The Man

by Irving Wallace

  “That’s right.”

  “Have you heard the news for yourself by now?”

  “Miss Watson, I not only heard the news, I’m trying to make some of it myself,” he said cockily. “It’s quite an experience, having someone you know, someone you’re dealing with, become President.”

  “That’s why I’m calling you, Mr. Poole. I hope I’m not being presumptuous. If I am, you tell me. To be perfectly honest, even though I hardly know you-well, actually I feel that I do-I’ve read so much of your work-I want to ask a favor of you.” She paused. “There, I’ve said it.”

  He puzzled over what on earth he could possibly do for a rich white girl whose father was a senior powerhouse in the Senate. “You name it, Miss Watson. If it’s something I can do, I’ll be glad to oblige.”

  “I mean, I don’t go around asking people favors like this,” she said. “I’ve never done this before. But maybe you won’t mind. I know a lot of people on my own. Maybe one day I can be of help to you-not that you need it, with your genius.”

  Impatience nudged Leroy Poole’s curiosity. “Like I said, name it.”

  She seemed to exhale her request through the earpiece. “I want you to help me get a job with President Dilman.”

  The request bewildered him. “A job with him? Why, I don’t know that I have all that much standing with him, Miss Watson,” he said. “Can’t your father do that better for you? After all, they were fellow senators, on the same side of the aisle.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said hastily, “but that would be awkward for a hundred reasons. Besides, my father doesn’t know President Dilman as well as you do, and even if he did, it would be a little difficult for him to pop right in and ask for Party patronage.” Her tone became a plea. “You’ll be with the President constantly. It would be easy for you. I’m sure he’d listen.”

  Leroy Poole straightened, gratified to have become Dilman’s adviser. He weighed her request. Her background was important. Intervening on her behalf was no skin off his ass. You did a favor, you had a debtor. It was good to have investments outstanding. When he saw Dilman-if he saw him-he could just toss it out, and if Dilman said yes or no, at least he had his debtor. “Miss Watson, I think you’d better tell me, what kind of job have you got in mind?”

  “I want to be his social secretary.”

  “Forgive me for being naïve, Miss Watson, but exactly what does that mean?”

  “Every President has a White House social secretary. Sometimes his wife has one, too. But now there’s no First Lady, so the President will need someone competent and experienced for both jobs. The social secretary helps the President with his-well, his social life, getting up lists, sending invitations, calling around to arrange cocktail parties, dinners, informal gatherings in the White House. Both T. C. and President Johnson had marvelous social secretaries, but President Dilman needs someone even better. His problems are more complex. Not having a wife or daughter, he’ll have to have someone who knows all levels of Washington society. And, well, the fact that he is colored, he may want someone who-well, Mr. Poole, you know-who is understanding, and so forth. I fill the bill.”

  She had entered Poole’s grounds, and he challenged her. “Where you from, Miss Watson?”

  She sounded disconcerted. “You mean where I was born and raised? I was born in Louisiana. My mother lives in New Orleans. Well, now she’s in Rome, but-and my father, well, you know, he’s-”

  “How’s it going to look, Miss Watson, a daughter of the Confederacy working so close to a Negro?”

  “I told you how I feel. I don’t have those die-hard sentiments. I was educated in the East. You saw me at the party last night. I like your people.”

  “I don’t mean how’s it going to look to you, Miss Watson. I mean how’s it going to look to your father? Even if Dilman took you on, do you think your father’d allow it?”

  “Mr. Poole, not my father, not anyone, waves me around like a Confederate flag,” she said with a tinge of anger. “I’m over twenty-one. I’m an American like you and the President. I belong to me and I do as I please. I want a job where my background can be useful. I think that’s the right job for me. Above all, I think I might be of use to the President. I can send you a résumé of my experience and abilities, to show to him. I can send you a list of persons, high up as Cabinet members, who would recommend me. Won’t you help me?”

  “Miss Watson, I like your sound, and I dig you. Yes, I’ll try to make a pitch for you. I’ll do my best.”

  “When? Do you have an idea? I’d like to apply before everyone else begins pestering him.”

  “I’m supposed to see him this week. If we speak on the phone earlier, I’ll mention you right off. Like I said, I’ll do my best. Whatever happens, I’ll call you.”

  “Let me give you my number-”

  “Wait, I don’t have a pencil.”

  “Well, no matter, I have my own phone. I’m listed as Watson, Sally, in the Arlington book. I don’t know how to thank you enough.”

  “Only thank me if I’m lucky. If I am, just see that I’m invited to one of those White House dinners someday.”

  “I’ll do more. I’ll have hundreds of copies of your book there, waiting to be signed. Thanks, Mr. Poole. I’ll be living by the phone. Goodbye.”

  Setting down the telephone, Leroy Poole crossed to the cheap pine desk on which his portable typewriter rested, located a pencil, and jotted a reminder to mention Sally Watson to Dilman, if and when. He then knelt, opened his suitcase under the desk, and pulled out two unwieldy legal-sized manila folders. One contained the typed transcript of his interviews with Douglass Dilman. The other was filled with typed research notes, newspaper clippings, photostats of magazine articles, and mimeographed handouts, all giving data on Dilman and his public record, on the Senate’s rules and history, and on Dilman’s home state and its politics; and there was also associated material on other Negroes who had served, or were currently serving, in Congress.

  Returning to the armchair, he set the research folder on the floor and opened the folder of typed transcripts before him. He put aside the pages covered with penciled notes of his last talk with Dilman, four days ago, which still had to be typed. He began to study what had already been typed, the result of at least two dozen sessions with Dilman, his questions, Dilman’s answers.

  The ringing of the telephone shattered his concentration. Hastily he closed the folder, shoved it between his leg and the arm of the chair, and brought the receiver before him, hoping that this was the call he wanted.

  “Yeh, hello?”

  “This is Memphis, Tennessee, long-distance operator. Is this Mr. Leroy Poole?”

  “Right.”

  “Please hold on a moment. Your line was busy. I’ll have to ring your party.”

  “Operator, who’s calling?”

  “Uh-Mr. Jefferson Hurley. One moment, please.”

  Leroy Poole could feel the smile creasing in his face. Hurley had not neglected him after all. Busy as he was, having moved from Topeka down to Memphis, obviously to set up a base closer to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Hurley still had found time to consult with him. Poole gloried and preened at the compliment, not so much of being a member of the Turnerite inner circle as in being Jeff Hurley’s friend.

  Waiting to hear the deep, thick voice, which never failed to move him, he visualized Jeff Hurley, whom he had seen too infrequently in the three years since they had met at a Crispus Society meeting on New York’s East Side. Hurley was a beautiful giant, at thirty-three but a year older than Poole, a self-educated, spellbinding, coffee-colored genius, determined and fearless, cleverer than any white man, unafraid of any human being, white or black. The Turnerite Group had been Hurley’s creation, hewed from the Crispus Society’s dead heartwood, a great and pulsating splinter committee secretly set upon a course of direct and immediate action to achieve equality now.

  Hurley had given the Group its arrogant name because of his admiration for the brave Negro farmer and
preacher, Nat Turner, who had dared to rebel against Virginia slavery in 1831. With five followers Turner had ranged through Southampton County, a vengeful black Moses determined to lead his children out of Egypt to freedom, and in the course of his rebellion he had slaughtered sixty whites. Freedom had not been won, and over one hundred colored men were to die from retaliation, but a point had been made. Never again would the South feel safe with its slaves.

  Hurley’s Turnerites wished to make no point. They desired to lead no chosen people to a Promised Land. Their goal was to make the United States that Promised Land, the one promised in the Constitution, and to do so by force, if necessary. The black-hooded picketing yesterday, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, had been their first move. If it, or the Turnerite actions to follow, were thwarted, Hurley had promised, like the white Moses of the Jews, like the Moses of the blacks, Nat Turner, to respond with “an eye for an eye.” The Southern leaders had ranted against Hurley, the Northern leaders had chastised him for intemperance and impatience, and Spinger’s Crispus Society (in which many Turnerites still retained membership) had pleaded with him to observe due process of the law. Now, in Hattiesburg, Hurley and his Group had been assaulted bodily and hurt without just cause. Those who still recalled Hurley’s fiery press pronouncements would be wondering: Would his Old Testament warning be acted out?

  Waiting at the telephone, Leroy Poole had no doubts. In all communities of people, you separated the men from the boys by determining which were the doers and which the talkers. Hurley was a doer. Leroy Poole adored him. It was not only Hurley’s authority that appealed to Poole, but the gorgeous physical aspect of the man, his short-cropped, glossy dark hair, his liquid brooding eyes, his aquiline nose, his gleaming teeth. This was the human being Leroy Poole wanted to be, but since the metamorphosis was an impossibility, it gratified Poole simply to stand beside that human being forever. For Poole, the best safety that he had ever known had been that offered by Hurley’s mammoth arm around him, Hurley’s hearty laughter, Hurley’s electrifying instructions. Leroy Poole had given only a part of himself, in friendship, to many black men and a few black women, but Jeff Hurley (whether Jeff knew it or not) was the only one of either sex for whom he would have given his life.

  From far Memphis he felt Hurley enfold him. “Leroy? You there?”

  “Jeff-Jeff-how are you?”

  “I guess I’m the guy who knows the guy who knows the new President of the United States. How about that, Leroy? Speak of shocks-”

  “I still can’t believe it.”

  “I don’t know the reaction up your way, but down here you’d think old Nat Turner himself had overthrown the government of the United States. Almost every Memphis, white is apoplectic. Even here on Beale Street our brothers are numbed, full of joy and fire-works inside but afraid to display it.”

  “The question is-what do you think, Jeff?”

  “I don’t know what to think yet. I know nothing about Dilman except for a couple of cracks you’ve made in your letters. I gather you haven’t much high regard for him. You once called him a doughface.”

  “Did I? Well, maybe that was too strong. He doesn’t exactly support the Southerners. Up to now I’ve just sort of felt he was less interested in equality than in self-survival. You know, Jeff, the kind of person who doesn’t even want to stop and help out when he sees someone in trouble or being wrongly hurt. He just wants to be left alone. Maybe that was understandable yesterday, but today’s a new day, and he’ll find no one’s going to leave him alone. What it comes to is who’s going to get to him first and strongest, and then he’s going to have to show if he’s nothing but a scarecrow stuffed full of bought ballots or if he’s a colored man with guts. I don’t have high hopes, Jeff.”

  The voice from Memphis was momentarily still. Poole waited patiently, and at last he heard Hurley speak. “We’ll see soon enough, we’ll find out if they’ve made our man into another hanky-head. Things are moving fast, Leroy, and we’re not letting anyone ignore them.”

  “That was awful, what happened down there in Hattiesburg. Was someone really blinded?”

  “Yes, Simon was, poor bastard. Completely sightless, of all the rotten things. And Marvin’s sustained a skull fracture, but he’ll live. The other ten are okay, as okay as anyone can be in those stinking cell blocks.”

  “When are they going to be let out?”

  “Let out?” Hurley snorted bitterly. “They come up for sentencing in a day or two-”

  “They come up for sentencing?” Leroy Poole shouted. “Je-sus, what did they do but peaceably picket in some Halloween costumes? What about the Grand Dragon who threw the-”

  “Leroy, Leroy, you know better than that. Those folks can’t do anything wrong, just like we can’t do anything right. The charges against our boys are a mile long. Disturbing the peace, inciting a riot, assault and battery-you name it; whatever’s in the book is being thrown at them. Worst of all, a county judge named Everett Gage is going to be on the bench, reading the sentence. We’ve got the biography on him. Twice in ten years he let off proven lynchers. And they’ve built a special cemetery, in some swamp, just to hold the Negroes he’s sentenced to hard labor.”

  “What are you going to do, Jeff?”

  “I’m heading down to Little Rock in an hour, and if Judge Gage does what’s expected, I’ll probably set up a base of operations in Shreveport. Then, if necessary, some of us’ll do what has to be done.”

  “You mean-?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Leroy Poole was suddenly unnerved. “Jeff, one thing. You talk about the sentencing. Didn’t our boys plead Not Guilty?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Well, what about the trial first?”

  “I omitted it to save long-distance charges. Leroy, you’ve been away from your South too long.”

  “Yeh.”

  Hurley’s voice came on more forcefully. “There is one thing that does count, and that’s an appeal carried on our behalf by an important attorney. Something to stir up pressure, force them into second thoughts, into moderation. That’s primarily why I called you.”

  “What can I do, Jeff?”

  “I’ll tell you what I’ve done, and what you can do. You’ve heard of Nat Abrahams-?”

  “The lawyer?”

  “The one who got those Mexicans off in California, and did that great job for the NAACP in Ohio. I tried to get through to him in Chicago. He was gone. His associate, fellow named Hart, said he was on his way to Washington. I explained the urgency of our case, and asked where we could contact him in Washington. Hart said Nat Abrahams was turning down all criminal cases, was involved with something new in your city. Leroy, I’d like to-”

  Poole interrupted, remembering what had been nagging at him as he listened. “Wait, Jeff, something just came to mind. This Nat Abrahams, he’s the one-when Dilman gave me the names of relatives and friends to interview, he named Nat Abrahams of Chicago as one of his best friends.”

  Hurley whistled. “Great. Better than I hoped for. I was going to ask you to look up Abrahams when he arrives, make a special plea for him to intervene for us on the appeal. But this is better, much better. When are you seeing Dilman again?”

  “Well, now that he’s become President-”

  “See him.” It was a command, and Leroy Poole came to attention. “See him,” Hurley repeated, “and when you see him, make sure he knows what’s happened to the Turnerites down in Mississippi, what’s happened to his people. Tell him you’d like him to get his friend Nat Abrahams to give us a little help. Tell him we’re desperate, anything you like. We need Abrahams, and no matter how busy he is, I can’t see him saying no to the President of the United States.”

  Poole was worried. “I can’t see Abrahams saying no to Dilman either, but I sure can see Dilman saying no to me. You should look at the notes of my talks with Dilman. He’s chicken. He’s a let’s-make-haste-slowly fink.”

  “Did you ever feel him out on the Turnerites?
”

  “I sure did. He hemmed and hawed, weaseling all the way. It’s in my notes.”

  Hurley’s tone had become fiercer. “Send me a copy of your notes on Dilman. Everything. In return, I’ll send you something today, some information that’ll maybe help you turn Dilman from a chicken to a bantam cock. Try your best, Leroy, any way you can. Get your man in the White House to deliver Abrahams to us. If you succeed, you’ve done a great service for us, and we’ve got a real fighting chance.”

  “What if I can’t make it, Jeff?”

  “Then we’re going all the way, like we agreed.”

  “I-I’d hate that, Jeff.”

  “You think I’d like it? But it’s that or nothing now. We’ve been knocked around long enough. Maybe it’s time we punch back hard.”

  “All right, Jeff.”

  “First things first. Before you pitch the President, make sure Nat Abrahams is in Washington. Once you’re sure, you get in there with Dilman, because right now it’s either the lawyer way or the other way, one or the other, but whichever, it’s got to be fast. We’re going fast from here on in.”

  Even an electric razor did not make the task of shaving easier on a swaying, speeding train. Ridding oneself of a thick stubble, while in rapid transit, required the steady hand of a surgeon and the concentration of a yogi. He possessed neither attribute this sulky gray morning. He blamed his unsure hand and his wandering mind on the stunning news that he had heard in Akron last night. He had been up half the night with it, following its implications along every dead-end tangent, and back again, and over again, and a few hours’ sleep had not alleviated the disturbance.

  Grunting surrender, Nat Abrahams gave up.

  Unplugging the cord, wrapping it around the electric razor, he considered the results of his shaving in the dim yellow mirror of the cramped, rattling compartment lavatory. A sadly uneven job, but then God had been there first, he decided wryly. No electric gadgetry could smooth the Maker’s work. Nor did Nat Abrahams really care much. The twin in the mirror with its shock of unruly brown hair, lined forehead, bushy eyebrows, sunken eyes, hooked nose between high cheekbones, amused mouth, prominent jaw, all gaunt, sallow, keen, had been faithful friend and partner through most of his quixotic idiocies and adventures for most of his years. The six-feet-and-one-inch twin-not only the face, but the lanky, ungainly, sinewy structure appended to it-had frightened off few clients (well, maybe a few fastidious ones), lost few juries, antagonized few judges. It had won him Sue. It had collaborated to gain him mighty pleasures and minor reputation. Who could ask for anything more?