A Shade of Difference

by Allen Drury

  “The President,” it said, “is pleased to announce the appointment of the Honorable Cullee Hamilton, Congressman from California, to the seat on the United States delegation held until 4 p.m. today by Mr. LeGage Shelby.

  “Mr. Shelby’s resignation from the delegation was requested, and received, by the President.”

  4

  And now LeGage was off on collision course, and so was his own wife, and it was a cold day for a wounded heart as the Congressman from California dressed slowly in his empty bedroom and prepared to depart for the Hill and the first day of action on his resolution of apology and recompense to Terrible Terry and his own people in the United States. Understandably, he had slept very little, watching with a sad fascination until late into the night the televised recapitulations of the riot at the UN, the supplemental riots in twenty obedient capitals around the world, the interviews with Sue-Dan and the chairman of DEFY as they were encouraged to denounce their countrymen and mouth a sullen insolence toward their government. Both spoke with a self-conscious, exaggeratedly hostile air, as though they were afraid someone might talk them out of it if they stopped to listen, and he got the curious impression from both that they were really talking to him and to no one else.

  Well: if so, they could talk a long day in hell, he thought bitterly as he descended the stairs to greet Maudie and eat his lonely breakfast. And so could all the other black bigots in the world, including the one who had called him shortly after midnight and breathed heavily into his ear for several moments before saying in a stagily ominous voice, “The Prophet is watching you.” He had told the voice immediately and with great explicitness what it could do to the Prophet; it had appeared taken aback by the harsh anger of his tone, and hung up. But he expected there would be more of the same, both anonymous and in the open, and he told himself grimly that he was prepared for it. He was sick and saddened by what might well prove to be the permanent loss of his wife and his friend, but he wasn’t so sick and saddened that he couldn’t fight back. It hadn’t really hit him quite as hard, in fact, as he had thought it might in his advance imaginings.

  You picked the wrong man if you think you can scare Cullee, he told whoever-he-might-be with a silent wrath. Old Cullee doesn’t scare.

  Nor, he thought with an equal grimness, does old Cullee fall for all these oily questions from the press in the middle of the night, either. They had all called him, AP, UPI, the Washington Post, the New York Post, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, Ebony, Jet, the Afro-American, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Defender, the Atlanta Daily World, and the rest. Had he known Sue-Dan was planning to do what she did? No comment. Oh, then he didn’t know, was that it? No comment. Oh, then he did know? Well, if he didn’t know, did he approve? No comment. Oh, then he didn’t approve? Was he going to see her when he was in New York? What about his resolution now? What did he think of LeGage’s actions? Hadn’t he been under pressure to participate himself? Why hadn’t he participated himself? Oh, no comment?

  That, they implied, sounded damned fishy to them, and, they indicated strongly, they were going to use his silence as the basis for all kinds of speculation, since he was going to be so damned stubborn about it. One or two from his own race even told him what they thought of him, before they hung up. He was, he gathered, an Uncle Tom, a white man’s nigger, a stooge, a patsy, a traitor to his people. It was a pleasant burden to carry with him into a bed whose emptiness complicated his unhappiness further by arousing a fiercely anguished desire that no one was there to satisfy.

  But it would take more than that to break old Cullee, he repeated to himself as he entered the dining room. By God, it would.

  “My sakes,” Maudie said tartly, “here come Storm Cloud No. 1. Stop fighting the whole world and sit down and eat your breakfast. Won’t do you any good to hate on thin air. Need something more than that to back it up.”

  “I don’t hate anybody, Maudie,” he said, observing the banner headlines in the Washington Post, the glaring front-page picture of Sue-Dan and LeGage struggling with a couple of UN guards, the terse little box insert informing the capital that “Rep. Cullee Hamilton, the man who wasn’t there at yesterday’s UN riot, refused comment at his Washington home tonight on developments involving his wife, Sue-Dan, and LeGage Shelby, the man he has succeeded on the United States UN delegation.” The day’s editorial cartoon showed a gallant group of giant glamorized blacks, stately, statuesque, overwhelmingly noble and righteous, rising accusingly out of an enormous gallery to look down upon a tiny Uncle Sam staring up in startled disarray.

  “Nobody here but us Americans,” the caption said.

  “You know, Maudie,” he said as he bit into his toast with a savage emphasis, “white folks baffle me sometimes.”

  “Baffle me, too, but I stopped trying to guess ’em fifty years ago. Won’t do you no good, believe me. Don’t think they know what they doin’ themselves, half the time. Best not to trust ’em, either, you got any such ideas.”

  “What ideas?”

  “You and that Orrin Knox and the President I heard about it.”

  “Maudie,” he said mockingly, “you’ve been peeking. Wasn’t anybody supposed to know about that.”

  “Whole wide world knows. They say you stoogin’ for Orrin Knox.”

  “So they say,” he agreed with an airiness he did not entirely feel. She sniffed.

  “Needn’t get smart about it. Gettin’ smart cost you a wife. Not that she’s worth keepin’, seems to me.”

  “I don’t care what it seems to you,” he said sharply. “You keep your opinions of my wife to yourself, hear? Also your opinions about my being smart. I’m not being smart. I’m doing what I think I have to do for the United States of America, that’s all.”

  “What the United States of America do for you?” she demanded. He snorted.

  “Got me in Congress making enough money to support one loudmouthed old woman who isn’t worth what I pay her. That’s what.”

  “Hmph,” she said, trying to sound angry but ending up in spite of herself in a chuckle that gurgled into a laugh. “Guess that ain’t much. Bet my grandpappy do better than that as a slave.”

  “Okay,” he said, for the first time since yesterday afternoon feeling amused and a little relaxed, “you just think about this as Cullee’s Castle, fine old plantation down in Georgia, and see how you make out. Don’t bother me about food money, that’s all. Just raise your own ’taters and corn down there in the pasture and don’t bother me, that’s all I ask of you, Maudie.”

  “Feed you on fatback and hominy,” she said. “Be lucky you get that. What you going to do now about all this?”

  “All what?”

  “Her and him. Orrin Knox and them. All this stuff you tearing yourself to pieces about. All this mess you mixed up in.”

  “Why, I don’t know,” he said, finishing his coffee and getting ready to depart. “I expect I’ll just play it by ear and see how it goes, Maudie. I’ve got me a resolution that’s going to take some doing to get through the Congress. I expect that’ll keep me busy for a day or two, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Going up to New York with all them high-flyin’ Africans, too? Understand you’re a mighty important man now, up there at the UN, well as here in Congress. How you going to ride all your horses at once, you ever think of that?”

  “I’ve thought of it. I’ll tell you in a couple of weeks.”

  “Be down in the pasture with my corn and ’taters when you want me. Also be here when you come home. That’s important too, I think, have somebody here when you come home.”

  “It is,” he said gratefully. “Guess I won’t sell old Maudie, after all. She’s too good a slave to sell.”

  “Get on, now,” she said, shooing him out the door. “You goin’ smilin’; now you come back smilin’, you hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll try.”

  But he was not at all sure that he could; nor did he anticipate that the da
y’s events would put him in a much better mood, even though he knew that much of a decisive nature would probably occur on his resolution before he again parked his car at the house off Sixteenth Street.

  “But, my dear boy,” the querulous, familiar old voice said swiftly over the telephone, “I don’t really think we can afford to go along with this pretense by Orrin that he doesn’t have a political interest in this. It’s so blatant, my dear boy. So fearfully blatant. I think no true liberal can afford to ignore his obvious motivation, even if it is tending toward a constructive result.”

  The executive director of the Washington Post sighed a heavy sigh that was promptly taken up at the other end of the line.

  “Now what’s the matter?” Justice Davis asked sharply. “Have I offended you in some way? You must tell me if I have. I’m only trying to be helpful, you know. I’m only trying to assist the liberal cause.”

  “Yes, Mr. Justice,” the executive director of the Post said patiently. “I’m sure we all appreciate your efforts and welcome your support.”

  “Well, then,” Tommy Davis said triumphantly, “don’t sigh at me when I’m being helpful. It makes me feel unwelcome. I don’t like it.”

  “I’m sorry. What do you want us to do about Orrin?”

  “What were you planning to do?” Mr. Justice Davis shot back promptly. The executive director of the Post shook his head in a puzzled fashion that he was glad the Justice could not see. The Justice, for all that he had gone into a spell of deep depression following the tragic outcome of his involvement in the attempt to bring Brigham Anderson into line on the Leffingwell nomination six months ago, had snapped back with remarkable vigor in the past few weeks. Now he was his old self again, lecturing his colleagues on the Supreme Court, fighting publicly with the Chief Justice, advising the Post and anyone else who would listen on how to conduct the affairs of the world. He was one of the few major participants in the crucible of the Leffingwell business who seemed to have come through it with an unshaken certainty in his own righteousness. The executive director of the Post suspected that a good deal of this was on the surface and that underneath the busy little Justice still felt moments of horrified doubt and unhappiness about Senator Anderson’s suicide; but for the practical purposes of the working day, he seemed to be quite himself again. The executive director of the Post wished the same could be said for everyone who had been involved. Certainly he had been badly shaken by the experience, and he still was.

  “My dear boy,” Tommy Davis chided from the other end of the line, “stop brooding and answer my question. What are you planning to do about Orrin?”

  “Probably the same thing you would do in the same position. Let him have it.”

  “Right between the eyes, I hope,” Justice Davis said with some spite. “The utter gall of attempting to appropriate the liberal position on the racial issue! How dare he, my dear boy; really, how dare he?”

  “He didn’t get where he is by reticence.”

  “Who does he think he’s fooling?”

  “No one, when we get through with him, I trust.”

  The Justice made a pleased little encouraging sound.

  “Good! I am so glad to hear you say that, my dear boy. Frankly, I was beginning to wonder about you lately.”

  “Oh? How’s that?”

  “It has seemed to me that your devotion to the liberal position has been somewhat—tentative—in the last six months. I don’t think the paper has been swinging as hard as it should on some of these clear-cut issues.”

  “Since when has there been a clear-cut issue?” the executive director of the Post inquired. “I don’t recall one, of late.”

  “Never admit it, my dear boy!” Justice Davis ordered. “No true believer can afford to admit that there might be two sides to a question. That destroys our whole position. It lets Them get the advantage. Surely I don’t have to tell the Post that, with all your fine record along those lines!”

  “We appreciate your compliments, Tommy,” the executive director said dryly. “But right now there is a rather delicate problem involved. How do we handle Cullee Hamilton, for instance? What do we do about LeGage Shelby? Is Orrin really involved the way we think, or isn’t he? After all, we only have Seab Cooley’s word to go on. I never thought we’d rely on Seab to justify our position on anything.”

  “Never hesitate!” the Justice said sternly. “Never doubt! And why worry whether it’s Seab or someone else? It suits the purpose, doesn’t it? Anyway, we both know it’s true, whoever says it. Orrin Knox has only one motivation in this, only one. He wants the Presidency, he’ll do anything to get it, this is only one more phase of it, and he’s got to be stopped, my dear boy. He’s simply got to be stopped!”

  “I agree with you there. But it seems to me we have to proceed with some care, considering our traditional position on racial matters and the fact that Cullee is so directly involved.”

  “If there’s anything I despise,” the Justice said sharply, “it’s these Negroes who play the white man’s game. Really!”

  “You seem to approve of some of them,” the executive director said mildly.

  “Why wasn’t he down there in Charleston doing the only proper thing any self-respecting Negro could do after I handed down my injunction? The law of it was on my side; not even Charleston’s attorneys challenge that. He should have leaped at the chance to follow through. Instead he left it to a foreigner! Prince Terry had to do it for him. I should think he’d be ashamed!”

  “Maybe he is. Maybe that’s why he’s decided to take this action in the Congress now.”

  “Only because Orrin put him up to it,” the Justice said triumphantly. “So there we are again, back to Orrin.”

  “Yes. Back to Orrin.”

  “Do let him have it,” Tommy Davis urged. “Write the editorial yourself, and let him have it. Anything that can stop him from becoming President is all to the good, my dear boy, you know that. In the face of stopping Orrin, all else pales. It really does, my dear boy. Furthermore, most of the press seems to think so, too. I hear there have been several editorials already pointing out the truth about this.”

  “You get around, don’t you?”

  “I have my spies,” the Justice said with satisfaction.

  “What’s next in Charleston, by the way?”

  “They’re coming back with another appeal tomorrow, but I won’t entertain it. The injunction stands until the whole thing comes up to us from below through the regular court channels again. It will take some time.”

  “Well,” the executive director said, “I’ll see what can be done about Orrin from here.”

  “I know you’ll think of a way to separate him from Cullee.”

  “Even though we agree entirely with what he and Cullee are trying to do?”

  “You can do it, my boy!” Tommy Davis said with great confidence. “The Post knows how!”

  But the world this morning, the executive director thought with a sigh as the bustling little voice went off the wire, was not so simple a proposition as that. Indeed, it was becoming less and less simple as time went by. Old certainties were being shaken, the old righteous—and self-righteous—positions were being challenged by the rush of events. The world was no longer the happy, open-and-shut proposition it used to appear to be when viewed through a certain highly-publicized angle of the ideological eyeglass; the comfortable assumptions that had once been accepted without question, the pleasantly rigid certainties that formed so comforting a foundation for a shaky universe were no longer so valid. The smugly arrogant denials of intelligence and honor to one’s opponents, which had for so long characterized certain notable companions in the cause, were shattered now a dozen times a day upon the hard rocks of a world in disarray.

  Now it was no longer enough to cry with a high, ringing certainty, “This is their position, down with it! This is our position, up with it!” There was too much inter-blending, too much commingling, too much of the one in the other. Now the Unite
d States had been brought to a position of peril all around the globe, and on both sides, he knew with an unhappy inner honesty, men must share equal blame for it.

  But of course it would never do to admit it. On that point the Justice was always and eternally right. The slightest concession to fairness and They, as Tommy called them, would indeed swarm over you. The comfortable slogans, the automatic thinking, the shielding, protective certainties that did away with the necessity for unsettling objectivity and did so much to make the world seem secure—they might be withering away in your mind and heart, you might even be subject to a certain genuine terror now as you realized how much you might have shared, however idealistically, in bringing your country to her present desperate position—but it would never do to admit it in public. That would indeed be abandoning the lifeline; that would indeed be throwing away the anchor. That would demand a courage and a character that were really too much to ask in times like these.

  He pulled his typewriter toward him with an impatient yank and felt the gradual, warming surcease of doubt, the reassuring, womb-like return of certainty, as his practiced fingers began to fly over the keys:

  “Despite our solid endorsement and support of the purposes of the resolution offered by Rep. Cullee Hamilton in the House yesterday, we cannot overlook the strong suspicion that it may, in essence, be nothing more than a stalking-horse for Secretary of State Orrin Knox in his incessant—and interminable—campaign to win the Presidency.

  “We do not blame Rep. Hamilton for being taken in by the shrewd ambitions of a practiced politician. Inexperience is no man’s fault, and we wish his resolution well.

  “Even so, we cannot escape the conclusion that …”

  And so, the President thought as he walked slowly along the arcade beside the Rose Garden toward his office in the gentle air, one faced decisions and one made them, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, more often, perhaps, with uncertainty and doubt and a prayer that subsequent events might prove them to be right. He had wanted LeGage off the delegation and Cullee on, he had given LeGage enough rope, and it had come about as he had planned. Now it remained to be seen whether this was the right course, when all was said and done.