A Shade of Difference (61 page)

Three: Cullee Hamilton’s Book

1

And so in the course of the Almighty’s unpredictable unravelings of the puzzles He sets for men, the fearsome burden of the world’s troubles had come to rest for a time upon the shoulders of the Congressman from California; and as he stood in the Delegates’ Lounge and watched the sputum of the terribly, terribly self-righteous young man from Kenya stain slowly into the green rug at his feet, he held desperately to just one thought: Thank God they’re broad shoulders—thank God they’re broad. He knew he had to hold to some such thought and think very hard of nothing else, for otherwise, despite the gently restraining hand of the Secretary-General on his arm, he would draw back an enormous fist and in a lightning insensate reaction the smug young man from Kenya would be suddenly and sadly damaged and put out of commission for quite some time. And that, of course, would be exactly the kind of scandal the smug young man from Kenya and all his friends and encouragers were hoping for.

So instead Cullee remained for a long moment with his head lowered and in his eyes a gleam of such contempt that the young man from Kenya, for all his brash arrogance, was frightened and abashed and presently turned away with an uneasy, self-conscious shrug that somehow did not look at all as brave and scornful as he intended. Nonetheless, the fact of his contemptuous action remained; and after a moment the talk began around them again, with an extra excitement and liveliness now in the wake of this new unanswered affront to the United States. In a moment the whole Lounge was buzzing with it. Nearby a group of reporters buzzed with it too, and it would not be long before the whole wide world would buzz. Of such noble items was the story of mankind composed in this sad, chaotic age.

“I think perhaps we had best go up to lunch, now,” the Secretary-General said calmly at his side, and after a moment he allowed himself to be turned away and led out of the huge room where Rumor was king and Gossip prime minister. As they left he caught one more glimpse of the quartet by the window, out of the corner of his eye and hardly in focus, but clearly enough so that even as he deliberately tried not to look he could see again the sardonic smile of the M’Bulu, the little air of satisfaction on the Panamanian Ambassador’s face, LeGage’s strained and embittered expression, the self-consciously scornful look of his wife. Don’t be so show-offy, little Sue-Dan, he told her silently: don’t be so show-offy or your big man will— Only that wasn’t true, he caught himself up blankly: her big man wouldn’t do anything at all, the way things stood now. And he did not know when they would change, or if they would.

It was therefore in a closed-off unhappy world of his own, lost in his thoughts and barely able to be civil, that he permitted himself to be taken over the soft carpets to the elevator and so up to the fourth floor to the Delegates’ Dining Room. In the elevator, as they stepped in, the Indian Ambassador was talking rapidly to the delegate of Ghana; before they fell abruptly silent, K.K.’s “an obvious piece of smarmy political lollygagging in the hopes he can get to the Senate” came clearly to his ears. He started to swing about angrily, but again the S.-G.’s firm pressure on his arm prompted a more sensible reaction. He turned slowly and nodded with an air of cold dignity. K.K. returned it briskly, but Ghana gave him only the barest of nods. You black bastard, he thought with a sardonic contempt, haven’t you heard we’re all brothers? Ghana must have gotten the message, because he returned an angry frown. Cullee turned back and faced front, feeling somewhat better.

In the dining room, conscious that many eyes were giving him the outwardly casual, quickly appraising examination reserved for those who have power by those who are jealous of it, he made some desultory attempt at small talk with the S.-G. which did not move very smoothly, despite that gentleman’s long practice in the exchange of necessary nothings with his unruly colleagues. Finally the Congressman put down his knife and fork and turned to the older man with an air of troubled intensity.

“How do you stand it?” he demanded. The Secretary-General looked surprised for a moment, and Cullee went on in a bitter tone: “Being patronized by the blacks, I mean. You expect it from the whites, but how do you stand it from your own people?”

“You say my own people,” the S.-G. said with an air of weary discontent. “You sound like the whites do, listing us all together. My own people are the Nigerians. They don’t patronize me. The rest of Africa—” He shrugged. “At this stage, all we seem to be able to do is despise one another. It is fashionable to blame the colonialists for this, but I am not so sure it is not inherent in us. Perhaps it is our fatal flaw, being hostile and suspicious and unkind toward one another.”

“They do a powerful lot of talking about brotherhood,” Cullee said, aware that dark ears nearby were straining to hear and hoping they would, “but I don’t see much of it lying around this place. Don’t they understand I’m trying to work it out in the Congress in the best way it can be worked out?”

“They’re impatient,” the S.-G. said. “You have to understand—”

“Yes, I understand,” Cullee said shortly. “I understand what an easy excuse that is for riding roughshod over every decent and practical way of doing things. It’s all very well for these Fancy Dans from outback to do a lot of talking, but it’s another thing for them to achieve anything with all their talk. It isn’t that simple.”

“To many of them, it is.”

“Then they’re never going to get anywhere. They’re always going to be disappointed.”

“And you aren’t disappointed?” the Secretary-General asked gently. “I had rather thought you were, in many things.”

“Why should I be?” Cullee demanded harshly, picking up his fork and resuming his meal. “I’m doing all right for a Negro, in my country.”

“If that is the ultimate in aspiration that a Negro can have,” the S.-G. agreed, “then I grant you, you should be well content.”

And why indeed should he not be, the Congressman thought angrily as he found himself suddenly involved in the storm of doubt, self-doubt, doubt of purpose, doubt of country, doubt of ultimate aim and achievement, that he knew the older man had deliberately tried to force him into. Well: it wasn’t hard. Old Cullee didn’t need much of a push to get to brooding. It was part of a nature that had always given him troubles that were hard enough to bear when the world was leaving him alone, let alone when it was not.

There came to his mind, in one of those journeyings back that come so often when the heart is hard pressed by events, the sleepy little street in the sleepy little town in South Carolina where he had been born; not too far, as he learned many years later, from Seab Cooley’s Barnwell. Of all the facts in the universe, that at the time was among the remotest, though it would eventually become a joking point and also, in some curious way that he had expressed to Orrin Knox the other night in Washington, a small sentimental link between himself and the fierce old Senator. It was a link neither had ever mentioned to the other, except in an occasional indirect exchange of compliments, as through the Secretary of State; but it was there, if they needed it. For all the defensive insistence of the South that its residents “understood one another,” in some infinitely subtle, infinitely complex and indescribable way, they did. They “talked the same language,” particularly in time of need. If he ever needed the Senator’s help, the Congressman had always felt, he could get it, and vice versa. Until now, when he knew they would meet on the battleground of the one issue upon which, he felt fearfully, neither he nor Seab nor their respective peoples might be able to really help each other, desperately imperative though it was for them and their country that they do so in this confused and tragic time.

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.