Irving Wallace - The Man

The news report infuriated Leroy Poole in two ways. First, it related that the Turnerites had retaliated for Klan violence with peaceful if dramatic picketing, and, as always, had been brutally attacked; and second, this horrible story, deserving of a page-one notice which might inspire national revulsion and action, had been buried on a back page because, unluckily, the President of the United States had died.

This defeat, as well as all his other frustrations and disappointments, had again filled his head, the instant the alarm jangled this morning. It would not be easy to undertake his daily exercise, and for seconds he considered skipping the exercise this once, but then he knew that he must not permit himself any inner flabbiness.

After that, he began his calisthenics.

Alabama. State flower: camellia. State tree: Southern pine. Motto: We Dare Defend Our Rights. Whose rights, you bastards? Father, a cotton picker, old, old at forty, dead at forty-one of malnutrition, pneumonia, fright. Mom, maid, cook, laundress, slavery (“Look, old lady, we know that lying nigger talk of yours, so if you’re too sick to come to work, you stay sick and stay home for good”). Older sister, prostitute for peckerwoods, not even mossbacks, but red-neck pecker-woods, the gutless bitch. Older brother, high I.Q., a shoeshine entrepreneur. His favorite cousin, grave outside Mobile. Almost a teacher. Walking in the woods with an educated white girl. Seen. Next day, six grabbed him, putting a blowtorch in his face. Leroy, Mom’s hope, youngest, running scared, hiding scared, hungry. Jewed by the hunchback, kicked and stoned by the squat red-necks, stealing once, twice, three times, wanting books, wanting everything, having nothing, but shoved, spat upon, threatened, cursed at, slapped, scared, always scared.

Pennsylvania. State flower: mountain laurel. State tree: hemlock. State motto: Virtue, Liberty, and Independence. Job in a trucking firm. Bullied and underpaid. No friends. No service in restaurants. No rooms in rooming houses. No nothing. Only freedom to read and read and read. College. Himself lonely, isolated, freakish. Scared, writing good English papers, amusing one white girl. She curious. Some meetings to talk literature. Discovered. Boy friends “protecting” her. Behind the gym at night. Holding him down, pulling off his pants, shorts, brandishing knives, then laughing (“Not enough to cut off, black boy, but keep it buttoned or you’ll lose it”). Humiliated, scared, quitting. North worse than South, because of pretense. North worse, because no place else to go.

New York City. New York Harlem. Flower: none. Tree: none. Motto: Don’t Want Your Daughter, Mister, Just Want Half Her Freedom. Black ghetto Harlem. Squalid, stinking, poverty, danger. Knives, booze, heroin, hot goods. Fleabags and tenements, and dinner out of garbage cans. Listening to New York voices, white: They’re illiterate, they’re shiftless, they’re not dependable, they’re criminals, they’re best in their place. Listening to Harlem voices, black voices: They sure is mean folk, they smells more than us, they is gougin’ crooks, they scared of us more than us of them, they no good never. Talk a waste. Learning, improving, escaping, all that counts. Reading books still free. Finding writer’s magazine in library, finding writing is paid for. Writing, writing, writing, first writing foolish white writing for money, can’t sell, then writing the Leroy way about what’s inside, crude, true, and the small magazine saying come over, and the Jew editor, a good Jew, saying you write, we’ll buy. Writing, writing, writing, and never stopping until his people make the scene, the American scene, but all of it still too slow. Need to cry out, to protest. Need to talk to someone, Mom too far, too scared. Joining everything. NAACP. Too slow. Crispus Society. Too slow. New thing, Turnerites, doers, not scared. Better. Much better. Mister, what’s wrong with me marrying your daughter? What’s so special about her? And, mister, who in the hell are you that’s in any way better than me?

As this exercising went on, strength growing through hot memory of oppression, Leroy Poole began to feel invigorated and purposeful. He decided that he would do one more minute of it before rising. His mind returned to the South, to personal offenses, to recollections of being shoved off the street, hustled to the rear of a bus, to degradations that he had witnessed, to recollections of his cousin being turned away from the polling place, his best friend being hooted away from the white high school. His mind did these push-ups, sit-ups, bends; his mind shadowboxed and ran a mile, until the blood throbbed in his temples, and his breathing came in gasps, and the rage coursed through his blood to quicken his heart and his determination never to relent.

It was the ringing of the telephone that stopped his exercise.

Satisfied with his preparation for the day, he shoved himself off the bed, hitched up his pajamas, and on bare feet hastened to the chipped telephone next to the armchair. Sitting, taking up the phone, he hoped that it would be Jeff Hurley, with a full report of the Mississippi trouble, and anxious to enlist Leroy Poole’s advice as a member of the Turnerite strategy board.

“Yeh, hello?”

“Oh, hello there. I hope I have the right room. Is this Leroy Poole, the writer?” The voice from the other end surprised him, for it came from a female, unmistakably from a refined Southern female.

“That’s right. This is Leroy Poole.”

“I hope I’m not interrupting your work, Mr. Poole. This is Sally Watson. Remember me?”

The name reminded him of no lady of his acquaintance. This did not surprise him. There were not many. However, occasionally club-women called, to request him to lecture or sit in on a civil rights panel. “I’m not sure, ma’am. The name is familiar.”

“Last night,” she was saying, somewhat distraughtly. “We met last night at the party for you. I was there with a friend. I’m Senator Hoyt Watson’s daughter-”

He placed her now. The well-shaped, edgy blonde. “Of course,” he said, “of course. How could anyone forget you?” He swallowed, restrained himself, not yet prepared to go on in this vein with a white girl, not while the remembrance of his cousin’s grave outside Mobile and his own humiliation behind the college gym were alive within him. “I enjoyed the pleasure of meeting you, Miss Watson.”

“And I enjoyed hearing you read from your new novel. I think it’s wonderful.”

Wonderful, he thought, a savage novel in which whites were reduced to a ten-per-cent minority in one imagined American county. “I’m glad you were open-minded enough to like it,” he said.

“Don’t let my accent or my father’s voting record fool you,” she said. “I’m quite my own person, and I count at least fifty Negroes among my good friends.” She paused, and then she said, “You must be very excited about the news this morning.”

“What news?” he asked.

“The new President, I mean.”

“Oh, that. I read all about it last night. I don’t think there’s anything especially exciting about MacPherson becoming President. He-”

“MacPherson?” She almost screamed the name through the telephone. “You mean you don’t know?”

He was utterly bewildered. “Know what? I just woke up, and I-”

“MacPherson died, too. One of your own people was sworn in as President last night. Your friend Douglass Dilman.”

The news vibrated in his ear. He sat thunderstruck, speechless and uncomprehending.

“Mr. Poole, are you there?”

“I-yes-I-are you sure? I can’t believe it.”

“It’s the truth. It’s all over the place. Everyone’s talking about it. Well, I’m glad I could bring you the news-”