A Shade of Difference (62 page)

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 school, “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.”

If only, he reflected now, things ever worked out as simply as they began. The two of them had gone into politics, right enough, but life had carried them down far different paths, and the two idealists who had roomed together at Howard could hardly bear now to look at one another in the Delegates’ Lounge. Well: it wasn’t his fault. He had remained true to what he believed in; he knew that. And the thing that made it hurt, of course, was that LeGage had, too.

For the first two years of their friendship, they had studied and talked and lived together with a singleness of purpose that overrode and nullified the basic tensions that almost immediately began to flare between them. “You’re only going to manage my political career,” he had remarked abruptly one day a month or so after they had found lodgings near the campus, “not my whole life.” The issue had been minor, something about which drawer of a bureau was to hold whose items of clothing, but the argument, which had occurred, had been out of all proportion and had shaken them both. LeGage had finally apologized profusely, there had been much earnest talk about ultimate purpose and standing-together-in-the-white-man’s-world and all the rest of it, but their friendship had never been entirely easy from then on. LeGage usually precipitated their arguments; LeGage usually apologized and implored him successfully to abandon his frequent threats to move out; but a constant tolerant forgiveness on his part never seemed to change the pattern. “Why don’t you just take it easy?” he had finally suggested. “Can’t you rest comfortable unless we’re fighting?”

But LeGage, as he came to realize, was not one to rest comfortable about anything, and in time their arguments became more serious as Cullee built up an increasingly brilliant academic record in history and government and became an increasingly popular campus figure, active in student politics as president of the junior class, active in athletics as a track man with a growing national reputation. LeGage had no flair for athletics or the casual popularity of student politics, though his academic record matched Cullee’s and in some areas surpassed it. His flair was for a more profound sort of politics, more serious and potentially more dangerous. The rising tide of Negro impatience in the decades following the Second World War gave LeGage what he thought was to be his personal key to the future. The day came in senior year when he expressed it aloud to his roommate.

“You may be a Congressman, boy,” he had declared expansively, “but me, I’m going to be one of those who make Congressmen move around.”

“I’ll be expecting to hear from you, then,” Cullee had said, and LeGage had said, “You will,” in a tone of such absolute conviction that his roommate found it a little chilling. He was not surprised to receive, a year after they had graduated and he had gone on to the University of California at Berkeley for his law degree, a triumphant letter from LeGage concerning the founding of his “Defenders of Equality For You.” DEFY sounded like LeGage, he thought then, uneasily; and it might mean a great deal more trouble than good.

In their concluding months at Howard, however, the steadily differing directions they were taking did not concern him as actively as it was to do later, because he had other things on his mind. The principal one, and it often seemed the only one, went by the name of Sue-Dan Proctor, and he was as helpless in the face of it as though he had no character or will of his own.

This entrance into his life did have its own particular kind of fanfare, blaring across a hundred yards of campus, filling the universe with a sudden insistent sound, upsetting his vision, shattering his thoughts, striking instantly into his heart, demanding and securing a hold upon his being that he neither wanted nor expected, then, to ever break. The perfect figure with its promise of everything his powerful body desired at that particular moment of its development—at that particular moment, now and forever, he was very much afraid—wiped out the world and filled it up again with the most powerful obsession he had ever known, all in the two minutes it took him to see her, move toward her, intercept her casual, flaunting walk across campus and blurt out an invitation to have a cup of coffee at the student union. “Why,” she said, an amused smile lighting up the clever little fox-face with its enormous dark eyes and slightly too large forehead, “I don’t mind if I do.”