Irving Wallace - The Man

“Mindy’s deception? Whom would it have harmed but herself? Would her secret blackness, hidden by white skin, if never revealed, have given a fatal disease to her men friends and women friends? Would it have infected them with bad or despicable notions or ideas? Would it have made her work less adequate or contaminated her living quarters? No, it would have done no harm to anyone-until now-except to Mindy herself. Can you picture my girl’s life these years since she ran off at eighteen? I often have. For all its advantages, her life, I imagine, has not been easy or uncomplicated. See her, as I have, escaping from a segregated black neighborhood of the Midwest into a white private school and then into a wide-open white world in New York. To do this, Mindy has deprived herself of mother, father, brother, and every other relative. She has disowned every childhood and school friend she had, except a handful of friends made while passing in a white school. She has sprung up, literally, from the earth afresh, with no past, no background. How impossible this seems in our world of curiosity and rapid communications today. Mindy, I suspect, had to find new friends, white friends, in her apartment building, in her white church, in her white social clubs, in her chance encounters, and in her job. What does one say to new friends, male or female, or on the employer’s application form and to his questions? Mindy must invent a white family, somewhere remote, that is actually nonexistent. She must create a cardboard white community, somewhere remote, where she grew up, and early schools that for some convincing reason cannot be contacted. And as she draws a circle of friends about her, she must fabricate a living past-find photographs of a white mother and father to put in frames, buy gifts for herself and send them to herself from her nonexistent white parents so that she is not alone giftless on Christmas, or unremembered on birthdays. She must compose and send herself occasional letters from distant places and pretend they are from white relatives or friends.

“But not enough. Once this fiction is completed, accepted, she cannot let down her guard. Will she, someday, while intoxicated or under anesthetic or even through some casual verbal slip, disclose that she is really colored? Will some astute newcomer to her circle begin to wonder about an expression she has used, an old habit of speech like ‘G’wan, man’ or ‘Look heah’ and begin to scrutinize the texture of her hair, breadth of her nose, thickness of her lips, moons of her fingernails? Will she, someday, while with her white friends, run into that one-in-a-million visitor from the Midwest, from her old place of life, who is Negro, and recognizes her, and comes up to her, a pretended white girl, and inadvertently exposes her? Will she, falling desperately in love as an equal with a young white man, unable to confess the truth and lose him, keep her secret, marry him, and awaken from the hospital table to find with horror that she has delivered an infant with features and hair more Negroid than white?

“I have not seen Mindy Dilman in all these years, not because I have not deeply wished it, for I love her, but because she chose it to be this way, so this is the way it had to be.

“Of course Mindy has been passing for white! Of course I have known it! I would not interfere, because I would not strip from her the advantages she deserves and would otherwise be denied. But I repeat, what is Mindy’s crime? Is it her fault that she was born to Negroes, and in a country where such birth is a sin? If there is crime in this, the crime is not Mindy’s, but yours and mine, that of the American government and the American people, who would not let her grow and develop in dignity and grace.

“Now, this morning, for the sake of boosting a newspaper’s circulation, for the cause of a politician’s prejudice and quarrel, Mindy’s secret is out. Now, for motives of sensation and hate, the camouflage of this harmless young girl has been stripped off, so that she is naked and alone and black, though no whit blacker or less worthy than yesterday or the day before. And for this my heart is heavy. I sorrow for my daughter, and over what she will endure, and what must become of her-but more, far more, gentlemen, I grieve for the nature of those in this country, and for the situation in this country, that drove Mindy to pass-and I grieve that such minds exist, in government, in the press, who feel that her pitiful masquerade was so monstrous a vice and transgression that they publicly had to brand her not with a searing scarlet letter but a burning black one, to destroy her, to hope to damage me as her father and as the nation’s President, in order to preserve the racial purity of the republic in which we live.

“Thank you for your attention, gentlemen. Thank you, and good morning.”

The Senate, sitting as a tribunal for the impeachment trial of President Dilman, had been convened promptly at one o’clock in the afternoon.

This was the tenth day of the trial, the first day having been given over to the opening speeches of the opposing attorneys, and the eight days since having been given over to the testimony of the witnesses for the House and the cross-examinations conducted for the defense by Abrahams, Tuttle, and Priest, with Hart confining himself to the paper work. Actually, excluding the Sunday during which the Senate had been adjourned, there had been only seven days of witnesses.

This afternoon’s session had begun with the House managers summoning Julian Dilman to the witness chair, set at eye level with Chief Justice Johnstone’s raised dais, to testify. Representative Zeke Miller’s interrogation of the President’s son had started mildly enough, with questions about the young man’s early years, eliciting information that traced his growth to the time of his entrance into Trafford University. Even though the interrogation had not been fearsome, Julian had appeared frightened, constantly twitching and twisting, his replies sometimes barely audible, sometimes too loud.

When, after twenty minutes of this, a senator had risen on a point of law and Chief Justice Johnstone had called a fifteen-minute recess to consult his associates and to review published precedent, the stately rectangular Chamber on the second floor of the Capitol had become an informal clubhouse once more.

Leaving his associates at their table on the Senate floor, their heads huddled together over some legal strategy, Nat Abrahams had quit the Chamber to smoke his pipe and to evaluate the position of the defense. He had gone through the Senators’ Private Lobby, meaning to turn off to his own assigned office, but then he had wandered into the Marble Room, so called for its circular Italian columns, had wended his way past a group of legislators chatting at the round reading table beneath the ornate crystal chandelier, and had then come to a stop next to one of the towering white columns. Still lost in thought, desiring to remain inconspicuous and undisturbed in this lair of the enemy (although every room, apparently, belonged to the enemy), Abrahams had gone behind the pillar, leaned back against it, and lighted his pipe.

Now, isolated and smoking, he could perceive the House managers’ strategy, all of it dominated by a public relations concept and intended to overwhelm the general public (and through them, the Senate jurors) in one emotional spate of accusation. After Miller’s frenetic opening address, the opposition had built the case for their Articles of Impeachment slowly and not too powerfully. Except for their presentation of several witnesses from Vaduz Exporters, to bolster their Article I charges against the President’s treasonable relationship with Wanda Gibson, except for their questioning of the Reverend Spinger and then his wife to further solidify Article I and give some credence to the extramarital liaison and preferential treatment to Crispus specifications in Article III, except for their parade of Washington experts to prove the New Succession Act was constitutional and the law of the land, and the questioning of Governor Talley to prove it had been violated by the President, which had invited Article IV, the House managers had presented only a series of shabby and inconsequential witnesses.