‘Yes, but will anyone ever know the true answer?’ Alf Friendly gave a half laugh. And to that note of self- questioning the party broke up.
Some weeks after, I wrote what you may call an epilogue to that Washington Post drama, and its theme was that terrible shadow-boxing game both the United States and the Soviet Union engaged everybody in over the close ring of Cuba. It goes like this:
With my hammer head
I’ll smash up the earth,
Said
The lizard:
And up reared
The aroused crown,
And then down
The blow
Came – like a courtesan’s head,
Deep in her pillow.
There were a couple more episodes. On my second day at the house, after listening in at the editorial conference, a most judicial affair with India’s Nehru under close examination in the matter of brutal assault at the hands of Chinese thugs, I was handed over to Mr Karl Meyer, a young editorial writer who revealed to me he also writes for the New Statesman. Because of an earlier lunch engagement, he passed me on to a colleague in the news section who in turn asked me to meet another co-worker so we could all go together for lunch in some joint around the corner. ‘Take care of him’ had been Mr Meyer’s parting words. ‘He’s a journalist from Nigeria, and from what I hear, a writer of some considerable talent.’
I never had that lunch, for once inside the restaurant, my two new friends and I got into an argument over neutrality, morals and all that.
‘What are the feelings in Nigeria over China’s invasion of India?’ one of them pinned me down even as we sank into our seats. I said I didn’t quite know, having been away from home for some time, and that my own brother was right then serving as a diplomat in India; and I said something to the effect that India and Nigeria were both Commonwealth nations, that Nigerian soldiers fought in India and Burma to keep out the Japs, and that naturally her sympathy must go to India, especially as China appeared the aggressor.
‘That’s all well and good,’ the man said, ‘but it doesn’t alter the fact that that man Nehru is an ass.’
‘What a stupid thing to say,’ I started. ‘A senator of yours said the same thing on TV the other day –’
‘Yes, and very right he was. Nehru for a long time has been riding the high horse of neutrality and all that. Now that he has been hit hard by the Reds, he wants help from the US. Let the so-called neutrals save India with their morals.’
‘Is Nehru an ass because he has no H-bombs to defend his neutral position? Tell me, is that what makes his morals nonsense?’
‘For a long time he has been preaching that only the yellows and blacks of the world have the right to morality and judgment. Now they are fighting themselves and want the awful white man to step in.’ By this time we were fairly shouting at each other, so that the proprietor, anxious for his other customers all of whom were looking curiously at us, came over to our table and asked if we cared for anything.
‘I want nothing to eat,’ I said.
‘There, are you afraid we’ll poison you?’ my host laughed from the left corner of his mouth.
‘Nonsense,’ I spat out, ‘if you think I’m going to die on this side of the Atlantic, you are mistaken.’
‘He’s taken our drink, anyway,’ the other baited.
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘And that’s real foreign aid offered to the wrong man, isn’t it?’
Then there was that hop to some shopping centre I took with one well-seasoned newshen on the eve of that great holiday of the Americans – Thanksgiving Day. We stopped for quite a while to talk to the manager of the big supermarket which, together with the bowling alleys close by formed the nerve-centre of what otherwise consisted of heaps of broken bones and bottles that once supported houses, and freshly patched up flesh and skin that passed for the new structures and superior positions fashionably styled urban renewal.
How many families affected? How many again on their feet? And with what amount of room to move about? Yes, compensations there must be, but are the brass and tin limbs provided really a replacement for the so-called withered ones amputated? For all these questions my female escort promised to furnish me adequate answers. Only I should wait until we got back to the office, for it was the Washington Post, more than any other force, that had moved the city authorities to embark on this project of rehousing Washington’s hard-pressed lower-income groups. And these just happen to be Negro. They squat in the city centre, while those with money have beautiful homes out in the open greens of the suburbs, making the capital look like a doughnut, all blighted and hollow inside.
‘Do you miss talking over the hedge to your neighbour?’ my newshen stopped an old woman sorting out what provisions to buy herself.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ the old woman said. ‘All I know is they’ve moved me from my home, and now I’m in this new hole in their big, mountain, apartment block. I may as well be in a home – in an institution for the old. Now that’s what they should call the place. Only the kids are so many, playing football down the street. I suppose the young folks like it, but me, I’m seventy, so nothing don’t matter.’
‘Pleasant thoughts for eve of Thanksgiving Day,’ I said. ‘You bet,’ the newshen cackled, moving us on in search for better grounds to scratch.
Back in the office and safe in the hands of Mr Friendly I asked if I could tag along with the man standing for the Washington Post at the President’s news conference that night.
‘Impossible,’ he dismissed the idea. ‘That’s for working editors only, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to help.’
‘Well, thanks all the same, for everything. As for that news conference I’ll make sure I see it on TV.’
‘Yes, that’s where I shall watch it too,’ he shook my hands.
‘Thanks again and enjoy your trip to Europe.’
‘I sure will try to, although it is a working trip,’ he said filling the doorway, and ‘do come again.’
I should have taken advantage of that offer, mere formula though I had come to recognize it. There were others in the Washington Post family I very much wanted to cultivate their acquaintance, namely, the magazine Newsweek, and the TV and sound network of the American Broadcasting Company, both of them, it goes without saying, very important and influential bodies in their own right.
3
The Blacks
‘The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section or the state in which he is born, has about one-half as much chances of completing high school as a white baby, born in the same place, on the same day; one third as much chance of becoming a professional man; twice as much chance of becoming unemployed; about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year; a life expectancy which is seven years shorter and the prospects of earning only half as much.’
PRESIDENT JOHN KENNEDY.
On TV again was James Meredith, this time at the end of his first term at Oxford, Mississippi. His term report was none too good, in fact it might lead to his being sent down. It was not read and given to the public by his tutors but by a co-ed doing the same year and course with the problem student. And how had she come by her facts? Oh, he simply wasn’t asking questions any more in class. Rings show around his eyes, and he yawns and fidgets, during lectures. Sad, wasn’t it, this whole affair? It was a most remarkable performance by this young lady on a live and nation-wide broadcast. Hands over notebook on a neutral lap, her back erect, and hair swept modishly behind in a mauve scarf, there she sat facing the cameras and all the world, not afraid to show her face, and not worried about giving her name. Only one or two interviews before, boys and girls, the very scions of the old Southern stock that has to be saved from pollution, in discussing this same Negro James Meredith and his forced grafting and entry into their midst, had worn hoods and masks and would not reveal their identity for fear of violence or worse being done to them by friends and compatriots to whom the very name of the intruder was anathema and incitement to fury and folly. Not that her account exactly made her out as an angel in the cause of peace and respect from one man to another, however shady in colour, but in the face of so much devilry and foolishness as was around, it was easy to forget to ask why one of America’s three largest TV networks should choose to have one student report upon another, why they failed to recognize that with the unbelievable strain and circumstances under which the man already was working, it was sheer absurd craze for pain and mischief to submit him to further pressure and treatment of this type, and what exactly were the poor marks he had earned that placed him so poorly beside other students at Ole Miss, bright and backward together.
That however was not the end of the sensational reporting. James Meredith himself was soon put on view. Close-cropped, jacket flailing in the wind, and arms full of a couple of paper boxes, he walked up to his car parked close by, let himself in through a door still showing dented and battered by bricks and bottles that were part of the warm welcome he had had only months before. And now, coming into view, as if to make sure no zealot came up and clobbered their ward from behind, were the US marshals and guards that kept a close and constant watch over James Meredith, the Negro, investing him with the singular but double honour of being the only one of his race to register in the University of Mississippi and the one student and citizen anywhere in the world enjoying a personal guard larger and stronger than that of his president or king.
Apparently, there had been no sign his troubles would come to an end. Admission had come to him at the point of a bayonet and there had even been bloodshed when federal troops returned fire in a desperate effort to quell a riot of gown and town. And latest of all, some unrelenting vigilantes, under cover of dark, had shot at his father’s home. Was there point then in carrying on the crusade, especially as he appeared a lonely black knight, with no new champions and fresh recruits flocking to the flag? Undoubtedly, this was the agony of the man, and it was to find resolution with himself that he was now going home to his wife and parents. Had the man then actually cracked up? Or would he come back? As Attorney-General Bobby Kennedy said on behalf of his brother, himself and all liberal and law-abiding US citizens, the damage from a retreat like that would prove irreparable and deep. After this, to pursue the charge of contempt of court against Governor Barnett, a course of action already too politically awkward to press home with advantage, would be like prosecuting the unscrupulous executor of an estate for trying to keep an heir out of his birthright and title when the young man has already dispossessed himself.
The strange mixture of carefree laughter and embarrassed silence that was the student response in Princeton’s Graduate College to the sick conditions of their country, was rankling still in my ears, when my hostess for that evening drove in to take me home to a party she and her husband were giving for a small circle of friends. Princeton was snow-bound then, so that we skidded in the huge station- wagon as we pulled out. She ought to have taken me on my word, she said, and let me come over in a taxicab as I had offered to do. Her doctor husband was out late in the hospital putting his patients away for the night, but he should be home by the time we got there. It’s your society, I thought to myself, that needs the doctor’s care, for it is sadly sick at heart. What with that state of mind myself, the party was for me no huge success. The children of the house wanted a carol or two before they would go off to bed, so we crowded round their mother who told us what tunes to sing by playing their first bars on the piano, but whether it was the raw weather outside or the sheer scientific weight of the guests inside, carols that should be familiar and clear in a Christian country came out broken and indifferent. Little wonder that the children, not quite impressed and satisfied, kept asking for yet another, like Oliver Twist. But soon they were bundled off to bed so the older folks could have their fun undisturbed.
Whatever fun there was at the party flickered like the fire in the hearth, and one spurt of tongue that comes vividly to mind was of a medical man. ‘Those are tribal marks on your face?’ He lit up suddenly.
‘Not exactly,’ I laughed.
‘How do you mean, not exactly? They must be; they look like tribal marks to me.’
‘And what may those be?’
‘Oh, surely, you must know – to tell you from fellows of an enemy tribe.’
