“I’ll take care of her,” said Liam O’Leary. He looked at her sideways as he rubbed the bruises on his face.
The governor tapped him on the shoulder. “Come along,” he said, looking so proud of himself, so pleased.
“Let’s go out in the Yard for a breath of fresh air.” He smiled contentedly at Sue-Ann Bradley. “You too,” he said.
O’Leary protested instinctively, “But she’s an inmate!”
“And I’m a governor. Come along.”
They walked out into the Yard. The air was fresh, all right. A handful of cons, double-guarded by sleepy and irritable men from the day shift, were hosing down the rubble on the cobblestones. The Yard was a mess; but it was quiet now. The helicopters were still riding their picket line, glowing softly in the early light that promised sun-rise.
“My car,” the governor said quietly to a state police-man who appeared from nowhere. The trooper snapped a salute and trotted away.
“I killed a man,” said Sue-Ann Bradley, looking abstracted and a little ill.
“You saved a man,” corrected the governor. “Don’t weep for that Lafon. He was willing to kill a thousand men if he had to, to break out of here.”
“But he never did break out,” said Sue-Ann.
The governor stretched contentedly. “Of course not. He never had a chance. Lafon spent too much time in the Jug; he forgot what the world was like. Laborers and clerks join together in a break-out? It would never happen.
They don’t even speak the same language as my young friend here has discovered.”
Sue-Ann blazed: “I still believe in the equality of man!”
“Oh, please do,” the Governor said, straight-faced.
“There’s nothing wrong with that! Your father and I are perfectly willing to admit that men are equal; but we can’t admit that all men are the same. Use your eyes! What you believe in is your own business but,” he added, “when your beliefs extend to setting fire to segregated public lavatories as a protest move, which is what got you arrested, you apparently need to be taught a lesson. Well, perhaps you’ve learned it. You were a help here tonight, and that counts for a lot… .”
Captain O’Leary said, face fun-owed, “What about the warden, Governor? They say the category system is what makes the world go round, it fits the right man to the right job and keeps him there. But look at Momma Schluckebier! He fell apart at the seams. He”
“Turn it around, O’Leary.”
“Turn?”
The governor nodded. “You’ve got it backwards. Not the right man for the job the right job for the man!
We’ve got Schluckebier on our hands, see? He’s been born; it’s too late to do anything about that. He will go to pieces in an emergency. So where do we put him?”
O’Leary stubbornly clamped his jaw, frowning.
“We put him,” the governor went on gently, “where the best thing to do in a crisis is to go to pieces! Why, O’Leary, you get some hot-headed man of action in here, and every time an inmate sneezes in E-G you'll have bloodshed! And there’s no harm in a prison riot. Let the poor devils work off steam. I wouldn’t have bothered to get out of bed for it except I was worried about the hostages. So I came down to make sure they were protected.”
O’Leary’s jaw dropped. “But yon were”
The governor nodded. “I was a hostage myself. That’s one way to protect them, isn’t it? By giving the cons a hostage that’s worth more to them.”
He yawned, and looked around for Ms car. “So the world keeps going around,” he said. “Everybody is somebody else’s outgroup, and maybe it’s a bad thing, but did you ever stop to realize that we don’t have wars any more?
The categories stick tightly together. Who is to say that that’s a bad thing?” He grinned. “Reminds me of a story, if you two will pay attention to me long enough to listen.
There was a meeting this is an old, old story a neighborhood meeting of the leaders of the two biggest women’s groups on the block. There were eighteen Irish ladies from the Church Auxiliary and three Jewish ladies from B’nai B’rith. The first thing they did was have an election for a temporary chairwoman. Twenty-one votes were cast. Mrs.
Grossinger from B’nai B’rith got three, and Mrs. O’Flaherty from the Auxiliary got eighteen. So when Mrs. Murphy came up to congratulate Mrs. O’Flaherty after the election, she whispered, ‘Good for you! But isn’t it terrible, the way these Jews stick together?’ “
He stood up and waved wildly, as his long official car came poking hesitantly through the gate. “Well,” he said professionally, “that’s that. As we politicians say, any questions?”
Sue-Ann hesitated. “Well,” she said”yes, I guess I do have a question. What’s a Jew?”
Maybe there was an answer. And maybe the question answered itself; and maybe the governor, riding sleepily homeward in the dawn, himself learned something from it which was true: That a race’s greatest learning may be in the things it has learned enough to forget.