‘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.
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ the Professor dismissed that episode. ‘She has been doing that job for almost thirty years, and nobody has found her wanting before. But to come to the subject of our meeting this morning,’ he stayed my protest, ‘you got my letter, I hope.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I am rather puzzled by it. The programme is over except for the round-trip portion of it. So I don’t see how the need arises for an extension of my fellowship. Are those for the others under review as well?’
‘Well, that’s the problem,’ the Professor stated. ‘The programme this year is as you say all but ended, and everybody preparing for his journey to wherever he pleases in the US before returning to his own country and job. Now the question is, Mr Clark, whether you have personally gained anything from coming here to Princeton and the United States as a whole.’
‘I don’t follow what you mean.’
‘Let’s put it this way then,’ the Professor sat back in his seat. ‘I hear from the Director of the Parvin Programme that you have not been attending classes, and others in the group have been making full use of courses available here at Princeton. ‘
‘I have sat in the classes I thought useful.’
‘And which are these?’
‘I took a course in International Politics –’
‘That was the first term, and Professor Sprout reports that you dropped out in the last weeks.’
I recalled those classes in International Politics, a discipline not so new now but still doing all in its power to appear logical and scientific, vying in that process with all the natural sciences, especially physics, including nuclear physics at that, in finding a formula for every action of a politician who happened to be prime minister or president, as if politicians even more so than other human beings acted according to fixed patterns of behaviour that the pet theories of professors could track down. Professor Sprout, always in a spruce suit and behind dark glasses, was something of a pioneer in the field. As a matter of fact, he and his wife had brought out at that time a new compendious volume on the subject, a work that modesty never quite allowed him to include in the fat reading list he drew up for members of the class. These consisted mainly of serious-minded young men undergoing this rigorous training in preparation for their teaching assignments later in life. But others were men who had already seen action in the public service of the United States, ranging from a rather panicky and talkative diplomat, who had served in Cuba and other missions in Latin America, to a stocky, solid, silent vice-admiral or officer not much farther down the ladder. ‘Do you think Krushchev can defend Castro all the way from Moscow?’ I had said to him during the Cuba debâcle.
