The Pleasure of “Seeing ’Em Jump”

The Pleasure of “Seeing ’Em Jump” is Wes Jordan’s name for the reward that makes political life hard to relinquish: watching other people respond to a politician’s presence with visible deference. He distinguishes that pleasure from money, fame, and even the power to improve a city. The concept joins the everyday theater of respect to the less public exchanges behind elections, then becomes personal for Roger White when political advocacy brings him recognition and a sense of belonging.

The reward Wes identifies

Wes describes politics as something Roger has begun to enjoy, although Roger does not initially recognize the pleasure Wes means. A politician may become accustomed to publicity: appearing on television, seeing a photograph in the newspaper, or being profiled in national media. Wes compares that familiar exposure to ordinary features of the landscape. What remains exciting, he says, is seeing people jump.

The phrase refers both to literal movement and to a broader act of deference. When Wes enters a room in Atlanta, people who are seated rise; when he needs a chair, someone hurries to find one. In shops, people abandon what they are doing to serve him. If he is late for a flight, airport staff will stop the operation around him to help him catch it. In public, people approach, flatter him, and ask for autographs. These examples make political status visible through other people’s conduct: authority is experienced as a capacity to redirect attention and activity.

Wes insists that this response crosses racial lines. Even the prominent white people euphemistically called the business interests, he says, will rise and attend to him; white people and African Americans alike may jump to serve a mayor. The pleasure is therefore not simply applause from a political constituency. It is the felt evidence that a person’s presence can command a room and prompt action.

The election machinery behind deference

Wes’s account of campaigning places this pleasure against the practical work of assembling political support. He tells Roger that a citywide race cannot be won on a candidate’s merits alone: it requires money and organization, including people who understand individual neighborhoods, particularly South Atlanta. Campaigns consume funds, and candidates can become increasingly tempted by checks they previously rejected.

Wes illustrates that temptation with a $20,000 check offered by a gay-rights organization in return for signing a letter supporting its agenda. He rejected the offer, believing the positions politically wrong for his constituency. Four days later, The Five Pointer denounced him as a homophobe opportunist, and he concluded that he had lost the gay vote without making a public statement on the issue. His story shows how a campaign contribution could bring both money and an expected political commitment—and how refusing the exchange could carry its own electoral cost.

He describes get-out-the-vote money as a more direct and illicit transaction. Near election day, neighborhood operators may claim they can deliver a specified number of votes and demand cash up front, sometimes aggressively and without negotiation. The candidate needs local intermediaries who can distinguish a reliable vote-deliverer from someone who cannot produce the promised support. Once the cash changes hands, the campaign has no control over its use and no recourse under the verbal agreement Wes describes. The operator may call potential voters on election morning and urge them to get out of bed and vote; according to Wes, the operator keeps about half, or somewhat more, of the money paid.

Wes calls the practice buying votes and acknowledges that it is illegal, but presents it as, except in rare cases, part of what it takes to win a citywide election. He says a candidate should reserve half a million dollars for cash distributed to voters, and that a full million would increase the candidate’s chances by 50 percent. He identifies Andre Fleet as the candidate guaranteed a million dollars for this purpose. In this account, political influence is not an abstraction: it runs through campaign funds, neighborhood knowledge, intermediaries, and the voters those intermediaries claim to mobilize.

The Atlanta Way and reciprocal power

Wes also explains the Atlanta Way through an image of a baseball being unwound. Beneath the white horsehide and what seems like a mile of white string lies a small, hard black core. He maps that image onto the city: the core is the 280,000 Black residents of South Atlanta, whose votes control the city, while the surrounding string represents three million white people in North Atlanta and the surrounding counties. His account describes urban political power as a relationship between a Black electoral core and a much larger white population, rather than as a simple measure of population size.

The airport expansion he recalls supplies an example of the bargain-making he associates with this arrangement. Maynard gathered the business interests around a billion-dollar project and announced that 30 percent would go to minority contractors. The business interests initially balked, Wes says, but the remaining 70 percent was enough to bring them around. Maynard later took pride in the project’s creation of twenty-five Black millionaires. For Wes, the episode exemplifies the Atlanta Way: business opportunity and minority participation could be negotiated together, with political power shaping the terms of a major development.

This account connects the spectacle of deference to an underlying system of negotiation. The mayor’s ability to make people jump is the public face of influence; campaign organization, local brokers, electoral blocs, and development bargains show some of the relationships through which that influence is built and exercised. Wes does not present these mechanisms as equivalent: he explicitly calls cash for votes illegal, while the airport example concerns the allocation of contracting opportunities. Together, however, they show the range of exchanges and accommodations that his discussion places within Atlanta politics.

Roger’s experience of political recognition

The concept becomes more than Wes’s lesson when Roger tells him what happened after their press conference at the library at Wringer Fleasom. Roger had entered the case with trepidation. Fareek Fanon disliked him at first, and Roger worried that representing Fareek would alienate the firm’s white clientele, after years of cultivating the business interests’ approval. The press conference changed how people on the street responded to him: African Americans who had seen it on television recognized him and offered support.

At a larger press conference, Gibley Berm approached Roger, whom he knew only from newspaper pictures, praised his work, and told him he had Roger’s back. Roger admits that he loved the recognition. He describes the change as no longer feeling like an African American who had risen far above his own people, but as being with his people at last. Wes answers that this, too, is politics. The episode gives the concept an intimate counterpart to a mayor’s public prestige: being recognized can bring Roger not only attention but a sense of connection he had feared his professional choices might have cost him.

Political pleasure and its limits

Wes tells Roger that money is not what makes a politician love politics. He says he loses money each year because his salary cannot cover everything expected of him. Nor, in his account, is the pleasure simply the power to reduce crime, rehabilitate the South side, or otherwise change city life. Fame also loses its novelty once publicity becomes routine. Against these familiar rewards, the sight of people jumping stands out as the sensation that can make political life addictive.

Roger has already experienced a version of that sensation through his dealings with Charlie Croker, whom he has made jump since first visiting him at Croker Concourse. Wes uses that example to tell Roger that he has already acted like a politician and helped both Wes and his client. Roger resists Wes’s interpretation, but recognizes that Wes has struck close to the truth. The concept thus complicates political service: recognition and influence may accompany useful advocacy, while the pleasure of commanding attention can become its own reward. In Roger’s case, political recognition also answers a longing for solidarity; in Wes’s account, the pleasure is the immediate, visible deference that power makes possible.