Trouble the Water by Frances O'Roark Dowell

Author:Frances O'Roark Dowell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books

15

The Weekly Advance

Orin Renfrow arrived at work Friday morning at seven fifteen. He always came in early on the day the paper was published in order to take care of any pressing business before the real work of the day began. At approximately eight thirty, five stacks of newspapers, each one bound with twine, exactly 246 papers in all, would be tossed off the back of a Hatcher’s Printing Company truck onto the sidewalk in front of the Weekly Advance office. Mr. Renfrow would be standing at the door, waiting for them.

Seven fifteen was especially early for Mr. Renfrow to come in, but today was a special day. His editorial about the need to integrate the town pool was in today’s paper, and he was expecting an especially vociferous response. Many of his readers would be against the idea. Don’t trouble the water, they’d write in impassioned letters to the editor. Leave well enough alone. He’d be stopped on the street, interrupted while eating his meat-and-three at the Hop, called up in the middle of the night. Let’s just keep the peace around these parts. Marcus Overby, who’d moved up to Celeste from Greenville, Mississippi, would take him aside after church on Sunday and say, You don’t understand how bad things can get when you start messing with white folks. We got it good here, Orin. We live our lives, they live theirs. Believe me—that’s the way you want it to be.

Mr. Renfrow understood. Why rock the boat? White folks and black folks had always gotten along well enough in Celeste, mostly by staying out of each other’s way. White folks were happy to take colored money; they’d even let you walk through the front doors of their restaurants to pick up your food instead of making you come around through a back alley to get it through the kitchen window. White and colored worked together at the paper mill, and though no colored worker ever got advanced through the line up to management, from what he’d heard and observed, the mill was a good place for a colored man to work. The bosses didn’t seem to care what hue your skin was if you did the job you were told to do.

There was an uneasy peace between white and colored in Celeste, and Mr. Renfrow understood how fragile it was, and how scared colored folks were about breaking it. He himself had a cousin in Breckinridge County who’d been lynched twenty years before, dragged from the county jail after he’d been accused of attacking a white woman. Violence was never far from the surface of any human relations. Folks were right to fear it.

Even so, he couldn’t help but believe that the world was changing. Colored men had fought alongside white troops on the battlefields of Europe during World War II, and only the year before, a federal court had heard a brilliant young Negro lawyer argue that the schools of America should be open to all. There were rumblings all around.

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