A Shade of Difference

by Allen Drury

  All of this, however, was far from the little world of the little boy who was born in Lena, S.C. to a field-hand father and a housemaid mother, striving with only a fair success to maintain some shred of stability in a hand-to-mouth existence for themselves and the five children Providence saw fit to give them in quick succession. His father had died when Cullee was eight, killed in a tractor accident on the broad acres of some big house. Cullee remembered him only as a towering, sweating, absent-minded, almost illiterate presence who in his concluding years took to drink with increasing frequency and ferocity, until toward the end his mother would bar the door of their cabin at night and send her children secretly away to hide with neighbors while she faced her husband alone. But she always did face him; that was one of the major things her children always remembered, and would remember until they died: she always did. The tenacity of character in that gaunt little body amazed them then when they half understood it and amazed them even more now that they appreciated it to the full. Sometimes she suffered beatings for her courage, but more often there was only a brooding silence that gripped the household after she had faced their father down, nursed him through a day or two of oblivion, and then called them home to resume their family living. Once in the midst of this, when the parents still were barely speaking to one another and a fearful hush lay upon the household, his father had suddenly lain his head on the table and started to cry.

  “You so good,” he said finally in a wondering voice, as though if she weren’t it would be so much easier for him, as of course it would. “You so good.” His mother had said nothing, but her oldest boy had agreed, in silence and with a fierce, protective love that blazed in him still. She was indeed; and to some degree everything he had done and was doing and would continue to do was an attempt to make up to her for the hard life she had been forced to lead in those early years.

  Out of that life, of course, had come one Congressman, two doctors, a professor, and the happily married wife of one of the nation’s rising young electronics scientists; so that much more than a casual flame burned in that indomitable heart. What had they all received from their father, aside from physical size, the Congressman often wondered in succeeding years; possibly some capacity for endurance and for pain, some streak of sensitivity beneath it all that had prompted him to realize the nature of the woman his life had run beside. Perhaps what he gave them was symbolized by whatever it was that had brought that harsh, hopeless, unhappy admission of her superiority on that long-ago night. Life did not explain these things, and who could say? His children tried to be fair to him in their own minds, but there was no doubt where their loyalty lay. “In the jargon, of course,” his youngest brother had remarked after medical school had given him the jargon, “you know we’re all of us definitely mother-oriented. But after all,” he added with a cheerful grin, “what else could we be, under the circumstances?”

  Under the circumstances, they all knew now, it was their mother who pushed them, with a fierce pride that drove none of them harder than it did herself, onto the paths they were all successfully to pursue. She had always kept herself neat; she had always reiterated over and over to them that they must keep themselves neat; she had emphasized diligence and courtesy and “respect for your betters”; she had drummed into them thrift and respectability and “all the other homely old virtues that nobody gives a damn about in this day and age,” as his next-to-youngest brother had remarked with a bitter-edged irony not long ago. And it was true. She had been determined, with a determination almost frightening in its intensity, that they should amount to something, that they should make their place in the world, that they should all of them rise higher than any of their forebears ever had in a society which could concede them many things but would only rarely forgive them the fact that they were black.

  To their mother this had seemed the preordained way of things, and to her generation, hearing the approaching drums of protest but too tradition-bound to answer them, the Negro’s “place” was approximately what a good many of their white countrymen, North and South, thought it was. For Cullee and his brothers and sister this was not so easy to accept. “You made us too proud,” he had told her once when she was protesting in considerable alarm his unsuccessful attempt to enter the University of South Carolina. “You made us too proud to take all this stuff. Don’t blame us if we act like you taught us.”

  “Like I taught you?” she had demanded, arguing with every line of her taut little figure, as she always did. “You aren’t acting like I taught you. You’re getting ’way above yourself, Cullee. You’re going to fall.”

  “Above myself?” he had cried in a sudden, harsh anger. “Where’s that? Who’s above me and what’s above myself? Not anybody! Isn’t anybody in this world better than Cullee Hamilton. Not anybody!”

  But it was not, of course, that simple, and he realized it early. The carefully circumscribed world in which Negroes lived, the servilely defensive mechanisms by which they were able to maintain their tenuous position in a white society and preserve to themselves in the midst of it some semblance of personal identity and independence, were impressed upon him, as upon all his race, as soon as he was able to perceive that there was a world outside the narrow limits bounded by the cabin, the neighbors, his father’s sadness, and his mother’s courage. The quivering attention to the white man’s mood, the desperate readiness to subordinate one’s own wishes to his, the constant planning so that he would not be offended and would not become either too fond of you or too hostile toward you, the endless rearranging of one’s life to suit his arbitrary rules for governing your conduct—all of these were soon, too soon, a part of his growing up. Something as simple as going to the bathroom became a major issue when you were in town with your mother. There were only one or two widely separated places where you could go, and very early you learned that on shopping days you mustn’t drink too much water in the morning because you wouldn’t be able to urinate, unless you used back alleys, which your mother’s pride wouldn’t permit you to do, until you got home again. And you sat in certain places in buses and streetcars, and you entered only certain doors that were marked for you, and you attempted to walk down the street in an inconspicuous manner, and you learned not to listen to what the white man was saying, unless of course you were supposed to hear, in which case you learned to laugh just a little too loudly and just a little too heartily to reassure him that yassuh, boss, he was indeed the Lord of Creation and you his admiring vassal, constantly surprised anew by his wisdom and his all-knowing superiority and his ineffable and incomparable wit.

  He hated it, the whole artificial contraption, the whole strange, awkward, childishly inhuman forcing of life out of its normal pattern to suit the whole strange, awkward, childishly inhuman concept of the relation of the races that dominated the society of the South. It therefore came to him as a great shock when he discovered that, for all the pious speeches and the noble pretenses that flooded the printed page and the troubled channels of the air, essentially the same concept also dominated the society of the North.

  It was a while, however, before this became a major factor in his life, for first there came the growing up, the going to grammar and high school, the gradual but definite realization that he and his brothers and sister had been favored with an intelligence and drive far beyond the level that kept so many of their contemporaries content to remain within the agreed-upon boundaries that separated the white and colored worlds. Ironically, the very fact that they were superior drew the white man’s approval and help. “I wonder what would have happened to us if we hadn’t become fashionable?” his sister had mused wryly once, and he had responded quickly, “Just the same thing.” But they were honest enough to acknowledge that they weren’t so sure. At least it wouldn’t have been quite as easy as it turned out to be, thanks to their mother’s pride, their own ability, and the desire of the white man to ease his conscience with a few good examples to point to.

  By the time he entered high sc
hool, “Kate Hamilton and her kids” had become the favorite project of half a dozen white families. This guaranteed them ample clothing, hand-me-down but substantial; enough food, often home-cooked and hand-delivered; more than enough housework for his mother, and, as they came along to working age, enough for all of them to make a modest but solid living, to purchase a small house in the colored section of town, to begin to live a life that was, by Negro standards, prosperous and good. Along with many other purposes, this served also the possibly subconscious but nonetheless powerful psychological need of those who gave them assistance. “I swear I can’t put up with some of these shiftless niggers,” they would say, sometimes in the Hamiltons’ hearing. “But Kate Hamilton and her kids are different. It’s a pleasure to do for them. Now, if they were all like that—”

  If they were all like that, he suspected, the situation would still be exactly the same; but it did not seem to him that the family should refuse the help so kindly given, whatever the motivation. In this his brothers and sister concurred, though for a time his mother’s pride was sufficiently hurt by what she regarded essentially as being patronized that she was inclined to be grudging and prickly in her acceptance of it. Those who gave assistance would have been horrified to be told that they were being patronizing, for to them it was a perfectly genuine expression of kindness between the races. In time his mother came to accept it as such and not worry about its subtler aspects. Kate Hamilton and her kids prospered and learned much about the delicate art of being successfully black in a white man’s world.

  For Cullee and his mother there had been no such dramatic confrontation with the gods as had been granted Terence Ajkaje and his mother on a storm-rocked night far away in Africa; yet at roughly the same time in their respective lives there had come to the Hamiltons, too, the conviction that there was waiting for the oldest son a destiny rather more special than that reserved for most of his contemporaries.

  The direction this was to take did not become apparent until he had graduated with high honors from high school and decided to go to Columbia University, far away in the magic North. This decision he made and adhered to despite the urgings of the president of the bank where he had been handyman that he stay there and try eventually to work up to clerk. Somehow this did not seem quite the future for his obvious intelligence, at least in his own mind.

  “You’re a smart boy; it’s a good life,” his employer had said. “You can’t expect much better down here.”

  “Maybe I’m not going to stay down here,” he had said.

  ‘You won’t like it up there,” his employer predicted. “You’ll make more money and they’ll make over you some, maybe, but they won’t understand you. You won’t be with your friends.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” he said.

  “The bank’ll be here,” his employer said. “Come back when you’ve had enough of it.”

  “I’ll never come back,” he had said flatly; and, of course, he never had, except to get his mother and take her to California when events conspired to send him West.

  When he first entered Columbia, however, he would have been astonished had anyone told him that California would become, in time, a major factor in his existence. The thing that filled his mind then was the wonder of being out of the South, of being in the North, of being in a society where nobody gave a damn about your skin and only judged you for what you were.

  This kindly illusion lasted roughly three months, during which he was given quite a rush by many of his white classmates and the self-consciously tolerant groups to which they belonged. How self-conscious, he did not realize at first, but it was not long before he began to be aware that for all their outward camaraderie there was a subtle shade of difference, invisible but unmistakable, tenuous as fog but hurtful as acid, that separated him from his newly found white friends. His colored friends told him with raucous sarcasm that he was being a fool, that it had all happened to them too, that just because he was big and good-looking and obviously bright he was being patronized, as they had been, to help white pretensions preen and white consciences rest easy.

  “You just wait,” one of them said, a star athlete as Cullee seemed likely to be. “One of these days you’ll get the final tribute. Some one of these white babes will go to bed with you and you’ll think, by God, now I’ve arrived, she really likes me. But don’t kid yourself. She likes black skin and the chance to tell her pals how democratic she is. But as for you, she couldn’t care less.”

  And when it happened, exactly as his friend had predicted, he tried desperately to convince himself that it wasn’t as empty as that. But he knew with a withering certainty in his heart that it was.

  For a time the shock of finding in the North the matching side of the coin his race found in the South—made, if anything, more unbearable because it was so damnably patronizing and so utterly false in its pretensions of humanity and tolerance that always evaporated instantly at the slightest attempt to establish any sort of genuine interdependence—was enough to throw him into a mental and emotional turmoil that sadly jeopardized his private stability and scholastic record. He did not do well in his year at Columbia, basically because he had hoped for so much from the North and found so little. You could take New York with all its phonies and blow it off the map, he concluded bitterly after the tenth or fifteenth or twentieth hectic all-night party on Morningside Heights at which blowsy, hairy, bespectacled girls and blowsy, hairy, bespectacled boys proclaimed at the top of their lungs through a haze of cigarette smoke and cheap liquor how much they loved humanity, particularly its blacker sections. They didn’t love anybody but themselves, he decided, and they wouldn’t give him or any other Negro the time of day if it didn’t bolster their fearfully insecure egos to do so. He was sick of the lot and ready to try being black again by the time the scholastic year ended. He had reached the conclusion that he could not escape his race, and, furthermore, did not want to.

  There were various colored colleges available to go to, but a growing interest in politics and government led him inevitably to Howard University in Washington. His mother had given him, among other things, a temperament that did not believe in taking things lying down, and confronted as he was by the tragic tangle of black-white relationships in his country, it was basic to his character that he should start looking about for ways to contribute what he could to its solution. The chances for a Negro in politics were slim at best, but three were serving in the Congress when he came to Washington, and it was part of his nature that he should begin to think, secretly and not always daring to admit it fully to himself, that someday he might follow the same road. It seemed to him that the trend was in the times, that the steady spread of the franchise to the Negro in all but the most stubborn areas of the South, together with the rising economic level of his race, made it within the grasp of possibility in his lifetime. He had not been on campus two days before he met someone else who felt the same and, with an urgent candor that surprised and delighted him, said as much with an impatient enthusiasm that made him want to get out and start running for office at once.

  Most of the people who are destined to mean the most to a life enter it without any special fanfare, and so it had been in this instance. He had been standing in line before one of the registration desks awaiting his turn when a tall, rangy figure had come alongside and asked abruptly if it could borrow a pencil. Hardly even bothering to turn his head, he had smiled and automatically said yes. “You might at least look at me,” the rangy figure had said, holding out a hand with a demanding air. “I’m LeGage Shelby.” “Okay,” he had said with a grin, shaking the hand and giving its owner a startled, amused glance, “I’m Cullee Hamilton.” “Get through registering and let’s have lunch,” ’Gage had said, and he had nodded, feeling flattered and also interested. Once years later he had asked LeGage how he happened to come up to him so abruptly that morning and ’Gage had shrugged. “Who ever knows what draws people to one another?” he said. “You looked like a good guy.
” He grinned. “I guess I must have, too. You didn’t say no when I asked you to lunch.”

  As a matter of fact, he thought moodily now, finishing his dessert and exchanging some meaningless remark with the Secretary-General as they waited for the bill, he had rarely said no to LeGage on anything thereafter. By nightfall, after a continuing talk that had ranged over every conceivable subject that could occupy two adolescent minds, they had decided to room together and dedicate themselves, in tandem, to the improvement of the Negro race. It had not taken them long to admit to each other that this was their secret aim in life, and it had not taken LeGage long to translate it into the practical terms that Cullee himself had already begun to think about. “I think you should go into politics and I should manage you,” ’Gage had said abruptly. “With my brains and your beauty, we couldn’t lose.” “Thanks so much,” Cullee smiled. “We’ll see who contributes what, but anyway, it sounds like a good idea to me.”