is justice, and to abide by the law of the land,” Hurley had announced. “We are also told to abide by the words of the Old Testament, that ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’ But this cautious and creeping Lord is not our Lord. We find a better Lord with better guidance in the words of Nahum, ‘The Lord revengeth and is furious; the Lord will take vengeance on his adversaries.’ ”
Dilman had deplored Hurley’s injudicious statement. Such pledges of lawlessness gave further ammunition to the enemies of the Negro race, and made Dilman’s own situation that much more difficult. No, he would not discuss the Turnerite activity with young Poole again. There were other ways to proceed, better means, within the law, and he would hasten them when he felt that it was possible.
“Miss Foster, you call Poole and tell him I’m too busy right now,” he said. “I’ll discuss the book with him—well—tell him next week.”
“I think he wanted to see you this morning.”
“Impossible.”
“Very well, Mr. President. Then there is Chancellor McKaye’s letter, the invitation to Trafford. I have a notation on my calendar that it must be answered by today.”
Dilman had forgotten. Chancellor McKaye and the Regents of Trafford University had written to him, inviting him to appear on Founders’ Day to accept an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree and to be the principal speaker at the gathering of the student body, alumni, and faculty.
Even his son had put aside his pique to congratulate him and to beg him to make the appearance. Dilman had avoided any decision, but now he knew that he must reach one. His instinct, he admitted, was against the appearance. If he could not turn down the honorary degree, he must turn down the invitation to speak. Julian would be disappointed, perhaps upset, but there were more important considerations. To date, he had avoided public speeches, accepting the advice of T. C.’s advisers that they might be inflammatory no matter what he said. While he must give his first television press conference this afternoon, and hold others later, this contact with the public would be buffered by reporters. When the time came to speak in public, he would have to do so, but certainly it would be unwise to make his first such appearance at a Negro school.
“Miss Foster,” Dilman said, “you write Chancellor McKaye to this effect—that I’m moved and pleased to be offered the honorary degree and that I will accept it later if I may, but that I regret I cannot accept the Founders’ Day speaking engagement. Tell him my overloaded schedule will not allow my leaving Washington. Make it—make it as tactful as possible. Leave the door open for the future. Say maybe on another occasion, when things ease up, I can pay Trafford a more informal visit. Tell him I’m not unmindful of the good job they are doing there, and I speak not only as Chief Executive but as the father of one of their undergraduates. You know how to write it. I’ll read and sign it later in the day. Anything else?”
(1964) The Man Page 33