A Shade of Difference (64 page)

This, however, came a little later, after he had put in a good year with the law firm, after he had learned a little more that white people weren’t all bad. Then they decided to buy a house in the San Fernando Valley. “For a quiet guy who doesn’t go around trying to stir up trouble,” LeGage wrote him in a triumphantly crowing letter. “You sure do make a stir, boy. We’re coming out to help you.”

But the help of DEFY was exactly what he did not want in the hectic two weeks during which his prospective white neighbors held indignation meetings, sent him threatening letters, dumped garbage on the lawn of the house he wanted to buy, and made stout statements to the papers that their dignified community “would not be permitted to become a haven for those who are unable to find homes elsewhere.” Fortunately for him—very fortunately—the head of his law firm was a courtly old gentleman who had principles and believed in living up to them, so that there was no reprisal at work, though he learned later the attempt had been made. By dint of a fearful argument with LeGage, who was supported by a scared and vitriolic Sue-Dan, he had managed to stop the picketing, the protests, and the fiery statements that his roommate wanted to initiate. Instead he had acted with great dignity under great provocation from both sides of the issue, confined his public remarks to the single statement that he hoped common decency and mutual goodwill could bring the situation to a successful conclusion, and asked respectfully that he be allowed to address a meeting of the householders who apparently feared him so.

This he was urged to do by four of them who also had principles, and who came to him openly and assured him of their support. They too engaged in fearful arguments, pointing out to their angry neighbors that the whole country and indeed the whole world were watching, asking if the swarm of reporters, cameramen, and television commentators who had immediately descended to record this new sensation involving the name of Cullee Hamilton were to send forth to the world a portrait of a community so devoid of simple fairness that it would not even let a man state his case. Sober second thoughts began to supersede the first hysterical reaction, and the night came when he stood up in a crowded room and faced his first hostile audience.

Nothing he would ever do again, he felt in that hour of crushing tension, would make upon him the fearful demands those opening moments did. Yet by now he had acquired much character, much strength and steadiness. It was with a relative calmness that he made his little talk.

It was not long. He said that he knew many of them were very upset, as he was too; that he had not intended to cause any such uproar when he bought the house; that he was a college graduate, as was his wife, and they were good citizens who would be, he thought, good neighbors; that he knew this dispute was a symbol of something that gravely troubled the country as a whole, but that somehow the strength and goodwill must be found to work it out if the country was not to be fatally injured. He said that he and his wife would contribute their strength and goodwill if his listeners would contribute theirs; that he had made his purchase in good faith; that he intended to be a good neighbor to them and he hoped that they, as his fellow citizens of a country they all loved, would be the same to him. He was not truculent and he did not truckle; he was himself, earnest and simple and direct and honest; and they gave him a hand, at first slow and reluctant, that turned into a standing ovation before they were through. The millennium had not come, but some small flag of goodwill had been raised against the darkness of the times. A week later, relieved, under no illusions, but aware that he had asked for, and been given, the chance to prove that he meant what he said, he and Sue-Dan moved in. The press, sensation over, went away. The world settled back into place.

Inevitably, however, it did not settle back into the same place; and now, as he expressed his thanks for lunch and said good-by to the Secretary-General, he marveled at how quickly the shift had led him into the paths he had wished for so long to follow.

Within a month there had come an invitation to join the local committee of his political party; within two he was beginning to make appearances around the Congressional district; at the end of a year he was being mentioned, at first half humorously but then with an increasing seriousness, as a possibility to run against the incumbent Congressman of the opposite party. Many things motivated the sudden rush he received: the desire to make amends, the desire to use his prominence, the desire to build up a candidate against the sitting Congressman, even, as he honestly admitted, something of the same desire to claim tolerance by going through its motions that had so disgusted him with New York. He perceived all this with an instinctive cynicism, which did not, however, leave him embittered as it might have LeGage or Sue-Dan. So motivations were mixed and perhaps not always as noble as they were claimed to be on the surface: so what? Were his own always unalloyed? Were anybody’s? He did not think so at twenty-nine as he began to ready himself mentally and emotionally to take the major step, for a Negro, of running for Congress in a district overwhelmingly white. He would take support as it came, he decided. His own purposes and what he thought he could do for the two races were sufficiently important so that he could afford to be a little hurt if some people didn’t love him for himself alone. He didn’t love them for themselves alone, either, he was honest enough to acknowledge to himself; he loved them for their ability to help him get where he wanted to go, to the Congress of the United States.

The announcement that he would run brought the immediate and inevitable response that he had expected. Once again the hordes of the communications world descended upon him. In the election that year, no single campaign for House or Senate received the attention and publicity his did all across the nation. His opponent complained bitterly, but there were ways of taking care of that. The opponent was photographed at ridiculous angles, his voice emerged strangely high-pitched and squeaky from the television screen, the lighting and makeup made him look ill, the reportorial panels before which he appeared were ten times more hostile and severe in their questioning of him than they ever were of Cullee. On election night Cullee was elected by a majority of 30,000 votes. His wife ended a wildly exultant bout of love-making at 3 a.m. with a sardonic little laugh. “You know what that election was?” she said. “That was a bad conscience speaking. How long do you think that kind of support is going to last?”

This comment, so typical of the shrewd candor and casual cruelty that he had come to realize were paramount in her personality, had terminated the love-making, the exultation, and the state of euphoria in which he had been able to convince himself for a few short hours that he was really a symbol of a new era in race relations; but it was a good thing for him, and in time he came to thank her for it. It did not make him bitter, as she perhaps hoped it would, or make him uncertain and unsteady, as seemed to be an increasingly dominant purpose of hers; what it did was to make him more determined than ever to live up to the responsibility he had been given and so to conduct himself that the support that had been conferred with a bad conscience would be transmuted to a support grounded firmly in appreciation, gratitude, and respect.

Here, too, he was strengthened by his mother, descending with a valiant tenacity into the long horror of a terminal cancer discovered three months before his election. Her admonition that he was “going there to be a servant to the public—you be a good one” had increased, if increase were needed, his determination to do just that.

And in this aim, he thought he could honestly say now as he walked slowly along the green carpet, drawn back to the Delegates’ Lounge by some impulse he understood very well but was helpless to fight however he despised it, he had been successful. There was a tolerance toward the newcomer in the Congress, he found, which smoothed the way for those who were able, diligent, devoted to their duties, and not too obviously concerned with the promotion of their own political advantage; and there was a disposition in the district, too, to give him a chance to prove himself now that he was in office. Neither he nor the voters knew exactly what they had on election night. By the end of his first term, both did. He had served them well, and they returned him by a much enlarged majority for a second term, and, two years later, for a third.

In the machinery of the House, composed with such subtlety of the rules men make for their own guidance and the human skill and error with which they uphold or evade them, he early found an enjoyable and effective place. There was a certain look-at-us-we’re-being-tolerant air about the way his party’s leadership pushed him forward, but the gruff common sense of the Speaker made it quite clear to him that if he had not measured up as a man this would have been forgotten as soon as suitable political profit had been secured. The Speaker, he made clear, would “go along with this kind of nonsense” just so far and no farther; he ran his dominion with an iron hand, and his bowings to political necessity were grudging and dispensed with as soon as possible. He apparently liked Cullee personally, with a genuine affection, and Cullee was pleased and flattered to accept a beneficence that he knew to be neither hypocritical nor self-interested. You always knew where you stood with the Speaker, which was why he was so powerful and mighty a man. Cullee, as he often found occasion to realize with thanks, stood very well.

So it was that he was appointed at the start of his first term to the Foreign Affairs Committee, one of three freshmen so honored; and so it was that he soon became a member of the Speaker’s little group of favored young men, one of those who was selected to propose important bills, make crucial motions, offer major amendments, make major speeches. He realized that some of the same practical considerations that go into many a sudden surge to prominence in the House had gone into his own: he was black, the Administration wanted to appeal to the newly emergent states of Africa and Asia, it would be advisable to put him on Foreign Affairs, it would be advisable to give him a lot of publicity and use him as a spokesman on racial issues—and so on. Of such shrewd considerations, compounded of the thoughts and plans and purposes of powerful men in powerful places, is many a successful career composed, in Washington. But some, selected arbitrarily for honors on some such political basis as race, fail to measure up. Some take the ball and run with it. He did.

The encouragement he received imposed upon him, as he had explained to Orrin Knox, a major obligation to be responsible. It had come to mean something, to be Cullee Hamilton. He was conscious every day of the burden it imposed upon him to be decent and honorable, as one of the few Negroes so favored by his countrymen. He had enough pride of race and enough belief in the Constitution of the United States to regard this as his right; but in the deeper sense in which any man of integrity, black or white, approaches the honor of public office conferred freely by his fellow citizens, he knew also that it was a privilege, and one that he must always do his best to live up to.

Two things only troubled the foundations of his world, and they were of course the two things that meant the most and the two, he knew now as he once more entered the Delegates’ Lounge and sensed the little excited flurry of looks and whispers that greeted his entry, he would either have to set right or do without in the crisis growing from the visit of Terence Ajkaje to the United States. One was his relationship with LeGage Shelby and the other was his marriage to Sue-Dan.

With LeGage his friendship over the years had undergone subtle but definite changes as he had gone down one road and his brilliant, impatient roommate had gone down another. ’Gage had moved more and more toward the violent elements in the Negro struggle for full equality in the United States—never, until now, far enough to lose contact with the middle ground that Cullee instinctively felt to be the indispensable foundation for the leadership LeGage was gradually building up with his incessant speechmaking, article-writing and statement-issuing, but farther than Cullee ever was ready to follow him. This of course had only increased the tensions of their close but uneasy personal relationship. Patiently over the years Cullee had taken upon himself the burden of being kind, of being patient, of assuming the blame for misunderstandings and making the excuses for angry arguments growing out of differing natures and a different approach. It never occurred to him that LeGage, in some terribly grinding way that ’Gage had lightly and quite to his own surprise admitted to Felix Labaiya, had always felt a fearful inferiority toward him. Cullee was too direct to be subtle in his personal relationships, and because he approached everyone on the same level of friendly courtesy, he would have been astounded to know the full extent of LeGage’s jealousies. He knew there were some, but he assumed them to spring only from the fact that he had achieved in public office the recognition that LeGage professed to want for him, but perhaps did not, entirely. The deeper psychological twistings of his roommate’s nature he neither perceived nor could have fully understood had he perceived them. Thus he did not really understand their ability to make him at times so unhappy. A feeling of baffled hurt was the extent of his reaction; but that was more than enough to keep him in a state of tension concerning LeGage that was as bothersome in its own way as LeGage’s constant state of tension about him.

On the political plane, of course, the differences were sharper, the basic arguments clearer, the clashes harsher and more open. Right now they were at their peak in the wake of his decision to accept Orrin Knox’s suggestion, to introduce his resolution of apology to Terry, to adopt the role of Administration advocate on a basis of moderation that LeGage was moving rapidly away from as his own impatience found its answer in the rising impatience of the younger Negro generation in the United States. In a very real sense, Cullee knew, he was risking his position with his own race by continuing to pursue a policy of moderation. It was not a fair charge, but one that could be given a glaze of superficial plausibility—and superficial plausibility was all it took to sway many minds in this careless age—that his moderation sprang not from his own nature but from a desire to appease and preserve his white base of support in his plans for political advancement. He knew this was not the case, he was pretty sure LeGage knew it, but he was coming to understand that LeGage had reached a point at which he was beginning to take leave of fairness, was beginning to abandon justice, was beginning to sacrifice their friendship to his own ambitions and the ravenous demands of his followers.