A Shade of Difference (82 page)

“I’m sure I don’t know,” he said.

“You
heard that I was giving in, was that it?” Seab Cooley asked, and abruptly he was back in focus on his opponent, the sleepy old eyes examining him sharply from under their weathered lids, the pugnacious old jaw stuck out. Cullee nodded.

“Yes, sir,” he said, not the “sir” demanded of color but the “sir” required by respect. “I was given to understand that you would filibuster against the resolution as it stands, but that a very minor change that would enable you to make a protest for the record and then yield gracefully would be satisfactory to you. I said that if you asked me for it I would probably be agreeable, and I thought that was why you were here.”

“Ask a colored man?” Seab Cooley said, and Cullee knew that all chance of agreement was over.
“Ask
a colored man? Why, boy, what made you think that?”

“Because we have the votes to beat you,” the Congressman said, trying hard to remain steady under the furious anger that suddenly surged in his heart, “and we will do so. With your co-operation or without it. That’s why.”

“Ask
a colored man?” Senator Cooley repeated, and suddenly the Congressman’s tight control snapped into open fury.

“Yes,
ask
a colored man! Why is that so difficult for you to understand, Senator? Day’s coming when you and your land will be asking colored men for a lot of things, don’t you know that? At least,” and sarcasm edged the anger, “I didn’t require you to ask me in public. I gave you the chance to do it privately, though I knew it wouldn’t do any good. I knew how you’d be. I just knew it.”

“How can I be other than what I am?” Senator Cooley asked. “I was raised to think a certain way. I
do
think that way. Surely you don’t expect me to change now. Surely not!”

“Yet you expect me to, Senator. I was raised in a certain way, too, and not the old way of always giving in when the white man says ‘jump!’
I
don’t jump, Senator. Can’t you understand that?”

“I don’t understand lots of things that go on nowadays,” Seab Cooley said, and again for a moment there was the revelation of a tired and baffled old man, touching and disturbing to Cullee Hamilton even as he knew the interview could have only one outcome now. “I thought I could end my years in honor, not betrayed by my friends into begging from a colored boy. Even,” he said with a small trace of smile, “as fine a one as I believe you to be.”

“It isn’t a matter of color any more, Senator, don’t you see,” Cullee told him, and almost in spite of himself his tone became gentler and more considerate. “It’s a matter of who has the votes. And I have. Now, I will agree to one change in my resolution”—and he read it off from the piece of paper on which he and Orrin Knox had jotted it down—“and that is all. You can take it, make your speech for the record, if you like, and be defeated; or you can refuse it, filibuster, and be defeated. Your choice, Senator. Not mine.”

“You still have the South in your voice a little,” Seab Cooley said, apparently apropos of nothing but, as Cullee was quite aware, very much to the point of their conversation. “You from Georgia originally?”

“I came from Lena,” the Congressman said, and the old man leaned forward quickly.

“Then you know what I have done for your race since I have been in Washington. Better schools, improved conditions, better housing, the school-lunch program—why,” he said, and a genuine pride came into his voice—“I expect as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee I’ve helped to pass and pay for more things to help the Negroes than any other man in Congress. And they know it and they’re grateful, too! Yes, sir, they know it and they are grateful. They know what it means to have a true friend in Washington to watch over them. They haven’t forgotten all Seab Cooley’s done!”

“I don’t deny you’ve done a great deal for the colored race, Senator, and I don’t deny that many other Southerners in Congress have done a great deal. But the thing you evidently can’t see is that
it’s all been so damned patronizing.
We want you to do things for us because you
like
us, not because you’re ‘watching over us’! Can’t you ever understand that?”

“No, sir,” Senator Cooley said with complete truthfulness, “I cannot.”

“Then it
is
hopeless,” Cullee Hamilton said dully. “It really is, not just this, but everything.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Seab Cooley said, “but if you mean you expect me to give in on this resolution just so you can flatter your own ego, you have another think coming. Yes, sir, another think. That’s really what you want, isn’t it, just to flatter your own ego that you made Seab Cooley beg? How are you any better than you claim we are, when you have a motive as shabby as that, Congressman? Tell me that, now!”

“I don’t know,” Cullee said in a tired voice. “Maybe I’m not. Maybe nobody’s perfect. Maybe we’re all mixed up in our motivations. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because I have the votes and the resolution’s going through.”

“I consider that entire last paragraph an insult to the United States and to all the fine white people who have tried to help the Negro all these years,” Senator Cooley said. “But, sir, I sometimes think you’re beyond help. Yes, sir, I sometimes think you’re beyond help!”

“Maybe we’re all beyond help, Senator,” Congressman Hamilton said. “Maybe that’s the secret history has waiting for us … Anyway, I said it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t. I was willing to meet you halfway on a compromise, but you don’t want it, so we’ll have to go ahead as things are. Unless you want to change your mind right now.”

“No, sir,” Senator Cooley said. “It may defeat me, it may be the death of me, but I’ll fight it through my way, because that’s how I am. Yes, sir.”

“I, too,” said Cullee Hamilton. “So be it.”

And when he called the Secretary of State down in the Majority cloakroom a few minutes later to tell him the result of the discussion, “So be it” was what Orrin said, too; and within half an hour the word was all over the Senate, seeping into the press, spilling over into radio and television, circulating through the corridors and the ever-chattering Lounge at the United Nations, carried around the globe, that the Senate would enter a no-compromise, no-holds-barred battle over the Hamilton Resolution on the morrow. The plan, said Chairman Tom August of Minnesota to the AP and UPI, was to approve the resolution in the Foreign Relations Committee in the morning, take it straight to the floor under a suspension of the rules, and pass it by nightfall.

“But what if Senator Cooley filibusters?” the reporters asked.

“So be it,” said Tom August, who was not one to let a good phrase lie.

Both the Majority Leader and the Secretary of State took occasion during the evening to call the senior Senator from South Carolina, and both found him embittered by what he regarded as their betrayal and determined to filibuster if necessary to stop the resolution. Both apologized, both implored him to reconsider, both found him adamant. Both regretted it, but both were committed to the course they had chosen, and both, reluctantly but diligently, proceeded to push it forward.

Bob Munson began telephoning and firming up his votes. Orrin Knox did the same. By midnight they were sure they had enough to pass the resolution as it stood by a comfortable margin. Only one thing puzzled and disturbed the Secretary. When he tried to reach the Senate members of the U.S. delegation to the UN in New York, he was unable to; and when Bob Munson finally did get through to Lafe Smith around 1 a.m., he found him evasive and noncommittal as to whether he and Hal Fry could come down for the vote. Hal had gone to bed, tired out, Lafe said, and they would not know until tomorrow whether either one, or both, could make it.

In the meantime, Lafe said, everybody at the UN was vitally interested in the outcome of the Senate debate, and much that would occur subsequently in the house by the East River would hinge upon it.

“I know that,” the Majority Leader said with some asperity. “Why do you suppose we’re breaking our necks over this thing down here? We expect you and Hal to do the same up there as soon as we’re finished here.”

“We will,” Lafe said calmly. “I think you can count on us both.”

“I hope so,” Bob Munson told him. “Orrin doesn’t want to have to make any changes in the delegation at this late date.”

“Orrin won’t make any changes. If any changes are made—” He broke off. “Stop worrying. You do your job and we’ll do ours, Robert, okay?”

“Well,” the Majority Leader said, puzzled but perforce agreeable. “Okay.”

6

The next day, just before noon, coming down the center aisle of the Senate to his desk and the circle of alert reporters who awaited him there he was still puzzled by this cryptic conversation with the Senator from Iowa. It was not the greatest of Bob Munson’s worries, by any means; but it nagged away at a corner of his mind in a way that made him know he was going to come back to it later and get an explanation. Perhaps Orrin had one. He planned to come up to the Hill later in the afternoon, and possibly they could talk about it then.

In the meantime, here were his friends of the press.

“Bob,” the
Wall Street Journal
said, “we hear Seab’s going to filibuster. Are you ready for him?”

“My, my, the things you do hear,” Senator Munson said, looking up at the rapidly filling galleries, many black faces among the white, an air of rustling, subdued excitement in the room. “He hasn’t told me. Where’d you get that—from the
New York
Times?”

“We don’t read each other except in the West Coast editions,” the
Times
told him, “so that couldn’t possibly be it. Anybody else going to go with the old boy on this, Bob, or will he be alone?”

“Really, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Seab may have a few things to say—it would be a strange day in the Senate if he didn’t, on a major issue—but I expect when he’s finished we’ll go ahead and vote on the resolution.”

“Without change?” asked AP.

“Without change.”

“We thought there was some talk of a compromise with Cullee Hamilton—” UPI began. The Majority Leader smiled.

“There’s always talk of compromise, around the Senate. These old walls are made of compromise. This old floor rests on compromise. The ceiling would fall if it weren’t kept up by the steadily blowing breezes of compromise. But on this resolution—?” He shrugged and smiled across the aisle at Warren Strickland, the Minority Leader. “I haven’t heard of any compromise, have you, Warren?”

“Not lately,” Senator Strickland said. “Not since young Cullee laid down the law to Seab, anyway.”

“How was that, Warren?” the
New York Herald Tribune
asked quickly. “We didn’t hear about that one.”

“Won’t from me, either,” Warren Strickland said cheerfully, turning away to riffle through his papers. “Anyway, Bob’s right. No compromise is the ticket.”

“You’ll help Bob break a filibuster, then?” the
Providence
Journal
inquired. Warren Strickland looked amused.

“Oh, we’ll stick around. Interested. Intrigued. Curious to watch the sinuous legislative maneuvers of the Majority Leader. We always are.”

“Thanks so much, pal,” Bob Munson said. “If there is a filibuster, we will stay here until it is broken.”

“The resolution is that important,” the Washington
Evening
Star
said thoughtfully.

“The Administration regards it as that important,” Senator Munson said.

“How do
you
regard it, Senator?” the
New York
Post
asked, off at the fringe of the group, and they realized from the special edge in his voice that he was not addressing the Majority Leader.

Down the aisle from the Majority cloakroom the senior Senator from South Carolina was slowly proceeding, head low and thoughtful upon his chest, eyes hooded and uncommunicative, an air of profound concentration about him, as though he were gathering strength for a battle, as indeed he was. Ignoring the
New York
Post,
ignoring them all, he shook hands gravely with the Majority Leader, then walked slowly to the dais and assumed the Chair in his capacity as President Pro Tempore. There he slumped, apparently oblivious, while the galleries stirred at his entry and across the floor his colleagues murmured to one another.

“I said, do
you
regard it as important, Senator?” the
New York
Post
asked again, the edge sharper in his voice, as they crowded around him at the dais. Senator Cooley gave him a bland look.

“Why, now, since that question comes from one of my staunchest editorial supporters in my argument with my good friend Orrin Knox—a supporter come a little later to the fold, but honest enough to acknowledge the error of its ways and be redeemed—why, sir, I will say to you that, yes, I regard it as important. Don’t you?”

“Yes, I do,” the
New York
Post
said, standing his ground amid the amusement of his colleagues. “I think it is absolutely imperative that it be passed.” His voice hardened. “Just as it stands, Senator.”

“Well, sir,” Senator Cooley said gently, “if you regard it as important enough that it’s ab—so—lute—ly imperative that it be passed, then I’ll just have to regard it as important enough that it’s ab-so-lute-ly imperative that it be defeated. Yes, sir, I will, now. Now that you’ve given me my cue, that is.”

“What do you make of that 8-4 vote for the resolution in Foreign Relations Committee this morning, Senator?” the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
inquired. “Not exactly a wide margin in your favor, was it?”

“Well, sir, that just goes to show how prone you newspaper folk are to go running after what happens in committees. Yes, sir, it shows it. Now, when you get the Administration rampaging on something, and the President, bless his heart, working on all his old friends and colleagues up here, and Mr. Orrin Knox, our distinguished Secretary of State, huffing and puffing, too, well, then, you’ve got a chance for a good vote in committee. A right smart vote in committee.
But”—
and
his voice dropped significantly and he peered up with a sudden sharpness at the ring of faces hovering attentively around the dais—“that isn’t the floor, ladies and gentlemen. That isn’t the floor. No, sir, the floor’s another matter.”