Wes Jordan

Wes Jordan is Atlanta’s mayor and an experienced political operator whose response to the Fareek Fanon controversy exposes how closely civic principle and private leverage can be joined in the city’s politics. He sees a danger of racial division, but does not rely on argument alone to contain it: he arranges for Charlie Croker, a prominent white businessman under financial pressure, to support Fareek publicly, and offers relief from that pressure as part of the bargain. The plan makes Wes both a civic strategist and a broker of political obligations.

The Mayor and His Political Setting

Wes appears through his dealings with Roger Too White, whom he addresses with the familiar fraternal greeting Brother Roger. Roger’s loyalty to him is powerful enough to override his misgivings about being conspicuous in Southeast Atlanta while carrying a hidden recording device. Wes has dispatched Roger to record a meeting at the Church of the Sheltering Arms, where Andre Fleet is holding a rally. The pastor, Isaac Blakey, is an influential political figure in the neighborhood; by allowing the meeting, Wes fears, he is implicitly endorsing Fleet. Wes’s ability to send Roger into this situation shows how political competition reaches beyond official offices and into churches and neighborhood leadership.

The episode also reveals the limits of Wes’s authority over his own allies. Roger wonders whether the mayor understands whom he is really working for, him or Fareek. Roger goes because he cannot bear Wes’s scorn, yet the assignment unsettles him once he is on the scene. Wes’s political needs can therefore put personal trust under strain: his associate is not simply delivering a message but taking a risk on the mayor’s behalf.

When Roger next meets him in the mayoral parlor, Wes wears his usual nondescript dark gray suit but a different tie. Roger notices that something about him has changed, though he cannot identify it. Wes’s familiar mock high-five and controlled manner remain, while a newspaper on the coffee table carries a photograph of the California earthquake. The small details frame a mayor who receives both political confidants and the news of a distant disaster in the same working space.

The Fanon Case and the Risk to the City

Wes describes the Fanon case as capable of doing more damage to Atlanta than anything since the murder of Martin Luther King or the Rodney King riots. In his view, it reaches into white fear and could split the city apart. He wants Roger to understand that the case is not merely a matter of individual reputations: its public handling may intensify a racial crisis. He consequently casts the preservation of civic order as a reason to intervene.

The earthquake story gives this concern an apt, if uneasy, image. Asked about the risk of a similar disaster in Atlanta, Wes explains that the region has no recorded history of earthquakes and that the nearest geological fault line is in Tennessee. He says the city promises eternal vigilance, then acknowledges that he is tempted to describe Atlanta’s real danger as a racial fault line, but does not say so publicly. The contrast distinguishes a manageable geological risk from a political fracture that cannot be answered with a simple assurance.

Wes argues that Charlie Croker, or someone like him, could be essential in keeping the city from coming apart. The choice of Croker is strategic: his prominence in the business establishment and his history as a Georgia Tech football star could give public weight to a call for calm. Wes does not present him as an expert on the allegations. Rather, he wants Croker’s standing to help shape how the city receives the controversy.

A Press Conference as Political Instrument

Wes rejects the idea of a protest or rally for the proposed intervention. Instead, he imagines a press conference whose stated purpose would be to urge calm and restraint. Within that framework, he would emphasize that men have rights too, including prominent Black athletes accused in a case involving a white woman. Croker, appearing after him, would reinforce the defense of Fareek and describe him as a fine young man.

Roger challenges the weak point in this design: Croker may never have met Fareek and therefore cannot credibly vouch for him. Wes answers that the two must meet and become acquainted. The encounter is not a ceremonial detail but a necessary stage in the political construction of Croker’s endorsement. Wes wants the businessman to speak in public with the confidence of someone who has formed his own view, while arranging the circumstances that might produce that view.

His proposed inducement is explicit. Roger should tell Croker to visit Fareek and then decide whether to take part in the press conference. If Croker agrees to do his part for the city, Wes says that communications from PlannersBanc concerning his outstanding loans will immediately cease. Wes presents this as a practical demonstration: Croker can test whether the mayor has influence over the pressures threatening him. The civic appeal and the financial bargain are thus tied together, not kept in separate compartments.

Wes acknowledges that the experiment might fail if he cannot deliver the promised intervention, but he is not worried. He explains to Roger that laudable political positions seldom prevail through their logic alone; the people advancing them must understand how politics actually works. His confidence, satisfied posture, and ironic smile make the lesson personal as well as procedural. He is not merely asking Roger to pass along a message. He is demonstrating how a public position can be made actionable by attaching it to material consequences.

Croker’s Agreement and the Cost of the Strategy

Roger eventually reports that Croker has agreed to participate in the press conference. He also reports that Croker sounded extremely low and had not accepted the deal unconditionally: it would not be on until Wes proved that PlannersBanc would stop pursuing him. Wes says that he cannot do anything that day but can make a phone call the following morning. The arrangement therefore remains contingent even after Roger secures Croker’s assent. Wes has won a commitment, not yet removed the condition on which it depends.

Wes praises Roger for doing the city a great service, and Roger, looking out over South Atlanta from the law firm’s high perch on Peachtree Street, unconsciously expands his chest at the recognition. The exchange shows how Wes’s political influence works through intermediaries as well as through direct promises: Roger carries the offer, secures the response, and receives the mayor’s approval for his role in it.

The strategy also runs into Croker’s physical and emotional crisis. Roger has assembled a thick file on him, drawing on corporate research and older accounts of Croker’s football fame and Turpmtine Plantation. Later, when Roger finds Croker after his knee surgery, Croker has disappeared from contact, leaving both Roger and Wes without the expected participant. Roger tells him that the mayor is lined up, that the conference is being organized, and that his presence as a businessman and former sports star could make a difference. This return to the plan shows Wes’s dependence on Croker’s actual cooperation: political influence can arrange the stage, but it cannot substitute for the person whose reputation is meant to speak from it.

Wes’s role is consequently defined by a productive contradiction. He identifies the Fanon controversy as a threat to the city’s racial cohesion and seeks a public appeal for restraint, yet he pursues that appeal through leverage over Croker’s debt. The novel presents his politics not as a choice between principle and calculation, but as a practice in which civic purpose is advanced through calculation—and in which the success of the public message depends on whether the private bargain can be made good.