16 January. Professor Golightly and his family were not granted detainee status. Instead, the White House promised him safe passage to Canada for all his past services even though he had not made the patriotic appeal the President had requested of him. But, at the border that evening, he was stopped and turned back. It turned out the Secretary of the Interior had called to countermand his departure. Golightly was not surprised. What really distressed him was his failure to convince the black leaders of the anti-Trade coalition to heed their own rhetoric: namely that whites in power would, given the chance, do to privileged blacks what, in fact, they had done to all blacks.
“I wonder,” he murmured, half to himself, half to his wife, as they rode in a luxury limousine sent, in some irony, by the Secretary of the Interior to convey them to the nearest roundup point, “how my high-minded brothers at the conference feel now about their decision to fail with integrity rather than stoop to the bit of trickery that might have saved them.”
“But, Gleason,” his wife asked, “would our lives have really been better had we fooled the country into voting against the Trade? If the Space Traders were to depart, carrying away with them what they and everyone else says can solve our major domestic problems, wouldn’t people increasingly blame us blacks for increases in debt, pollution, and fuel shortages? We might have saved ourselves–but only to face here a fate as dire as any we face in space.”
“I hope your stoic outlook helps us through whatever lies ahead,” Golightly responded as the car stopped. Then guards hustled him and his family toward the buses being loaded with other blacks captured at the Canadian border.
Tomorrow. . . .the conclusion.
Ann
