‘Oh, no; in point of fact I’d very much rather you went to Moscow or Tokyo.’ And I think I said something to the effect that English students like him were but poor products of sterile professors still propping up private outposts for themselves while the Empire was fast falling apart around everybody, and that it was the peculiar warped opinion of those initiated in this obsolescent school and cult to forget that oral literature has as much legitimate life as that hawked between two inscribed covers. My friend looked me up and down and asked whether I was just being facetious or plain jealous. I promptly denied the charge on both counts.
‘Then it is world comparative literature you must be thinking of?’ he mused wisely.
I said perhaps. By this time however we had attracted quite a lot of attention from indigenous students and faculty members shunting their various ways to and from the university library at Toronto.
‘Here,’ someone pulled me round; ‘why not come up to the Common Room, and then we can all discuss this over a cup of coffee? You are right in the middle of the street here, you know.’
And so we were. Our new friend and moderator, when he finally came into focus, turned out to be a postgraduate student from Bombay, and although he proved interesting at table and talked as sweetly of the international character of letters as he did bitterly of standards falling in his native India, the heat had gone out of us all there, so that the coffee went cold in my hands, and I was glad when someone reminded me of another engagement long since overdue.
Nor was it among English students alone that there was this vague sense of misdirection and drift, and the often attendant defensive stance, touchy and bristling at the least sign of attack. My host in Toronto, who was a history graduate from home, had completed his master’s degree with a study of how Australia had fulfilled the mandate the United Nations gave her over New Guinea. Now all set for his doctorate on some aspect of his own country’s political career, he finds he has either to go on flying down across the border to the Library of Congress in Washington which hasn’t got all the documents anyway, or come back home where the West African Pilot and Daily Times he needs so much for his material are published.
‘Haven’t I travelled some distance to arrive home!’ he laughed in his direct, open manner. ‘In the meantime,’ he added, ‘others from abroad are digging deep at home.’
‘Oh, no,’ I got infected by his laugh, ‘of course they aren’t; but don’t you dare come home and call them squatters!’
Truly, as Dr Johnson put it so well on another occasion, not so different from ours, the Scythians wandered abroad to make conquest of the world; meanwhile strangers were in occupation of Scythia.
8
Atop Capital Hill
On a Decision Day in January, members of the Parvin Fellowship Programme, appropriately led by their director Colonel Robert Van de Velde, paid a visit to the United States Supreme Court as personal guests of Associate Judge William O. Douglas. Characteristically, I had arrived late that Monday morning, although Mimi Crowell, as lovable a hostess as she was formidable and stimulating in talk, especially when establishing her claim that Americans are altruistic by nature, had taken the extra trouble of driving me into town herself. So, as I climbed the high steps to justice, official frowns lowered upon me. I had just enough time to check my topcoat before tailing the group, all on its best behaviour now, into the vast crowded hall of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
Quite a number of attorneys from a sprinkling of states were getting enrolled that day and we had to sit through their long repetitious ceremony of oath-taking. That tedium plus the fact that there in the spacious precincts of the court were some of the surest nuclear blast shelters, not only in the Union but in all the universe, gave me such a settled and safe feeling at last that I had quite a job, without at all wanting to be disrespectful, of staying wide awake through the proceedings of the court, ultimate across the wide sweep of the land. My alarm therefore was great and genuine when a bull-dog faced usher or marshal lumbered up to where we Parvin people sat as a group and said throatily: ‘Stay awake there!’ But I need not have jumped out of my skin. ‘Yes, you, madam,’ the muscular arm of the law seized upon his quarry, ‘you stay awake or step out with me.’ It was Barbara, the Colonel’s own wife, sitting just next to me: I could not believe it. Naturally the lady tried protesting vocally and vigorously in the very democratic manner of her country but the marshal, in equal defence of the Constitution, hushed her down and then drew away to continue his beat. Meanwhile, too embarrassed to look Barbara in the face, I took up study of the sitting arrangement of the nine worthies on the rostrum.
Right in the centre sat Chief Justice Earl Warren. Immediately to his left and right were our own Justice Douglas and Justice Hugo L. Black, both of the so-called ‘liberal’ group of the Court, and next to them as if to restore the balance came the ‘conservatives’ Justice John M. Harlan and Justice Tom C. Clark. Others to the right were the ‘liberal’ Justice William J. Brennan Jnr and Justice Byron R. White whose voting role was still to emerge, while at the opposite end sat Justice Potter Stewart, often called the ‘pivotal’ man between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘conservative’ voting blocs of the Court, and last but by no means the least was Mr Justice Goldberg who was the replacement for Justice Felix Frankfurter, the much feared old interrogator of counsel, now retired. All fitted-out in gowns, they presented a fine group portrait of white in black, and as about half of them persistently swayed forward and back in their rocking chairs, just like the President at his news conferences, while their colleagues remained immobile in their solid seats of oak, I had the strange feeling of being before some frightening flank or phalanx, not quite advancing, not quite receding for any appreciable length of time, like waves upon the shore.
The Court handed down three decisions that morning, one agreeing with the claims of a Chinese American in California that the police in their investigations of a certain dope racket had trampled brutally on the man’s fundamental human rights as a citizen of the US. A second ruling, concerning two petrol dealers, one of whom had succumbed to cut-throat competition with the other in spite of concessions obtained direct from his refinery and suppliers, established the fact that all is fair in war as in love. And the third judgment that session, one of personal interest to me and other black people there, was the Court’s ruling in favour of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People to the effect that a party other than that directly aggrieved had every right under the Constitution of the United States to concern itself with seeking on behalf and in concert with the aggrieved a redress for the abuse of his rights as a citizen. This in its own way was a decision great enough to stand beside the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeca, Kansas desegregation decision in 1954, and the Baker v. Carr ruling in 1962, conceding voters their right to sue in federal courts if deprived of equal representation through state devices such as malapportionment.
An additional duty performed, among many others most onerous, by each Justice of the Court is a personal hearing of applications for bails and stays of various sentences. Justice Douglas, I was told, enjoyed the fine reputation of attracting the majority of these frantic, desperate calls for rescue directed at him, giving to each a most sympathetic hearing. At the close of the session, the old judge, as responsive as ever to calls by applicants of all sorts for his personal attention, took us of the Parvin Programme, over which he presides, into a reception room in his chambers where he treated us to cocktails. For a man of his age and position, the judge proved jaunty, spontaneous and communicative beyond belief. Glass in hand, he breezed among his guests from several lands, and being much travelled and read, showed himself at ease and home with each.
‘You are a writer, I hear,’ he cornered me. ‘Then we are of the same profession. Have you seen my new book?’
‘You mean America Challenged? I enjoyed reading it very much.’
‘Thank you; but that’s my old one. I meant the new book 1 have just brought out. I call it Manifesto for Democracy.’
‘No, I haven’t seen it yet.’
‘Then I must have a copy mailed to you immediately, all of you in fact.’
‘Is your book, Sir, a reply to the Communist Manifesto?’ my Polish friend Daniel Passent asked with a laugh.
‘Don’t ask me,’ the old judge winked an eye. ‘I’m holding brief for nobody, and making a reply to none either. But I believe there are positive virtues in the democratic way of life which nobody as yet has bothered to present in a manifesto the ordinary man can find winning and useful. And that’s all I have tried to do.’
Next the old judge graciously posed for a photograph with us, keeping everybody talking and laughing all the time so that the photographer did not have to say cheese to get his smiles. After which our host turned to all of us and apologised that he would unfortunately not be at lunch with us, since the President was giving Congress that afternoon his state-of-the-union message, and Supreme Court Justices, as honourable members of the tripartite power, had all to be there. But other distinguished colleagues of his, representative of the entire judicial structure of the United States, would be pleased to dine with us and answer any queries we cared to voice. If he could, he would love to come back and rejoin the group, but if not, then this must be his parting with us Parvin Fellows, although we would always stay together in the spirit of open communication that engendered the programme. It was only after the learned judge had left us that I noticed we had not had the benefit of being presented to his wife. ‘Where is Mrs Douglas?’ I asked in all innocence. ‘She suffered a bad accident recently and is still convalescing,’ Colonel Van de Velde and his wife answered in one soothing voice. Later I heard of talk about separation and divorce that the judge was to be married a third time, to a co-ed just graduated, and the wife was to be married for the second time, to a luminary of the Washington DC bar.
But to turn to those distinguished members of the American bench and bar present with us Parvins at that Douglas luncheon, I remember vividly the Chief Justice from the Circuit of Federal Appellate Courts, a judge at the Federal capital’s own district court who had the rare distinction of being a three-term Governor of Minnesota, a newly appointed federal attorney with the asset of being the son of Dean Acheson, then the talk of the town for throwing the British a few home truths, which they thought insults. There was another attorney who said he acted as a filter and strainer in the Office of the President, and a veteran lawyer who had represented the United States on a number of high-powered committees in the United Nations. I sat by this remarkable old gentleman. He had a creeping bore-through-the-other-man’s-body drawl that I still cannot track down now with any degree of precision as to his age or Yankee origin. And the Congo was a big bee in his bonnet, more bothering by its buzz than in its sting.
‘I still do not think it is right for the United Nations to coerce Tshombe into returning Katanga to the rest of the Congo,’ he told me for the umpteenth time.
‘Why?’ I blew my soup.
‘Because Tshombe and Katanga ought to be conceded their individual sovereign right of choice,’ he patiently explained to me.
‘Just as Abraham Lincoln should have allowed the Confederate States to back out of the Union?’ I blew my soup a trifle more.
‘That’s not a similar case at all,’ the old man dropped his spoon. ‘The United States was already one country –’
‘And the Congo?’ I cut in.
‘Whereas the Congo has never been,’ the man ignored my rude interruption.
‘Of course that’s not true,’ I said.
‘Of course it is,’ he corrected me. ‘The Congo as you understand it was a mere creation of the Belgians out of several different tribes.’
‘So some of us understood America to be – a creation of the British.’
I do not know how the matter would have ended had those post-prandial speeches not started then, and douched everybody with praise overflowing for the US judicial set-up and all that. Proposing the toast was the some time, many-term Governor now turned Judge. He must have taken his assignment more as an old-time politician than anything else, for he warmed into his part so much that he made a speech lasting the better part of an hour or more. And his theme was all one of greatness for America, especially after seeing in his world tour, brought only recently to a happy return home, how small all other systems were in comparison. By the time the feast was over I felt so sick I got up and threw out a query. This I was told in no uncertain terms afterwards was tantamount to contempt of court. And according to information volunteered by the Colonel later in our last encounter, he wanted to ship me home there and then on the one count of that misdemeanour, but Barbara his wife had pleaded for one more chance for me.
And my point had been that if we took the entire judicial structure of the United States as one tall tree, nobody would dispute the fact that the Supreme Court as the tree’s crowning boughs and foliage was straining all the time to reach the sun, enjoying in the process its own fair amount of light and a high view which kept it in constant sight of climbers and spectators all over the world. But at the bottom base of the tree is the complex of police, justice of peace, municipal, county, state courts, and it is within the close, oppressive shadow of these that the majority of citizens walk, get trampled upon, and must seek shelter and refuge.
Only a very small handful possess the extra energy, skill and expensive equipment, not to mention the courage and patience essential for scaling the stout and tall tree to attain for themselves justice at the top. But what happens to bulk of people below? The situation becomes even more dangerous when those entrusted to tend the tree at the base are men and women, not necessarily the brightest independent minds a community has to offer, but are mostly career politicians voted into office at popular heady elections held on partisan party lines. Thus the entire line-up, from the prosecutor to the magistrate and judge, consists of party functionaries put in office on the same ticket that determines the election of governors, representatives and Senators. And assisting them in arriving at decisions day by day are the normal and grand juries picked and summoned out of a standing list of responsible respectable citizens.
Of course all this is a fair reflection of the democratic way of life as Americans have lived it since George Washington booted out the English, and the astounding achievement of it has been that exemplary spirit of a people bred on the ideals of individual freedom. But what happens if, as was disclosed by a rare defending attorney to the shock of America, the entire staff tending the tree are drawn, and indeed have always been and will for a long time to come, exclusively from one sector of an irrevocably mixed community, even though the cry is that all offenders come of that one neglected section called coloured? Could the accused ever expect a fair trial and sentence for a charge often as flimsy and trumped up by bitter and frustrated members of the dominant sector? The answer has been lived down through a century of lynchings and compliance to the will of mob-rule, and only lately many all over the United States must have found it distressing on seeing the film To Kill a Mockingbird.
That was a long-winded and florid query, put almost exactly in the foregoing words and imagery. I am happy to report that it got a very terse and brief reply. The matter of tyrannies and atrocities to the individual was one for education, the Chief Justice pronounced ruling, and the government and the people of the United States were doing the very best they could. At this point, with all eyes balefully and pitifully focussed on me where I had slumped back into my seat, I did not dare ask whether those two in happy concert, the American government and people, included the Negro as well.
