Black, White, and RED All Over, part 7-- Ironwood Hamilton from #freewrite in an extended story!

Took a break yesterday -- church and such -- but again, thank you, thank you to the @freewritehouse for the adoption, and we continue with extra content: part 7 of "Black, White, and RED All Over"!

Here are parts one, two, three, four, five, and six -- if you are just jumping in, in this part we get our first look into the workings of the Lofton County Free Voice, the new and confrontational Black newspaper that has upset Lofton County, VA and has made enemies in all the police departments in the county but one by its demand for records of arrests of all Black citizens for the last ten years.

Tinyville's police department, led by Captain Hamilton, was first to comply -- but then, he's the newest captain and just back home after 23 years. The Free Voice expects the other departments to hold out -- but then, they don't. Every remaining department agrees to submit to the request on the coming Friday, but why? If you missed the big clue in part 5, the mystery is only going to get deeper in part 7 as the newspaper's principals make their decisions on how to proceed and Captain Hamilton and Lieutenant O'Reilly get ready to head out on a separate track of discovery that you will read tomorrow in part 8 ... but because part 7 has to come before part 8, here it is after my graphic...

Captain Hamilton had correctly predicted the disposition of the Lofton County Free Voice: its principals were smart enough not to have a central location to put out the paper. Its editorial staff met by conference call most often, talking informally as they ran across each other on their regular and known routines.

Printing was done quietly, at printers some of the staff regularly went to for work projects – a quick turn to the side, a flash drive plugged into a printer, being paid for at the printer's card reader with a card pre-loaded with cash at a kiosk, and copies of the Lofton County Free Voice quietly and efficiently were printed by the printer while those responsible for getting it printed went about their regular routines. The card and flash drive were removed – and all record of what had been done went with that removal as the printer rebooted for the next customer.

On to the designated place for the next step: a casual meeting at someone's home for food, fun, fellowship, and folding: the 11X17 sheets had to be carefully folded in quarters so there would be no chance of them getting crumpled or rippled because of their size, and so they would fit easily into the work bags of those who would post them, either before going to graveyard shift jobs or before going to day shift work on the commute to Big Loft or Roanoke. Big carpools, shared gas costs subsidized by the paper, and a team of people assigned to a segment of the towns and county, who could post up their assigned area and get on to the next ones and then to work with such speed that they would not be easily detected and identified.

By the time the papers were posted on the very first day, the reporters – some of them trained journalists, some of them younger interns enjoying on-the-job training fanned out to record the results. That spread of reporters would only happen that one time, and they had netted a bunch of fine reactions from people the Lofton County Free Voice would be digging into for weeks, months, and years. A lot of its reporting was not field reporting, because of the potential risk to those known to be identified with the paper. Instead, people quietly researching, along with record pulls and requests both big and small, and then phone calls to relevant officials, made up much of its content. The conference calls were where things were pulled together.

Still, from time to time, a face-to-face meeting was necessary between principals. Lofton County's sudden and complete capitulation to the Lofton County Free Voice's FOIA requests was such an occasion.

Although Henry Varick IV had his name as editor-in-chief on the first edition of the Lofton County Free Voice, nobody in Lofton County who did not know for sure had quite connected the dots. Few people even in the Black community knew that the community gospel choir leader had such an interesting second life – he was best known for his musicianship, and his ability to get just about anyone to sound good together. The hundreds of children who had gone in and out of his children's choirs knew him as “Uncle Harry Varry.” That friendly, harmless moniker had stuck; the gentle giant of music was accounted by no one as a personal threat.

Still less was Mr. Harvey Harrison, who had announced himself as “Marcus Garvey” for a publisher name, accounted as a threat – he was a pleasant middle-aged gentleman not known for publishing anything more controversial than the newsletter for the Smallwood Community Center.

Mr. Thomas Stepforth Sr. was known to be increasingly active in Tinyville's Black community with its youth, but no one had dreamed of his role with the paper – chief financier. He was the wealthiest man in Tinyville, bar none, and would give the richest Loftons of Lofton County serious pause about their wealth superiority had he been so unwise as to flaunt his wealth. He was not. He dressed quietly and lived quietly, and kept a firm grip on his grandchildren and their friends in his daily life... and quietly directed $1 million to a blind trust he had set up for the Lofton County Free Voice, with Mr. Varick and Mr. Harrison as trustees with him. He had grown up in Lofton County, and shared with them a deep passion for a righting of the injustice Black people had suffered and continued to suffer. It was a joy to him to share his resources and his technical expertise with them in running a decentralized physical newspaper.

However, the Lofton County Free Voice now faced its first serious physical challenge, requiring a rare meeting … but Mr. Stepforth was known to pack up his Baby Steps – his three youngest grandchildren – and head out to places like the Smallwood Community Center every day of the week. Mr. Varick's choirs routinely made the rounds of Lofton County's community centers, so it was also not out of the ordinary for him to be in the Smallwood Community Center – and, in fact, his children's choir was scheduled to perform at an event the next week. So, it raised no eyebrows anywhere when Mr. Varick and Mr. Stepforth arrived in Mr. Harrison's workplace.

Mr. Stepforth had arrived in time to let his little ones join the Little Steppers dance class for preschool through first grade, and while he watched them, Mr. Varick settled down beside him on one side, and Mr. Harrison, on his break, settled on the other. Just three Black men of mature age, watching over the children – in more ways than one.

“Who would have thought the county would have just given in like that?” Mr. Harrison said.

“Shocking, and suspicious,” Mr. Stepforth said.

“Indeed,” Mr. Varick said. “They are trying to drown us in data. Tinyville generated five thick folders; Big Loft alone will have 30 to 40 times that amount of data, and then the county will have twice as much as that. Tinyville's police department was big for the size of the town, but lazy; there are indeed 48 cases that need to be reopened, but there is mostly a pattern of harassment and false arrests that lead to no further legal ramifications. Most of the time, the folks in Tinyville couldn't be bothered to follow through.”

“Captain Sidney was 78,” Mr. Harrison said. “By the end, messing with us was just a pastime – the 48 happen all at the beginning of the ten years we asked for. His house was already paid off, after all.”

“Indeed, but we are digressing,” Mr. Stepforth said. “Assume five thick folders for each of the small towns, 150 for Big Loft, and 300 for the county, and we have 500 folders to pick up from five different locations, and that much data to crunch.”

“We aren't going to be able to get that done before the next paper comes out – it will have to suffice us to announce this week that Lofton County has surrendered and turned over the data,” Mr. Varick said. “Captain Hamilton's suggestion about dripping content will have to be taken as well; there is no way to get that much information out in any one or even 20 issues.”

“The key thing is to sort out what is important to go first,” Mr. Harrison said. “Captain Hamilton's sorting and indexing will be helpful to us in looking at the whole mess we are about to be handed tomorrow. We can use his sort to do our sorts, but we must decide what to present to our readers first. Is it the convictions that have been unjustly obtained, the pattern of false arrests and harassment, the officers who are the absolute worst?”

“My thought is that the pattern of harassment and false arrest sets the tone to discuss the more egregious matters – but until we know what we are getting, I can't say that for sure,” said Mr. Varick. “Let me solve the first issue, though: I'll go pick up the data, after we get the paper out Friday. No one else needs to be tagged with this. We need to pull or so 12 people together to receive the information, but there is no need for them to be identified.”

“Wait a moment,” Mr. Stepforth said. “The odds on you being tailed are very high, Harry. Previous to this, the paper has never had its representatives in one central place, working.”

“Good point,” Mr. Harrison said. “You do have to take all that stuff somewhere, Harry, and that does require a location.”

Mr. Varick considered this, and then slowly shook his head.

“Ah, so that's why...”

“I can think of several workarounds,” Mr. Stepforth said, “but you know, I guarantee you that the people in question do not think we are intelligent enough to think out workarounds. What if we let them believe what they want to believe, and see what happens?”

Mr. Varick and Mr. Harrison thought about that for a long moment.

“Big risk,” Mr. Harrison said. “Potentially big reward. Great story that may well be our way in to sharing the rest of this data.”

“I like it,” said Mr. Varick. “I know of three buildings we can use to do the sort you have in mind, Thomas.”

“One of them is in Tinyville,” Mr. Stepforth said. “Let's use that one – and we'll see how interested the captain there truly is in law and justice.”

Mr. Varick smiled thinly.

“He is somewhat interested in the concepts, as far as he understands them. I would say that he is learning.”

“That's something, in these parts,” Mr. Harrison said. “Can either of you feel him out by tomorrow?”

“I'll do it,” Mr. Stepforth said. “Your assessment fits with mine, Harry – he is open to learning, and he is at least approachable. We don't need him, but I'll find out if we can get his help.”

Privately, because Mr. Stepforth knew Captain Hamilton's record as an investigator, Mr. Stepforth thought that it was possible that the captain might already be thinking on a similar line as he and Mr. Varick and Mr. Harrison. Yet it was still necessary to proceed with great caution. The risk was immense, and gaining the reward would be costly in many ways. Captain Hamilton's interest in justice might not be quite that large – or at least, he might not see the needs of 28 percent of Tinyville as equivalent to the cost. Still, it was worth carefully making the attempt...

Captain Hamilton at that moment was in fact thinking of the Lofton County Free Voice and its constituents, quietly enjoying the sad irony of the need for their existence while an example of the need was yelling in his face.

Mrs. Mary Leigh had come all the way to the police station because a window had been broken out again – not at her house, but at the Gilligan House, once a stately mansion in the days of the antebellum South, now a somewhat neglected landmark of a town and county that did not want it – or shall we say, goodly portions of 72 percent of the town and 61 percent of the county did not want it.

However, the Gilligan House had been a spot on the Underground Railroad, once the only one, then the first at anything closing in on a major city after what was now Fruitland Memorial Park had been freed by its new owner, General J.J. Lofton, in 1839. General Lofton's attitude toward slavery, even through his final years as a Confederate, was that it was antiquated evil that needed to be dispatched willingly (but not by external force, which is why he had died just after the battle of Cold Harbor, in the field, which act had made inevitable the combined 80 miles he and his brother had owned becoming Lofton County. Virginia could not resist making another idol out of someone who didn't want that).

Mr. Gilligan, contemporaneous with the general in the 1840s, did not share the general's opinion, but his slaves built him a house with extra rooms anyway, and ran the Railroad right through his house for 20 years! Thus, it had actually been Mr. Varick and Mr. Harrison, with the help of friends, who had gone through all the processes to make the building a county landmark, and then a state landmark. It could therefore not be demolished.

Lofton County's powers-that-be were furious at being outwitted and end-run by the future founders of the Lofton County Free Voice – so, the decision was made to destroy the Gilligan House by attrition, through neglect. It was working, although since the building was open to the public and county wasn't paying attention, it was working very, very slowly – people came and worked on the interior regularly, essentially donating labor, time, and materials to the Gilligan House, to keep it as long as possible.

Mr. Varick and Mr. Harrison had not neglected to mention the Gilligan House and official indifference to it in the very first edition of the Lofton County Free Voice: they rubbed it in the county's face by putting forth the history of what the building had been and why it was important to Lofton County having a true understanding of itself. Yet they knew that it was a losing battle, in the end. No one had wanted to put the money together to save the building by buying and renovating it outright (Mr. Thomas Stepforth Sr. had not returned to the county yet). Their choosing to put it forth as a landmark was a last resort to preserve it for just one more generation.

That generation's children was just playing catch on the yard, since there was no security, and the ball had gone through a window of the house. Not even a police matter, really. But, Mary Leigh wanted done what she and others wanted done.

“This wouldn't have even happened if that building were just taken down and something useful put in its place!” she said.

Captain Hamilton retained his usual calm, with an effort.

“It is a landmark, which means it is useful in its historical value,” he said.

“Oh, nonsense – it has no value to anyone whose history is important!”

“I would venture to say 28 percent of Tinyville and 39 percent of Lofton County would disagree with that opinion.”

“I am so tired of these Negroes having to be considered in every decision made in this county – I tell you, it is ridiculous! Their endless demands for recognition!”

“It does tend to be that, among free people, the wishes of three or four out of every ten should be at least considered.”

“You're a panty-waist verging on being a traitor to the Southern cause, Captain!”

“The cause was defeated 154 years ago, so I can't say I'm terribly worried about that. What I am concerned about is maintaining peace and justice for all law-abiding citizens of Tinyville – and that citizenship question has also been settled for 150 years. That is the law. As a law enforcement officer, I have no authority to do or say anything that would question the reality of full Black inclusion in the civil process in Tinyville, Lofton County, Virginia, or the United States of America.”

Lieutenant O'Reilly watched in amazement at how his captain shook off the insults of his irate old interlocutor with easy calm, a calm that only provoked Mrs. Leigh.

“You were born in Tinyville – out of the best of Virginia's mingled stock! How did you get so weak?”

“Must be the fact that I am a great-great-great grandchild of the one man in Virginia who knew it was over when it was over, and who seems to have carried the knowledge with him to his vault in Lexington, in a sad October of 1870.”

Lieutenant O'Reilly suddenly saw just a little of that all-too-familiar face in Virginia's history, in his captain's profile...

Mrs. Leigh could not do anything with what Captain Hamilton had said; she stuttered and stammered and then stopped, in complete confusion.

“I've already investigated the broken window, Mrs. Leigh. We're not going to charge a whole bunch of little kids looking for a place to play in the summer for trespassing when they had no way of knowing they were trespassing, and we're not going to jack their parents up, either. County has needed to put up a fence and properly care for the landmark for 20 years; the responsibility for neglect and all the resulting problems is on the county. That ends this department's involvement in the matter. I hope that is clear now, Mrs. Leigh.”

“You mean you intend to let this travesty continue?”

“I have no authority to do anything more than what has been done.”

“Useless to all greater purposes – you're useless!”

“Then I suppose you are wasting your valuable time, ma'am, in continuing this conversation.”

Mrs. Leigh sputtered to a halt again, and Lieutenant O'Reilly stifled his laughter by getting up and opening the door for the angry woman as she stomped out.

“Wait,” Captain Hamilton said as Mrs. Leigh's footsteps went out of hearing, “and, now, Lieutenant.”

Lieutenant O'Reilly put his head on his desk and laughed until he cried.

“I don't know how you do it, Captain!” he said. “You never frowned or raised your voice or cussed her out – I know I would have cussed her out, because there are no weak people who can do what we do every day!”

Captain Hamilton smiled at last.

“Indeed there are not,” he said. “I'll tell you the secret, and it will be of great use to you as a young Christian at the age of 25: settle in your mind now that as a white man you are walking the earth as a man and are not and at no time will seek the privileges of being treated as a god, but will walk with God and do no more and no less than what He commands.”

“That's deep,” said Lieutenant O'Reilly. “I mean, I sort of know that, but think about what that does to our thinking about the Southern past and the nation's future. What if every church had taught us that, 400 years ago?”

“The past cannot be changed,” Captain Hamilton said. “It is for you today, and tomorrow, and the rest of your life, to consider it. The slave owner was a worse-case scenario in terms of indulging delusions to godhood, but that same delusion would have caused me to be very unkind to Mrs. Leigh. It would cause me to mistreat you, my family, this town, daily.

“Yet if I am but a man, lower than the angels, finite, limited, and mortal like everyone else around me, how am I justified in pretending to be above anyone else? And, if I am a Christian, following a Savior Who was servant to all, and who submitted Himself to the insults of man while He was God in order that the Father's will be carried out, who am I not to serve and submit, so that the Father's will may be done?”

“That's deep,” Lieutenant O'Reilly said, “yet I know the Scripture says the servant is not greater than his master, but can be like him – so, you're right. Either God can be God or we can try at it – not both.”

“Right,” said Captain Hamilton. “Get that through your mind and your spirit now, because Mrs. Leigh or someone like her might come back in here, and I'll need you to remind me. Don't think I'm perfect. I wanted to slap her with the hand of ten thousand angels, as one my favorite YouTube comediennes, Ms. Shirleen, said, but she also said, 'That ain't of Him – that ain't what He wants.' ”

Lieutenant O'Reilly fell over onto his desk again.

“I saw that one!” he said between laughs. “I guess we're in the law bedazzling business!”

“You're actually right,” Captain Hamilton said. “The Scripture says our lives are to adorn the doctrine we believe, and since our livelihood is as law men, you're right. We adorn the doctrine with how we go about fairly and justly upholding the law.”

Lieutenant O'Reilly froze.

“Captain, do you realize that since what you are saying is true, that means that the entire so-called history of so-called Christian America is questionab--.”

“Lieutenant, we don't even have time to deal with that today. You're right, but we don't even have time to deal with it properly. We've got to go house hunting.”

“What?”

“It's a police matter, about to happen. When the Lofton County Free Voice picks up all that material from the departments next to ours, it is about to go down like it is 1869 in Lofton County. If I knew how and when, we could stop it today, but, I don't, so we are going to go get evidence together so we are ready. Turn on the phone forwarding service to my cell; we're both going out on a call for house-hunting, because I want you to understand should something happen to me what the motives are, and how the evidence connects.”

“Please don't get hurt, Captain,” said Lieutenant O'Reilly. “I'm not ready to be acting captain.”

“The first step is knowing that,” Captain Hamilton said. “The next step is to be willing to learn, and to get ready. I'm not trying to leave you, but, just in case, let's have you ready to handle what's coming.”

Captain Hamilton paused, and then his face turned grim.

“We may be grateful for Mrs. Leigh in the end,” he said. “She provided both a good reminder of what is at stake, and from what direction it may come, and even who encourages the kinds of things we are likely to face. You'll see what I am talking about in a little while. Let's go.”