{"product_id":"our-town-isbn-9780307341884","title":"Our Town","description":"The brutal lynching of two young black men in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930, cast a shadow over the town that still lingers. It is only one event in the long and complicated history of race relations in Marion, a history much ignored and considered by many to be best forgotten. But the lynching cannot be forgotten. It is too much a part of the fabric of Marion, too much ingrained even now in the minds of those who live there. In\u003ci\u003e Our Town\u003c\/i\u003e journalist Cynthia Carr explores the issues of race, loyalty, and memory in America through the lens of a specific hate crime that occurred in Marion but could have happened anywhere.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMarion is our town, America’s town, and its legacy is our legacy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike everyone in Marion, Carr knew the basic details of the lynching even as a child: three black men were arrested for attempted murder and rape, and two of them were hanged in the courthouse square, a fate the third miraculously escaped. Meeting James Cameron–the man who’d survived–led her to examine how the quiet Midwestern town she loved could harbor such dark secrets. Spurred by the realization that, like her, millions of white Americans are intimately connected to this hidden history, Carr began an investigation into the events of that night, racism in Marion, the presence of the Ku Klux Klan–past and present–in Indiana, and her own grandfather’s involvement. She uncovered a pattern of white guilt and indifference, of black anger and fear that are the hallmark of race relations across the country.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn a sweeping narrative that takes her from the angry energy of a white supremacist rally to the peaceful fields of Weaver–once an all-black settlement neighboring Marion–in search of the good and the bad in the story of race in America, Carr returns to her roots to seek out the fascinating people and places that have shaped the town. Her intensely compelling account of the Marion lynching and of her own family’s secrets offers a fresh examination of the complex legacy of whiteness in America. Part mystery, part history, part true crime saga, \u003ci\u003eOur Town\u003c\/i\u003e is a riveting read that lays bare a raw and little-chronicled facet of our national memory and provides a starting point toward reconciliation with the past.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn August 7, 1930, three black teenagers were dragged from their jail cells in Marion, Indiana, and beaten before a howling mob. Two of them were hanged; by fate the third escaped. A photo taken that night shows the bodies hanging from the tree but focuses on the faces in the crowd—some enraged, some laughing, and some subdued, perhaps already feeling the first pangs of regret.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSixty-three years later, journalist Cynthia Carr began searching the photo for her grandfather’s face.\"Whatever the ultimate literary verdict on this sorrowful and penetrating but uneven book, I cannot think of a nonfiction author in this country who has so bravely taken up [James] Baldwin's dare. Carr calls her volume \"Our Town\" without a trace of irony or superiority. While she certainly has no desire to exculpate the murderers of 1930 or their flagrantly bigoted successors today, neither does she intend to condemn them in order to elevate more enlightened whites like herself. Family history has offered her no such luxury.\" —Samuel G. Freedman\u003ci\u003e, New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Cynthia Carr goes deep into the heart of our national darkness—the public ritual of violence we call the lynching. Carr investigates its aftermath in a small town and, page by page, we understand everything that we can, experiencing the shock, the disgust, and the harrowing heartbreak that always attend murder wearing the blues mask of ‘rough justice.’ Carr’s clear-eyed rendering of her quest follows the transformation of that murder from a rumor to a collective act to a disputed fact that sits uneasily in the memory of a community.” —Stanley Crouch, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity\u003c\/i\u003eCynthia Carr was for many years an arts writer for \u003ci\u003eThe Village Voice\u003c\/i\u003e, writing as C.Carr. She lives in New York.ONE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      My Marion\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I was an adult before I ever saw the picture. But even as a girl, I   knew there’d been a lynching in Marion, Indiana. That was my father’s   hometown. And on one of many trips to visit my grandparents, I heard   the family story: the night it happened back in 1930, someone called   the house and spoke to my grandfather, whose shift at the post office   began at three in the morning. “Don’t walk through the courthouse   square tonight on your way to work,” the caller said. “You might see   something you don’t want to see.” Apparently that was the   punchline—which puzzled me. Something you don’t want to see. Then   laughter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I now know that, in the 1920s, Indiana had more Ku Klux Klan members   than any other state in the union—from a quarter to a half million   members—and my grandfather was one of them. Learning this after he   died, I couldn’t assimilate it into the frail Grandpa I’d known.   Couldn’t assimilate it at all and, for a long time, didn’t try. He was   an intensely secretive man, and certainly there had been other   obfuscations. He always said, for example, that he was an orphan, that   his parents had died when he was three. I accepted this, but the   grown-ups knew better. After Grandpa’s funeral, my father discovered a   safe deposit box and hoped at last to find a clue to the family tree.   Instead he unearthed this other secret: a Klan membership card. All my   father said later was “I never saw a hooded sheet. He’d go out. We   never knew where he was going.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Much of this story is about shame. My grandfather was illegitimate, a   fact that someone born in small-town Indiana in 1886 would rather die   than discuss. And so he did. But if that particular humiliation seems   foreign today, what about the other secret? A lot of us who are white   come from something we would rather not discuss. “That’s in the past,”   we like to say, as if that did anything but give us another hood to   wear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I was in my late twenties when I first came upon the lynching photo in   a book: two black men in bloody tattered clothing hang from a tree, and   below them stand the grinning, gloating, proud, and pleased white   folks. I couldn’t believe that this was my Marion, the lynching   referred to in my family, a tree I’d walked past as a child. I looked   anxiously for my grandfather’s face in that photo. Didn’t find it. That   was some relief. But he too had gone to the square that night. There’d   been something you don’t want to see. Then laughter. And as I began to   tell people this story, that was one detail I left out, because it   shamed me: there was laughter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My Marion. As a child, I loved the town. And one thing I loved most was   the fact that it had a past, unlike the various midwestern suburbs   where I grew up. Directly in front of my grandparents’ house—tall, dark   green clapboard with a black stone porch—stood an iron hitching post, a   black horse’s head with a ring through its nose. It was no decoration.   They’d just never taken it down. They lived with history. And every   visit gave me a chance to ask Grandma for the family stories, to page   with her through the family album. Somehow I never noticed that all the   stories and pictures were my grandmother’s. My grandfather had none.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    During one summer vacation when I was nine or ten, I found a brittle   yellow newspaper clipping in a desk drawer at my grandparents’ house.   The headline said josie carr, and parts of certain lines had been cut   out with a razor blade. I walked it into the living room asking, “Who’s   Josie Carr?” No one said anything, but Grandpa took the clipping from   my hand and left the room. Someone explained then that Josie was his   mother. I had just found her obituary. We’d been told that she had died   about 1890 “from tuberculosis.” Or perhaps she had died “from grief,”   said Aunt Ruth, my father’s sister, who liked brooding on the mystery.   For all those years my grandfather kept the obituary, certain facts   trimmed out with a razor blade. Then that day he took it from my hand,   and no one ever saw it again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    We didn’t know who Grandpa’s father was or why he abandoned Josie. Nor   did we know when she died, what killed her, where she was   buried—nothing. My grandmother knew everything, of course. But she   said, “We don’t talk about it. It makes your grandpa feel very bad.” So   we waited till my grandparents were out of earshot before discussing   our slender clues.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Aunt Ruth would take the tintypes from the old beige Nabisco box. Many   of those pictured were strangers to us. Uncle Rad? Aunt Pet? We   couldn’t ask Grandpa. We relied on Aunt Ruth to find the images of   Grandpa’s mother: “This is Josie before the tragedy. This is Josie   after the tragedy.” Aunt Ruth showed us in the later picture where   clumps of Josie’s hair had fallen out. “Maybe someone poisoned her,” my   aunt mused. “Maybe someone was trying to get rid of her.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Aunt Ruth held both possessions of Josie’s that came down to us. One   was a locket with a handsome young man’s picture, a date—February 11,   1883—and the words “All twisted up. N” Or was it W? Or H? The other was   a letter in different handwriting addressed to “Josie kind Josie” from   a P.W.H., Bluffton, Indiana—October 28, 1885. A letter full of nonsense   about a dog and “I have no time to write you.” Why had this one letter   been saved? She must have received it around the time she became   pregnant. My grandpa was born in July 1886.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My aunt was both guardian of these artifacts and the one who most   needed to know what they meant. She had a recurring dream about the   family mystery—that she and Grandpa were in a mausoleum, watching   someone pull out a casket. In real life, of course, Grandpa did his   grieving alone. My father and my aunt recalled from childhood that on   every Memorial Day he rode the interurban to Gas City, just south of   Marion, taking three geraniums to the cemetery. We guessed that Josie   must be buried there. He, of course, never said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Aunt Ruth would tell us the story about applying for a job in a Marion   furniture store, how Grandma had warned her, “They’ll only want to talk   to you about your family.” And sure enough, the man interviewing her   said, “Young lady, do you know who your grandfather is?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Then Aunt Ruth would recount the words of her long-dead auntie Mame:   “Could you ever forgive us for what we did?” But Aunt Ruth never knew   who “us” referred to or why they needed her forgiveness. “I guess I was   brought up not to ask questions,” she said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    We had a drawing my grandfather did as a child—a palatial sort of   Victorian mansion. At the bottom he had signed his initials: E.R. His   name was Earl Carr. He’d taken his mother’s last name. But clearly he’d   known from boyhood who his father was, and he’d imagined taking that   identity. Young Mister R.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Finally on his deathbed Grandpa told us, “They cheated me. I could have   had ten thousand dollars.” That was all he ever said about his secret:   They cheated me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This is Josie before the tragedy. This is Josie after the tragedy. My   grandpa was the tragedy. In the first picture we have of him, he is   paying for this sin in sad eyes three years old. He was raised by   Josie’s mother, his grandma Carr, who ran a boardinghouse in Marion at   18th and Adams. As a boy, my grandfather sat on the lap of the star   boarder, Eugene Debs, the great American socialist who organized on   behalf of railroad workers. Grandpa loved Debs enough to name my father   after him. But he said very little about his childhood. I picked up   hints that the grandmother who had raised him was less than kind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He was always so quiet, so remote. It was part of the family lore: he   had never smiled in one photograph in all of his life. He hated cars   and never learned to drive. I don’t think he liked what the world had   turned into. He took long walks for recreation, one time all the way to   Jonesboro and back. Twenty miles. He never let my grandmother have any   money and did all the grocery shopping himself: tongue, mush, hominy,   green tomatoes to fry, the fatty cuts of meat. He would get up at two   a.m. to be at work by three. He worked at the Marion Post Office from   1908 to 1956. There he accumulated a record one thousand days of sick   time and gave it back to the government. “To act tough,” said Aunt   Ruth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    For a hobby he studied railroad timetables and knew which trains rode   on what tracks, every track in America. A little rack of timetables sat   next to his favorite chair. I used to see him study, then refold them.   He was always walking to the tracks to see a train. I often wondered   why he hadn’t worked for the railroad, why he hadn’t simply hopped one   of those trains and left Marion. I think he felt obligated to the   family that hadn’t abandoned him. And what I finally understood was   that he would not take a risk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Grandpa wore a necktie and long-sleeve dress shirt with cufflinks every   day of his life, even in the hottest weather. He owned a single necktie   and would wear it till it wore out before he bought another. Such   peculiarities made him a figure of intense interest to me as a girl.   The way the pleasures had been carefully measured out. Every year he   took the family on the same vacation: one day in either Cleveland or   Chicago to window-shop and ride the elevated. If we offered him an iced   tea or juice, he would specify just how much. “Two fingers,” he’d say.   Maybe three. He was a teetotaler who did not allow liquor in the house.   Every now and then he made us kids some little milk shakes, served in   jelly jars.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He had one living relative, his cousin. We called her Great Aunt   Catherine, and I remember how very old she was, how very old her dog,   how steep the stair leading up to the ancient house. She had been to   Josie’s funeral when she was maybe three—so Aunt Ruth said—but   Catherine recalled nothing except being at a church in the country.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Great Aunt Catherine had been like a sister to Grandpa. He dropped out   of school after eighth grade to work for Catherine’s father, his Uncle   On. That’s how I heard the name, though really his name was Alonzo or   Lon. I liked having someone in the family named On. He was Josie’s   brother and ran a grocery store in downtown Marion. He’s the one who   said of Josie: “When all the other girls were riding sidesaddle, she   rode astride and her hair blew in the wind.” It’s the only thing anyone   remembers that anyone said of her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Aunt Ruth didn’t even know her grandmother’s name till she went to see   a fortune-teller during World War II, and the fortune-teller said, “I   get a Jo or a Josie.” So Aunt Ruth reported this to one of the   relatives, who snorted, “Oh, she mentioned that one, did she?” That   one. Still unmentionable as the world changed, as Grandpa became a   grandpa, as he stooped ever lower with Parkinson’s disease till he was   bent nearly double. He shook uncontrollably, and his spine curved. All   twisted up. This is Josie before the tragedy. This is Josie after the   tragedy. Soon there would be no one who remembered the tragedy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When Grandpa died, I was seventeen, old enough to see how not-knowing   had hurt my father and my aunt. What if my grandfather had realized   that, decades after his death, his silence would still reverberate in   all of us? I’m not sure even that would have moved him. As he lay   dying, I remembered how I’d found that obituary, thus ensuring the loss   of our only real clue. I hoped that my grandpa would speak, but all he   ever told us was, They cheated me. Lying there in the hospital, he was   no different than he’d ever been. Born old in the other century,   already a tiny shaking grandpa, he would die still fatherless.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So I had that life for proof, that you could die and still not fix it.   And as I grew older, I saw that this, in fact, was the usual story: A   life of things unfixed. A whole history of things unfixed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My father felt free to look for the truth after my grandpa died. It was   1967. For a while he drove to Grant County every weekend, searching for   Josie. He never found her. Cemeteries didn’t always keep records in the   old days, he’d tell us. Hardly anyone bothered with death certificates.   No one knew when she died—or for that matter, when she’d been born. My   father found no evidence that she’d ever existed. But it had been there   in that clipping, the one cut with a razor blade. My father went to all   the little newspapers to look at back issues, but there was no obituary   for Josie Carr. In a Gas City graveyard, he found the brother and   sister who’d preceded her in death, their names on two sides of the   obelisk that marked the plot. We speculated that Josie was there too   but unmarked. My father checked all the cemeteries. He talked about   getting caretakers to stick long steel rods in the ground. He explained   that if they hit an air pocket, a body had been there once, in a pine   box—both turned to nothing now. “Might have been her,” my dad would   say. I didn’t ask him how he’d know the right air. He wasn’t really   looking for the dust she’d become. He wanted her story. And if he got   just the very last page—the scene with the preacher’s incantation and   the coffin lifted slowly from the back of a wagon—that would have been   something. He could have said, Here’s where they stood once: my family,   my great-greats, the people who knew all the things that were kept from   me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was Great Aunt Catherine who finally told us something. My father   and my aunt had assumed that she wouldn’t. They’d known her all their   lives, after all, and she’d never said a word. But when Aunt Ruth   finally blurted out “Who is our grandfather?” the old woman replied,   “Don’t you know that?”With a new epilogue by the author","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303700877541,"sku":"NP9780307341884","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307341884.jpg?v=1767734344","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/our-town-isbn-9780307341884","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}