When Black Is Dutiful : COMPANY MAN, <i> By Brent Wade (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: $18.95; 219 pp.)</i>

This is a novel of two voices. There’s the voice of Billy (or Bill) Covington, a black executive who has “made it” in a major computer firm at the cost of chopping off his ethnic roots. His is an educated voice, suave and supple, from which every echo of the cotton fields and the ghetto has been bleached away.

And then there’s a second voice--the voice inside the reader’s head--which responds in ways that author Brent Wade seems to have anticipated:

But this Covington dude doesn’t SOUND black.

This is Wade’s point exactly. Covington, a product of small-town Maryland, has sidestepped the teen-age trap of equating academic achievement with “acting white.” He has mastered the “ritual language” of business, “the lexicon of shifting responsibility, of keeping myself safe . . . of strategic silences, whispered reassurances, of innuendo and pleasant puppet smiles.”

The rewards are obvious: “a great salary, the patronage of the company president, a beautiful wife, a handsome old house” in a Baltimore suburb “and a cardinal-red (Jaguar) XJ6.” As well as he can, he fits in with the rest of the boyz in his high-tech ‘hood. But something has been lost.

And we hear what it is. Covington’s voice lacks color--not just the “black English” that some white readers might expect but also the range and vitality of speech that surges through Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” a novel that clearly influenced this one. Ellison’s wandering hero is haunted by his grandfather’s advice to appease white people, Covington by his grandmother’s self-hating admonition to purge himself of “niggerishness.” The Invisible Man tells his story from a flood-lit hole in the ground; Covington, no less invisible in the ways that count, tells his from a hospital bed where he lies half paralyzed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

What Covington has lost, simply, is his black identity--his awareness that being black, in a racist society, is a significant fact. In distancing himself from blacks’ problems, he has also cut himself off from nourishment. He suffers from impotence, bad dreams, anxiety attacks. Finally, he is confronted with the kind of race-based choice he has spent a lifetime avoiding: Should he support his boss, who plans to move a factory to Mexico and lay off American machinists, many of them black, or a militant colleague who wants Covington to sign a petition opposing the move?

Hey, buddy, welcome to the private sector.

In conversations with his father-in-law, an old-line civil-rights leader, Covington reflects: “I don’t believe I could ever make (him) appreciate how difficult it is to sustain a sense of dignity in the corporate world--and stay employed. Men and women of (his) generation see the doors open they fought to have opened and then look upon the likes of me with embarrassment. They have little understanding for what lies beyond that ivory threshold.”

True, what lies there awaits black and white alike. In Covington’s firm, a blue-blooded drug addict is kept on the payroll as an in-house spy; the president, a bright fellow with former “beatnik” yearnings, hardens into his role. We’re back in the 1950s world of William H. Whyte’s “The Organization Man”: an essentially feudal world where getting ahead is a matter of tribal loyalty and cozying up to the powerful.

But Wade suggests that for the black employees in our air-conditioned plantations--people whose ancestors were literally slaves to the bottom line--sustaining a sense of dignity is both more important and more difficult. What drives Covington into a full-fledged breakdown is the realization that for friends and foes alike, he still doesn’t exist as an assimilated individual--only as a representative of other blacks.

The breakdown is the problematic part of the story. In the quieter scenes in homes and offices, Wade, who has worked for Westinghouse and AT&T;, is subtle and persuasive, but at the climax he spooks Covington with every skeleton in the closet: a sex-harassment complaint from a white secretary, a mugging, a nightmarish tour of the Atlanta slums and hallucinations in which he hears his grandmother’s voice. Ellison piled on similar effects, but in a picaresque framework. Novels of the executive suite, it seems, demand to be more buttoned-down.

Then there’s the framing story--the excuse for Covington’s telling the main one: He’s writing a journal in reply to letters from a boyhood friend whose homosexual advances he rejected 19 years ago. Most such conventions needn’t be taken seriously, but here the broken relationship marks the point at which Covington feels his life went wrong. And we aren’t sure why. Covington isn’t gay. There’s no link to the sexual problem in his marriage (a tired and obvious metaphor for his problems at work). Apparently this flaw in the friend, a brilliant student, made him yet another example of “niggerishness” to be fled from. But when Covington tries to explain it, his language gets unintelligibly fancy.

Still, this guy Wade has got hold of something. Let’s hope he doesn’t let go.