think he’s from Vermont-I keep remembering he is a company man and his company is headquartered in the South. Anyway, that’s nothing that need bother you, Nat. You are sharper than I am about people. You’ll stay on top of him.”
The waiters had returned, and were busily removing the empty plates and platters, and used silverware. Both men waited for the able to be cleared, and for the ice-cream cake and coffee to be served, so that they had their privacy once more.
Something had entered Abrahams’ mind, and would not go away. While he knew that his friend was sensitive and secretive about his personal relationships, Abrahams was curious and he determined to investigate one area. He had finished the dessert, and he filled his crusted, straight-stemmed pipe and lighted it, he said, as casually as possible, “Doug, I was thinking of what you were saying before about being lonely, and then I couldn’t help thinking of someone you’ve mentioned several times in your letters The lady you once introduced to Sue and me when we had dinner at your place. I mean Miss Gibson, Wanda Gibson.”
Dilman did not raise his head from his coffee. “What made you think of her?”
“As I said, your loneliness. I had a suspicion-Sue did, too, the night we met her-that you were fond of the young lady.”
“I am,” said Dilman.
“You still see her? I didn’t know. You haven’t mentioned her name in-why, I guess in over a year.”
“Aside from you, she’s been the person closest to me. Until now, we’ve kept company all the time. She’s very unusual.”
“Pretty, too,” Abrahams said, “and I thought sound and intelligent.”
“Yes, all that. Now I don’t know what’ll happen to us. This President thing came right down between us like-I was thinking recently-like a steel grill. You know, this is privileged talk, Nat, strictly, like everything else-but I tried to call on her alone tonight, first time since all that happened to me-it was awful-”
In a subdued, almost compulsive spate of recollection, Dilman recounted the details of his effort earlier in the evening to see Wanda alone at the Spingers’. He told of his offer to her of a job in the White House, and of her absolute refusal to accept one.
“That’s what happened,” Dilman concluded, “and here we are, wanting one another, and farther apart than ever before. I wish she weren’t so prideful. I’d give anything to have her in the White House.”
“Anything, Doug?”
Dilman looked up sharply, eyes narrowing. He started to retort, but did not. He waited.
The sensitive area, Abrahams thought. And then he thought, we’re either friends all the way or not at all. “You could have her here in an instant, Doug. It would take only four words: ‘Will you marry me?’ That’s the only anti- loneliness, Doug. Have you asked her?”
“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.”
