(1964) The Man

by Irving Wallace

  “I understand Mindy and all like her who pass as white, because I can understand, as many of you around me cannot, what it is to rid yourself of second-class citizenship, of poverty, of receiving contempt, of inferior social status, and to take on in their place, even if the pleasure is acquired through a deception, the advantages and joys of equality under the law, a respectable job, the feeling of belonging, new friendships based on one’s personality rather than color. It grieves me that this has to be so, that this is the condition in our country, but I understand it.

  “And I understand more. I understand the deep rage within Negroes, the deep and helpless rage that defies all reason and sense, against not only their present lives but against lives in their past, rage at the accidents of heredity and of environment that made them as they are, and put them in the wrong place at the wrong time. Do you have the slightest idea of what truly makes one human being black and another white? When you consider how violently a person’s life is affected from birth to death if he is born black rather than white, it is almost impossible to believe that such a slight change within the human body creates this vast and traumatic difference.

  “According to the foremost geneticists, blacks and whites possess within them the same pigments, the same skin-coloring elements, exactly the same red blood. Then what creates the difference in their skin shading which so affects their lives? The decisive factor is a particle that cannot even be seen by the naked eye, and it is called a gene. Yes, a gene. What is a gene? Bear with me briefly, gentlemen.

  “To create a human life, a Mindy, requires two factors—a male sperm so minute that a hundred million sperms can be counted in a single drop of seminal fluid, and a female egg so tiny that it is smaller than a typewritten period on a printed page. Both this liquid drop and this period-sized egg contain something even smaller called chromosomes, and they in turn contain something yet smaller called genes, and these invisible genes are what give each newborn child his hereditary characteristics and control his skin color. If a new-born child has a dominant gene that will cause the production of excessive melanin, a dark pigment, he will be black on the outside. If he possesses a different kind of microscopic gene, he will be brown or yellow on the outside. And if he has an unseeable gene that produces hardly any melanin, he will be some shade of white. And so, what a Negro is comes down to no more than a slight shake and blend of genes, like tiny dice rolling out of the past, and when the shake is done, one goes before the world as a black-skinned individual or a white-skinned one, or somewhere in between, and that’s it for life. And because of this luck of genes, a man or woman comes forth a Negro, sometimes a fair-skinned Negro, but a Negro nevertheless, and because of this luck of genes, a human being is labeled for the rest of his days, in certain places, as an inferior. No wonder the Negro rages, both against this accident in his past, and against the conditions in the present that insensibly penalize him for his ancestry. No wonder one like Mindy, light-skinned through a hap-hazard blend of white and black genes, makes use of this avenue of escape.

  “My daughter Mindy committed no crime, no matter how vicious the tone of the condemnation in Representative Zeke Miller’s newspaper. She committed a deception, yes—but that is a minor human frailty, not an exclusively Negroid characteristic. Who among us, at one time or another, has not engaged in deception? Husbands lie to their wives, and wives to their husbands, and children to their parents, in order to make life easier. I do not condone this, either. I say simply, it is there, it is life. Businessmen exaggerate and boast untruths, to improve their business. Clerks and white-collar workers lie about their accomplishments and skills, and products, to sell themselves or their goods, in order to succeed, to get ahead, to improve their lot. Some Jews pretend not to be Jews, in an effort to obtain a desired position, a country club membership, a house they long for in an anti-Semitic neighborhood, in order to escape the onus of being different. Some Catholics pretend not to be Catholics, because of feelings against the Holy See, to get along, just to get along. I deplore the deceptions in our culture, but more, I deplore the conditions that seem to make them necessary.

  “Mindy’s deception? Whom would it have harmed but herself? Would her secret blackness, hidden by white skin, if never revealed, have given a fatal disease to her men friends and women friends? Would it have infected them with bad or despicable notions or ideas? Would it have made her work less adequate or contaminated her living quarters? No, it would have done no harm to anyone—until now—except to Mindy herself. Can you picture my girl’s life these years since she ran off at eighteen? I often have. For all its advantages, her life, I imagine, has not been easy or uncomplicated. See her, as I have, escaping from a segregated black neighborhood of the Midwest into a white private school and then into a wide-open white world in New York. To do this, Mindy has deprived herself of mother, father, brother, and every other relative. She has disowned every childhood and school friend she had, except a handful of friends made while passing in a white school. She has sprung up, literally, from the earth afresh, with no past, no background. How impossible this seems in our world of curiosity and rapid communications today. Mindy, I suspect, had to find new friends, white friends, in her apartment building, in her white church, in her white social clubs, in her chance encounters, and in her job. What does one say to new friends, male or female, or on the employer’s application form and to his questions? Mindy must invent a white family, somewhere remote, that is actually nonexistent. She must create a cardboard white community, somewhere remote, where she grew up, and early schools that for some convincing reason cannot be contacted. And as she draws a circle of friends about her, she must fabricate a living past—find photographs of a white mother and father to put in frames, buy gifts for herself and send them to herself from her nonexistent white parents so that she is not alone giftless on Christmas, or unremembered on birthdays. She must compose and send herself occasional letters from distant places and pretend they are from white relatives or friends.

  “But not enough. Once this fiction is completed, accepted, she cannot let down her guard. Will she, someday, while intoxicated or under anesthetic or even through some casual verbal slip, disclose that she is really colored? Will some astute newcomer to her circle begin to wonder about an expression she has used, an old habit of speech like ‘G’wan, man’ or ‘Look heah’ and begin to scrutinize the texture of her hair, breadth of her nose, thickness of her lips, moons of her fingernails? Will she, someday, while with her white friends, run into that one-in-a-million visitor from the Midwest, from her old place of life, who is Negro, and recognizes her, and comes up to her, a pretended white girl, and inadvertently exposes her? Will she, falling desperately in love as an equal with a young white man, unable to confess the truth and lose him, keep her secret, marry him, and awaken from the hospital table to find with horror that she has delivered an infant with features and hair more Negroid than white?

  “I have not seen Mindy Dilman in all these years, not because I have not deeply wished it, for I love her, but because she chose it to be this way, so this is the way it had to be.

  “Of course Mindy has been passing for white! Of course I have known it! I would not interfere, because I would not strip from her the advantages she deserves and would otherwise be denied. But I repeat, what is Mindy’s crime? Is it her fault that she was born to Negroes, and in a country where such birth is a sin? If there is crime in this, the crime is not Mindy’s, but yours and mine, that of the American government and the American people, who would not let her grow and develop in dignity and grace.

  “Now, this morning, for the sake of boosting a newspaper’s circulation, for the cause of a politician’s prejudice and quarrel, Mindy’s secret is out. Now, for motives of sensation and hate, the camouflage of this harmless young girl has been stripped off, so that she is naked and alone and black, though no whit blacker or less worthy than yesterday or the day before. And for this my heart is heavy. I sorrow for my daughter, and over wha
t she will endure, and what must become of her—but more, far more, gentlemen, I grieve for the nature of those in this country, and for the situation in this country, that drove Mindy to pass—and I grieve that such minds exist, in government, in the press, who feel that her pitiful masquerade was so monstrous a vice and transgression that they publicly had to brand her not with a searing scarlet letter but a burning black one, to destroy her, to hope to damage me as her father and as the nation’s President, in order to preserve the racial purity of the republic in which we live.

  “Thank you for your attention, gentlemen. Thank you, and good morning.”

  The Senate, sitting as a tribunal for the impeachment trial of President Dilman, had been convened promptly at one o’clock in the afternoon.

  This was the tenth day of the trial, the first day having been given over to the opening speeches of the opposing attorneys, and the eight days since having been given over to the testimony of the witnesses for the House and the cross-examinations conducted for the defense by Abrahams, Tuttle, and Priest, with Hart confining himself to the paper work. Actually, excluding the Sunday during which the Senate had been adjourned, there had been only seven days of witnesses.

  This afternoon’s session had begun with the House managers summoning Julian Dilman to the witness chair, set at eye level with Chief Justice Johnstone’s raised dais, to testify. Representative Zeke Miller’s interrogation of the President’s son had started mildly enough, with questions about the young man’s early years, eliciting information that traced his growth to the time of his entrance into Trafford University. Even though the interrogation had not been fearsome, Julian had appeared frightened, constantly twitching and twisting, his replies sometimes barely audible, sometimes too loud.

  When, after twenty minutes of this, a senator had risen on a point of law and Chief Justice Johnstone had called a fifteen-minute recess to consult his associates and to review published precedent, the stately rectangular Chamber on the second floor of the Capitol had become an informal clubhouse once more.

  Leaving his associates at their table on the Senate floor, their heads huddled together over some legal strategy, Nat Abrahams had quit the Chamber to smoke his pipe and to evaluate the position of the defense. He had gone through the Senators’ Private Lobby, meaning to turn off to his own assigned office, but then he had wandered into the Marble Room, so called for its circular Italian columns, had wended his way past a group of legislators chatting at the round reading table beneath the ornate crystal chandelier, and had then come to a stop next to one of the towering white columns. Still lost in thought, desiring to remain inconspicuous and undisturbed in this lair of the enemy (although every room, apparently, belonged to the enemy), Abrahams had gone behind the pillar, leaned back against it, and lighted his pipe.

  Now, isolated and smoking, he could perceive the House managers’ strategy, all of it dominated by a public relations concept and intended to overwhelm the general public (and through them, the Senate jurors) in one emotional spate of accusation. After Miller’s frenetic opening address, the opposition had built the case for their Articles of Impeachment slowly and not too powerfully. Except for their presentation of several witnesses from Vaduz Exporters, to bolster their Article I charges against the President’s treasonable relationship with Wanda Gibson, except for their questioning of the Reverend Spinger and then his wife to further solidify Article I and give some credence to the extramarital liaison and preferential treatment to Crispus specifications in Article III, except for their parade of Washington experts to prove the New Succession Act was constitutional and the law of the land, and the questioning of Governor Talley to prove it had been violated by the President, which had invited Article IV, the House managers had presented only a series of shabby and inconsequential witnesses.

  Analyzing it now, weighing the effect of the defense’s own cross-examinations, Abrahams was able to see better what progress the opposition had made. Miller had done a fairly good job, not legally but emotionally, in shoring up Article I, charging the transfer of secrets through Wanda Gibson. Until three-quarters of an hour ago, he had offered no witnesses on Article II, the Julian-Turnerite charge, except one affidavit, from the Attorney General, relating the President’s delaying tactics on the banning of the extremist society. As yet, Miller had made little progress on the specifications of Article III. He had made no mention of Sally Watson, and the witnesses he offered to prove the liaison with Miss Gibson, favoritism toward Spinger, political partisanship, and intoxication had been so vague and irrelevant, and had been so rattled under the relentless cross-examinations of Abrahams and his colleagues, that Article III had become more an embarrassment than an asset.

  Miller’s case for Article IV, that the President had broken a law by firing Eaton in defiance of Congress, had been more impressive for the quantity of his witnesses than for their quality. Under Abrahams’ ceaseless bombardment, many of the witnesses had lost their assurance and authority. However, the question of whether the President had removed Eaton because he believed his Secretary of State was usurping his Presidential powers, or because he feared his popularity, was still not settled. And the question of whether the President had removed Eaton without consulting the Senate because he believed the New Succession Act to be unconstitutional and therefore believed that there was no need to consult anyone, or whether he had merely determined to defy and humiliate the legislative branch, and be headstrong and break a law, was still not decided. To this moment, the battle over Article IV was probably a draw.

  Today, Abrahams guessed, Zeke Miller would be unloading his big artillery in one concerted and smashing effort to scatter the defense and send it into hopeless retreat. Today, no doubt, Miller would bring forth those who were still missing: Wanda Gibson to build up Article I, Sally Watson to save Article III, Secretary of State Arthur Eaton to clinch Article IV, just as he now had on the stand Julian Dilman to prove Article II. Miller would try to bring his case, through the evidence of these witnesses, to a peak in one shattering afternoon, rocking the public and the Senate with the President’s criminality, so that nothing Abrahams or the defense managers could offer in rebuttal, after that, would be able to halt, or even slow down, the assault.

  Why, Abrahams asked himself, had the House managers determined to crowd the best of their case into a single afternoon? Because, he decided, they felt the timing was right, the climate never better.

  The steady if gradual shift of sympathy and support to President Dilman, among the public, had faltered in the last nine days. Miller’s weather eye was keen. Eight days ago the President had admitted to the nation that he might, if necessary, sacrifice the lives of an all-white American fighting force in the defense of a little-known African nation. The Negroes and liberals approved, but the larger part of the nation boiled with resentment. Then Julian had confessed to his Turnerite affiliation, and while the majority of twenty-three million American Negroes may have been sympathetic once more, and some whites impressed, the greater part of 230 million Americans were increasingly suspicious of the President’s past activities. Now, this morning, Zeke Miller’s revelation about the President’s daughter passing for white, with the President’s knowledge and lack of disapproval, would once more turn the Negro population against him and infuriate most of the white population. And, Abrahams saw, even Doug Dilman’s profoundly moving explanation of his daughter’s passing, and of his own role in it, would fail to counteract the damaging publicity. For the rest of the press, who had missed Miller’s sensational scoop, were trying to make up lost ground by excerpting portions of the President’s remarks, lifting them out of context, angling and distorting them to make headlines anew and sell copies of their newspapers.

  Abrahams rubbed his shoulders against the pillar, put a flame to his pipe again, and considered the situation. Yes, for Zeke Miller, the national climate was right to bring out, from the principal witnesses, the last of the evidence against Dilman. There was momentum in the sentiment
against the President, and whatever headlines Miller could create and throw forth today would ride with the momentum, until the charges would be too many and too powerful for it to be stopped.

  Abrahams did not like the defense’s position. If the prosecution concluded its testimony today, it would be the defense’s turn, either late today or tomorrow, to summon up its own rebuttal witnesses. These were good witnesses, but not colorful, not space grabbers, not names, and they would receive scant attention. Abrahams needed what Miller possessed—a cast of stars—and he had none, not one.

  Only a single faint hope remained, Abrahams decided, and that was to make Miller’s stars his own stars. He must build up Julian and Wanda, even though subpoenaed by Miller, as defense witnesses. He must tear down Eaton and Sally Watson, so that resultant headlines would favor the President over his prosecutors. It would not be an easy game to play, if it could be played at all, but, he thought mournfully, it was the only game in town.

  He heard an agitated voice call out, “Congressman—Congressman Miller—”

  Looking off, he was surprised to see George Murdock, fugitive from the press gallery and Blaser’s collaborator, hastening in his general direction. Then Murdock hurried past him, and abruptly halted. Abrahams poked his head around the pillar, and he recognized Zeke Miller, profile to him, considering the reporter with annoyance.

  “What are you doing here?” Miller demanded. “You’re supposed to be up there doing what you’re paid to do.”

  “Congressman, I’ve got to speak to you,” Murdock insisted, clawing his acned, pasty face. “That story you and Reb broke this morning—about Mindy passing—”

  “Don’t bother me now. I have no time. I’ve got a trial to conduct.”

  “Listen—wait—I signed a paper for that girl, promising if she gave me the letter Julian wrote her, I’d never in my life whisper a word of who she is or what she is. I told it to you in confidence—remember? It was part of our deal—you could use everything else I got you, as long as you never used that. You promised, like I promised. You pledged your word.”