(1964) The Man (41 page)

“Okay, so how are you to behave? Just be yourself? Who in the hell are you, anyway? I’m sure you don’t know. Maybe I don’t know, either, but maybe I have a better idea than you do. You are our President. That’s a fact. You are an American citizen. That’s a fact. You are a Negro American. That’s a fact. Because of the last, the pigmentation of your skin, you are different from any other President in our history. That’s a fact. What does this mean to you? Does it mean you act like a minority party who’s now king of the hill and going to put his heel in everyone else’s face? Does it mean you act like somebody who wandered into the wrong house, and you better beat it quick before you’re arrested? Does it mean you act like you know you don’t belong because you are different, and you back away and hide? Or does it mean you act like a human being who has inherited, through no wish of his own, the toughest job on earth, and you know it, and they out there know it, and you are going to fill that job like any human being fills any job he has to do?”

Dilman stared past Abrahams’ shoulder, twisting his cigar, twisting it until the tobacco leaf flaked. “Thank you, Nat. Very good in a Northern courtroom, where there’s a sanctified air of reason. Not very good here, where I’m servant to a mass of two hundred and thirty million who don’t always observe rules or reason.” His troubled eyes met Abraham’s eyes. “Your premise is not built on solid ground, Nat. You need one more fact, and it’s missing. Out there, even to the best of them, I’m not a human being. That’s it. I’m not a human being.”

“Doug, for God’s sake—”

“Facts, Nat, two lawyers addressing themselves to facts. You don’t want me to be a mean Negro or a servile Negro or a Negro in white face. You want me to be a human being who has a job called President, and to serve the job as a human being. How can I? Who’ll let me? What happens if I slip out of here one day, unrecognized, with Wanda for my wife, with nobody knowing who we are, and travel across the country? What am I then? Human being? I’m a nigger like any other nigger—you can’t tell one from another, you know—in the South and Southwest, and a Negro in the East and North and West. That’s what I am, Nat, when I’m not pretending to be senator or President. I’m a black man, nothing more. None of the government and organization language, like education, employment, equal suffrage, good housing, public accommodations, none of that is out there. It’s a simpler language out there. It says if you stand in line an hour in a market or store, and it’s come to be your turn, and a white man walks in, he gets served first. It says if you’ve got a hunger pang in your belly, and want to park at the first hamburger slop-joint you see, you can’t, because they won’t let you in. It says if your wife’s got to go to the bathroom, and there’s no public rest room she can get into, she’d better have a good bladder. It says if your throat is parched, and you want a Coke, just a lousy Coke, you can’t find a place to buy one, nowhere, no, sir. It says if you’re exhausted and grimy on the road and want to stop overnight, there’s not a hotel or motel with a vacancy when you ask. It says what Roy Wilkins always used to say, that every time you step out of your front door in the morning, until you come home and shut the door in the evening, you run the risk or certainty of all this kind of mistreatment and denial and humiliation. That’s the real language out there, Nat, and it reminds you, in case you ever tend to forget, that you’re not a human being, not here, not now, but a black man, meaning a half man.

“Sure I am President, Nat, but I’m not forgetting, and no one will let me forget, I am a black man, not yet qualified for human being, let alone for President. No matter how I feel, I can only act one way, Nat, only one way, and that’s as if I’m a servant of T. C., keeping the house in order while he’s away. . . . It’s the old story I used to hear a Negro deacon tell when I was a little boy. He told it from the pulpit. ‘Ef yo’ say to de white man, “Ain’t yo’ forget yo’ hat?” he say, “Nigger, go get it!”’ That’s got to be my job, Nat, getting T. C.’s hat.”

Nat Abrahams was too deeply moved, too filled with white man’s guilts, to plead further with Dilman. He knew that he should accept Dilman’s view of reality but try to broaden it, to help him see more clearly his role and future. It was no use now, impossible, after this confessional. For years he and Dilman had openly discussed the Negro problem, and yet he could not recall any other time when he had heard his friend sound so passionately embittered.

“Okay, Doug,” Abrahams said quietly, “you’ll get T. C.’s hat. But there are a few other things you have a right to do, to instigate, to press, on your own. You have a right—”

Dilman held up a tired hand. “Nat, I have no more rights here than I have out there. Maybe fewer here. Someday, it might be different. But this is here and now. Don’t you think I’m aware of what’s going on? Don’t you think I know everything there is to know about the New Succession Bill they’re rushing through? Why all this speed from my colleagues on the Hill? Because they can’t forget I’m Negro and they don’t trust me, don’t want me to put in an Ethiopian Cabinet, with a black Secretary of State who might one day succeed me. And you know what, Nat—I’m not going to veto it. No, sir.”

“You should.”

“No, sir. I’m not going to sign it ‘Approved,’ either, but I’m not going to veto it. I’m going to let it sit on my desk ten days and a Sunday, and let it pass into law without either my approval or disapproval. It’ll get knocked out eventually by the Supreme Court, anyway. But I’ll play their little game, so they feel safer, so they know I’m not peopling the succession line with recruits from the Crispus Society or NAACP. I’m letting them know that I know my place, and I’ll do what I’m supposed to do, like it or not. If I didn’t, Nat, I’d be inviting real trouble for every Negro, let alone for myself, and for the unity of the country at large.”

“Maybe it’s time for that,” said Abrahams.

“It’ll never be time for that until my wife can go into any restroom in the land, and until a Negro can walk through the front door of the White House by popular demand.” He pushed himself away from the table. “It could be worse, Nat. I inherited some pretty good people from T. C. I know Governor Talley isn’t too smart, but he gets things done. Secretary Eaton is crafty and helpful, and a gentleman. As far as I can tell, the Cabinet is a good one. As for the bills pending, the minorities bill, the crisis in Africa, I think I can’t go far wrong listening to T. C.’s advisers. After all, they want what’s best for the country, too.”

Abrahams slipped his pipe back into his coat pocket. “Everyone wants what’s best for the country. Everyone isn’t always right.” He tried to smile. “Read the fine print, Doug. There’s always fine print.”

“Don’t worry, Nat. Maybe I’m serving T. C., but I can’t rubber-stamp his name. It’s got to be my name affixed to everything. And I always read what I sign.”

“Good enough,” said Abrahams. He saw Dilman stretch and yawn, and he stood up. “First session adjourned, Doug. I’d better get back to poor Sue, and you’d better get what sleep you can.”

“I think that’s best, Nat. I’m bushed. Let me walk you to the elevator.”

Only later, when he was by himself in the elevator, was Nat Abrahams relieved that Sue had not come to dinner. He knew that she would have wept.

Douglass Dilman was alone in the dimly lighted intimacy of the Lincoln Bedroom, in his baggy pajamas, slumped in the Victorian velvet-covered chair, downing the last of his sherry and trying to read the completed Minorities Rehabilitation Program Bill.

It was no use. The long day, the dinner, the Bordeaux, the sherry, had made him heavy-lidded and drowsy. He cast the printed bill on the marble-topped table, placed the sherry glass next to it, and tried to think of what Nat Abrahams had said and what he had said. He was too fatigued to recall exactly. His memory slid off to Wanda, to Julian, to Leroy Poole, to Arthur Eaton, to Sally Watson, to Clay Kemmler and the Cabinet, and then slid past them, searching for respite.

He heaved himself out of the chair, tightened the cord of his pajama trousers, and peered at the Empire clock. It was after midnight. He turned off the lamp, padded in his flopping slippers to turn off two more, pausing once to examine the handwritten copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and then giving up because the words ran together and blurred.

Yawning, he shuffled to the giant rosewood bed, sat on it, kicked off his slippers, stuffed his weary, middle-aged body between the white sheets, and reached over to turn off the last global lamp.

In the welcome darkness he fell back against the pillow.

He knew that sleep was coming swiftly, and his tired mind groped for one noble good-night thought, one lofty sentiment, to commemorate this unique historic occasion, a black President ready to slumber his first night in the white man’s White House.

He tried to evoke something of Abe Lincoln’s wisdom, since he rested in Abe Lincoln’s bed. He sought words . . . noble . . . lofty . . . historic . . . malice toward none . . . charity for all . . . firmness in the right . . . in the right . . . in the right . . . in rights, rights, rights.

It had gone, as sleep suffused him, and what remained was an old Negro jingle chanted among the shanties . . . noble . . . lofty . . . historic . . .

Sorry . . . Mistah . . . Lincoln . . . ah’s skeered . . . skeered . . . skeered.

He turned on his side, curling beneath the thick white blanket, seeking and nearing the warm encompassing safety of night oblivion. There was one moment’s lucidity before sleep drew nothingness over it.

One moment’s thought: How hard this bed is, how hard and big and white, too hard for a soft man, too big for a small man, yet maybe, maybe, not too white for a black man. Maybe.

Douglass Dilman, President of the United States, slept at last.

T
he stars and Stripes, whipping from the pole above the White House, was no longer at half-mast.

It had given Douglass Dilman a small shock when Crystal, fifteen minutes ago, had delivered this fact to him with his breakfast tray, in the second-floor Yellow Oval Room. She had proudly described the event as an eyewitness: yesterday, coming to work, she had seen the flag hanging limply midway down the pole; today, coming to work, she had seen it billowing in the wind at the very top of the flagstaff. She had reported the change as if it were a momentous event.

Remembering Crystal’s glowing face now, as he gulped down his coffee, Dilman supposed that she was right. The returning of the nation’s banner to its normal position meant that the thirty-day period of national mourning had ended. On this day, four weeks and two days since he had taken office, the beginning of his second month as President, his fellow countrymen would do an about-face. They would cease looking backward. They would look ahead again, and find him before their eyes. They would begin looking at him, at him and no one else. Not that they hadn’t already done so, he thought wryly.

A vicious editorial, in one of Zeke Miller’s more Southern newspapers, came to mind: “Citizens, keep your Old Glories at half-mast for the rest of Dilman’s term, not in mourning for T. C., but in mourning for the death of our dignity and stature as a nation.” But now Crystal had told him, in effect, that Miller’s advice had not been followed, that this day the flag once more celebrated at full-mast a living President.

Yes, he thought, today it’s official. They would all be looking at him, and he did not like it. He was not ready for their total scrutiny and judgment.

He drank his coffee in haste, knowing that today would be another busy and trying day, even more trying than the ones that had preceded it. When the telephone at his elbow rang genteelly, as befitted its station in the gracious damask room, and then musically rang again, Dilman was not surprised. Lately Edna Foster had been starting off his mornings with these calls from her office because there were more and more messages awaiting his reluctant arrival, acting like so many powerful magnets trying to draw him into a day that he shrank from attending.

With a sigh he gave the saucer back its cup, and answered the telephone before it could begin its third summons.

The caller was Edna Foster.

After assuring her that she had not disturbed him, not at all, that he was dressed and fed and almost prepared to come downstairs, he listened for the inevitable.

“There are several messages, Mr. President—”

“Yes, Miss Foster.”

“Grover Illingsworth called in a terrible panic—I mean for him.”

Dilman enjoyed good humor for the first time this morning. Visualizing Illingsworth in a panic was as difficult as picturing a waxen Prince Albert in Madame Tussaud’s trying to slap a fly off his nose. Ever since Kwame Amboko, the President of Baraza, had arrived two days ago, the tanned, tall patrician Chief of Protocol had been a dominant part of Dilman’s life. Everything about Illingsworth was formidable—he was Back Bay Boston, his English so precise as to sound faintly foreign, his chalk-striped gray suits as impressive as a military uniform, his knowledge of
Burke’s Peerage
and
Almanach de Gotha
as thorough as his fluency in French, German, Italian, Spanish was expert—yet he did not make Dilman cower. And this instant, Dilman realized why: because, as Chief of Protocol, Illingsworth regarded all heads of state as equals without regard to their race, religion, or background. When you rode in jet planes or jeeps or on horseback with leaders of millions of people in Ireland, in Spain, in Nigeria, in Iran, in India, in Japan, you charted men by their position in life and not by their color. To Illingsworth, Dilman was one more head of state, like so many black or yellow ones he had known and dealt with, and he was easy and casual with Dilman, and Dilman felt relaxed and natural with him. But this man phoning in a panic? Had Miss Foster taken leave of her senses?

“What is he upset about?” Dilman asked. “Is anything really wrong?”

“Tonight’s State Dinner you are giving for President Amboko. Mr. Illingsworth knows the menu is set, but he just found out Amboko is a vegetarian!”