One of the reasons this structure on East Street in nearby Dedham is so well-preserved is because of a lurid court case which drained the family coffers and made it impossible for them to add plumbing, electricity, or heat. That means original walls stood. Original doors, closets, and stairs too.
What happened? Jason Fairbanks was accused of murder. A lover’s tiff gone wrong (he claimed his girlfriend had killed herself), followed by a jail break and run across the state up to Lake Champlain where the young Jason hoped to make it to Canada.
He didn’t. He was tried, found guilty, and executed.
But one more colorful detail: the last Fairbanks to occupy the residence, Rebecca, finally moved out when a lightning strike traveled down the chimney and killed her dog Jake.
This post was gonna have two parts — some history and then personal impressions — but it took so long to put this together, I’ll send personal impressions separately.
Did you know that there were two cancelled marches from Selma prior to the completed, successful one to Montgomery?
Background— January, 1965
“Martin Luther King with SCLC joined SNCC,* the Dallas County Voters League, and other local …activists in a voting rights campaign in Selma where, in spite of repeated registration attempts by local blacks, only two percent were on the voting rolls. SCLC had chosen … Selma because they anticipated that the notorious brutality of local law enforcement …would attract national attention and pressure President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to enact new national voting rights legislation.” King Institute at Stanford.
Spoiler alert: it worked.
February, 1965
Alabama state troopers broke up a protest in nearby Marion in February with vicious beatings. One cop shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young church deacon, as he tried to protect his mother from a billy club. He died eight days later (also from King Institute).
March, 1965
The first march attempt, on March 7, was organized in response to the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson. However, it didn’t get past the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Troopers advanced against the crowd and brutally beat and gassed them. Cameras were rolling. John Lewis was among the injured.
This violent melee became known as “Bloody Sunday” and was aired on national news.
Governor Wallace used the pretext of preserving safety to deny the protesters all manner of support and a local judge put out a restraining order to prevent the march for a few more days.
As Andrew Young described in the PBS series Eyes on the Prize, since no state or federal support was forthcoming, ‘we sent out the call to people of goodwill.’
That’s when 450 white pastors, nuns, and others committed to social justice arrived from the north.
Rather immediately thugs started harassing them too. On March 7, a group of locals beat the shit out of James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Massachusetts. Reeb died two days later.
This was galvanizing which was a good thing but it was also controversial since it made people wonder why Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death hadn’t garnered a similar response.
The second march started in spite of the judicial ban and the lack of protection but, probably for both of those reasons, it ended before even crossing the bridge. This was quite a moment. Backed by more than 2,000 protestors, Reverend Martin Luther King stopped and then knelt down to pray. The crowd behind him followed suit. He then stood, turned around, and led people off the bridge and away.
At this point in the PBS Show Bridge to Freedom, I learned that MLK had never before violated a federal order and was reluctant to do so. Also around then, President Johnson was pressuring Governor Wallace to do the right thing. When it became clear that he wouldn’t, Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard.
[Aside: in Ava DuVernay’s powerful telling in Selma, some of the most dramatic moments were the conversations between President Johnson and MLK and the president and Wallace].
March 15
President Johnson addressed Congress with an impassioned speech about the “crippling legacy of bigotry” and called on members to draft voting rights legislation (you know — that landmark law that the Roberts court has been systematically dismantling).
President Johnson’s use of the language of liberation (“we shall overcome”) at the speech’s end was heard loud and clear and cheered by Black citizens.
MLK had been asking and asking for this legislation and Johnson kept putting himoff. The time wasn’t right. He couldn’t do it so soon after the Civil Rights Act, etc. But the shared experience of watching the shameful and shocking violence on national news changed the equation.
[Aside: Think about today, where we don’t watch the same channel, making it hard for a single event to galvanize the nation. A recent exception: the nine minute video of Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd].
The day after Johnson’s address to Congress, ‘demonstrators submitted a … march plan to Judge Johnson, who approved the demonstration and enjoined Governor Wallace and local law enforcement from harassing or threatening marchers.’ (the Stanford King Institute).
March 17
Johnson submitted voting rights legislation to Congress.
March 21
On this the third try, the march began and continued all the way to the state capitol, Montgomery. Fifty four miles. Four days. According to the King Institute, by the end there were 25,000 participants.
BTW — you know that iconic image of MLK linked arm in arm at the front of the march, with others wearing suits? That was by design. Credible death threats against King were circulating at the time and so, since ‘they can’t tell us apart’ (Andrew Young interview, Eyes on the Prize), it was decided to dress many of the men out front like the Reverend.
Sources:
The movie Selma by Ava DuVernay (Netflix)
Eyes on the Prize, Season One: The Bridge to Freedom. (you can watch on PBS. Or Prime, I think)
K and I went to Charleston five years ago to celebrate my 60th birthday (Did you say FIVE YEARS AGO?)
One of the places we toured was Boone Hall Plantation.
I was reminded of the tour this morning because as I was driving to pick up my new glasses I listened to most of an NPR interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones talking about her enormously influential 1619 Project.
I still have the 2019 NYTimes Magazine
In the interview, Hannah-Jones talks about the anodyne history offered in public schools. How much is missing. How Black history is American history is Black history. And how certain words either romanticized slavery or further demeaned the enslaved.
One of those words was “plantation.” It’s a word that calls to mind Tara of Gone with the Wind. It makes us think of long, beautiful live-oak-lined allees (which Boone Hall has), instead of snake-infested rice fields and all kinds of human misery. The better term, she suggests, is “labor camp.”
When K and I arrived at Boone Hall, they were setting up chairs for an outdoor wedding. I was appalled and said so on Facebook. There I was schooled by a local docent / historian who said that without the income produced by such affairs, many significant historic sites would’ve been turned into condos and golf courses. Okay, but still.
A Boone Hall employee sitting on a chair outside the first of many slave dwellings proudly announced that Boone Hall was “the second most romantic setting for a wedding in America.”
Without thinking, I said, “What’s number one — Auschwitz?”
If I’d been thinking, of course, I would have named an American setting. Perhaps Riker’s Island?
That’s it. That’s the memory.
Small add on — the first time I ever saw an eagle was at Boone Hall.
This popped up on my Instagram feed moments after I posted.
Focus and restriction can yield relief. After a few days on the BRAT diet, I am feeling better. Blood and stool lab work all came back negative. Phew. So a re-set. I can do that.
Focusing on the history of our young nation through the lens of John James Audubon also makes me feel better. I’m reading a second biography and taking notes. I’ve read two biographies about his wife, Lucy.
Okay, okay — so much for keeping secrets. But you probably would like to learn that at one point the Audubons owned close to a dozen slaves, yes? And that for some reason, historic mentions quantify nine as “a few.” Let me reality check. Would YOU refer to nine of anything as “a few”?
You cannot read about Audubon without getting fantastic descriptions of huge sycamore and chestnut trees, of paddling down the Ohio, of camping with the Osage, and of course birds. Birds, birds, and more birds.
Audubon loved them all which makes him even more appealing somehow — from the humble warblers and wrens to the spectacular eagles and rose-breasted grosbeak.*
Here’s what I’ve learned about JJA as a husband. He was hyper-focused on his drawings and investigations of nature, which meant he roamed the woods for weeks and even months at a time. He was an abject failure at business and also given to confabulation (DID he study with Jacques-Louis David, for instance?). In short, he was unreliable.
He presents the weird mix of fate and innate capacities that produces works of genius. But you also get poverty and extended periods of isolation for Lucy. For substantial stretches of their marriage, Lucy supported them by teaching.
It’s chilly this morning but supposed to reach 100 this weekend. Huh?
Had dinner with friends last night. Seven of us. We didn’t hug even though it’s been a while but if someone was sick, we’ve all been exposed, hugs or no.
K is on a conference call with China. They tend to be endless, which is part of why I’m outside. He goes into the office three days a week now, I think I’ve said. It seems a little pointless — the commute and diminished sleep the cost of collegiality?
All the annuals are in pots now.
* Under a Wild Sky, John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America, by William Souder, pages 90 – 93.
All 3 collages from Paris Collage Collective’s weekly prompt
After dinner while K watched a taped Patriots game, I made a slideshow. It’s in the middle of the post. A few stills follow.
Montage of old collages about fear
But first the original collages of the running girl. In them, her urgent need to escape emerged from the iterations. The double/triple exposures that form the basis of the slideshow, seemingly of their own accord, continue that feeling. The way she comes in and out of view heightens the sense of imminent harm and also, perhaps, points to the way trauma damages one’s ability to stay in the body.
I couldn’t sleep last night. Eventually got up and read. I came across an article about Emmett Till which you can read here.
Short version: a journalist hired to write about Till’s murder for Life Magazine (this was after the two men were acquitted), couldn’t get releases from two OTHER murderers, so he just WROTE THEM OUT OF THE STORY.
The journalist could be tried (could have been? Sorry, it was 3:00 in the morning) for accessory to murder after the fact.
The current article makes plain that not only was it journalistic malpractice and very possibly illegal, the omission generated more terror in the Black community than had they known there’d been four perpetrators.
If two men were capable of THAT, what’s next?
Paris Collage Collective prompt. I now see the girl running in negative space with leaf as hair. Do you?
Maybe the sense of haunting had something to do with the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. K and I watched a Frontline episode — America After 9/11. Oh my god the lying politicians. The lazy press. It underscored a pithy tweet I read which said that we would have been better off as a country if we had literally done nothing.
The personal impact of the tragedy is rendered beautifully in this memoir piece: Hero by Liz Ackert.
Four of the hijackers spent their last night on earth in a discount hotel less than a mile down the road.
The place has long since been torn down.
P. S. Just went back and found a post about dreams the week before 9/11. And a Tarot card pulled (The Tower). Interesting to look back. A little haunting.
