of you has to sit there and take it.”
And he went on to invite people to approach him after Mass if they wanted to enroll their children in the Catholic school. Then he began his regular sermon. It didn’t seem, though, that anyone paid very close attention. The crowd was abuzz with his unexpected pronouncement and no one could stay still.
I couldn’t believe that Father Pace had talked about the Garretts. Without ever mentioning them by name, without even speaking the words Negro or black or teacher or nurse, he’d made his position—and the position of the church—very clear. I didn’t understand how he could do this—how he could reconcile his usual words of doing right in the eyes of God with the stance he now condoned. But considering his church’s reaction to my parents and me, I suppose I shouldn’t really have been surprised.
Maybe if I’d been older, I might have had a better sense of how unsettled people were by all the changes going on in the country. Maybe I might have understood how what was happening in Boston was having effects that rippled all the way to Deerhorn. But the nightly images I saw on the news confused me more than anything. The sight of buses full of black children being pelted with rocks, of white children walking nervously through hallways full of black faces, of police in riot gear being taunted by white youths with baseball bats and hockey sticks, of the Irish city councilwoman speaking about the coming race war, felt as far away to me as the images of the disgraced president stepping off his plane, of the bombings in Cambodia. I did not understand what all the fuss was about. I couldn’t comprehend why people were so upset, or what exactly they believed was at stake. It seemed strange to me even then, when I was a child, and I’m not sure that my perception would have been any different if I’d been twelve or seventeen instead of nine. What I might have had with age, though, was a greater appreciation for the seriousness of people’s reactions. What I might have had with age was a healthier sense of fear regarding what was possible.
Later that afternoon, I ran into the Garretts. I’d been doing nothing in particular, watching the Packers game so I could be in the same room as my grandfather, when my grandmother asked me to go to the market to buy some milk and ice cream. The main strip of town, which included Jimmy’s Coffee Shop and Earl Watson’s gun store, was about six blocks away. The market, a small, five-aisle store that was the town’s main source of groceries, was at the near end of Buffalo Street, across from what used to be the Sears building and was now some kind of storage place for discarded old appliances.
I liked to go to the market, or maybe I just liked how important I felt when I was running an errand for my grandmother, and there was one cashier, a dyed red-head named Gloria, who always gave me candy. That day, because I could handle the load with one bag, I took my bike up to the store. I skipped inside and passed the end displays of potato chips and Pabst, and as I turned the corner into the freezer aisle, I almost ran right into them—Mr. Garrett and the woman who must have been his wife, a thin, dark-skinned woman of about his age. He was leaning on the shopping cart while she opened the freezer door and pulled out a carton of strawberry ice cream. They were talking easily, unguarded, and when Mrs. Garrett turned back from the freezer I saw how she looked at him, eyes showing a pleasure I wasn’t used to seeing expressed between married people. She had strong, high cheekbones and slightly hollowed cheeks that were so polished and smooth they might have been carved of stone. There was something in her bearing and the set of her shoulders that made her look regal, even there in the freezer aisle. She was wearing a neat blue dress and carrying a handbag, as if they’d just come from church. (And now I wonder— had they been at church? Did they
And he went on to invite people to approach him after Mass if they wanted to enroll their children in the Catholic school. Then he began his regular sermon. It didn’t seem, though, that anyone paid very close attention. The crowd was abuzz with his unexpected pronouncement and no one could stay still.
I couldn’t believe that Father Pace had talked about the Garretts. Without ever mentioning them by name, without even speaking the words Negro or black or teacher or nurse, he’d made his position—and the position of the church—very clear. I didn’t understand how he could do this—how he could reconcile his usual words of doing right in the eyes of God with the stance he now condoned. But considering his church’s reaction to my parents and me, I suppose I shouldn’t really have been surprised.
Maybe if I’d been older, I might have had a better sense of how unsettled people were by all the changes going on in the country. Maybe I might have understood how what was happening in Boston was having effects that rippled all the way to Deerhorn. But the nightly images I saw on the news confused me more than anything. The sight of buses full of black children being pelted with rocks, of white children walking nervously through hallways full of black faces, of police in riot gear being taunted by white youths with baseball bats and hockey sticks, of the Irish city councilwoman speaking about the coming race war, felt as far away to me as the images of the disgraced president stepping off his plane, of the bombings in Cambodia. I did not understand what all the fuss was about. I couldn’t comprehend why people were so upset, or what exactly they believed was at stake. It seemed strange to me even then, when I was a child, and I’m not sure that my perception would have been any different if I’d been twelve or seventeen instead of nine. What I might have had with age, though, was a greater appreciation for the seriousness of people’s reactions. What I might have had with age was a healthier sense of fear regarding what was possible.
Later that afternoon, I ran into the Garretts. I’d been doing nothing in particular, watching the Packers game so I could be in the same room as my grandfather, when my grandmother asked me to go to the market to buy some milk and ice cream. The main strip of town, which included Jimmy’s Coffee Shop and Earl Watson’s gun store, was about six blocks away. The market, a small, five-aisle store that was the town’s main source of groceries, was at the near end of Buffalo Street, across from what used to be the Sears building and was now some kind of storage place for discarded old appliances.
I liked to go to the market, or maybe I just liked how important I felt when I was running an errand for my grandmother, and there was one cashier, a dyed red-head named Gloria, who always gave me candy. That day, because I could handle the load with one bag, I took my bike up to the store. I skipped inside and passed the end displays of potato chips and Pabst, and as I turned the corner into the freezer aisle, I almost ran right into them—Mr. Garrett and the woman who must have been his wife, a thin, dark-skinned woman of about his age. He was leaning on the shopping cart while she opened the freezer door and pulled out a carton of strawberry ice cream. They were talking easily, unguarded, and when Mrs. Garrett turned back from the freezer I saw how she looked at him, eyes showing a pleasure I wasn’t used to seeing expressed between married people. She had strong, high cheekbones and slightly hollowed cheeks that were so polished and smooth they might have been carved of stone. There was something in her bearing and the set of her shoulders that made her look regal, even there in the freezer aisle. She was wearing a neat blue dress and carrying a handbag, as if they’d just come from church. (And now I wonder— had they been at church? Did they
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