Since no physical exertion could reduce his body to the same hardness as that of his mind and heart, Leroy Poole compensated for this by toiling daily to invigorate and fortify what lay invisible beneath his skull and skin. Like Richard Wright, a boyhood idol, Leroy Poole had learned long ago that “there existed men against whom I was powerless, men who could violate my life at will,” and that their savage and unjust superiority must be combated, even unto death. He had to toughen his will against white men’s bribes: no money, no comfort, no intellectual rationalizing, no compromise promises of future Green Pastures, no white token acceptance and approval could be permitted to negate the searing helplessness and humiliation that he and his family had suffered, were suffering, or allowed to modify and weaken the determination in his mind and heart. These were the muscles-the inner muscles of righteous hate-that Leroy Poole sought to energize and sustain every morning. The exercise performed was a simple one: he remembered his past, and was strong again.
It was not always easy. It had not been easy this morning. Last night’s party had left him weakened, and a residue of this weakness remained. It had not been the drinks. He did not drink. His abstinence he owed less to the hellfire Baptist upbringing of his childhood than to the fact that drinks made black men as foolish as white men, but while white men could afford such lapses, black men could not. The weakness that carried over from the party was caused by the fact that he had been induced to read aloud a passage from his new novel, and relate some of the story, and he had been applauded and been made prideful and been lulled into believing, briefly, that life might not be so bad after all.
That was one impediment to his exercise this morning. Another was that he despised the work he must do in the next hours, days, weeks. He resented having to abandon his polemics, his angry and effective articles and essays on his experiences as a Negro and on his ideas about equality, for which he was poorly paid, to undertake a hack political biography that would profit him nothing but money. He resented, too, delaying his great novel, a moral earthquake that would shake the mossbacks and crackers of the South and the pretentious tolerators of the North from their fixed poles of prejudice. He resented delaying it in order to feed the vanity of stupid and ignorant Negro readers who wanted to enjoy vicariously the rise to Congress of one of their own color.
And there was more that distressed him after the alarm clock had jarred him from his sleep. He was ashamed of himself for the small corruption of making heroic, to his people, an undeserving ward heeler who, through servility and errand-running and ass-licking, had become a senator. If only he was presenting to his people the figure of a brave and true Negro leader like Jeff Hurley, his beloved friend, his superior in the Turnerites, it would be a worth-while and noble endeavor. But then, he knew, the Hurleys did not become congressmen in the paleface world. Only the handful of Dilmans could make it, because they were puking counterfeit whites. It distressed Leroy Poole that he must spend this precious day typing up notes of his last meeting with Dilman, preparing questions for the next interview, and then spend several months more writing the crummy, phony biography.
If he could not do his own work, he told himself upon awakening, then at the very least he should be at the barricades, where the action was, where the freedom fight would finally be won, just the way the whites had won their fight at Concord and Bunker Hill. He was miserable about the Turnerite fiasco in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, yesterday. He had known for some time, having learned about it from Hurley, that the first step in the new program was planned for yesterday afternoon. He had not known the result until last night. His mind went back to last night.
Because he had been offered a ride, and had research to do, he left the party early, over much protestation. The streets were curiously desolate, but then he supposed this was because T. C. had been killed and everyone was at home or in bars glued to television sets. There had been some talk between his driver, a Howard University boy, and himself about the President’s demise and what it might mean to their cause, and they agreed it meant nothing at all. Since the time Theodore Roosevelt had invited Booker T. Washington to the White House, no white President had proved any better than another for them. It was not yet ten o’clock when Leroy Poole was deposited before the small, three-story hotel, rising between an alley and a grocery store, its broken red neon sign shining out: PARADISE HOTEL.
He entered the minuscule lobby, with its spotted rug and seven threadbare chairs, and waddled to the reception desk. No one was there. Peering off, he saw the pimply young clerk at a table in the office, head in his arms, snoring softly. Leroy Poole went behind the desk, pulled down his key, and then walked toward the rickety self-service elevator. He paused at the newspaper rack, to buy the late edition, but the rack was empty. Disappointed because he had anticipated seeing the space the Mississippi demonstration received, he considered going out in search of a newspaper. At that moment he sighted one newspaper folded on a chair. It proved to be a discarded early evening edition, and the headlines proclaimed T. C.’s death and Speaker MacPherson’s succession to the Presidency.
Leroy Poole took the newspaper up to his second-floor room, and once he had bolted his door, he sought the results of the Turnerite demonstration in Hattiesburg. As page after page made no report of it, he began to believe that the newspaper had been printed too early to carry the news. And then, on page eighteen, he found it.
The wire service story was brief: To counteract the terror of the revived Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, a Negro activist group, the Turnerites, had sent twelve members, wearing black hoods and robes, to picket a department store owned by the local Klan’s Grand Dragon; the white proprietor had rushed out, unmasked one Turnerite picket, and thrown sulphuric acid in his face, permanently blinding him; the Negroes had gone berserk, beating the white Klan leader, smashing his store windows and damaging most of the showcases inside; the armed police and their dogs had come, and two of the Turnerites were in the county hospital, critically injured, and the other ten were in jail.
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.