Of the Congo
and Guernica) tobacco
Enough to plant
another Garden:
Now, old Moses
for whom, they say,
Mannas fell in the desert,
did he push a button as this,
and who knows at what price?
Professor Patterson’s secretary was back in her seat when I rang the Woodrow Wilson School later. I began with trying to say how sorry and ashamed I was that I overslept and failed to call her back earlier in the day to confirm the hour of appointment, but she seemed either too busy working to listen or was just not interested in long explanations and excuses.
‘Mr Clark, you failed to call me back. Now, why didn’t you? That’s gross disrespect, the like of which has not been seen here before, a student telling the professor when he would be pleased to present himself for an interview. Anyway, Professor Patterson has now directed that you turn up unfailingly at nine tomorrow morning,’ she spouted over me without stop.
‘Excuse me,’ I began.
‘Now, Mr Clark, there is nothing to excuse. I think you fully understand all I have said.’
‘Well, we shall see,’ I said mysteriously and placed back the receiver on her, for she had started spouting again.
That was how things had been in the few days past. Returning from a brief trip up to Canada the week before, I had joined the rest of the Parvin group for our second pilgrimage to Washington. It had turned out a most tiresome affair. Arriving a little after eight in the evening by train, we had each been claimed and whisked off by host families, all prosperous sons of Princeton. I got billeted with my Nigerian colleague at the William Wrights, real estate people. They were most kind to us, although living out in Virginia, from where Mr Wright had to drive us into town every morning on his way to work, I half expected any moment to be called ‘nigger’ to my face, and given the necessary works therefrom. On the one occasion our host could not take us direct to where the long day’s journey began for us into night, we hopped a bus into town. That seemed to send a shock of silence from aft to stern of the vehicle, accompanied by a spontaneous shying and shooing away movement and a shaking out of dress on the part of other riders, all of them whites, naturally. But that is another story entirely.
What did happen to me however was the merciless drill and systematic brainwashing that formed the Parvin lot ad nauseam all the session, but more blatantly in the course of those Washington pilgrimages. A two-hour visit to a ‘23 million jobs’ school exhibition at the patio of the Department of Agriculture building, and briefings at the hands of AID programme officials lasting more than three hours in the State Department took up all the morning. ‘Then ‘individual interviews with appropriate State Department area officers’ followed hot after a late lunch in the cafeteria there, a large classified affair. And taking the rest of the day was a visit to the Housing and Home Finance Agency, where a representative of Dr Weaver, who is a Negro conspicuously heading a full government department, told the silliest trash about housing and urban renewal feats, as if he did not know that everybody there knew what cheating and removal uprooting of those already poor and blighted went under guise of that well-meaning operation called urban renewal.
We had a buffet supper that evening at the palatial home of the Hon. Mr and Mrs Andrew Berding, way out in the posh suburb of the capital. The Hon. Mr Berding had served in the Eisenhower administration as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, but now, more or less retired from public affairs, engaged himself completely with writing and lecturing. Very urbane and warm, he told us anecdotes late into the night which made my eyes flood with laughing. Although it was dark and we could not inspect the garden and admire its flowers and general layout, I passed a most pleasant and delightful time in the porch with Mrs Berding, talking flowers, how to breed new kinds, from the rose, red and white, to the hydrangea, dogwood, azalia and tulip, all beginning to blossom and shout out the arrival of spring, after a sharp, long winter, the severest within living memory. And as a grand finale underscoring the perfect union and bliss that was ‘the Berdings’, husband and wife played us their favourite pieces, one on a musical saw, the other accompanying on the piano.
‘Oh, how beautifully you play together!’ a female guest there gushed. ‘Your timing is just great.’
‘It ought to be; we’ve been at it for more than thirty years together,’ Mrs Berding, eyes a bit glassy now, said briefly. I thought she was going to cry. Altogether theirs was a performance most charming and soothing. In fact, when a friend’s wife drove in from somewhere in the city centre to collect me home at about midnight, it seemed churlish to tear myself away from a party showing no signs of breaking up for the night.
‘He now moves with the millionaires,’ my friend reported to her husband.
‘Well, why didn’t you tell them about us poor struggling students and family from Nigeria? We need money, you know,’ he said. ‘One can’t go on rushing from one job to another a whole day for much longer. It’s giddy and maddening.’
‘You are telling me,’ I slumped into a seat. ‘I have always wondered how you carry it off in addition to studying full time.’ It had been a long slogging day, and another was already then hard on its heels.
That day, a Friday, began with a call at the head offices of the US Chamber of Commerce. There we heard from a smug spokesman of the Chamber a dreary lecture ‘on the role of business in US political process and society’, a talk with a most exasperating tone, marked by the man’s straight-faced declaration that it was good for big business to organize but bad for workers to have trade unions which was denying the individual his right to find employment. Happily, his were claims soon offset by those put forward by the rough-hewed Dickensian character who addressed the Parvin group on the ‘role of labour in the political process of the nation, the general outlook on technological change, automation and retraining of displaced workers’. It was a fine contrast in the debating styles of two formidable proponents of the American way of. life which, both were equally emphatic in stating, secured its firm foundation on the rock of private property and ownership arising from free enterprise that no Communist or Socialist lever could displace or topple over with talks about ownership of means of production and a fairer distribution of national wealth.
Break for lunch came like a fresh burst of air into the stuffy room each spokesman for America was bent on making the place for me. It was more so as Mimi and Eldon Crowell had come over and collected Dan Passent and me to have lunch with them at Washington’s club for top lawyers, of which Eldon was a member. For us two Parvins, that really was a break-through of sun and sunshine in a sky oppressive with clouds.
In the afternoon, piloted by a gentleman from the Foreign Student Service Council, the group, striving very much to remain together, toured the American Indian Hall at the Smithsonian Institution of Natural History, and went desultorily on from there to the National Archives. It was here that I realized for the first time that Lincoln’s famous emancipation proclamation actually was directed solely at and effective only in the Union-occupied South, so that for a chaotic interval during which self-righteous Northern States searched their hearts and factories and farms, white masters and black slaves did not know for sure on what side of the line they stood. Washington, much steamier than Lagos, was teeming that Friday with wide-eyed, young and old pilgrims visiting from distant states the shrines of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. And moving among these crowds looking so lost among the relics and replicas of their ghost past, and having my grey retired public-servant pilot close by my side, since all others had either deserted or simply passed out, I felt rather like Dante being shown by Virgil through the various regions of punishment and pleasure in the underworld.
This then provided the backdrop against which the petty drama of my last days at Princeton, and indeed in the United States, was enacted to the exclusion of an outside audience and body of independent adjudgers and critics.
I did not turn up at nine on Tuesday morning at the offices of the Director of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Later in the day, someone, I think it was that overbearing secretary again, called to say I had a most urgent and important letter to collect from my pigeon-hole at the School. I was not around but went over immediately to take delivery as soon as I was told of it. ‘Dear Mr Clark,’ it directed without much ado, ‘Will you please arrange with Mrs Sangston a meeting with me on Wednesday, April 24, to discuss the question of whether your fellowship should be continued beyond May 1.’
And appended at the bottom was the personal seal and signature of Professor Patterson, the Director.
My first reactions prompted that I simply ignore the note, for what it was worth. I was due to go down with the rest of the Parvin crowd at the latest on May 13. Indeed, Colonel Van de Velde, our ubiquitous stage manager and more, already appeared genuinely to be losing sleep and weight over the failure of some of us to submit to him the plan and itinerary for our individual round-country tour of the United States in fulfilment of the last part of the Parvin bargain before going our different ways home.
I rather looked forward to that advisory session with the Colonel. When I went to Cornell University at Ithaca in Northern New York State and to Canada across the border, he had proved most useful, not only in making funds available, but especially in the plotting out of routes. There, with a map spread out over the litter on his desk, he charted out for me on each occasion the course of my trip, down to the last detail of execution. Old soldiers never die, I said silently to myself in honest admiration. And in my mind’s eye I tried to picture the man just as he must have looked in camp, as well as on the field in occupied France. All this was a scene I looked forward very much to seeing him re-live in however obscure an operation.
Meanwhile, I thought I should first make sure of my booking on a boat sailing for the Far East and India from San Francisco on the West Coast on June 23. Confirmation came at last from the Cunard Shipping Line in New York. So I began working out where and what I would like to see more of the United States. The deep South for me was a top issue. I said that would be the first place I would go if I was going to tour the country at all. The Colonel however would not hear of it, offering a stout and sincere resistance which won my praise and thanks not a little. A Rhodesian Parvin had gone South in the last year in company of two white friends, and for all the segregation and discrimination he had suffered before at home, he came back a deeply hurt man, having in addition helped to spoil a pleasant holiday for his friends. Now, that fellow, though a journalist like me, was a most charming and accommodating guy. I got the tip all right.
‘I still want to go down South and see things for myself ‘I insisted.
‘Well, you brought some native costumes with you, didn’t you?’ The Colonel sought a new line of action.
‘And what may those be?’ I asked.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said wanly. ‘All I mean is whether you have your Nigerian dress with you.’
‘Like which?’ I teased him.
‘Well, I had in mind those colourful flowing robes – now, what do you call them? Africans around here and in New York and Washington wear them pretty often.’
‘You mean the agbada and sokoto?’
‘Say that again,’ he urged, removing his leg off the arm of his chair. ‘Yes, I think, if you insist on going South, now those are the things you should wear all the time. With your tribal marks showing in addition, they ought to convince everybody you are no American Negro.’
‘I don’t have any such clothes, not even at home in Nigeria,’ I explained.
‘Really?’ the Colonel expressed surprise.
‘Honestly,’ I assured him. ‘We have lots of dresses in Nigeria, depending on where you come from, although the Yoruba agbada has fast become the adopted style with many, especially the Easterners. I know of friends in the Foreign Service who have worn European dress all their lives, but on getting posted abroad, ran off to the market to have that kind of Nigerian dress prominent in their wardrobes.’
‘Isn’t that what they call projecting the African Personality?’ the Colonel asked humorously. ‘That’s the first thing I thought you would do coming over here. Your friend from Nigeria is simply delightful in his gorgeous costumes. At parties he makes quite a splash in them.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘He adopted them back home.’
‘Aren’t you a strange one? A nationalist and fighter like you, without your national costume! I think you ought to borrow some from your friend before thinking of going South.’
‘Not to carry out a masquerade,’ I frowned. ‘If I cannot go anywhere I want to in this country without fear of harm or harassment, then I don’t see where all your talk about freedom and equality leads us.’
‘Well, I confess it is a great shame things are like this in the US. Still, we are trying. I’m only trying to be honest with you. There’s no point in having you run off South with your temper as it is. You will only get hurt badly, and then we shall be called to give account. You ought to go to the New England States, or go to the Mid-West and see the Grand Canyon, the Salt Desert and national parks out in the North-West – they are all splendid sights. And of course you must go to California, the climate is just like yours, only with the steam off. Now this is the tour I should be planning had I the good fortune to be in your shoes.’
That was the last friendly talk I had with the Director of the Parvin Programme at Princeton, and it came before our journey of torment to Washington. After that, like an incensed manipulator of lights in the theater, he began switching all the lights off around me on the stage, just when I was preparing to take the cue for the formal finishing act, and then make a quiet if not graceful bow-out.
I called on Professor Patterson at his offices at eleven on Wednesday morning. Mrs Sangston, his secretary, gave me to understand that the Director was at that moment engaged with one or two other professors, and in the meantime would I please take a seat and wait my turn. After some ten minutes, Professor Patterson came out with his visitors, bade them good morning, and then turning my way, waved me into his office.
I recognized him immediately as the gentleman who had laughed quite a lot and very easily at a small house party Professor Livermore and his wife had held for us Parvin Fellows in the home of two lady friends of his right at the beginning of session. I had not met him since, as he too pointed out, as he explained the nature of the painful duty others had advised him to perform by me that morning. Hands in his pockets, when he was not blowing his nose (the effect of a slight cold, he apologized) the Professor, quite small especially for an American, paced in the small space between his chair and the wall behind, looking out every now and again through the window at the street immediately outside and the John Foster Dulles Annexe to the Firestone Library showing just beyond. It seemed to take him some time coming to the point. I tried in that interval to explain on my side why there had been the apparent wrangling over fixing this appointment. The trouble was that I allowed myself to be drawn into a quarrel with a secretary who I thought was most rude.
