A Shade of Difference (72 page)

“Then am I doing wrong? Am I expecting too much of them when I try to impose understanding on them? Should I just try to appease them and forget any obligations to my own country? That’s what I don’t know.” He sighed. “I thought maybe you could tell me.”

“I can tell you only to do what your conscience suggests,” the S.-G. said. “Nothing else would suffice. Furthermore, you would listen to nothing else. Isn’t that right?”

The Congressman gave him a tensely unhappy look.

“It isn’t enough,” he said, looking down at the slow-crawling Sunday afternoon traffic along First Avenue, far below.
“It isn’t enough.
I’ve got to have answers. And there aren’t any answers.”

“That is right,” the S.-G. said, and suddenly, surprisingly, found himself in the grip of a candor far greater than he had planned, so honest and so disturbed was the handsome face before him. “It is no more true for you than it is for me. I have no answers either, though I, too, would like to have them.” He stood up and turned away, staring down also at the traffic, his hands clasped tightly behind his back. The conversation was not going as he had intended, but he found it impossible to stop the rush of words that hurried to his lips.

“When I was elected here, I expect there was no more idealistic man in the world concerning the United Nations. To think that I, a black man, had been chosen to serve this great assemblage which is, let us be truthful about it, still dominated in many ways by the white powers even though we Africans are granted our positions of influence in it. To think that I, from Lagos, Nigeria, had been chosen Secretary-General. To think of all the service I could render to humanity! My son, no one came here with higher hopes. No one was given more swiftly to understand that they were futile and childish and naive and empty. Answers! I received answers, surely enough, I can tell you. Such answers as it sometimes nearly breaks my heart to realize. Better I were back in Lagos than in this mockery of an office. Better for the world. Better for me.”

He paused, appalled to find himself so shaken with bitterness that for several moments he could not go on. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that his young visitor was watching him with a frightened awe, but he plunged on nonetheless.

“You ask me whether you are right or wrong. Who knows what is right and what is wrong in this topsy-turvy upside-down organization that could be so great if its members would only let it be! Look you! We send a little medicine here, we distribute a little food there, we give proof of what we could do if mankind would only devote as much attention to its own preservation as it does to its own destruction. And what does it all add up to, alongside the veto and the futile, empty debates? And the hatred that spills across the Assembly Hall and the Security Council Chamber between nation and nation and race and race?
You
want answers! How do you think it feels to be given a position of responsibility without power, honor without influence, pretense without privilege? The hope is so great here—and so small and shabby is the execution. And I, who have this title of Secretary-General, can do nothing. Nothing at all, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing! What do you think of that, my young friend who wants answers?”

Cullee Hamilton, he realized, was on his feet too, and for several moments he did not reply. When he did, it was in a voice lower than the Secretary-General’s but equally shaken.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. I guess things are difficult for all of us in these times. I’m sorry I took your time. I’m sorry.”

“It is I who am sorry,” the S.-G. said, “for giving way to an old man’s lament. But you came to me for help, and I could not give it—and so I burdened you with my own unhappiness. It was not kind of me.” He smiled sadly. “You see, I fail even in the small crises of life as I do in the big ones. Good luck to you. May all things come well of your own deciding.”

“Yes,” the Congressman said softly. “Of my own deciding. I guess that’s really what it’s going to have to be.”

And there, the Secretary-General thought with a terrible self-bitterness as the door closed behind his visitor, goes another I have failed. Do the gods have no mercy for an old man in this sick, sad world that makes such fearful sport of us all?

Whether they did was not, at this moment, a matter that concerned the ancient figure that walked slowly along the deserted corridors of the Old Senate Office Building. He would not have expressed it that way, anyway, having a due respect for his own Lord but even more for his good right arm, and having learned in many a bitter legislative battle that when the crisis came it was not a matter of bemoaning fate or beseeching divine intervention but of getting in there and fighting. The thing that made
him
melancholy on this curiously unsettling Sunday was not his own weakness or the betrayal of the gods. It was simply a vague, unsettling restlessness and weariness unlike anything he had ever known before.

He felt, if truth were known, useless, and he was not fooling himself about it, even though he had tried to fool the others. Seabright B. Cooley, seventy-six, had nowhere at all to go when the brunch ended at Dolly’s; and so, as he had on so many thousands of occasions in the past, he was returning to his office on the excuse of doing some work.

“No, thank you, Orrin,” he had said, “no, thank you, Beth,” when the Secretary and his lady had held out an olive branch and invited him home with them for the afternoon and dinner. “Got some work to do at the office. Got to get ready for young Cullee’s resolution. Got to read up on all my precedents and rulings. Got to work.”

But, with a strange bleakness that wasn’t like him, he was admitting to himself now as he trudged along that this time he really had no work. He was just old Seab Cooley, feeling tired and beleaguered and unbefriended by the world.

This, he told himself as he met a guard and nodded a gruffly friendly hello, was a bad mood to be in and he must snap out of it. It was no mood in which to face either his age or the demands upon it that were being imposed by the visit of the M’Bulu and the events flowing therefrom. He needed to be in top form, shrewd and alert and perceptive and astute as he had always been; and these qualities were not strengthened, nor were they encouraged, by a self-pitying depression. He must stop being maudlin and begin to plan.

No sooner had he given himself this stern advice than he passed the door of the office that had belonged, six short months ago, to the senior Senator from Utah; and as he remembered his last visit to that office and what he had found there, the body of Brigham Anderson dead by his own hand, his resolve collapsed and the sorrow of the world swept over him redoubled. He didn’t want to think of all that tragic tangle, but there it was again. Somehow, although it did not bear directly upon the present situation, many elements in the present situation could be traced back to it; and so he felt the same unhappy aura shadowing this present battle. Perhaps its conclusion would be equally sad for somebody. Perhaps, he acknowledged with a sudden constriction of his fierce old heart, for him.

For they really were against him now, the forces of the hurrying world and the intolerant, impatient twentieth century. They were not prepared to admit that he might be taking his stand on what he honestly believed, that he might be fighting from the citadel of a completely honest conviction. They only wanted to bring the citadel crashing down and him with it. And the measure of their determination was to be found in the savage anger with which they attacked him, and the ruthless way in which they sought to bring about his defeat.

Whether this applied to Orrin and Harley and Bob and the Speaker and young Cullee Hamilton, he could not honestly say. He rather suspected that they were moved, genuinely if mistakenly, by what they believed to be the imperatives of the age than they were by any personal vindictiveness. They didn’t hate him, as some did—Fred Van Ackerman, for instance, who had good cause and was waiting for vengeance.

Nonetheless, they did oppose him, and that was what mattered. In other battles, he had been able to detach one or more from the phalanx that faced him and, by a skillful use of persuasion, pressure, and parliamentary maneuvering, put together an often winning combination. Now they were solidly aligned against him, and he did not know whether he could do so or not. Each for his own reasons was yielding to the appeals of political preferment in his approach to the racial issue. It did not make it easier to acknowledge, with a grimly ironic honesty, that to some degree, of course, he was too.

And yet, even though his stand was what his people in South Carolina and the South wanted him to take, he could not concede that his position was entirely political, or even in major part. By the same token, he could not quite believe that his more responsible opponents might be as fully convinced of the right of their position as he was of his. He could not quite see Orrin, with an eye on the White House; or the Jasons, with a similar ambition; or Cullee, with his desire to get to the Senate; or any of the rest, being as completely committed to a sincerely held position as he was.

That this might be a fundamental error, and one that weakened him as it led him to underestimate the depth of their conviction, he did not realize.

For, even if one were to grant all that, there was still the overriding importance of the international issue as it shaped up at the United Nations, and no American, he felt, could really be in doubt about it. Nothing could justify the apparent desire of his own government to assume the humiliation for itself in Congress instead of fighting the issue out in New York. He did not know what America was coming to, humbling herself in the face of the blacks and the Asians. He thought it was damnable nonsense to accept so abject a position.

One thing anyway, he recalled as he entered his silent office, tossed his coat on a chair, and began to leaf through a copy of Friday’s
Congressional Record,
he had told Patsy Labaiya exactly what he thought of her and her scalawagging husband. Patsy had asked for it and he had let her have it. The thought was not enough to lift for long the melancholy that seemed to accompany him this day as he awaited Congress’ decision on the Hamilton Resolution, but it did provide some little satisfaction. He would have more to say about the whole Jason family and their precious business when the Senate debate began.

When the Senate debate began—

His pleasure at this prospect was such that he did not realize for several moments that he was already, in effect, conceding House passage of Cullee’s resolution and pinning his hopes of stopping it, once again, upon the complex and cantankerous body to which he had belonged for fifty roaring years.

He sighed, a heavy sound that grated strangely in the empty office, and turned with an automatic flicking of pages to the
Record’s
voluminous story of the events of Friday last. He felt old—old and tired. But he would not have been Seab Cooley had he not presently lifted the telephone and dialed the familiar number that he so often called in the House in times of crisis, aware that its owner, like himself, was known for working on Sunday. Best give it the old school try anyway; best rally the troops on the eve of battle, shaky and equivocal though they had seemed to be a couple of days ago. Maybe today they were different.

“Jawbone?” he inquired gently. “This is Seab, Jawbone. How’s everything shaping up over your way for that vote tomorrow? You not going to fail me now, are you, Jawbone, surely! Surely you’re not!”

He had been away from the house off Sixteenth Street only three days, yet in some ways it seemed that he had been away forever. He looked at it as though he were seeing it for the first time, this handsome, comfortable home in this handsome, comfortable neighborhood. Was this fine house his? Did this belong to little Cullee Hamilton, from Lena, S.C.? How high you’re getting, little Cullee Hamilton, he thought. How high and mighty in the world, little unhappy black boy from the swamps of the South. Little mixed-up child down a long dark street.

Well: not any more. Unhappy, maybe, but not lost and not mixed up, if not being lost and not being mixed up meant knowing what you intended to do. Not if it meant finally deciding something when you had spent three days going through the agonies of not deciding, with the whole wide world clawing your insides about it.

“Maudie!” he shouted as he went in. “Maudie! Hey, old woman Maudie! Your chick and child is home!”

Somewhere upstairs he heard her moving, and after a moment she came slowly down the stairs to the living room, where he was sprawled in his favorite chair, grinning happily.

“I hear you,” she said tartly. “Guess I have two ears and an empty house to listen in. I hear you. Been hearing
about
you, now I
hear
you. Let me look and see if it’s the same man.”

“I haven’t changed, have I?” he demanded, standing up and turning around elaborately. “Same me. Same simple little Cullee. Isn’t that right, dear old homespun Maudie?” And he kissed her abruptly on the cheek.

“Hmphf,” she observed, sitting down heavily on the sofa and looking him up and down. “Seems to me you’re flying mighty high all of a sudden. What happened, they decide to give you the White House or make you king of the UN, or something? Must be something awful big.”

“Nope,” he said soberly, resuming his chair. “I just decided what I’m going to do, that’s all. Any man can fly high when he knows that, Maudie. Any man.”

“I been hearing all about it. You been in all the papers and on all the programs. Hasn’t been anybody on earth last couple of days as important as Cullee Hamilton, seems like. I wondered about you. I wondered if it was setting with you all right. I worried about you.”

“Thanks, Maudie,” he said gratefully. “I expect you’re about the only one who really did.”

“Bet
she
didn’t. You see her?”

“Didn’t those programs tell you that, too? Yes, I saw her. Don’t know whether she’s coming back to this house or not, Maudie. Can’t say as I expect you to cry about it.”

“Oh, I’d like her back if it would make you happy. I’d always go someplace else if I couldn’t stand it. Not so easy for you to go someplace else, maybe.”