Departure
by Robert J. Marton
Drive up Main Street on this snowy evening, you find it lonely and almost abandoned.
It is only eight o’clock, but you see mostly-darkened storefronts, a few snow-covered parked cars, and no pedestrians.
Even the bus station that never closes seems abandoned. A dim light creates shadows from unoccupied benches in the waiting area. Somewhere there must be an attendant. Maybe he’s asleep in the back, but not visible at a quick glance.
The jewelry store, furniture store and bank –side by side by side–are closed for the day.
Even the movie theater is dark. This is a stay-at-home-and-watch-television night rather than one to venture out.
Curbside petunias in large pots peek through their snowy white cover. They were just beginning to come out of their winter doldrums only to suffer the shock of another blast.
This late February storm is not unusual or unexpected. But not welcome either. It was warmer last week –sunny and into the 60’s one day– a teasing promise of spring. But there is lots of winter left.
The snow grows in intensity.
One light shines in the middle of the block. Thomas Carroll sits at his desk in the Mayefield Messenger office, facing the street through large plate glass storefront windows. The rest of the staff –such as it is—has long left for home, but it is Monday night and, as he does almost every week on Monday night, Thomas toils away, writing last minute stories, editing final copy, and getting his –actually his uncle’s—weekly paper ready for the presses.
Thomas (not Tom, or Thom or Tommy) – 27, journalism school grad, aspirations of doing important work, feels stuck as a reporter on his uncle’s paper. If he waits long enough for his uncle to die, the Messenger may be his some day – enough of a carrot to keep him planted, not nearly enough to stop him from dreaming.
This is a quiet place, not loud and frantic as one usually associates with a newspaper office. There’s no printing press here – the Messenger contracts out its typesetting and printing to a shop twenty miles away. During a normal day, the only sounds in the office are the clicking of electric typewriter keys, ringing telephones, voices interviewing sources for news stories or taking classified advertisements over the phone, and the rustling of paper as copy is handed from reporter to editor. None of these sounds is heard tonight.
Instead of the work he should be doing, Thomas watches the snow cover sidewalk and pavement. He dreams of leaving this place. Mayefield: named for the Maye family that used to own the mill at the end of Main Street. The “field” in Mayefield? Who knows? Just a suffix to make it a place name. Thomas is a “Maye.” He is a native, part of the town’s history.
His model as a young reporter is George Willard, the unifying presence in Sherwood Anderson’s 1923 novel, Winesburg, Ohio. Like George, Thomas is acquainted with his town as few others are. He knows the proper and respectable citizens, many of whom make frequent appearances in the Messenger, announcing their births, graduations, engagements, marriages (but never their divorces) and eventually their deaths. No achievement is too small to get noted in the Messenger. It is all about names – get as many names as possible into the paper each week. People want to read about themselves, their children and their neighbors. Is a story really news when readers already know about it? Little that goes into the Messenger actually qualifies as news – in this small town, it takes only hours or days for any real news to circulate mouth by mouth. The weekly newspaper merely becomes the official record of what people already know.
Thomas also knows the less proper residents, the townspeople who live on the outskirts in shanties and shacks, or the few who barely survive in the alleyways or on the riverbank. Where are they on this desolate night? Have they found shelter from the storm? As hard as he tries, he can’t tell their stories in the Messenger. The owner and publisher, his Uncle Hyatt, is interested in two things – subscribers and advertisers. And the downtrodden are neither.
Mayefield was a mill town during colonial days. Now a town of 10,000, it is mainly home a few farmers and commuters to the nation’s capital and the bustling Atlantic port. The race track on the edge of town brings thousands of fans to Mayefield’s perimeter, but few to the town itself –except for the undesirable track workers who are responsible (or blamed) for most of Mayefield’s petty crime. The nexus of the town is the crossing of the major north-south highway (on its way to Florida or Maine) and Main Street, which continues west to the site of the abandoned mill and the stone houses (some stately, some dilapidated) which formerly housed mill workers.
The Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist and Baptist churches, the mainstays of respectable worship are on Main Street. Other denominations (who are these Church of Christ people, anyway?) are relegated to outlying streets. Mayefield has no synagogues – the few Jews in town travel to the cities to worship.
Just north of Main Street, a trickling branch of a major river flows quietly on its way to the ocean. To the south, seven residential streets of orderly homes are laid out in rows– homes for white families only, except two blocks on the furthermost street which has a slightly higher elevation, called the Hill, more commonly known as “colored town.”
Race is a topic often discussed in Mayefield these days — central to the town’s identity at this time in history and to its future. It is 1969: the year after Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were shot and killed, and the year after major American cities, including those nearby, burned. The previous year had been a year of hatred and death. Will this year be different?
Back to Main Street, which continues to be blanketed by snow on this evening.
Thomas is supposed to be writing the obituary of Harold Long. Harold died last weekend on an abandoned tractor factory site outside of town. No one seems sure why he was even there. It wasn’t his property. Rumor has it Harold was looking for scrap metal or anything else he could steal and sell, something he was known to do. He was found crumbled and burned at the foot of a utility pole, his right hand and arm black and charred. Police surmise he had been climbing the pole and made contact with live electrical wires. An accident? Suicide? For the obituary in the Messenger, it’s not really important. What matters is Harold was a Mayefield native, 63 years old, married to Mildred for 32 years, had no children, was a member of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, and will be buried at Oak Lane cemetery on Friday. The Messenger doesn’t care about causes, just effects. No opinions, no nuances. Report the facts (as inoffensively as possible) and move on.
Thomas knew Harold his whole life. Writing the obituary was too depressing. It could wait until later.
He also has sport stories to write – stories about meaningless high school basketball games and wrestling matches — where jamming in the names of as many local players as possible takes precedence over plays or scores. Also awaiting his attention is a report on last week’s Lion’s Club meeting, an announcement of an upcoming elementary school pageant, birth announcements, engagements and weddings. These and more, waiting for him to create the words that will make them unique, while sounding just like everything else he has written.
These too will have to wait.
He becomes mesmerized by the falling snow. What a beautiful sight, he thinks, watching the cascading flakes in the streetlight. But it is disconcerting to think about snow or winter. The florist shop across the street just put out a spring and Easter window display.
In a little over a month it will be Easter, an early Easter this year.
It is way too soon to think about Easter, especially after last year.
Could it have really been a year?
Mayefield has had a traditional Easter parade for generations. Easter morning was a time for church services, including a nondenominational sunrise service on the river bank, family breakfasts and Easter egg hunts. But the afternoon belonged to the parade: Young and old alike promenaded up Main Street in their Easter finery; the women and girls in colorful dresses and hats (everyone wore hats – the traditional Easter bonnet), either bought or made for the occasion. Men and boys were less gaily attired, but dressed up just the same.
Families paraded together. Lovers –young and not so young—walked side by side. All to be seen and admired (at least they thought so) by the spectators on the crowded sidewalks.
So many people participated in the parade, Thomas often wondered how there was anyone left to watch. How does someone make that decision – be in the parade or watch the parade?
Each Easter afternoon, Main Street was closed to car traffic as the colorful throng assembled in front of the movie theater beginning at 12:30. At one o’clock, the march began up four blocks to Light’s department store, where selected town officials and dignitaries sat in judgment, deciding who was the best dressed family (the big prize and always controversial), as well as best dressed woman, man, girl, boy and –in years past—even pets. Pets were banned starting in 1962 when the mayor’s daughter stepped in the gooey aftermath of a cocker spaniel who showed a lack of parade etiquette by depositing a big one right in the middle of the merry marchers.
There were prizes for the most original and most colorful outfits, but these prizes were considered less desirable, almost clownish. The respectable townspeople wanted to be stylish, fashionable and subdued, never garish or “colorful.”
Rich or poor, it didn’t really matter. On Easter, they all shared the same experience, although it was obvious from the quality of their outfits who could afford the finest clothes. And it’s no wonder the moneyed folks usually won the prizes.
Every year, a rag-tag band, with a vocalist, played:
In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it
You’ll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade
The Mayefield Easter Parade was a celebration – a celebration of town spirit, of community, of tradition.
It was a celebration of white folks enjoying the company of other white folks in a safe and secure environment.
For many years, it was an all-white affair.
It is not that blacks (called Negroes, or colored, or worse in those days) were forbidden to participate in the Easter parade. They just weren’t invited, and until the mid 1960’s, that was enough to keep them out. Blacks –most young people—always viewed the parade from a distance, from alleyways or behind trees or in clusters separated from the white spectators, and they were usually dressed in their Easter clothes – girls in colorful dresses and white shoes and bonnets; boys in suits and pressed shirts and ties. But they didn’t attempt to parade.
By the mid-1960’s, some of the blacks decided they wanted a piece of the action, not only in the Easter parade but also in Mayefield life in general. There had been a sit-in at the drug store lunch counter. It was a fairly quiet demonstration: No shouting, no retaliation, just ten or twelve blacks who requested service, were refused, and then sat down on the floor so no one else could be served. The police came, and stood around and watched and joked with bystanders. After about an hour, the demonstrators got bored and left. Thomas wrote a story on the incident, but his uncle wouldn’t publish it. “What’s news about a bunch of niggers lying around?” Uncle Hyatt just laughed and tore up Thomas’s copy. “We can go up to the Hill and see that any time.”
A few blacks strutted along side the paraders on Easter in 1966, not really part of the parade but close enough to make the white ladies in their pretty dresses uncomfortable. The mayor told the police to move them along, which they did without much of an incident. There was no violence or arrests.
The band played:
I’ll be all in clover and when they look you over
I’ll be the proudest fellow in the Easter parade
The same thing happened the following year: just more blacks marching along and even more on the sidewalks –intermingling with the white spectators. There was some pushing and shoving when the police tried to disperse them. A small group of white teenage boys tried to “help” the police by punching and kicking some black kids, who had the audacity to punch and kick back. Again, Thomas wrote an article, again Hyatt rejected it. “Write about the Easter Parade, damnit,” Hyatt boomed, “not about the racial stuff. Nobody wants to read that crap.”
“This is not going to happen again.” Mayor Moore was adamant. One of the largest crowds ever attended the town council meeting a month prior to Easter in 1968. The mayor huffed and puffed: “Undesirables will not ruin our town. We will stop them before they start making trouble. The good colored people in the Hill don’t want trouble. They understand how to get along. They can have their own parade. They don’t have to ruin ours.”
So the decision was made. Mayefield would have two Easter parades, one on Main Street and one on Eighth Street on the Hill. It wasn’t officially stated one was for whites and the other for blacks, but everyone understood it.
But most blacks didn’t want their own parade. Most of them didn’t want to waste their time marching around in fancy clothes at all. Those who were interested in the parade were doing so under the guise of civil rights – separate but equal did not accomplish their goals. So, the Hill parade didn’t happen.
As Easter approached, the town council was uneasy that its solution was not going to keep blacks off the Main Street parade route. So, more preparations were made. Police leaves were cancelled for Sunday, which meant all eight officers would be in uniform and on duty. The state police were notified and would also be on patrol.
But a momentum was building that was not going to be halted by a few extra policemen or by the stubbornness of the status quo. It was inevitable blacks and whites were going to exist together eventually, like it or not, and many of the black citizens of Mayefield realized it even if few of the whites did. To make it happen took courage, and in the case of the Mayefield Easter Parade, it took the courage of one person, a young black man named Leroy Matthews, who grew that day from being a “good boy” to become a criminal in his hometown as well as the man he professed to be.
Last September, Leroy Matthews had gone away to state college in an urban part of the state. An enthusiastic, earnest young man, he was one of the few from Hill community to advance to college after graduation. At Mayefield High, he was among the top students in his class and winner of the Citizenship Award. He was known as “a good boy.”
When he visited home Easter weekend, he had earned eight months of higher education and a new, bold attitude which said, “I am a man.”
He was to return to college the day after Easter, but that return trip was delayed.
Leroy spent Sunday night and part of the following week in the Mayefield town jail, charged with disorderly conduct (the police wanted to charge him with inciting a riot, but they couldn’t justify it based on minor cuts and bruises, a smashed window and a few dented automobiles.)
Mainly, Leroy was guilty of ruining the Easter Parade for the fine white people of Mayefield.
On the warm Saturday evening before Easter, Leroy and other young people of the Hill took up their usual place on a corner of Eighth Street across from the St. James United Methodist Church – the “colored” Methodist church, not to be confused with the First United Methodist on Main Street. This was their hangout, a place to see and be seen, to smoke cigarettes, and drink beer when they could find someone to buy it for them, to shoot some baskets at the playground next door. But this evening was not about smoking or drinking or playing games. Leroy set into motion the plan he brought home with him from college – march boldly right into the parade: ignore the hostile stares, the police, the rednecks looking to fight some coloreds.
In college, Leroy had read both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. This was not a time for the pacifist MLK approach. This was a time for Malcolm, whom he quoted to his young friends on the street corner:
“Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.”
Leroy delivered this message on the same street corner the next morning as the families of the Hill arrived at church for Easter services.
“If you are a man, you take it.”
Later that morning as parade preparations were being made on Main Street, several dozen blacks, of all ages, assembled for their own march – a march of unity up Eighth Street to Main, then down the six blocks to join the white Easter paraders.
Thomas watched the blacks walk noisily past the Messenger office. With camera and notebook in hand, he followed the crowd, observing the scene closely as nervous bystanders and police stared in silence.
He began to compose his news article even before Leroy and friends joined the official parade.
“The Easter Parade Riot” was the banner headline he composed, which later was modified by his uncle to a tamer, one-column “Youths Disturb Parade.” “Youths” being code for “black kids,” as if it were only young people who decided they deserved equal rights on that Easter Sunday. Blacks of all ages turned out. There were black children and teenagers; families, and extended families with grandmothers and aunts and cousins.
Black children ran around, singing, screaming, dancing, pushing, shoving and breaking up the orderliness of lines – matching stride-for-stride the singing, screaming, dancing, pushing, and shoving of their white counterparts.
So much was discussed later it seems impossible it was all over in such a short time. At first, the blacks politely went to the rear of the line (a symbolic gesture of peace?) but the white marchers in front of them seemed paralyzed with surprise and fear, so they pushed forward. They came to parade, not to stand around. People were pushed aside; children –black and white– were knocked down. White teens shoved and black teens shoved back.
A few white teenagers showed up with baseball bats. Were they expecting this?
Bats met black heads. A rock flew from Leroy’s black hands into a white face. He punched. He kicked. When a white man confronted him, Leroy threw him out of the way and shattered a store window.
Women and children screamed.
Chaos in black and white, tinged with the Easter colors of pink, lavender, yellow, blue, and green, as well as the red of rage and blood.
Incongruously, the band played as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening:
Oh, I could write a sonnet about your Easter bonnet
And of the girl I’m taking to the Easter parade
It was over within half an hour. Mayefield and state police moved in with batons swinging, mainly at blacks. At one point, a few young blacks surrounded officers and shouted and threw objects at them. Two officers were taken to local doctors’ offices and treated for eye and leg injuries. Eventually the police gained control as brawlers—black and white—fled the scene. The police wisely decided to shut down the parade and order everyone off Main Street.
Five young black men, Leroy included, and one white man were arrested. Many more from both races could have been taken in, but those six represented the capacity of the Mayefield jail, and the state policemen were not about to litter their jail with the remnants of a small town racial incident.
Leroy saw the inside of a jail for the first time in his life. It was small and dingy. He shared the cramped cell with one other black prisoner, a young man of 16 who cried and called out for his mother. Overall, it was a noisy and demeaning experience.
Thomas did not get to write the story he really wanted to –an article detailing the anger and violence he observed that Easter Sunday—but his uncle had to publish some account. After all, a newspaper is expected to print news, no matter how unsavory or embarrassing. “Don’t go overboard,” Uncle Hyatt told him. “I don’t want to give these coloreds credibility. I don’t want it to look like they did something noble. They’re thugs. Criminals.”
Sarah Mencken, the Messenger’s editor did not want to use any photos with the story: “That’s what they want” (“they” being another euphemistic, almost polite, code word). “They want publicity. The next thing you know that Martin Luther King will be here, having his own colored parade up Main Street.”
Miss Mencken, as she insisted almost everyone call her, had been the Messenger’s reporter and editor, and Hyatt’s personal secretary (and lover?) since the old lawyer gained ownership of the Messenger as payment for a legal debt in the 1930’s. Thomas and most other people in town called her “Miss Mencken” to her face but privately almost everyone referred to her as “Miss Munchkin” as a play on her name and a reference to her diminutive size.
In the end, Thomas convinced Hyatt and Sarah they had an obligation to report the news with both words and pictures, without going overboard or aiding any political cause. So he wrote it straight and bland, almost as if it were an account of a Rotary Club dinner. The lead paragraph, which was heavily edited by Miss Munchkin, read:
A melee erupted at the beginning of Mayefield’s family-themed Easter parade on Sunday afternoon, with several police agencies responding to break up fights between unruly teens. The violence came amid an increased police presence after minor incidents in past years and the rejection of a separate parade in the Mayefield Hill community.
The story went on to describe the property damage and personal injuries. The racial aspect of the incident was downplayed, although it couldn’t be ignored:
Six people were arrested, mostly teenagers, and charged with disorderly conduct. Authorities determined late yesterday that several of those involved were affiliated with radical outside groups.
Thomas never did find out who the “outside groups” were, but the police insisted they had evidence to that effect.
The police identified all six arrested, but the focus was on Leroy. Was he considered the outside influence by virtue of attending college? There was much disappointment in his behavior.
“I wish I could take the Citizenship Award away from him,” decried John Phelps, his former high school principal. “He was such a good boy. College ruined him. Pumped him full of hurtful ideas. Now look at him: in jail, has a record, he’ll never amount to anything.”
As reported in the Messenger, town officials reacted strongly to the idea this could happen again:
Officials said the violence signaled a change in the traditional town event, which they said has gradually attracted a different crowd over the years.
Robert B. Williams, a spokesman for the Mayefield Police Department, said organizers must consider increased security measures next year, such as entry points where searches are conducted. “Officials planning these events must realize this is not the Mayefield of 1940s and 1950s,” Williams said. “There is a new criminal element in the town.”
The uproar and indignation lasted for several weeks. Young white men, with baseball bats and probably other more-lethal weapons, drove frequently through the Hill. Black teens seldom congregated at the corner by the church, and when they did, they kept a watchful eye for pick-up trucks. Rumors of continued violence were widespread, but the police did not report any new incidents. More than anything else, Mayefield became a town of smoldering anxiety.
The five young black men arrested were charged with disorderly conduct and released on Tuesday morning after a short hearing at the courthouse. Leroy was fined $500, which was paid by someone –he never did find out by whom. After a short visit home, during which his mother and grandmother cried, his father warned him to stay out of trouble in the future, and his younger brother and friends continually high-fived him, he took the bus back to college. He was a changed person in several ways: in some respects he was a now a man, a man with conviction and a man with a conviction.
The racial tensions carried over through the spring and into summer. There were some minor demonstrations at the town swimming pool that summer. A few blacks tried to gain admission, were rejected, demonstrated at the gates, and were pretty much ignored by the white swimmers walking past them. In an attempt to avoid further demonstrations, the town agreed to integrate the pool every Monday. Of course, only blacks showed up to swim on “Black Mondays,” and the town drained and cleaned the pool every Monday night for the white swimmers who returned on Tuesdays. It was two more years before the pool became fully integrated.
The Messenger did not run a story on the partial integration of the town pool that summer.
As he considers all of this on this snowy evening, Thomas is again reminded Easter is only a few weeks away. There has been little talk about this year’s parade. If the parade committee has met, it hasn’t called in its usual “news” to the Messenger. Thomas suspects Easter parades may be a thing of the past in Mayefield. Maybe that is the best way to beat integration – blacks can’t participate in events which don’t exist.
Thomas feels depressed again just thinking about his lost opportunity –the Messenger’s lost opportunity- to fully chronicle a significant event. The fight for equal rights is an important story, and he could be reporting from the battle lines. An Easter parade by itself isn’t very significant, but as a metaphor for inclusion in the American Dream, it becomes a part of history. And the story of Leroy Matthews –local boy who fought for his manhood on hometown streets—is one Thomas encounters only rarely. But the Easter parade riot and Leroy’s hour of leadership passed almost as nonevents. If there is news and no one prints or reads it, does it really happen?
Again, Thomas knows he has to leave Mayefield to truly become a man. Getting out is his dream. Like his hero George Willard, departure is his goal. “Departure” is the name of the final story in Winesburg, Ohio, in which George finally leaves town to strike out on his own. But Thomas lacks the energy to leave. The here and now cements him to this place.
He will go, he knows. But not now. Not this week. Not this night.
He has much work to do. There are still many stories to write for this week’s issue, but they will have to wait until tomorrow.
The snow continues to fall.
The street is empty.
The only footprints miring the beauty of the night are Thomas’ as he slowly walks home.
(Robert J. Marton)