A Shade of Difference (63 page)

That time, too, there had been an all-day-and-into-the-night conversation that had ranged over everything conceivable, but that time, of course, there was a desperate sexual urgency that put it within ten minutes on a plane from which it had never shifted since. The body and mind of Sue-Dan Proctor—“I’d like to spell it S-U-D-A-N, just for kicks,” she had told him with an ironic little smile, “but I might as well be honest. It’s Sue for my mammy and Dan for my daddy, and I guess that’s plenty good enough for me”—had everything Cullee wanted, and in two weeks’ time he had taken possession of them—or, rather, as he soon came to realize, they had taken possession of him.

Physically, he and Sue-Dan consumed each other, and for the rest he was content enough that she had a shrewd and perceptive mind, a quick intelligence, a concern for him and his ambitions that, while always a little more detached and realistic than he might have liked, was nonetheless single-minded in its devotion to his welfare. “You ought to go into politics,” she had said, almost as early in their relationship as LeGage had, and quite independently of him. “I have a friend who thinks that, too,” he had said; “my roommate, in fact. I’d like you to meet him.” He had approached this confrontation of the two people he already suspected were to be, with his mother, the most important in his life, with a nervousness that literally had him sweating when he introduced them. But he need have had no worries; they hit it off at once, liked each other cordially but, he sensed with relief, impersonally, and seemed to be completely agreed on him and his future. He felt that he was in the hands of two faithful friends, not one. The only thing that disturbed him in the slightest was the fact that Sue-Dan seemed to agree rather more with LeGage’s impatience on racial matters than with the moderation that was already beginning to characterize his own approach. She did not, however, choose to make an issue of it then, and in fact got rather short with ’Gage when he remarked, “This boy thinks our best bet is to walk instead of run.” “He’ll get there walking,” Sue-Dan had said sharply, “and maybe before you.”

All that, however, was a long time ago; and as he and the Secretary-General left the Delegates’ Dining Room, past the ever-watchful battery of eyes, he thought with a sigh that as walking had become more difficult and running more popular, so had his relationship with both of them begun to deteriorate. In those days Sue-Dan must have thought she and ’Gage could bring him around; the growing waspishness that had become so characteristic in recent years had only come when she realized this was not to be. And at first, of course, he had followed their lead and attempted to proceed along a line of protest more violent than maturity and a growing judgment of political and social factors in mid-century America later convinced him to be sound.

They were married four months after they met, and shortly before graduation, sitting around with ’Gage and the placid girl he had decided to marry, the subject of where Cullee should go from there had inevitably come up. He was about to graduate with high honors in political science, he had decided that law was the best road to politics. A record-breaking triumph in the recent Olympics had put his face on the cover of
Life
and given him something of a national name, and it was with some care that he was considering the matter.

“You come from South Carolina,” ’Gage said. “Why don’t you go to law school at the University there?”

“Are you crazy?” he had demanded. “This is here and now, boy; it isn’t Judgment Day.”

“Why not?” ’Gage had said calmly. “At least it’ll make a terrific row when they turn you down, and that’ll help the cause.”

“It will, Cullee,” Sue-Dan had said. “You’ll be a hero. My hero!” she added, with an ironic little laugh that he didn’t know whether to take as a compliment or an affront, and so ignored.

His initial reaction had been one of profound doubt and misgiving. At the University of South Carolina he would of course be rejected automatically because of race. Then he would have to reapply somewhere else with a consequent loss of time and expenditure of effort. It all seemed pointless to him, except, as LeGage said, for “the cause,” and he was already growing leery of LeGage and his causes. Immediately after graduation he had taken Sue-Dan home to Lena to meet his family and was pleasantly surprised to find that his mother at first seemed to like her. This peaceful interval did not last long. They had been home two days when his sister asked what he planned to do next, and the serenity of the visit came abruptly to an end. “He’s going to go to law school at the University of South Carolina,” Sue-Dan said promptly, and the roof fell in.

Six hours later, after an argument that had raged back and forth before, during, and after dinner, he had been forced to take his wife and leave the house, still hearing as they went the bitter protests of his mother, the uneasy comments of his brothers and sister, the shrilly angry defiance of Sue-Dan. “You’re all stick-in-the-muds,” she finally said bitterly. “The world has moved on and you’re being left behind. Can’t you see that, you’re being left behind!”

“We’ve been honorable people all our lives,” his mother shot back, “and I hope Cullee isn’t going to let you change that.”

The estrangement thus begun had lasted six months, during which he had allowed himself to be persuaded by his wife and LeGage to go ahead with their plans for him. ’Gage was full of ideas about getting publicity, and in that time of national emphasis upon civil rights, publicity was not hard to come by. Feeling an inner reluctance but allowing himself to be carried along by their enthusiasm, he had presented his application to the University law school in person: the picture of it being flung back in his face by the registrar appeared on every front page in the country. “Appeal it,” LeGage said, and so he did, to the president of the University and the board of regents. “S.C. LAW SCHOOL ADAMANT ON NEGRO TRACK STAR,” the headlines said, and again against his better judgment, he permitted himself to be interviewed on national television programs and presented on national networks. LeGage was wildly excited by the uproar that had been created, and Sue-Dan looked at him with an unusual respect. Without telling anyone but his mother, whom he telephoned secretly one night at the height of the controversy, he applied by telegram to the University of California at Berkeley, and in short order—in fact, for there was an eye for publicity in Berkeley, too, within nine hours after his final rejection by South Carolina—the University announced that he had been accepted. His life went West, and he knew instinctively that it would never return to the uneasy and unhappy regions where it had begun.

Why he should have chosen California, he did not entirely know; some impression of a greater tolerance, some thought that with a racial background composed of Spanish, English, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and Negro there would be a greater acceptance, was probably at the base of it. Like most dreams, this too suffered the attritions of time and fact and reality, but on the whole he found the atmosphere less restrictive than the South, less hypocritical than New York, and generally more conducive to feeling like a human being than he had found it anywhere else in his troubled land, Sue-Dan, also, seemed to settle in, to be more content, and the fact that LeGage was far away, off in Chicago organizing DEFY, contributed its share, too, to the growing serenity he felt about his life and career. His brothers and sister followed him West within a year. At the end of two they had persuaded his mother to sell the house in Lena, had purchased another, much more substantial, in Oakland, and were committed to a new life in a new place. The quarrel over his application to South Carolina died when the incident died, and in sum it seemed to have left him with increased respect from his family, increased respect from his wife, and a certain aura attached to his name nationally that could be, as LeGage wrote him earnestly several times, put to good use when he decided to go actively into politics.

His desire to do this never slackened, though by the time he finished law school as one of the top five of his class he was very well aware that even in California this would not be easy. The thought of returning to New York, much as he hated its frantic cocktail-hour insincerities, occurred to him briefly; so did Chicago. The availability of those two black ghettos as a foundation for a political career was, superficially, enough to overcome his dislike for them. But something deeper made him reject this relatively easy way out. Somewhere in himself, even in the unpleasantness of the episode in South Carolina, he had found the strength to begin to understand the two sides of the puzzle in which he had been trapped by the accident of birth. Away from LeGage’s constant hammering, it occurred to him suddenly one day that so had all his countrymen been trapped, of whatever color. It was the start of wisdom.

For this, as for so many things in a character thoughtful and determined, he had his mother to thank; some basic common sense in her, some steady and fair-minded way of looking at things even when they were at their most hurtful, had been passed along to him in their long talks about the situation. She was the only one he could talk to calmly about it: LeGage was too angry and Sue-Dan too sarcastic. It was his mother who helped him restore the balance. He had grown so sick at the self-interested hypocrisy he found in so many that it took him a good while—aided by his mother’s reasonable reminders—to realize that along the way he had also known quite a large number of kind and decent white people, as disturbed as he was about their mutual problem, genuinely interested, genuinely democratic, truly tolerant because it never occurred to them to think that being decent to fellow human beings was something upon which they should preen themselves. Good white friends on the track team, others that he studied with, some he had known socially, several professors, the white doctor who gave them with infinite kindness the news that Sue-Dan would never be able to have children, even his employer ’way back at the bank in Lena who had done his best to be helpful according to his lights—there were quite a lot, when he stopped to think about it. And in time, fortunately while he was still young enough to profit from the process, he did.

Looked at in this light, the white world emerged to him as less of an endlessly forbidding dead weight hanging over his world and more of a problem that might, with time and patience and sufficient goodwill and tolerance on both sides, be solved in a peaceable and mutually helpful way. The conclusion led inevitably to a reappraisal of his own race, to a rethinking of many of the scornful, angry, spiteful conversations that he had heard at other all-night parties on Morningside Heights, in Harlem, at Howard, and in Berkeley.

“Why, man, isn’t one of ’em gives a good God damn about you … You can find ’em north, you can find ’em south, you can find ’em east, west, and outer space, and they all want the same thing, to keep us down … Hell, they wouldn’t give us the time of day if they didn’t have to, and where they don’t have to, they don’t … In their minds they’re all Simon Legrees and we’re all Uncle Toms. What makes you think you can talk sense to
them?”

So many voices, so many spiteful, scornful comments, so much impatience, so much anger. That, too, he found he had grown sick of as he passed out of adolescence and into maturity. Not for him, he came to realize, the incessant sick hatred of the whites; not for him the pathetic, self-conscious, self-defeating downgrading of the Negro heritage in America; not for him the fearful self-despising that left so many of his friends, particularly in the younger generation, adrift in limbo between the white world they hated but tried to mimic, and the black world they despised but could not escape. “It seems to me the whites are human beings, just like us,” he had written LeGage during this period of reappraisal, and LeGage had written back an angrily scathing letter in which he said it wasn’t so, and who did Cullee think he was, Pollyanna? But he concluded, silently and doggedly, again discussing it only with his mother because he found Sue-Dan to be as scornful as LeGage of his efforts to be fair, that it
was
so, and he was not Pollyanna: he was only Cullee Hamilton, who had some vision of his country, confused like everybody’s but nonetheless strong in him, who thought he might someday be able to help.

Why he, as a Negro, should have this feeling about the country, he did not altogether know. “What has the country ever done for you?” one of his colored friends at Columbia had sneered; and the attempt to find a coherent answer had ended in vague generalities and the scornful mockery of his friend. Yet somehow it had come to him: nothing that could be expressed very clearly, nothing that was very well defined, just the feeling that here in this America men had been given something very precious, that birth had given it to him too, and that somewhere under the drab and the dross and the sad betrayals of the dream that far too many men permitted and far too many men enjoyed, there was a reality and a loveliness that nothing could besmirch and nothing take away, unless its own people took it away by their impatience, their mutual intolerance, and their inability to remain true to what they had. He did not propose to be one of those who threw away America. Others might, but the guilt would not rest on him. Of that he was determined.

When he graduated with such high honors from law school, the way to make his contribution began to open up for him. He received offers from seven law firms, three of them Negro, four of them white. One was in Atlanta, two in New York, two in Chicago, one in San Francisco, and one in Los Angeles. He dismissed the South, New York, and Chicago, and narrowed his choice to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Much as he loved San Francisco, shining whitely on her hills, it seemed to him that the opportunities for ultimately entering politics were better in the raucously sprawling world of Southern California than they were in the beautiful city by the Bay. He and Sue-Dan gave up their apartment, packed their few belongings, said good-by to the family, and started down Highway 101. Controversy waited for them at the end of it, and once again national headlines swirled around his name.