The Man

by Irving Wallace

  He looked at Abrahams. “Nat, it’s my fault for not resigning when I could, for being a selfish and prideful mule and bucking the men with the whips, and all I’ll have succeeded in doing is to harm everyone-Wanda, Julian, the Spingers, and now the worst of it, my little girl Mindy. I knew I was up against mudslingers, but I thought I’d be taking most of the mud. I didn’t know it would spatter so wide, so wide and far and destructively. Well, I guess there is no turning back now.”

  Absently clasping and unclasping his hands, he wandered back to the middle of the office floor. Aware of Tim Flannery again, he said, “What can I do for my girl? I don’t know.”

  Flannery said, “Fight the mudslingers in the press, the way you’re fighting them in the Senate, Mr. President. Is there any statement we can release to offset this-I don’t mean just for your sake-for hers, too, to ease it for her?”

  “No. What could I say that would do anything but make it worse? Thanks, Tim. You’d better get back to your work.” Then, as Flannery shrugged and prepared to leave the office, Dilman said to no one in particular, “If people only understood what makes a colored person pass for white.” Suddenly, he exclaimed with wonder. “Wait now-why not tell them? Why not tell them what it is like?”

  He saw Flannery had hesitated at the door. “Tim, if Mindy can’t speak for herself, maybe her father should speak for her. I think I will make a statement.”

  As Flannery returned, Dilman looked at Abrahams. “Any comment before I do, Nat?”

  Abrahams said, “Don’t worry about my problems. This is something altogether your own. This is personal. Act the way I know you want to act-like a father, and not like the President.”

  “Yes,” said Dilman.

  “Do you want to dictate this statement now?” asked Flannery.

  “Dictate it? No. I just want to go out in the press lobby-yes, that’s what I’ll do-and speak my mind. You go ahead, Tim. Alert the correspondents that I want to make a few brief remarks, and that’s all.”

  Flannery hastened out. Dilman remained lost in thought for long seconds, then he went to the wastebasket, retrieved the Citizen-American, unfolded it, studied the headlines, and scanned the story.

  “Poor child,” he said, and then he left, with Abrahams following him.

  After Dilman went through Edna Foster’s empty office into the corridor, where two Secret Service men fell into step behind him, and turned toward the Reading Room, he was conscious of his press secretary’s staff watching him curiously from their desks as he passed them.

  Nearing the open door leading to the press lobby, now blocked by Tim Flannery, with Edna Foster and her shorthand pad and pencil behind him, Dilman could see Flannery holding up his arms to quiet the clamoring reporters. Dilman hung back, listening, until Flannery finished his speech.

  “-I repeat, gentlemen, those are the rules. He’s decided to make an impromptu statement about the unfortunate story that appeared exclusively in Zeke Miller’s Washington Citizen-American this morning. When he has finished his remarks, no questions about the matter will be entertained. None, boys.”

  “Hey, Tim,” someone shouted, “after he does that, would he mind a couple of questions about the impeachment trial? I’d like to ask him about the House witnesses yesterday from the Vaduz Exporters, who insisted-”

  “Absolutely no,” Flannery replied. “Nothing’s changed about that. No comment on the impeachment trial, or the Dragon Flies and Baraza, or anything else this morning. And no questions about his daughter. If you refuse to abide by our stipulations, I’m afraid-”

  Several voices yelled out, “Okay, Tim!… Bring him out!… Let’s go! Where’s the President?”

  Tim Flannery turned and nodded to Dilman, who came forward, easing his way between his press secretary and personal secretary, until he stood within the thickly massed assemblage of eager and impatient correspondents. For a moment Dilman scanned their familiar faces, then dropped his gaze to the pencils and notebooks or pieces of paper their hands held ready. They were waiting, and behind him, behind the Secret Service agents, Flannery, Miss Foster, Nat Abrahams, and many of the White House staff were waiting.

  Dilman’s lips were dry. His Adam’s apple had grown huge in his throat. His lungs felt hot. For a hanging second he wondered if this was wrong, feeding fuel to the scurrilous Blaser story, and then his eyes picked out Blaser’s toad face, puffed and important, toward the rear. At once, he knew that he must speak what was in his heart, because somewhere in New York his poor girl child might be waiting also, and listening.

  Dilman opened the newspaper in his hand, studied it, then held it aloft.

  “You all read this-this news, I’m sure,” he said. He cast the newspaper aside, heard it flutter to the floor. “It is quite true, every word of it. Despite its tone or interpretation, these are the facts. The facts are correct. I have a twenty-year-old son named Julian, who has returned to his studies at Trafford University. I also have a daughter, yes, she is older than my son, she is twenty-four, and her legal name is Mindy Dilman. I have not seen her, not set eyes upon her, since shortly before my wife’s death, when my daughter was eighteen or thereabouts. With my wife’s encouragement, Mindy left the Midwest for the East, to seek a career. Like my wife, more than my wife, Mindy was fair-skinned, and had delicate features. On my wife’s side, for perhaps three or four generations back, and to a lesser extent on my own side, there were Caucasians and Indians, white and brown forebears.”

  Dilman hesitated. “I might add, this is not unusual. I am well acquainted, as are most literate Negroes, with the history of our common ancestry. The information about ourselves comes to us largely from white sociologists and anthropologists. According to these authorities, there has always been miscegenation-racial mixing with consequent propagation-in the United States. This began in colonial times, although the most intensive interracial contact among Caucasians, Negroes, and Indians, as Dr. Gunnar Myrdal has pointed out, occurred during our period of slavery and immediately thereafter. It was a time when Negro women were sexually exploited by white men. As a result, according to Dr. Myrdal and numerous other sociologists, as a result of this mixing between whites and colored peoples, with or without the benefit of marriage, there are today estimated to be 70 per cent to 80 per cent of American Negroes who have some degree of so-called white blood or, more accurately, white genes. Because of this, my wife and I, like eight out of every ten Negro Americans, have some white heredity, no matter how minute. I might add that conversely, because of this mixing, at least 20 per cent and perhaps as high as 40 per cent of the whites in the United States have some degree of so-called Negro blood in their veins, whether they know it or not. In any case, because of these heredity facts, many Negro families will, every generation or so, produce offspring who more closely resemble their one or two Caucasian ancestors.”

  Dilman studied the tops of the reporters’ heads encircling him, and then he went on.

  “In our family of four, there were two of us who were black-skinned like myself and two who, because of the old admixture, were fair-skinned. My wife Aldora was fair-skinned, what is called, in a certain section of the country, ‘pumpkin yellow.’ I, her husband, as you can see, am unmistakably black. My son is also unmistakably black. But my daughter Mindy, from birth to maturity, was as fair as her mother. Her complexion was, and no doubt is today, more light-colored than many Mediterranean whites.

  “Now, it is a regrettable fact, or so I believe, that among American Negroes themselves, most of them, the lighter-skinned ones, often feel superior, and are envied or looked up to by their brethren. Why is this? I think the reasons are obvious. Just as whites consider white skin more esthetically satisfying than dark skin-despite the widely prevalent effort, constantly, to become sunburned or tanned by the sun, since this is a status symbol equated with leisure time and therefore wealth-despite this, whites find whiteness more attractive than blackness, just as in India and Brazil, the natives consider the lighter ones of their commun
ities more attractive-so this same color scale has invaded and infected the American Negro community. But ahead of pure esthetics, there is a more compelling reason why American Negroes are frequently pleased to have, and are envied for having, tan or pink or almost white or totally white skins. It is that these lighter Negroes get closer to the majority of the white population, are more acceptable to the dominant white community, more apt, by mistake or their own intent, to escape discrimination and persecution. And often these almost white Negroes, seeing how much easier and better life is for them when they are taken for white instead of Negro, become tempted to cross the color line, to live permanently in the white world as whites, to enjoy being a part of the aristocratic majority with all its advantages and privileges.

  “Yes, every Negro like myself, especially one who has had a nearly white wife and an almost white daughter, knows a good deal about this subject. I can tell you, with considerable authority to support the statement, that at least three thousand American Negroes with light-colored skin, at least three thousand a year, maybe as many as six thousand a year, take advantage of their appearance, slip away from their Negro homes, communities, family, friends, and cross over and join the white race. I can tell you, also on excellent authority, that of the one million mixed or interracial marriages in the United States at the present time, and there are that many, at least nine hundred thousand are marriages in which the white partner does not know his or her mate is Negro, or of some other color, because that mate is passing as white and has got away with it.

  “For the most part, Negro parents do not like it when their fairer-colored children quit their race and surreptitiously join the white classification, the white world, the white census, pretending to be white when they are not. Negro parents will condone the action of one of their children if he passes as white in order to acquire a better education or get a better job that might not otherwise be available to him. This is condoned on the condition that the one passing remembers he or she is Negro, and returns from the school or business world to resume family and social life among his or her Negro brethren. What Negroes resent is permanent passing by one of their number who resigns entirely from his race, attempts to blot out his blackness, pretends to be white in school, in work, and in his social life. Yet, as much as Negroes resent permanent passing, only rarely do they expose or give away to whites the true origin of their defectors. They will guard a passer’s secret because, as black Americans, suffering as a minority group, they can understand how driven one of their kind must be to risk this form of escape into equality.”

  Dilman halted. The circle of heads came up. He inspected the faces, nodded, then resumed speaking, and the heads went down to the note-taking.

  “Now you have the background explaining my daughter’s defection. She was reared as a Negro, and around her she could see the terrible injustices and inequities that were to be her lot. When she realized that she alone, of the four of us, need not endure the suffering, like a curse on her for the rest of her years, she fled it, she escaped it, she ran over the line and far away, and lost herself in the white world of New York City, where there was no reason for anyone to suspect that she was not white. I will not stand here and say I approved of Mindy Dilman’s action. I will simply say I did not try to stop or dissuade her then, and I would not now, because I understand her and the three to six thousand other Negro girls and boys who annually cross over.

  “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 ofte
n 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.