For Wilshire Baptist Church
“They lived in a fever all the time. Awake, they acted more like caged wild animals than normal human beings. Excitement! Ever more excitement! It seemed they were unable to sit quiet and think for any length of time but must have frequent new contacts from the outside to enable them to exist. It would seem their inner selves were not good company.”
It sounds much like a description of our current culture where many of us are pumped up on social media and virtual reality and struggle with short attention spans and the need for greater numbers of likes and followers. But the words are not about our present world at all; they are from a book published in 1924.
The book is “Norfleet,” the first-person account of J. Frank Norfleet, a West Texas rancher who was conned out of $45,000 in a complicated financial scheme while on business in Dallas. That equates to almost $600,000 today, and Norfleet spent the next four years of his life and more of his own money pursuing and gaining convictions of the men who had fleeced him.
The book was given to me by my grandfather, who was 26 when the book was published. Norfleet was a folk hero to many folks in North Texas at the time, and Grandpa certainly would have been among his admirers for the way he sought justice and sounded the alarm against unscrupulous schemers. I first read it as a teen and just recently read it again. It’s an interesting story full of colorful phrases and exaggerated descriptions you’d find in an old movie. And it paints a detailed picture of how con games worked – how schemers would gain someone’s confidence over time and lead them to make financial transactions that were too good to be true. But on this recent reading I found myself seeing and hearing with new eyes and ears. I found a new context for a century-old story.
Norfleet wrote the words I quoted earlier after disguising himself and spending a week with some accomplices of the men he was after. He turned the confidence game around and witnessed the darkness that drove the con men to hurt other people. He concluded: “They presented that most pitiful spectacle: the human being trying to get away from association with the secrets of its own soul.”
The words made me shudder; they are perhaps the most unsettling words I’ve read in years. I wrote them down knowing I would share them somehow, because while written in 1923, they speak loudly today.
“But, wait a minute,” you might say, “Norfleet was talking about the men who gained his confidence and talked him out of his money. That won’t happen to me.” Probably not, although we all are at risk of cyber-attacks that take advantage of our confidence, laziness or gullibility. But even more so, we are at risk of cozying up to diversions that shift our priorities and damage our relationships. Most troubling – and the reason I wrote down those words – is that while Norfleet was describing the con men, it is you and me who are at risk of becoming the ones unable to spend time with our inner selves.
It took some time with an old book for me to step back a moment and check myself on these points. And there’s another old book on the shelf I need to spend some time with as well for some fresh context.