Irving Wallace - The Man

“No.”

“Okay, I can’t pry further.”

Dilman said, “It’s all right. If anyone has a right to ask, it’s you, Nat. I know you want to help me. But I can’t go into it. I haven’t gone into it deeply enough with myself. Maybe someday I’ll be able to discuss it with you. All I can say-the only explanation I can make is-well-I can’t see myself with Wanda in a big ceremonial state wedding in the White House. Having one lone colored man in the White House is churning up enough trouble. Maybe it’ll calm down, because they’ll see I’m sort of alone and inoffensive, not threatening to anyone. But a Negro man and his wife in this Southern mansion? That would be too much for them out there to take-too much, and I’m not ready for it. I know it’s a shameful infirmity in me, Nat, but it is an infirmity I can’t overcome, like a limb missing, and one simply can’t will that limb back on. I haven’t the strength of character.” Embarrassed, Dilman fumbled for a cigar. Abrahams watched him, leaned across the table corner to light the cigar, and then sat back.

“Doug,” Abrahams said at last, “how can I lecture the President of the United States? I can’t. But I can lecture one of my oldest and best friends. I’m going to.”

Dilman grunted. “I’ve been lectured at all day, by the boy who’s writing my biography, by my son, by Wanda, by myself. I don’t mind one more, only I’m afraid the ground’s been pretty well covered.”

“I’m sure it has,” said Abrahams. “But since I’m giving up making jury speeches, I’d like to hear the sound of my voice on a similar issue one last time, in valediction.” He knocked his pipe against the heel of his hand, then packed and lighted it once more. “Doug, there’s never been a Negro as high up as you, politically, in our country’s entire history. I know all there is to know about that. Most Negroes are happy about this, but many are scared of your sudden exposure and the subsequent white resentment. You are one of these. The nigger-hating whites are doubly inflamed, that’s for sure. You did worse than marry their sisters, you became the head of their plantations, their Massah, their Colonel. The rest of the whites are-what? Uneasy, edgy-let’s leave it that way. If the country had a say now, you’d be out in the street in ten seconds flat. The country has no say, so it has to sit still for you, until this Presidential term is over. But no matter how much hate there is out there, everyone knows you are here by law, the white man’s law. Nothing can alter the historical fact of your succession. You are rightfully their President, our President.

“Okay, so how are you to behave? Just be yourself? Who in the hell are you, anyway? I’m sure you don’t know. Maybe I don’t know, either, but maybe I have a better idea than you do. You are our President. That’s a fact. You are an American citizen. That’s a fact. You are a Negro American. That’s a fact. Because of the last, the pigmentation of your skin, you are different from any other President in our history. That’s a fact. What does this mean to you? Does it mean you act like a minority party who’s now king of the hill and going to put his heel in everyone else’s face? Does it mean you act like somebody who wandered into the wrong house, and you better beat it quick before you’re arrested? Does it mean you act like you know you don’t belong because you are different, and you back away and hide? Or does it mean you act like a human being who has inherited, through no wish of his own, the toughest job on earth, and you know it, and they out there know it, and you are going to fill that job like any human being fills any job he has to do?”

Dilman stared past Abrahams’ shoulder, twisting his cigar, twisting it until the tobacco leaf flaked. “Thank you, Nat. Very good in a Northern courtroom, where there’s a sanctified air of reason. Not very good here, where I’m servant to a mass of two hundred and thirty million who don’t always observe rules or reason.” His troubled eyes met Abraham’s eyes. “Your premise is not built on solid ground, Nat. You need one more fact, and it’s missing. Out there, even to the best of them, I’m not a human being. That’s it. I’m not a human being.”

“Doug, for God’s sake-”

“Facts, Nat, two lawyers addressing themselves to facts. You don’t want me to be a mean Negro or a servile Negro or a Negro in white face. You want me to be a human being who has a job called President, and to serve the job as a human being. How can I? Who’ll let me? What happens if I slip out of here one day, unrecognized, with Wanda for my wife, with nobody knowing who we are, and travel across the country? What am I then? Human being? I’m a nigger like any other nigger-you can’t tell one from another, you know-in the South and Southwest, and a Negro in the East and North and West. That’s what I am, Nat, when I’m not pretending to be senator or President. I’m a black man, nothing more. None of the government and organization language, like education, employment, equal suffrage, good housing, public accommodations, none of that is out there. It’s a simpler language out there. It says if you stand in line an hour in a market or store, and it’s come to be your turn, and a white man walks in, he gets served first. It says if you’ve got a hunger pang in your belly, and want to park at the first hamburger slop-joint you see, you can’t, because they won’t let you in. It says if your wife’s got to go to the bathroom, and there’s no public rest room she can get into, she’d better have a good bladder. It says if your throat is parched, and you want a Coke, just a lousy Coke, you can’t find a place to buy one, nowhere, no, sir. It says if you’re exhausted and grimy on the road and want to stop overnight, there’s not a hotel or motel with a vacancy when you ask. It says what Roy Wilkins always used to say, that every time you step out of your front door in the morning, until you come home and shut the door in the evening, you run the risk or certainty of all this kind of mistreatment and denial and humiliation. That’s the real language out there, Nat, and it reminds you, in case you ever tend to forget, that you’re not a human being, not here, not now, but a black man, meaning a half man.

“Sure I am President, Nat, but I’m not forgetting, and no one will let me forget, I am a black man, not yet qualified for human being, let alone for President. No matter how I feel, I can only act one way, Nat, only one way, and that’s as if I’m a servant of T. C., keeping the house in order while he’s away… It’s the old story I used to hear a Negro deacon tell when I was a little boy. He told it from the pulpit. ‘Ef yo’ say to de white man, “Ain’t yo’ forget yo’ hat?” he say, “Nigger, go get it!”’ That’s got to be my job, Nat, getting T. C.’s hat.”

Nat Abrahams was too deeply moved, too filled with white man’s guilts, to plead further with Dilman. He knew that he should accept Dilman’s view of reality but try to broaden it, to help him see more clearly his role and future. It was no use now, impossible, after this confessional. For years he and Dilman had openly discussed the Negro problem, and yet he could not recall any other time when he had heard his friend sound so passionately embittered.

“Okay, Doug,” Abrahams said quietly, “you’ll get T. C.’s hat. But there are a few other things you have a right to do, to instigate, to press, on your own. You have a right-”

Dilman held up a tired hand. “Nat, I have no more rights here than I have out there. Maybe fewer here. Someday, it might be different. But this is here and now. Don’t you think I’m aware of what’s going on? Don’t you think I know everything there is to know about the New Succession Bill they’re rushing through? Why all this speed from my colleagues on the Hill? Because they can’t forget I’m Negro and they don’t trust me, don’t want me to put in an Ethiopian Cabinet, with a black Secretary of State who might one day succeed me. And you know what, Nat-I’m not going to veto it. No, sir.”