by Allen Drury
“And this is the end of it, as far as you’re concerned?” Orrin asked. Again there was the rollicking amusement.
“Mr. Secretary, this is the end! … Of course,” he added, more soberly, “I do think that—well, there are some things in your country that are not perfect. I could wish they were better.”
“Yes,” the President said gravely. “You have helped to emphasize them to the whole world, possibly at real risk to your own life, and you have a right to criticize us for them. But we work at it, my impatient young friend. We work at it all the time, and it gets better all the time.”
“Not very fast,” Terry remarked.
“About as fast as a democratic society can move.”
“Then perhaps a democratic society is not the answer to the world’s problems,” the M’Bulu said quickly.
The President nodded.
“Yes, that’s the obvious comment. So narrow it overlooks a great many things having to do with the freedom and dignity of the individual—but obvious.”
“Are rotten eggs and tomatoes part of freedom and dignity?” Terrible Terry inquired, and now he was not smiling at all. “Is trying to win a great victory over little children part of freedom and dignity?”
“Not dignity, no,” the President said. “Surely not. But freedom, yes. Now,” he went on, as the M’Bulu made as if to interrupt, “I may condemn certain practices in your country—we, for instance, abolished slavery here well over a hundred years ago, and it has been a great many years, and then only under the greatest of desperation, that one of us ate another—but that does not stop the United States from supporting independence for Gorotoland, as we expect to do this coming week at the United Nations. We believe you can correct these evils, which some might say were signs of a barbarous and savage and unworthy country, if you are given sufficient tolerance and help and the freedom to solve your problems within their own context. Would you say that was a tolerant, fair-minded attitude, or would you not?”
For a long moment they stared at one another, until the M’Bulu’s eyes finally dropped and he shrugged.
“I would say it is typical of the United States.”
“Is it fair?” the President persisted. His guest gave a sudden laugh and, as always when pressed, an evasive answer.
“Fair, fair! Freedom! Dignity! Such words! All I know is that I have had a delightful evening with charming hosts, and now I must go back to the Hamiltons and get my rest before returning to New York tomorrow.”
“And there are no shenanigans planned for the UN?” Orrin Knox inquired. Again the M’Bulu gave a laugh, startled this time.
“She-nan-i-gans?” he repeated carefully, sounding not at all like a former graduate student at Harvard. “A wonderful word, whose meaning I can guess. No, Mr. Secretary,” he said with a flourish, “I do not think any she-nan-i-gans.”
“Is that a promise?” Orrin asked, and Terrible Terry looked at him with a playful blankness.
“I have nothing in mind but to go back to New York, make my speech to the Assembly, and hope for the best when the vote is taken.”
For a long moment in his turn, the Secretary stared at him, and this time with a bland innocence he stared back and his eyes did not drop.
“Good,” the President said comfortably. “Then we part friends. Let me see you down. Staying with the Hamiltons, you said?” For a second his eyes met Orrin’s and looked away again, but not before the Secretary had responded with the slightest of nods. “Cullee’s a fine Congressman, a fine American. Orrin, wait just a minute and I’ll be right back. I want to talk to you about an invitation I got from Peru today to visit down there.”
But when he had seen his guest safely off in a White House limousine and returned to the comfortable study, minus his predecessor’s coin collection but otherwise the same masculine leather-filled room it had been as long as he could remember it, the Secretary had nothing to report on Cullee.
“He won’t tell me anything. His wife didn’t even want to tell him I was calling, and then he was very guarded, possibly because she was there. Something’s going on.”
“You mean you didn’t believe our distinguished visitor?” the President asked dryly.
The Secretary snorted. “Not a word. No more did you.”
“That’s right,” the President said thoughtfully. “Not a one.”
But that was not the way they heard it at the other end of Sixteenth Street. “Oh, you should have seen them, the two stupid fools,” said Terrible Terry, sprawled in the Hamiltons’ biggest armchair. “They believed it all. No shenanigans at the UN, said the great Orrin Knox, that fool! You don’t hold a grudge against the United States, said the great President. How much of an idiot can a man be! I fooled them! I fooled them!”
“Did you?” Cullee said. “I’m sure you should be very proud of that.”
“Why shouldn’t he be?” Sue-Dan demanded in a tone so sharp that Maudie, bringing in coffee on a tray, stopped short and gave her an exaggerated stare. “And stop staring at me, old woman! Bring that coffee in here, and get out!”
“You’ve no call to speak to Maudie like that,” the Congressman said with an angry sharpness of his own.
“I’ll speak to Maudie any way I—” she began, but he interrupted.
“You’ll speak to Maudie like a lady. She is a lady, even if you’re not. A fine Senator’s wife you’ll be!”
“Senator’s wife!” she said scornfully, as Maudie set down the tray, gave her an insolent look, and flounced out. “That’s a chicken that’ll be a long time coming out of the egg. Go on, Terry; I want to hear about it even if this brave boy doesn’t. His friend Mr. Knox has already been on the phone trying to spy on you.”
“Oh?” said the M’Bulu, all trace of amicability suddenly gone from his face, a dangerous quietness replacing it. “How was that?”
“He called from the White House,” the Congressman said with a patient calm he did not feel, “to tell me you were on your way, that’s all.”
“That’s what he says,” Sue-Dan observed with a sardonic little smile. “That’s what you say, Cullee.”
“All right, suppose he did want to know what was being planned. And suppose I told him. What could you do about it, big boy? Or you either, little gal?”
“Did you tell him—” Terry began, leaning forward tensely in his chair, but Cullee held up a hand.
“Oh, no,” he said in a tone of tired disgust. “I didn’t tell any of your precious secrets. I don’t think it’ll matter much to us, anyway.”
“Who’s us, Cullee?” his wife asked softly. “Who’s ‘us’?”
“‘Us’ is the United States. That’s the country I belong to. Who do you belong to, Sue-Dan?”
“I belong to you, Cullee,” she said sarcastically. Then her tone hardened. “I also belong to the colored race. Terry and me, we belong to the colored race. We wouldn’t expect you to understand that, Cullee.”
“Are ’Gage’s boys and girls still outside?” he asked, ignoring her thrust, though a deep rage at its unfairness welled in his heart; and, going to the window, he drew the draperies and looked out.
The street was quiet at last; the group of DEFY picketers that had been in front of the house all day with big banners proclaiming “TERRY THE COLORED HERO” and “AFRICA WILL FREE AMERICA” was gone. He let the draperies fall back.
“I guess he’s called them off.”
“They’ll be back,” she said with satisfaction. “They’ll be back everywhere they’re needed, until the job is done.”
“I don’t think Cullee cares about the job,” Terry said tauntingly. “He just cares about standing in well with the white man. He doesn’t want to get involved in anything messy.”
“When are you going back to your own country?” the Congressman asked levelly. His guest laughed.
“Are you tired of me already, old Cullee? Well, I guess they are, too. When I get my vote, I’ll go. You can tell your friend the Secretary, if he’s interested.
”
‘Tell him yourself. You fool him so well.”
“Well,” the M’Bulu said, “let me put it to you this way: Who do they think they are? All they’ve done to the colored people all these years, and then they think if they issue a pretty invitation and put on a pretty party and the President pats you on the head and says, My boy, be nice, you’ll be nice. Why, hell and damnation!” he exclaimed with his guttural British precision. “Who do they think they are? Who do they think we are?”
“Go to bed, Terry,” Sue-Dan said, finishing her coffee, getting up, and starting for the stairs. “He doesn’t care. You’re talking to a stone wall when you talk to Cullee.”
“Stone walls get broken down,” the M’Bulu observed harshly. His host with a great effort controlled his impulse to shout back in anger.
“Yes, Terry,” he said softly. “Go on to bed. You’re tired and you tire me. We’ll have breakfast at eight and I’ll take you to the plane.”
“Don’t bother,” the M’Bulu said with a grin. “I’ll whistle to Claude Maudulayne and he’ll send an Embassy car ’round.”
“Good night, then,” the Congressman said quietly, and after a moment’s hesitation his guest arose, picked up his robes from the sofa where he had flung them when he got in from the White House, and started slowly after Sue-Dan.
“You coming, Cullee?” she asked from the top of the stairs.
“Why?”
She laughed.
“Suit yourself. Good night, Terry. Be sure you stay in your own bed.”
The M’Bulu threw back his head with a shout of amusement.
“I would love not to, but I am afraid old Cullee would not permit it.”
“You’re right,” the Congressman said with a last halfhearted attempt to be more amiable. “Hospitality doesn’t extend to offering wives in this country. It’s against the rules. Not that Sue-Dan,” he added under his breath with a twist of agony in his heart, “wouldn’t enjoy it.”
He picked up a magazine and dropped aimlessly into the armchair, one leg over its arm, as Maudie came back in to get the coffee tray.
“Don’t like him,” she said grumpily, lowering her voice just enough so that it was inaudible beyond the living room. “Don’t like her. Think I’d best go—”
“Oh, Maudie,” he said in genuine alarm, “don’t do that. I have to have somebody around here I can talk to.”
“Who he think he is, coming to this country and messing things up?” she demanded indignantly. “We gettin’ along down that road without ’no-’count African trash showin’ us what to do. We don’t need African trash.”
“You go to bed, too, Maudie,” he said. “Maybe we’ll all feel better in the morning.”
“He’s trouble,” she said as she started for the kitchen. “He’s Mr. T. for Trouble. T for Terry and Terry for Trouble.” She repeated it like a litany as she went out and left him alone in the softly lighted, luxurious room. “T for Terry and Terry for Trouble. Yes, sir.”
And so at last, he thought, as he looked about the empty room of this house, which used to hold such happiness for him and recently was holding so little, he was alone to think about things for the first time in three days. He had been presented quite an issue by this dashing visitor; this hero of the front pages, the airwaves, and the television cameras; this bright, self-appointed symbol of the colored man’s hopes and the UN’s problems. T for Terry and Terry for Trouble: it was certainly true enough for him.
And doubly so, of course, because, in a sense that he had been vividly aware of ever since he won election to the House, he was indeed trapped between the two races. His every instinct as a Negro had cried out to accept Terry’s taunting challenge to go with him to Henry Middleton School; after the limousine had driven away from “Harmony,” he had stood in the bedroom with hands clenched and said to himself over and over in an agonized whisper, “I should be there. I should be there.” Yet at the same time he had known with an equally agonized certainty that he could not be.
There was herein a conflict so fundamental and yet so subtle that he knew very well that it could never be understood by the great majority of his people. It was a conflict on the practical political level, and, since he was a decent and steady man who felt a great responsibility to his country and a great concern for her welfare, it was on yet another, much higher, much more racking level. The practical aspects of it were easy enough to grasp; Sue-Dan, much as she wanted to be a Senator’s wife, was still capable of accusing him of being afraid to participate so dramatically in the desegregation struggle because it might antagonize his white electorate in California. And this was true. He didn’t like to admit it to himself, but he had to: it was true. He was to some degree bound by the knowledge that even in California he could arouse antagonisms that would be fatal to his public career if he went ahead as fast and as blatantly in that area as LeGage, for instance, was always wanting him to do.
’Gage and Sue-Dan, he thought with a sigh; there was a pair for a man to contend with. Both wanted him to be what he was, his race’s finest representative in the national government; both wanted him to advance to the Senate; and yet neither could resist constantly needling him to take actions so violent in the area of race that they would inevitably destroy his public career, topple him from the House, and make of the Senate a blasted dream.
Well: he wasn’t the only man in public life who was torn many ways by many things, and he probably shouldn’t let it bother him too much. And perhaps it wouldn’t, were it not compounded by the other factor: an ability not given to many of his people to place their problem in perspective, to stand back and judge their needs against the overall necessities of the United States, hard pressed and under fire everywhere, in this most disorderly and irresponsible of centuries.
Never before, he imagined, had humanity been so completely frivolous about its own survival. In a sort of gargantuan joke on everybody, the fabric of a stable world society was ripped and torn on every hand, reason and restraint were tossed to the wind, decency and truth were hurled in history’s waste can, things that were declared to be things that were not, things that were not solemnly hailed as things that were. “Freedom!” they cried, and destroyed freedom in its name. “Progress!” they shouted, and scurried back as fast as they could scramble to the dark night of dictatorship and the death of the mind. And here was one little colored boy, trying to make sense of it all; one little colored boy, he thought grimly, who had been more than well-treated by his white countrymen and therefore felt himself under obligation to be responsible when he approached the matter of the beloved country they shared together.
Did this make him, then, a “white man’s pet,” as LeGage would have it? Because he wouldn’t walk with Terry through obscene women to take a little girl to school, because he wouldn’t engage in the easy slurs of the white man that were such a staple of daily conversation among so many of his people, because he tried to be objective—a desperately difficult thing to do, in this age of organized intolerance of the other fellow’s point of view?
Well, maybe. But he could not honestly believe it. He had some concept of himself better and higher than that. He remembered what his mother had said, shortly before her death, when he was first elected to the House.
“You goin’ there to be a servant to the country,” she had said with the intensity of the dying, staring at him out of the enormous dark eyes in the wasting face. “You be a good one.”
Be a good one. It was an injunction he had always done his best to follow, even now when his wife, his friend, everything, and everyone were conspiring to make it as difficult as possible.
Be a good one.
He got up with a sudden air of decision, crossed the room to the telephone, dialed a number, and said softly to the voice that answered—drowsily, for it was past midnight—“Mr. Secretary?”
From another telephone high in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York there came a muffled, questioning sound fifteen minutes later. The acting he
ad of the United States delegation to the UN was also struggling awake.
“I’m sorry, Hal,” Orrin Knox said. “I didn’t want to wake you, but it seemed best. Cullee Hamilton just called to tell me what Felix has in mind. Are you awake?”
“Yes,” Senator Fry said, obviously making an effort to be instantly bright and receptive and apparently achieving it. “Go right ahead. I’m listening.”
Two minutes later he objected, “But we can stand that, can’t we? It may be a little embarrassing, but—”
“Any other time,” the Secretary agreed, “it would be embarrassing, but we could probably get it quietly killed in committee, or beaten if it had to go to a vote. But with this business of Terry to compound it, it could really do us great damage—very great damage—all over the world. Particularly in the way it’s going to be offered, which ties it in with the other matter. We really may not be able to beat it, with the Afro-Asians as excited as they are … I just called Patsy and woke her up, which I must say I enjoyed doing because of a little argument earlier in the evening that I’ll tell you about when I see you, and she said Felix was on the Pennsylvania Railroad sleeper to New York. She was a little vague, I suspect deliberately, as to where and when you could reach him tomorrow, but I’d like you to see him if you possibly can. Tell him that if he will hold off on this, I’ll begin serious talks with him at once on that Panama matter he’s been after. He’ll know the one.”
“Is it important enough to head him off on this?” Hal Fry asked in some surprise. “What is it, cession of the Canal?”
“No, but in that area. So will you see him, please?”
There was a momentary hesitation and the Secretary caught it up at once.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, now, what?”
“Well, it’s just that—it’s my day to go up the Hudson, you know? I haven’t been able to get there in a couple of weeks, and I felt I should. Not that it makes any difference,” Hal Fry said with a sadness so deep it made the Secretary want to cry, “but I think I should. However, under the circumstances—”