The Adcocks
Robert Wexelblatt
Nobody foresaw what took place at last year’s town meeting. The agenda was as dull as ever. There were no pothole or snow-removal crises. The water was colorless and flowed on demand. The sewers weren’t backed up, and the school system was sending its graduates on to the customary colleges and universities. The town budget was substantially unchanged from the year before; and, as nobody was proposing a property tax increase, attendance was no greater than usual.
Yet there was a scene, an explosion. Intemperate things were said, regrettable words spoken, and the consequence was that the Adcocks moved away.
We supposed it wouldn’t take long to forget them. Many of us would have liked to forget them and the episode at the town meeting. People move in and out of town all the time, we said; they relocate, retire, divorce, die. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened. We certainly didn’t expect to miss the Adcocks, and it’s not as if we dwell on them—on the contrary. We speak about them seldom and do so in whispers. The whispering not only means we remember but that some of us are ashamed and miss Roland, Lena, Bertrand, and Joanie.
The Adcocks were a standard-issue suburban family in nearly every respect. They lived in one of the colonials on Hancock Street, owned a late-model Honda CRV and an old Toyota Corolla. The kids were polite, good in school, athletic, and had plenty of friends. Roland was district manager with a data firm. Lena was a large woman, an earth-mother, and everybody loved her. For the most part, they were ordinary members of the community, liked and respected. Yet there were problems, though problems doesn’t feel like a satisfactory word. Maybe snags or hitches. Except for Lena, each of the Adcocks had something that stuck out where it should have been smooth, some bump that abraded.
The August after they moved in, some ten years back, the Adcocks were invited to a neighborhood barbecue by the O’Connors.
Roland was stout but not flabby, a little under average height, with a round face that exuded good nature. He wore his brown hair closely cropped which made his ears stick out. He had a habit of stroking his chin especially when he was going to speak at length, as if he were checking on his shave or missed having a beard.
At some point that evening, after a few beers, Fred O’Connor asked Roland about his name.
“Roland. That’s an unusual name.”
Roland smiled and rubbed away at his chin then explained in a way Fred later described rather confusingly as serious and at the same time not.
“My mother was from Mobile, Alabama and romantic in the way of southern belles. In her case, the fascination was with knights—not nighttime, medieval knights, with a k. Did you know that before the Civil War the bestselling books in the South were all by Sir Walter Scott? Ivanhoe was my mother’s favorite. The War stuck a pin in that inflated, flowery stuff for lots of Southerners, but not all. A harmless thing, really, but she called me Roland after the Frankish hero—Hruolandus in Frankish, Orlando in Italian, but Roland in French. When my son was born, to please my mother, I called him Bertrand, after Bertrand du Gueslin, another famous French knight.”
“How about your little girl?”
“Joanie? After Jeanne d’Arc. She was a knight, too.”
“No kidding?”
“Sure. Then there’s the dog.”
“Your dog?”
“When the kids picked him out at the pound, I called him Otto. Otto von Estenfeld was a celebrated Teutonic knight. The mutt just didn’t look French.”
Then Frank and Roland had a laugh and another beer. The name business was unusual, but that wasn’t Roland’s eccentricity, not the one that rubbed people the wrong way. That came out for the first time—but not the last—at the next year’s July Fourth picnic.
Roland got into this discussion with Bill and Jill Meyer and Harold Baer. Apparently, it began when Harold said something about patriotism and the Revolutionary War. Roland rubbed his chin.
“The colonists were brave but also greedy.”
“What do you mean greedy?” Jill asked.
“They should have paid up for British military protection.”
“Who from?”
“The French, but mostly the Indians.”
“Native-Americans,” Jill corrected.
Roland went on. “Slavery would have ended far earlier under British rule. In fact, the southern colonies rose up when the British promised their slaves freedom. Greed again. And racism, of course. The Brits outlawed the slave trade in 1807. There would have been no Civil War. The colonists won because of French aid which helped to bankrupt France and brought on their revolution and so the reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. Sheer hypocrisy—a war of liberation led by slave owners. And the colonists’ guerrilla tactics made war even less civilized than it had been up till then.”
“But that’s how we won,” said Bill, an Air Force veteran.
“You’d prefer that we stayed British colonies?” Jill asked, genuinely astonished.
“Look at Canada today. Free and sovereign as the US but also more humane and less disorderly. And on the metric system, too.”
At this point Bill got a bit hot. “Why don’t you move to Canada then, you like it so much, eh?”
“Some of my forebears did just that. But I’m not Canadian and I’m not British. I’m as American as you are.”
“Are you?” said Harold. “If you don’t think much of the Declaration or the Revolution, I’d say it’s in question.”
“Harold, calm down,” said Jill.
“It’s not a requirement of citizenship to support anything,” said Roland with a smile.
“Thanks to the Revolution,” Harold retorted.
“Well, not really. Thanks to centuries of political philosophy and the framers of the Constitution, who read it.”
Everybody who was there agreed that Roland sounded pompous but also that he remained entirely calm. He rubbed at his chin and smiled at them indulgently, very sure of himself.
Roland Adcock may have looked the same as always—stout, with that open, round, good-natured face—but, after the story went the rounds, people didn’t look at Roland in quite the same way.
Bertrand Adcock didn’t start for the high-school football team, but he played in every game. He had his father’s physique, so he was made a guard. Bertrand was an officer of the Service Club and not just to please his charitable mother. He organized a successful food drive on his own. His grades were solid and he never got into trouble. There was just the one thing: after he got his license, he drove the Corolla into Detroit every Saturday to study with the imam of a mosque. His best friend, Ronnie Freeland, mentioned this to his mother Betty, who was troubled. When she ran into Lena Adcock at the dry cleaners, she got up the nerve to ask about it.
“You aren’t at all worried?”
“Well,” said Lena, “I was raised a Quaker and Roland was raised an Episcopalian. We sent the kids to Sunday School at Saint Emmanuel’s. Joanie still goes, but Bertrand decided to stop when he was eleven. Now he’s curious, and we think that’s just fine. Don’t you?”
Neither Betty Freeland nor the women she told thought it was fine.
Bertrand was a popular boy and not small. Nobody went after him at school, no bullying, hardly any teasing. The boy seemed the same as ever. He didn’t go around quoting the Qu’ran, dressing up in white robes, or look like he was trying to grow a beard. He didn’t talk about his visits to the mosque but, when asked, he didn’t deny them either.
Warren Olson, one of his teammates, asked him about going into Detroit.
“Aren’t you scared?”
Bertrand grinned and said he’d never run into any trouble there and had made a bunch of new friends.
“I mean, but why, you know, Islam?”
Bertrand, smiling all the while, explained that he thought life in America—or at least our town—might have become just a bit too easy and maybe a little empty.
“People talk about the stuff they own and want to be entertained all the time, binge-watching and shopping online, sexting and vaping and drinking. Nothing’s sacred and hardly anything isn’t allowed and I think the two might be related. You know? I mean, there’s nothing really wrong about the stuff we do. It’s not that. But people think about themselves too much and they wonder whether anything means anything and maybe it doesn’t, but at the mosque they look at things differently.”
“Are you going to convert or something?”
Bertrand shrugged. “I’d have to be something to convert from. I guess I’m like a poor guy in a jewelry store. Just looking.”
His friends may have been okay with Bertrand’s going to Detroit, but the word for how we grownups looked at Bertrand would be askance.
Lena, the earth-mother, wasn’t concerned about her husband’s being a Tory or her son learning to be a terrorist. In fact, she didn’t appear to care. If anybody criticized them, she didn’t exactly fight back, didn’t defend them or their views individually. She cheerfully said everybody had a right to think whatever they wanted. We took this to mean she was just as accepting of our criticism as of her family. It was disarming. Lena was sweetness itself. She never got angry. She loved everybody.
Yet Lena attracted a kind of criticism, too. Some women, including my wife, thought she could be a lot more attractive if she’d put a little effort into it, that she was too crunchy and dressed like a hippie and could stand to lose some weight. “Vegetarians eat too much cheese,” declared my wife, the dietary expert. But there wasn’t any malice in all this. On the contrary, the idea was that if Lena could just dress a bit more fashionably, use a little makeup, and drop ten pounds, then she’d be happier. Everybody could see she was content; but, to some of her neighbors, this contentment was settling; it was resignation. Though they weren’t exactly contented themselves, they thought that if she were more like them, she’d be happier.
Lena didn’t just love everybody; she also wanted to feed everyone. Soon after they moved to Hancock Street, Lena had the two big arbor vitae in the backyard taken down and rototilled the whole thing. She planted some flowers and a few spireas, but mostly vegetables and herbs. The yard was really a small farm, and Lena worked in it almost every morning. When the crops came in, there was always an over-abundance. She supplied her neighbors with tomatoes, zucchini, summer squash, pole and string beans, strawberries, lettuces, carrots, potatoes, parsnips, and herbs. The leftovers she put out on a table by the curb with a brightly painted board that said FREE!
She also did volunteer work, visiting the elderly, reading to toddlers at the library, being on call two nights a week for the local Samaritans. Then her son’s food drive gave her an idea.
She drove the Corolla outside to the exurbs and beyond to visit local farmers. She must have charmed them. The result was our popular Thursday farmers’ market. She made sure there were always a couple of crates of produce set aside for Bertrand to take with him to Detroit on Saturdays.
If anyone tried to thank her for setting it all up, Lena wriggled with pleasure and embarrassment inside her mumu.
“Oh no,” she’d say, “thank you for coming. It makes me so happy.”
Joanie Adcock was a little blonde thing, the slightest bit plump. She was smart, maybe even precocious. Her face was as sweet as her mother’s and open as her father’s. Her voice was high-pitched but firm and winning. She was charming even after she turned serious. This seriousness apparently began during her last year of middle school when she started to listen to lots of NPR. The one thing she wanted for Christmas was her own subscription to the Detroit Free Press. Apart from that, Joan Adcock was by all accounts an ordinary enough thirteen-year-old girl just becoming interested in boys, anxious about her looks and clothes, playing soccer, listening to music, texting back and forth with friends.
All the ninth-graders had to do a final project in Social Studies. It was a state requirement not taken very seriously by the students, not in June of their last year, nor, for the same reason, by their teachers. It was box-checking. Go online, cut and paste a report (with citations) on something like the transcontinental railroad or the Battle of Bunker Hill, Henry Ford, Edwin Muir, the Erie Canal, the history of online gaming. Anything would do.
Probably because of NPR, the Free Press every day, and her big brother’s stories about Detroit, Joan decided to do a report on how the Brown v. Board of Education decision affected school integration in the area. She read the 1954 decision and several articles about it. She researched white flight and the deterioration of the Detroit schools that followed. This led her to the case of Milliken v. Bradley. By then, she had evidently become, if not obsessed, then passionate and indignant.
Here’s a short version of Joan’s report: In 1970, the NAACP sued the state of Michigan over school segregation in Detroit. The distinctive point in the suit was that it demanded the inclusion of the suburbs in a desegregation plan. The NAACP pointed out that the city’s population was by then largely black and that of the suburbs white. Therefore, any desegregation plan limited to the Detroit school district would be completely meaningless.
A federal district judge named Stephen Roth heard lengthy testimony on why and how Detroit was black and the suburbs white. He agreed with the NAACP that residential segregation in the metropolitan area was the result of government policy going so far as to say that, if the boundaries of Detroit’s school district had been drawn up in 1970, they’d have been unconstitutional. Roth’s plan was not to alter those boundaries, though, but to have white suburban kids enroll in Detroit school and vice versa. The decision was immediately appealed.
The Supreme Court overturned Judge Roth by a 5-4 vote in 1974, exactly two decades after the Brown decision—a coincidence made much of by Joan. The Court’s majority held that the government had nothing to do with residential segregation in Detroit and so no remedy was called for. Joan, who had done her research assiduously, wrote that, only days before the decision was issued, the mayor of Dearborn told the New York Times, “I favor segregation.” He also remarked, on the record, “Every time we hear of a Negro moving. . . in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire.”
Perhaps a few of our oldest residents had some vague memory of this history, but most of us learned of it from Joan Adcock’s report.
How you see the upshot of Milliken v. Bradley depends, of course, on your point of view. To white suburbanites, like most of us, people who’d fled Detroit and taken on scary mortgages and high taxes to send their children to better schools, the decision was both fair and wise, sparing us the disorder of court-ordained interference and ensuring the fruits of our sacrifices. The other view was that the Court had at a stroke exempted the entire North from the desegregation it imposed on the South. In his thundering dissent, Thurgood Marshall called it “a giant step backwards.”
Joan Adcock saw things the same way.
Our annual town meeting was scheduled, as always, for the second week in June, just before the school year ended and people began to scatter to summer vacations. On the first of the month, Joan Adcock took herself to Town Hall and the Office of the Council. She handed Justine Bullock, the Council secretary, a flawlessly typed request to be included on the meeting’s agenda.
Justine read it, smiled at the girl.
“I think it’s just wonderful that you’re so civic-minded.”
It was a patronizing response, and our popular Council President, George Whitmarsh, reacted the same way.
“Well, this is a first,” he said jovially to Justine when she handed him Joan’s request. “I don’t see why we can’t give the kid a few minutes at the end. It’s good to encourage young people.”
Neither Justine nor George thought to ask Joan why she wanted to speak or about what.
The auditorium in our century-old Town Hall might once have held the entire citizenry. Now it’s too small for a mass meeting but serves for recitals by visiting B-list musicians, awards ceremonies, hearings of no general interest, and the annual town meeting. It’s a handsome room, with walnut wainscoting on two sides, high windows, an iron chandelier, and a low stage upfront. There are two fading WPA murals on opposing walls. The one on the left romantically depicts a hygienic Ottawa or Chippewa village with good-looking women in fringed buckskin skirts and cherubic children playing outside two lodges. Four muscular braves are just emerging from the surrounding forest with a dead, but bloodless buck, a twelve-pointer. On the right, in the same style and probably by the same artist, is a rendering of the town as it might have looked decades before the paved roads, fast-food franchises, post-war subdivisions and new McMansions—an idealized farming town, clean and innocent, with hitching posts, a dry goods store, and a blacksmith shop.
When the dull business of the town meeting was finished, George Whitmarsh turned his best smile on the small crowd.
“Now, everybody, we’ve something out of the ordinary to wind up this year. One of our town’s public-spirited students has asked to address the meeting for a few minutes. So, please don’t anybody get up and leave. Miss Adcock?”
Clutching her report to her chest, Joan got up from her seat in the front row, took the two steps on to the stage and went to the podium. George, still smiling, lowered the microphone for her and made a kind of flourish with his arm. “The floor’s all yours, my dear.”
Without any preliminary remarks, Joan read her report. It took fifteen minutes. It was bit like a lecture delivered by a humorless little professor with a charming soprano voice.
When she ended the reading, George, minus the smile now, got up to thank her and adjourn the proceedings. Joan stopped him.
“Please. I’m not finished.”
“You’re not? I beg your pardon,” George growled.
Joan laid aside her report and just looked out over the hall.
“I couldn’t find anything in the Milliken decision that forbids voluntary integration. In fact, there have been some successful programs doing that in Boston and Milwaukee. These programs are successful but they’re tiny. Only a handful of city kids get bussed to suburban schools. I think Judge Roth had the right idea. So, I’m formally proposing a resolution that we set up an exchange program with the Detroit Public School District. I also propose that we pool our school funding with Detroit’s until the same is spent on everybody and every child can get a decent education no matter where they happened to be born.”
Bertrand, sitting by himself way in the back, leapt up.
“I second the proposal!”
The crowd pretty much erupted and George, frowning now, moved himself between Joan and the microphone.
“Both the proposal and the second are out of order. Neither this child nor the person seconding her proposal is a registered voter.”
“I am!” shouted Roland Adcock over the din of the crowd. He stood up beside his wife who went on contentedly knitting. “I’m a registered Republican!”
That’s when it began to turn ugly, with booing, cat-calls, scornful laughter.
“Ridiculous!”
“Absurd!”
“Damned socialist nonsense!”
“Who’s this kid to preach at us?”
“Yeah, who does she think she is? Self-righteous brat!”
“This town isn’t racist—”
“If anybody thinks I’m going to—”
“Never—”
Then it got worse.
“These Adcocks,” somebody said loudly. “Roland hates America.”
“And the boy’s a jihadist.”
“That little girl’s been brainwashed.”
“Liberalism gone nuts.”
At this point, Lena put down her knitting, labored to her feet, and walked slowly to the front of the hall.
“It’s Lena.”
“Oh.”
The noise quieted some.
Lena made her way on to the stage and to the podium, excusing herself as she elbowed George out of the way. She raised the microphone and looked over the room with an affectionate smile, but one that seemed wan and melancholy.
“It’s really too bad,” she said. “I love this place and all of you, my neighbors, and I love the farmers we’re lucky to have all around us. We’ve become close, I like to think. But, after hearing what you think of my family—and especially my brave, smart, decent Joanie—I’m afraid the time’s come for us to move.”
And with that, Lena lumbered down from the stage like a woman with bad knees and made her way up the center of the suddenly silent auditorium, with its nostalgic murals of the Indian lodges and dead buck, the dry goods store and the blacksmith shop. Her family followed and, before the month was out, so were the Adcocks.
Robert Wexelblatt
Nobody foresaw what took place at last year’s town meeting. The agenda was as dull as ever. There were no pothole or snow-removal crises. The water was colorless and flowed on demand. The sewers weren’t backed up, and the school system was sending its graduates on to the customary colleges and universities. The town budget was substantially unchanged from the year before; and, as nobody was proposing a property tax increase, attendance was no greater than usual.
Yet there was a scene, an explosion. Intemperate things were said, regrettable words spoken, and the consequence was that the Adcocks moved away.
We supposed it wouldn’t take long to forget them. Many of us would have liked to forget them and the episode at the town meeting. People move in and out of town all the time, we said; they relocate, retire, divorce, die. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened. We certainly didn’t expect to miss the Adcocks, and it’s not as if we dwell on them—on the contrary. We speak about them seldom and do so in whispers. The whispering not only means we remember but that some of us are ashamed and miss Roland, Lena, Bertrand, and Joanie.
The Adcocks were a standard-issue suburban family in nearly every respect. They lived in one of the colonials on Hancock Street, owned a late-model Honda CRV and an old Toyota Corolla. The kids were polite, good in school, athletic, and had plenty of friends. Roland was district manager with a data firm. Lena was a large woman, an earth-mother, and everybody loved her. For the most part, they were ordinary members of the community, liked and respected. Yet there were problems, though problems doesn’t feel like a satisfactory word. Maybe snags or hitches. Except for Lena, each of the Adcocks had something that stuck out where it should have been smooth, some bump that abraded.
The August after they moved in, some ten years back, the Adcocks were invited to a neighborhood barbecue by the O’Connors.
Roland was stout but not flabby, a little under average height, with a round face that exuded good nature. He wore his brown hair closely cropped which made his ears stick out. He had a habit of stroking his chin especially when he was going to speak at length, as if he were checking on his shave or missed having a beard.
At some point that evening, after a few beers, Fred O’Connor asked Roland about his name.
“Roland. That’s an unusual name.”
Roland smiled and rubbed away at his chin then explained in a way Fred later described rather confusingly as serious and at the same time not.
“My mother was from Mobile, Alabama and romantic in the way of southern belles. In her case, the fascination was with knights—not nighttime, medieval knights, with a k. Did you know that before the Civil War the bestselling books in the South were all by Sir Walter Scott? Ivanhoe was my mother’s favorite. The War stuck a pin in that inflated, flowery stuff for lots of Southerners, but not all. A harmless thing, really, but she called me Roland after the Frankish hero—Hruolandus in Frankish, Orlando in Italian, but Roland in French. When my son was born, to please my mother, I called him Bertrand, after Bertrand du Gueslin, another famous French knight.”
“How about your little girl?”
“Joanie? After Jeanne d’Arc. She was a knight, too.”
“No kidding?”
“Sure. Then there’s the dog.”
“Your dog?”
“When the kids picked him out at the pound, I called him Otto. Otto von Estenfeld was a celebrated Teutonic knight. The mutt just didn’t look French.”
Then Frank and Roland had a laugh and another beer. The name business was unusual, but that wasn’t Roland’s eccentricity, not the one that rubbed people the wrong way. That came out for the first time—but not the last—at the next year’s July Fourth picnic.
Roland got into this discussion with Bill and Jill Meyer and Harold Baer. Apparently, it began when Harold said something about patriotism and the Revolutionary War. Roland rubbed his chin.
“The colonists were brave but also greedy.”
“What do you mean greedy?” Jill asked.
“They should have paid up for British military protection.”
“Who from?”
“The French, but mostly the Indians.”
“Native-Americans,” Jill corrected.
Roland went on. “Slavery would have ended far earlier under British rule. In fact, the southern colonies rose up when the British promised their slaves freedom. Greed again. And racism, of course. The Brits outlawed the slave trade in 1807. There would have been no Civil War. The colonists won because of French aid which helped to bankrupt France and brought on their revolution and so the reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. Sheer hypocrisy—a war of liberation led by slave owners. And the colonists’ guerrilla tactics made war even less civilized than it had been up till then.”
“But that’s how we won,” said Bill, an Air Force veteran.
“You’d prefer that we stayed British colonies?” Jill asked, genuinely astonished.
“Look at Canada today. Free and sovereign as the US but also more humane and less disorderly. And on the metric system, too.”
At this point Bill got a bit hot. “Why don’t you move to Canada then, you like it so much, eh?”
“Some of my forebears did just that. But I’m not Canadian and I’m not British. I’m as American as you are.”
“Are you?” said Harold. “If you don’t think much of the Declaration or the Revolution, I’d say it’s in question.”
“Harold, calm down,” said Jill.
“It’s not a requirement of citizenship to support anything,” said Roland with a smile.
“Thanks to the Revolution,” Harold retorted.
“Well, not really. Thanks to centuries of political philosophy and the framers of the Constitution, who read it.”
Everybody who was there agreed that Roland sounded pompous but also that he remained entirely calm. He rubbed at his chin and smiled at them indulgently, very sure of himself.
Roland Adcock may have looked the same as always—stout, with that open, round, good-natured face—but, after the story went the rounds, people didn’t look at Roland in quite the same way.
Bertrand Adcock didn’t start for the high-school football team, but he played in every game. He had his father’s physique, so he was made a guard. Bertrand was an officer of the Service Club and not just to please his charitable mother. He organized a successful food drive on his own. His grades were solid and he never got into trouble. There was just the one thing: after he got his license, he drove the Corolla into Detroit every Saturday to study with the imam of a mosque. His best friend, Ronnie Freeland, mentioned this to his mother Betty, who was troubled. When she ran into Lena Adcock at the dry cleaners, she got up the nerve to ask about it.
“You aren’t at all worried?”
“Well,” said Lena, “I was raised a Quaker and Roland was raised an Episcopalian. We sent the kids to Sunday School at Saint Emmanuel’s. Joanie still goes, but Bertrand decided to stop when he was eleven. Now he’s curious, and we think that’s just fine. Don’t you?”
Neither Betty Freeland nor the women she told thought it was fine.
Bertrand was a popular boy and not small. Nobody went after him at school, no bullying, hardly any teasing. The boy seemed the same as ever. He didn’t go around quoting the Qu’ran, dressing up in white robes, or look like he was trying to grow a beard. He didn’t talk about his visits to the mosque but, when asked, he didn’t deny them either.
Warren Olson, one of his teammates, asked him about going into Detroit.
“Aren’t you scared?”
Bertrand grinned and said he’d never run into any trouble there and had made a bunch of new friends.
“I mean, but why, you know, Islam?”
Bertrand, smiling all the while, explained that he thought life in America—or at least our town—might have become just a bit too easy and maybe a little empty.
“People talk about the stuff they own and want to be entertained all the time, binge-watching and shopping online, sexting and vaping and drinking. Nothing’s sacred and hardly anything isn’t allowed and I think the two might be related. You know? I mean, there’s nothing really wrong about the stuff we do. It’s not that. But people think about themselves too much and they wonder whether anything means anything and maybe it doesn’t, but at the mosque they look at things differently.”
“Are you going to convert or something?”
Bertrand shrugged. “I’d have to be something to convert from. I guess I’m like a poor guy in a jewelry store. Just looking.”
His friends may have been okay with Bertrand’s going to Detroit, but the word for how we grownups looked at Bertrand would be askance.
Lena, the earth-mother, wasn’t concerned about her husband’s being a Tory or her son learning to be a terrorist. In fact, she didn’t appear to care. If anybody criticized them, she didn’t exactly fight back, didn’t defend them or their views individually. She cheerfully said everybody had a right to think whatever they wanted. We took this to mean she was just as accepting of our criticism as of her family. It was disarming. Lena was sweetness itself. She never got angry. She loved everybody.
Yet Lena attracted a kind of criticism, too. Some women, including my wife, thought she could be a lot more attractive if she’d put a little effort into it, that she was too crunchy and dressed like a hippie and could stand to lose some weight. “Vegetarians eat too much cheese,” declared my wife, the dietary expert. But there wasn’t any malice in all this. On the contrary, the idea was that if Lena could just dress a bit more fashionably, use a little makeup, and drop ten pounds, then she’d be happier. Everybody could see she was content; but, to some of her neighbors, this contentment was settling; it was resignation. Though they weren’t exactly contented themselves, they thought that if she were more like them, she’d be happier.
Lena didn’t just love everybody; she also wanted to feed everyone. Soon after they moved to Hancock Street, Lena had the two big arbor vitae in the backyard taken down and rototilled the whole thing. She planted some flowers and a few spireas, but mostly vegetables and herbs. The yard was really a small farm, and Lena worked in it almost every morning. When the crops came in, there was always an over-abundance. She supplied her neighbors with tomatoes, zucchini, summer squash, pole and string beans, strawberries, lettuces, carrots, potatoes, parsnips, and herbs. The leftovers she put out on a table by the curb with a brightly painted board that said FREE!
She also did volunteer work, visiting the elderly, reading to toddlers at the library, being on call two nights a week for the local Samaritans. Then her son’s food drive gave her an idea.
She drove the Corolla outside to the exurbs and beyond to visit local farmers. She must have charmed them. The result was our popular Thursday farmers’ market. She made sure there were always a couple of crates of produce set aside for Bertrand to take with him to Detroit on Saturdays.
If anyone tried to thank her for setting it all up, Lena wriggled with pleasure and embarrassment inside her mumu.
“Oh no,” she’d say, “thank you for coming. It makes me so happy.”
Joanie Adcock was a little blonde thing, the slightest bit plump. She was smart, maybe even precocious. Her face was as sweet as her mother’s and open as her father’s. Her voice was high-pitched but firm and winning. She was charming even after she turned serious. This seriousness apparently began during her last year of middle school when she started to listen to lots of NPR. The one thing she wanted for Christmas was her own subscription to the Detroit Free Press. Apart from that, Joan Adcock was by all accounts an ordinary enough thirteen-year-old girl just becoming interested in boys, anxious about her looks and clothes, playing soccer, listening to music, texting back and forth with friends.
All the ninth-graders had to do a final project in Social Studies. It was a state requirement not taken very seriously by the students, not in June of their last year, nor, for the same reason, by their teachers. It was box-checking. Go online, cut and paste a report (with citations) on something like the transcontinental railroad or the Battle of Bunker Hill, Henry Ford, Edwin Muir, the Erie Canal, the history of online gaming. Anything would do.
Probably because of NPR, the Free Press every day, and her big brother’s stories about Detroit, Joan decided to do a report on how the Brown v. Board of Education decision affected school integration in the area. She read the 1954 decision and several articles about it. She researched white flight and the deterioration of the Detroit schools that followed. This led her to the case of Milliken v. Bradley. By then, she had evidently become, if not obsessed, then passionate and indignant.
Here’s a short version of Joan’s report: In 1970, the NAACP sued the state of Michigan over school segregation in Detroit. The distinctive point in the suit was that it demanded the inclusion of the suburbs in a desegregation plan. The NAACP pointed out that the city’s population was by then largely black and that of the suburbs white. Therefore, any desegregation plan limited to the Detroit school district would be completely meaningless.
A federal district judge named Stephen Roth heard lengthy testimony on why and how Detroit was black and the suburbs white. He agreed with the NAACP that residential segregation in the metropolitan area was the result of government policy going so far as to say that, if the boundaries of Detroit’s school district had been drawn up in 1970, they’d have been unconstitutional. Roth’s plan was not to alter those boundaries, though, but to have white suburban kids enroll in Detroit school and vice versa. The decision was immediately appealed.
The Supreme Court overturned Judge Roth by a 5-4 vote in 1974, exactly two decades after the Brown decision—a coincidence made much of by Joan. The Court’s majority held that the government had nothing to do with residential segregation in Detroit and so no remedy was called for. Joan, who had done her research assiduously, wrote that, only days before the decision was issued, the mayor of Dearborn told the New York Times, “I favor segregation.” He also remarked, on the record, “Every time we hear of a Negro moving. . . in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire.”
Perhaps a few of our oldest residents had some vague memory of this history, but most of us learned of it from Joan Adcock’s report.
How you see the upshot of Milliken v. Bradley depends, of course, on your point of view. To white suburbanites, like most of us, people who’d fled Detroit and taken on scary mortgages and high taxes to send their children to better schools, the decision was both fair and wise, sparing us the disorder of court-ordained interference and ensuring the fruits of our sacrifices. The other view was that the Court had at a stroke exempted the entire North from the desegregation it imposed on the South. In his thundering dissent, Thurgood Marshall called it “a giant step backwards.”
Joan Adcock saw things the same way.
Our annual town meeting was scheduled, as always, for the second week in June, just before the school year ended and people began to scatter to summer vacations. On the first of the month, Joan Adcock took herself to Town Hall and the Office of the Council. She handed Justine Bullock, the Council secretary, a flawlessly typed request to be included on the meeting’s agenda.
Justine read it, smiled at the girl.
“I think it’s just wonderful that you’re so civic-minded.”
It was a patronizing response, and our popular Council President, George Whitmarsh, reacted the same way.
“Well, this is a first,” he said jovially to Justine when she handed him Joan’s request. “I don’t see why we can’t give the kid a few minutes at the end. It’s good to encourage young people.”
Neither Justine nor George thought to ask Joan why she wanted to speak or about what.
The auditorium in our century-old Town Hall might once have held the entire citizenry. Now it’s too small for a mass meeting but serves for recitals by visiting B-list musicians, awards ceremonies, hearings of no general interest, and the annual town meeting. It’s a handsome room, with walnut wainscoting on two sides, high windows, an iron chandelier, and a low stage upfront. There are two fading WPA murals on opposing walls. The one on the left romantically depicts a hygienic Ottawa or Chippewa village with good-looking women in fringed buckskin skirts and cherubic children playing outside two lodges. Four muscular braves are just emerging from the surrounding forest with a dead, but bloodless buck, a twelve-pointer. On the right, in the same style and probably by the same artist, is a rendering of the town as it might have looked decades before the paved roads, fast-food franchises, post-war subdivisions and new McMansions—an idealized farming town, clean and innocent, with hitching posts, a dry goods store, and a blacksmith shop.
When the dull business of the town meeting was finished, George Whitmarsh turned his best smile on the small crowd.
“Now, everybody, we’ve something out of the ordinary to wind up this year. One of our town’s public-spirited students has asked to address the meeting for a few minutes. So, please don’t anybody get up and leave. Miss Adcock?”
Clutching her report to her chest, Joan got up from her seat in the front row, took the two steps on to the stage and went to the podium. George, still smiling, lowered the microphone for her and made a kind of flourish with his arm. “The floor’s all yours, my dear.”
Without any preliminary remarks, Joan read her report. It took fifteen minutes. It was bit like a lecture delivered by a humorless little professor with a charming soprano voice.
When she ended the reading, George, minus the smile now, got up to thank her and adjourn the proceedings. Joan stopped him.
“Please. I’m not finished.”
“You’re not? I beg your pardon,” George growled.
Joan laid aside her report and just looked out over the hall.
“I couldn’t find anything in the Milliken decision that forbids voluntary integration. In fact, there have been some successful programs doing that in Boston and Milwaukee. These programs are successful but they’re tiny. Only a handful of city kids get bussed to suburban schools. I think Judge Roth had the right idea. So, I’m formally proposing a resolution that we set up an exchange program with the Detroit Public School District. I also propose that we pool our school funding with Detroit’s until the same is spent on everybody and every child can get a decent education no matter where they happened to be born.”
Bertrand, sitting by himself way in the back, leapt up.
“I second the proposal!”
The crowd pretty much erupted and George, frowning now, moved himself between Joan and the microphone.
“Both the proposal and the second are out of order. Neither this child nor the person seconding her proposal is a registered voter.”
“I am!” shouted Roland Adcock over the din of the crowd. He stood up beside his wife who went on contentedly knitting. “I’m a registered Republican!”
That’s when it began to turn ugly, with booing, cat-calls, scornful laughter.
“Ridiculous!”
“Absurd!”
“Damned socialist nonsense!”
“Who’s this kid to preach at us?”
“Yeah, who does she think she is? Self-righteous brat!”
“This town isn’t racist—”
“If anybody thinks I’m going to—”
“Never—”
Then it got worse.
“These Adcocks,” somebody said loudly. “Roland hates America.”
“And the boy’s a jihadist.”
“That little girl’s been brainwashed.”
“Liberalism gone nuts.”
At this point, Lena put down her knitting, labored to her feet, and walked slowly to the front of the hall.
“It’s Lena.”
“Oh.”
The noise quieted some.
Lena made her way on to the stage and to the podium, excusing herself as she elbowed George out of the way. She raised the microphone and looked over the room with an affectionate smile, but one that seemed wan and melancholy.
“It’s really too bad,” she said. “I love this place and all of you, my neighbors, and I love the farmers we’re lucky to have all around us. We’ve become close, I like to think. But, after hearing what you think of my family—and especially my brave, smart, decent Joanie—I’m afraid the time’s come for us to move.”
And with that, Lena lumbered down from the stage like a woman with bad knees and made her way up the center of the suddenly silent auditorium, with its nostalgic murals of the Indian lodges and dead buck, the dry goods store and the blacksmith shop. Her family followed and, before the month was out, so were the Adcocks.
