Irving Wallace - The Man

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.”