A Good Neighborhood

by Therese Anne Fowler

“Why am I doing this? Well, for one thing, white men listen better to other white men. And white men bear the responsibility for undoing the damage their forbears have done. But every person who cares about justice for him- or herself—and that’s all of us, I’m pretty sure—ought to stand for group justice, too. Do you see?”

Outside was a bit of a different story; outside were memories of wandering the loamy, pine-studded land upon which the trailer was anchored, poking about through the wildflowers and weeds to discover the great wonders of what seemed to her the wilderness. Beetles and butterflies and toads and tree frogs, and sparkly slivers of pyrite that she collected and saved in a Pringles canister. Outdoor playtime, for little Juniper, had been a suspension of all the bad.

The main thing to emphasize here is that the state of Mississippi’s largest airport bears the name of a Black hero of the civil rights movement, while the state itself continues to fly a flag that has as a significant part of its design the entire flag of the Confederacy. This kind of dichotomy is the South in a nutshell.

Here we have no choice but to be trite and say, “Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” and “What’s done is done,” and continue with our story because it’s in the telling of a tragedy that we sow the seeds—we hope—of prevention of future sorrows.

In one car en route to the cemetery, a debate got under way: Was Valerie some kind of bad-luck charm? She’d lost her husband, and now she’d lost her son. Should Chris Johnson be worried? (We might assert here that in this country only white men have even a shot at worry-free lives, and thus are the ones likely to say such a thing.)