A Shade of Difference (26 page)

At the doorway there appeared the figure of the school superintendent, his voice quavering and cracking with strain as he raised it against the clamor of the bell and shouted, “This school has no choice but to obey the law and we intend to do it!” So great was the tension that no one shouted back. Nor did anyone need to. The silence was more ominous than any spoken word.

For perhaps five minutes, while the bell completed its call and ceased, the silence held, the tension stretching and twisting and turning like a living thing, whipping hearts to a furious pace, straining eyes, catching breath short, making muscles ache with the frozen postures of bodies that did not know in exactly what fashion they would be called upon to perform, but knowing that in a split second’s time the demand would probably come.

Perhaps five minutes—and then, quite suddenly from a side street, unexpected and stunning in its abrupt appearance, there turned into Melton Avenue and drove to the school entrance, with a slow but inexorable pace that forced the silent women to fall back before it, a long black Cadillac.

From it, while the crowd watched with the same tense silence, now heightened by bafflement and curiosity, there descended two persons. One was a little colored girl of six, wide-eyed and frightened and hanging desperately to the enormous hand that gently held her own. The other was a figure seven feet tall, dressed in gorgeous robes of gold and green, wearing a purple-tasseled cap and walking with a calm and lordly disdain straight for the center of the group of women who blocked the entrance to the school.

So astounded were the ladies that for perhaps another two minutes, while the new arrivals bore down upon them, there seemed to be no reaction at all. Only the press photographers, dancing frantically in front of the advancing figures as they sought effective angles from which to snap them, only the short, excited expletives of the television cameramen trying to picture everyone at once, only the sharply-drawn breaths of newsmen scribbling frantically on their note pads, broke the silence. Not until the stately progression of the two disparate figures, the little girl terrified to the point of tears, her stately companion looking straight ahead with a composed fierceness that struck genuine terror into his viewers, reached the gates and started in, did the tension break. Then it was the belly-manipulator who suddenly screamed in a high, frantic voice, “Don’t let the black bastards in,” and ran forward, hesitant but determined, to try to block the way.

At once the silence dissolved into a wild outcry of shouts and screams and catcalls as a handful of her sisters surged forward behind her. Seven strong, they stood shouting before the M’Bulu, and for just a moment, while the little girl started to cry and hid behind his robes, he surveyed them with a withering distaste. Then he bent down and with one gentle, scooping movement lifted the little girl to his arms. And then he resumed his progress, step by step with a blind fury on his face that, even more than his physical presence, made them fall back before him. The last to give way was the belly-shaker herself, still screaming obscenities, but now with a high, terrified note of mounting frenzy and fear in her voice. Contemptuously the M’Bulu trod on her foot and she gave a sudden yelp of pain and hobbled away to the side. The police surged forward, but they too hesitated before the giant figure, awesome in its controlled fury. The pause was long enough for the M’Bulu and his tiny terrified burden to pass within the gates and begin to mount, step by step while the photographers scrambled frantically to record each foot of progress, up the stairs to the waiting superintendent.

At the top, the M’Bulu paused beside the superintendent, who looked terrified himself, and, turning with the little girl in his arms, looked back upon the once-more silent crowd. It made a magnificent picture (the AP photographer who took it would subsequently win first prize in the annual White House News Photographers’ Contest), and he held it for a long moment. Then he turned, gave the little girl a gentle kiss, gently put her down, gently disengaged her hand from his and transferred it to the shaking hand of the superintendent, and, turning once more, resumed his stately progress back down the steps toward the waiting limousine.

As he passed out the gates the fury of the ladies broke again through their fear, and although this time they kept a careful distance, they did offer him tokens of their esteem. From all sides eggs, rotten tomatoes, bricks, sticks, and rocks, thrown in wild excitement and without very good aim, began to rain upon him. Only one of the more solid objects struck home, a small stone that landed solidly on his right temple. He stopped as blood spurted suddenly down his face and raised a hand to it with an expression of surprise, faithfully recorded by the jostling photographers. Then he moved slowly on while the barrage resumed. By the time he reached the car, his gorgeous robes were stained and draggled from head to foot with broken eggs and splattered tomatoes; and these too he displayed for the photographers as he turned once more and looked at the screaming crowd with an utter contempt before slowly entering the car.

Then he was driven away, while behind him the last shreds of the soft peace of morning vanished altogether as the gentle ladies of the schoolyard, bitter with a wild frustrated fury, yelled and spat and caterwauled.

So acted His Royal Highness Terence Wolowo Ajkaje the M’Bulu of Mbuele, heir to Gorotoland, son of Africa, between 8:35 and 8:49 of a fall morning in the city of Charleston, South Carolina. The consequences were immediate and, as he and his friends had known they would be, worldwide.

By 9:30 a.m. extras were on the streets of New York, radio and television commentators were busily relaying the news, and across the nation and the world in a mounting babel of voices in a thousand tongues and dialects the word was being carried to the farthest corners of the globe.

By 10 a.m. business at the United Nations had virtually come to a standstill as delegates gathered in buzzing groups in the corridors, in the lounges, in conference rooms, in every available corner and cranny of the vast glass building, to exchange excited comments. The British Ambassador was observed to be, for once, openly concerned. The Soviet Ambassador and the Ambassador of Panama were observed to smile, not blatantly, but with a solid satisfaction. Senator Fry of the American delegation was seen to look tired and worried, Senator Smith to lose his customary affability. LeGage Shelby was not to be seen, though many from Asia and Africa wished to seek him out.

By 10:37 Edward Jason, Governor of California, had issued a statement in Washington, where he was visiting his sister, expressing on behalf of himself and his family “the greatest sorrow, dismay, and condemnation for this lawless episode in our adopted state of South Carolina.”

By 10:38 the switchboard of the
New York
Times
was besieged by excited callers wishing to add their names to next week’s “FAIR PLAY FOR GOROTOLAND” advertisement.

By 10:46 a.m. (4:46 Greenwich) a question was being asked by the Opposition in Parliament, and two minutes later the Prime Minister was launched upon one of his gracefully obfuscatory replies which managed to chide the M’Bulu, uphold the M’Bulu, chide the United States, uphold the United States, comfort the white race and encourage the black, and all in the most charming, amicable, pragmatic, and fatherly language.

By 11 a.m. the State Department had gathered itself together sufficiently to issue a statement on behalf of the Secretary expressing deepest regret, and hard on its heels at 11:15 the White House issued one from the President conveying his personal apologies to the M’Bulu and announcing that he was canceling his vacation stay in Michigan in order to return to the capital at once and both confer with, and entertain, the nation’s distinguished visitor. (“I think we’ve got things in fairly good shape,” Orrin Knox had begun when the call came through from the Upper Peninsula. “Dolly’s going to give a dinner party for him—” “Dolly, hell!” the President snapped back with a rare profanity. “I’m going to come back and entertain the little bastard myself. He’s got his White House party.”) In his statement the President also expressed the hope, in language fair but firm, that South Carolina would see fit speedily to comply with the rulings of the courts.

By 11:45 the President had been hanged in effigy at Henry Middleton School.

By 12 noon Eastern Time, or 2 a.m. Japanese Time, the first of what the Secretary of State was later to label in his own mind as “Anti-American Riots, M’Bulu Series” was under way in Tokyo, where several hundred well-paid youths were serpentining angrily in front of the American Embassy and threatening to knock down its gates.

By 12:30 p.m. similar demonstrations were under way in Moscow, Jakarta, Cairo, Stanleyville, Mombasa, Lagos, and Accra.

By 1:15 they had also begun in Casablanca, Rome, Paris, London, Caracas, Havana, Port-au-Prince, Rio, and Panama City.

By 1:22, having disposed of routine business, both houses of the Congress of the United States were engaged in angry debate, with the senior Senator from South Carolina making a furious denunciation of the M’Bulu in the upper chamber and his colleague, Representative J. B. Swarthman of South Carolina, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, doing likewise in the House. Both were being constantly heckled by Senators from North and West, in the one case, and Congressmen from Chicago, Detroit, and New York, in the other.

By 1:35 three famous television programs had announced that the M’Bulu had accepted their invitations to appear, and in New York both the Overseas Press Club and the United Nations Correspondents Association were able to announce the same.

By 2:36
Life
magazine disclosed that it had signed an exclusive contract with the M’Bulu for a first-person account of his experiences in South Carolina.

At 3 p.m. the British Embassy in Washington announced that the M’Bulu would arrive shortly at National Airport and would be entertained at a reception tomorrow night prior to the White House dinner.

At 3:31 p.m. the plane carrying the M’Bulu touched down at National Airport, and to the waiting reporters he gave only a graceful greeting and the news that instead of spending the night at the Embassy, as the Ambassador had invited him to do, he would instead stay with his old and dear friend the Congressman from California, here at his side. To the insistent demands of the reporters the old and dear friend refused comment. He did manage to keep a calm outward aspect and a pleasant if firm attitude, but as they finally gave up and started to turn away he seemed to let down and for a moment looked terribly unhappy, as though he were being harried and haunted by many things. Fortunately none of the press perceived this. Only Terry perceived it, with an ironic smile. “Cheer up, old Cullee,” he said. “Everything’s going our way.”

In newspapers all over the world the news of the M’Bulu’s courageous gesture and its worldwide repercussions rated banner headlines. The news about the British White Paper on Gorotoland merited only passing mention in many papers and none at all in some. It was freely predicted everywhere that the Panamanian resolution on immediate freedom for Gorotoland would now be passed at once by the United Nations.

11

And so it always was, the M’Bulu told himself, at each stage of his forward progress when he acted truly and forcefully as his instincts and his destiny told him he should: his brothers died, the way to the throne opened for him, the citadels of white society fell, the U.K. retreated before the claims of Gorotoland, the UN rallied to his cause, and the proud Americans were humbled in their own front yard. The gods had answered on that wild night in the storm when his mother had cried out, and they were with him still. Who else could have been so noble? Who else could have been so brave?

“No one,” he said fiercely aloud. “No one.” Beside him in the British Embassy limousine bringing them from the house off Sixteenth Street to the reception in the stately Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue his hostess stirred and turned to look at him in some surprise.

“No one what, Terry?” Sue-Dan said.

“No one can do what I can,” the M’Bulu replied, with so crystalline a certainty that her initial impulse to be sarcastic died halfway. “They all go down before me, don’t they, Cullee, friend?”

The Congressman, staring out the window, deep in his own thoughts, at first did not reply. Then he gave his guest a sidelong glance in which tiredness, distaste, disapproval, and a lingering trace of reluctant envy fought with one another.

“You’re a great man, all right, Terry,” he said finally. “There’s no doubt about it now. You’re the greatest thing that ever hit these United States.”

The M’Bulu gave his merry laugh and his graceful palms-out shrug.

“Anyone could have done what I did. Anyone who loved his own people. And was brave enough.”

“Cullee’s smart,” his wife said with a sudden sharp sarcasm. “He thinks that’s better than being brave.”

“I invited him to go with me,” Terry said with a wistful regret. “I gave him every chance. He preferred to be—objective.”

“I don’t know what I married,” Sue-Dan said viciously, and was pleased to see her husband’s hands knot furiously in his lap. “I swear I don’t.”

“You’re not the only one who wonders that,” he said, and deliberately turned his back to stare again out the window. He felt her fingers claw into his arm with ferocious strength.

“Don’t you turn your back on me, Cullee Hamilton!” she said shrilly, and up front the British chauffeur, completely expressionless, pressed a button. A glass wall slid neatly up into place to close him off from their discussion. “Don’t you treat me like dirt. You’re the dirt! Where were you when your own people needed you? You let Terry do it! You let a foreigner do it! Someone had to come from Africa and do the job you should have done! And you call yourself a Negro!”

“I thought you called it nigger, Sue-Dan,” he said evenly. “Now, I’m not going to argue with you—”

“How can you?” she demanded, still in the same shrill way. “How can you, when I’ve got a jellyfish for a husband? Terry’s the only man in this car!”