by Allen Drury
“And both for the same reason,” Terry said spitefully. “For their own political advantage. At least that old fool of a President of yours is honest. He doesn’t think much of me and he won’t pretend he does, no matter what the consequences.” His eyes darkened and he spat out the words: “I hate this pious, pretending country!”
“I know you do,” Cullee Hamilton said in a tired fashion that suddenly made him seem much older than he was, “and I think it is too bad that you have to suffer us and we have to suffer you. I happen to love this country—I was born here; at least with all its faults it’s mine; and even if I didn’t love it, your saying you hate it would make me do so. Now, I’d suggest we get on back. I’m tired and I’m going to read awhile and then turn in. I’m not leaving you loose in Charleston tonight. So come along, Your Royal Highness. Whistle up your Cadillac and let’s us poor oppressed colored folk ride back to the Battery where we belong.”
The M’Bulu looked at him appraisingly, and for a moment Cullee wasn’t sure but what he would have to make good on his threat and persuade him to come by physical means. But Terry once again threw back his head and laughed, turning to wave up the Cadillac as he did so.
“You’re so persuasive, Cullee, friend, and so logical. I just couldn’t refuse Sue-Dan’s husband anything.”
“Fine,” Cullee said, exercising great restraint and managing to make a joke of it, which he knew disappointed his companion; “if I can count on that, we’ll get along.”
“Oh, we’ll get along,” Terry said as they got in the car and started the short ride back to “Harmony.” “No doubt of that …”
“Two numbers in New York for you to call,” the butler said as they reentered the stately house.
“No other calls?” Terry asked sharply.
“No,” the butler said.
“I’ll take them in the library.”
Fifteen minutes later he rejoined Cullee, by now comfortable in pajamas and slippers and starting to read, in the bedroom.
“Well,” he said with an amused air. “Imagine that. My friends in the United Kingdom have just issued a White Paper on Gorotoland. It seems we conduct human sacrifices, we eat people, we deal in slavery, and, worst of all, we’re accepting help from the Communists.”
“It’s all true, isn’t it?” Cullee asked. Terrible Terry didn’t answer directly, but gave him instead a cheerful grin.
“You know very well that not one of those fools who attended the luncheon today will believe it. Nor will most of your press and television. That was the New York Post asking me if I considered it a pack of lies. I said I did. You see, they make it easy for you. They put the words in your mouth and all you have to do is agree.”
“I think you’re not much,” the Congressman observed, without looking up from his book. The M’Bulu’s grin increased.
“But in this country they make it so easy for you to get away with it.”
And as he went whistling and humming about the room getting undressed and ready for bed, his companion reflected that, for all those unscrupulous enough to take advantage of the fact, this was unfortunately all too true. There was a sort of perverse and self-defeating innocence about America, which made her easy game for the phonies, the self-serving criticizers, the sly and subtle enemies of freedom and decency in the world. The eternal baby-faced innocent, waiting wide-eyed for the pie in the face from the villains in the cheap comedy of international errors put on by the Communists and their stooges—that was his country. With a sudden fierce anguish he thought: I will help you. And instantly deflated himself with the thought: What can you do, one little colored Congressman? One little white man’s pet, as LeGage put it? One little nigger, as his wife put it?
“Better call the Secretary and tell him I’ve been a good boy,” Terry suggested cheerfully as he got into bed. “Well!” he added as the phone rang on the nightstand between them. “There he is now.”
But it was not the Secretary, and he was not calling Cullee. The call again was for Terry, and when, in great glee, he told Cullee all about it a moment later the Congressman tried in great alarm and anger to persuade him to abandon what was apparently a carefully conceived plan by the M’Bulu and certain of his friends. Terry, however, would have none of it. All he would do was suggest mockingly that Cullee might like to come along.
“We need our great Negro Congressman at a time like this,” he kept saying. “Your people need you, Cullee.”
The Congressman, terribly disturbed, lay awake long after the M’Bulu had dropped off to sleep and started to snore heavily; for he was torn between what he knew he should do for his country and what he knew he could not do because of his race, and he was aware now that there was no longer anything at all amusing about the visit of Terrible Terry to the United States.
10
In much the same fashion as “Harmony,” the Henry Middleton School had also grown old and dignified with the years, and like “Harmony” it too was experiencing strange things on this fine fall morning following the M’Bulu’s luncheon. Again the soft autumnal haze lay upon the city, lending an atmosphere of somnolent peace drastically challenged by events now proceeding at the stately institution just below Broad Street.
Here, too, the television crews, the reporters, and the press photographers were gathered, indeed had begun to gather as early as 6 a.m. Here too were the gossiping knots of newsmen, the impromptu coffee lines at nearby stores, the peering eyes of television, the atmosphere of expectancy and excitement. But here there was a difference, for there was in the air around Henry Middleton School an ugly unease, a tense and explosive sense of violence that filled the bland morning air with a definite and inescapable menace.
Partly this came from the city policemen who stood about, sullen and nervous, in the streets, on the steps, and on the grounds of the school. More insistently, perhaps, it came from the steadily growing group of white women who clustered near the approaches to the grounds, talking together in hurried, raucous fashion, broken now and again by squeals of excitement and loud, nervous shrieks of laughter. Studied objectively, with an eye to their sloppy clothing, their half-combed hair, and the ostentatious vulgarity of their outcries, it could be seen that these ladies were not the cream of Charleston society. It did not matter; nor was it necessary that gentler ladies should do the task that was being done by these cordial dames. Those who were there were white, and that was quite sufficient to make the point they wished to make to the little gathering of Negroes that stood about, silent, sullen, and equally nervous, at a corner some one hundred yards down the street.
To this little group, which carried one rather shamefaced DEFY banner and could not have numbered more than ten or twelve, the ladies of the schoolyard gave frequent and noisy greeting.
“Go on home, you God-damned niggers!” they would scream, making sure the television cameras were turned upon them. “We don’t want no niggers messing with our kids!” Banners, too, waved gallantly in the breeze: “THIS IS A WHITE SCHOOL: NO NIGERS NEED APPLY” and “KEEP YOUR BLACK BASTIDS IN YOUR OWN BACK YARD.”
Now as the hour neared eight-thirty the excitement increased and the tension mounted. CBS and ABC had by this time interviewed some ten of these Christian souls and were about to extend equal privilege to the Negroes, already tapped by NBC. These operations, too, had provoked a certain attention from the chorus of Graces clustered near the steps. “Why don’t you northern nigger-lovers go home?” one disheveled charmer yelled, while a companion, for no pertinent reason that the cameramen could see, but which they dutifully photographed, made obscene motions with her belly. “Why don’t you take these burrheads back to New York with you? We don’t want ’em!
For these kindly suggestions there did not seem, at the moment, any rational rejoinder that the newsmen and television crews could make, even though a few were provoked to mutter angry comments to one another. One such comment was overheard by a policeman, and the cameraman responsible was promptly arrested for disturbing th
e peace. This made for a diversionary scuffle as other cameramen sought to take pictures of the police throwing a cordon around their colleague. The outcry of the ladies grew even louder, more excited, and more obscene.
Ten minutes went by in these pursuits, and it was almost time for the school bell to ring. A sudden hush descended upon the raucous crowd as they looked down the street toward the little group of Negroes. The police hurriedly formed parallel lines along the walk that led to the entrance to the school. The Negroes seemed to gather more tightly together. A silence, infinitely tense, infinitely menacing, fell upon the street. The world of reason, the world in which decent people tried to understand and help one another, the universe where kindly folk tried to make sense of humanity’s eternal contradictions, the places where Christians tried to live like Christians, even the many areas where whites and blacks existed tolerantly together, were suddenly far away. Abruptly there was no more world, no more anything but a silent street, filled with anger, blindness, hurt, and hate. Slowly the school bell began to toll and, as if commanded by some great director, there came from everyone, white and black alike, a sudden expulsion of pent-up breath.
At the doorway there appeared the figure of the school superintendent, his voice quavering and cracking with strain as he raised it against the clamor of the bell and shouted, “This school has no choice but to obey the law and we intend to do it!” So great was the tension that no one shouted back. Nor did anyone need to. The silence was more ominous than any spoken word.
For perhaps five minutes, while the bell completed its call and ceased, the silence held, the tension stretching and twisting and turning like a living thing, whipping hearts to a furious pace, straining eyes, catching breath short, making muscles ache with the frozen postures of bodies that did not know in exactly what fashion they would be called upon to perform, but knowing that in a split second’s time the demand would probably come.
Perhaps five minutes—and then, quite suddenly from a side street, unexpected and stunning in its abrupt appearance, there turned into Melton Avenue and drove to the school entrance, with a slow but inexorable pace that forced the silent women to fall back before it, a long black Cadillac.
From it, while the crowd watched with the same tense silence, now heightened by bafflement and curiosity, there descended two persons. One was a little colored girl of six, wide-eyed and frightened and hanging desperately to the enormous hand that gently held her own. The other was a figure seven feet tall, dressed in gorgeous robes of gold and green, wearing a purple-tasseled cap and walking with a calm and lordly disdain straight for the center of the group of women who blocked the entrance to the school.
So astounded were the ladies that for perhaps another two minutes, while the new arrivals bore down upon them, there seemed to be no reaction at all. Only the press photographers, dancing frantically in front of the advancing figures as they sought effective angles from which to snap them, only the short, excited expletives of the television cameramen trying to picture everyone at once, only the sharply-drawn breaths of newsmen scribbling frantically on their note pads, broke the silence. Not until the stately progression of the two disparate figures, the little girl terrified to the point of tears, her stately companion looking straight ahead with a composed fierceness that struck genuine terror into his viewers, reached the gates and started in, did the tension break. Then it was the belly-manipulator who suddenly screamed in a high, frantic voice, “Don’t let the black bastards in,” and ran forward, hesitant but determined, to try to block the way.
At once the silence dissolved into a wild outcry of shouts and screams and catcalls as a handful of her sisters surged forward behind her. Seven strong, they stood shouting before the M’Bulu, and for just a moment, while the little girl started to cry and hid behind his robes, he surveyed them with a withering distaste. Then he bent down and with one gentle, scooping movement lifted the little girl to his arms. And then he resumed his progress, step by step with a blind fury on his face that, even more than his physical presence, made them fall back before him. The last to give way was the belly-shaker herself, still screaming obscenities, but now with a high, terrified note of mounting frenzy and fear in her voice. Contemptuously the M’Bulu trod on her foot and she gave a sudden yelp of pain and hobbled away to the side. The police surged forward, but they too hesitated before the giant figure, awesome in its controlled fury. The pause was long enough for the M’Bulu and his tiny terrified burden to pass within the gates and begin to mount, step by step while the photographers scrambled frantically to record each foot of progress, up the stairs to the waiting superintendent.
At the top, the M’Bulu paused beside the superintendent, who looked terrified himself, and, turning with the little girl in his arms, looked back upon the once-more silent crowd. It made a magnificent picture (the AP photographer who took it would subsequently win first prize in the annual White House News Photographers’ Contest), and he held it for a long moment. Then he turned, gave the little girl a gentle kiss, gently put her down, gently disengaged her hand from his and transferred it to the shaking hand of the superintendent, and, turning once more, resumed his stately progress back down the steps toward the waiting limousine.
As he passed out the gates the fury of the ladies broke again through their fear, and although this time they kept a careful distance, they did offer him tokens of their esteem. From all sides eggs, rotten tomatoes, bricks, sticks, and rocks, thrown in wild excitement and without very good aim, began to rain upon him. Only one of the more solid objects struck home, a small stone that landed solidly on his right temple. He stopped as blood spurted suddenly down his face and raised a hand to it with an expression of surprise, faithfully recorded by the jostling photographers. Then he moved slowly on while the barrage resumed. By the time he reached the car, his gorgeous robes were stained and draggled from head to foot with broken eggs and splattered tomatoes; and these too he displayed for the photographers as he turned once more and looked at the screaming crowd with an utter contempt before slowly entering the car.
Then he was driven away, while behind him the last shreds of the soft peace of morning vanished altogether as the gentle ladies of the schoolyard, bitter with a wild frustrated fury, yelled and spat and caterwauled.
So acted His Royal Highness Terence Wolowo Ajkaje the M’Bulu of Mbuele, heir to Gorotoland, son of Africa, between 8:35 and 8:49 of a fall morning in the city of Charleston, South Carolina. The consequences were immediate and, as he and his friends had known they would be, worldwide.
By 9:30 a.m. extras were on the streets of New York, radio and television commentators were busily relaying the news, and across the nation and the world in a mounting babel of voices in a thousand tongues and dialects the word was being carried to the farthest corners of the globe.
By 10 a.m. business at the United Nations had virtually come to a standstill as delegates gathered in buzzing groups in the corridors, in the lounges, in conference rooms, in every available corner and cranny of the vast glass building, to exchange excited comments. The British Ambassador was observed to be, for once, openly concerned. The Soviet Ambassador and the Ambassador of Panama were observed to smile, not blatantly, but with a solid satisfaction. Senator Fry of the American delegation was seen to look tired and worried, Senator Smith to lose his customary affability. LeGage Shelby was not to be seen, though many from Asia and Africa wished to seek him out.
By 10:37 Edward Jason, Governor of California, had issued a statement in Washington, where he was visiting his sister, expressing on behalf of himself and his family “the greatest sorrow, dismay, and condemnation for this lawless episode in our adopted state of South Carolina.”
By 10:38 the switchboard of the New York Times was besieged by excited callers wishing to add their names to next week’s “FAIR PLAY FOR GOROTOLAND” advertisement.
By 10:46 a.m. (4:46 Greenwich) a question was being asked by the Opposition in Parliament, and two minutes later the Prime Minister wa
s launched upon one of his gracefully obfuscatory replies which managed to chide the M’Bulu, uphold the M’Bulu, chide the United States, uphold the United States, comfort the white race and encourage the black, and all in the most charming, amicable, pragmatic, and fatherly language.
By 11 a.m. the State Department had gathered itself together sufficiently to issue a statement on behalf of the Secretary expressing deepest regret, and hard on its heels at 11:15 the White House issued one from the President conveying his personal apologies to the M’Bulu and announcing that he was canceling his vacation stay in Michigan in order to return to the capital at once and both confer with, and entertain, the nation’s distinguished visitor. (“I think we’ve got things in fairly good shape,” Orrin Knox had begun when the call came through from the Upper Peninsula. “Dolly’s going to give a dinner party for him—” “Dolly, hell!” the President snapped back with a rare profanity. “I’m going to come back and entertain the little bastard myself. He’s got his White House party.”) In his statement the President also expressed the hope, in language fair but firm, that South Carolina would see fit speedily to comply with the rulings of the courts.
By 11:45 the President had been hanged in effigy at Henry Middleton School.
By 12 noon Eastern Time, or 2 a.m. Japanese Time, the first of what the Secretary of State was later to label in his own mind as “Anti-American Riots, M’Bulu Series” was under way in Tokyo, where several hundred well-paid youths were serpentining angrily in front of the American Embassy and threatening to knock down its gates.
By 12:30 p.m. similar demonstrations were under way in Moscow, Jakarta, Cairo, Stanleyville, Mombasa, Lagos, and Accra.
By 1:15 they had also begun in Casablanca, Rome, Paris, London, Caracas, Havana, Port-au-Prince, Rio, and Panama City.
By 1:22, having disposed of routine business, both houses of the Congress of the United States were engaged in angry debate, with the senior Senator from South Carolina making a furious denunciation of the M’Bulu in the upper chamber and his colleague, Representative J. B. Swarthman of South Carolina, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, doing likewise in the House. Both were being constantly heckled by Senators from North and West, in the one case, and Congressmen from Chicago, Detroit, and New York, in the other.