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In Their Own Words
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In Their Own Words
Quiet Lessons in Prejudice You're a die-hard baseball fan. You take a vacation to New York City with your family over the summer, and somehow convince them to drive to Cooperstown, New York, to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. You get there, and your kids are whining that they are tired and they want to go back to the hotel. Your wife is wondering why she agreed to this little outing, and is pretty close to putting the kids in the car and leaving you there.
You walk inside the building and look at the list of exhibits that are open to the public. The name Jackie Robinson catches your eye. Theres a monument to him out in a park behind the building, and you decide that you all need some fresh air. You start walking out to the park, your kids still complaining. You tell them it will be an educational experience and that Jackie Robinson was a great man. In truth, you know little about him except that he was the first black player in the major leagues.
The heat is beginning to get to you when you finally reach the park. There's a gate with a large sign over it, reading simply, The Jackie Robinson Monument. You open the gate and there's a large wall made out of white granite. It stretches across the width of the small park. In the very center of the wall are two dark brown doors with a sign over each door. One reads WHITE and the other COLORED. Slightly unnerved, you and your family turn the doorknob of the door marked WHITE. Your children ask what is going on and you tell them that in Jackie Robinsons time, blacks and whites were separated from each other, that blacks had to use separate bathrooms and water fountains, sit in separate places, and even go through separate doors. Your daughter is horrified that she and her best friend wouldn't have been allowed to be together.
Once you pass through the door, you are all quiet for a few seconds, taking in the sights. There is a bronze-colored path inscribed with writing directly in front of you, which leads to a large wall made of shiny black granite. The wall seems to have been cracked in two. Suspended directly over the crack is a baseball bat the same color as the path. It appears to have been the thing which cracked the wall in half. The larger-than-life-size bat bears the signature Jackie Robinson. Inscribed on the wall in white letters twice as tall as you is the word PREJUDICE.
You walk slowly down the path, noticing the soft green grass on either side of you. There is no fence preventing you from stepping onto the grass and walking across it until you reach the waist-high fence surrounding the park. You stop every few feet to read the writing on the path. They're quotes from Jackie Robinson. You read about his struggles while traveling the long road to finally cracking the wall of prejudice in major league baseball in two.
When you reach the wall, you touch it, tracing the letters from the bottom up until you can no longer reach them. Your children ask what it means and you explain. They are both quiet for a minute and then your son asks how people could be mean to someone without even knowing them. You tell him that you don't know, and that he has asked a question that people have been asking for a long time.
After a minute all of you walk around the wall, feeling strangely united. You see a plaque, the same bronze color as the path and the bat. It tells of Jackie Robinsons life, from his incredible baseball skills to his work as a civil rights activist. Your son who is just learning to read reads it aloud, stumbling over a few words before he reaches the end, which names Robinson as the greatest athlete of the century.
You tell your son he's reading beautifully and you all go and sit on the grass for a while. You and your wife tell your children what you know about the civil rights movement, leaving out the worst parts for until they're a little older.
Later, you quietly say thank you to Jackie Robinson. I begin to smell the stink from the paper mill when were a half hour away, after eleven hours in the car with my parents and two younger sisters. That acrid smell, sulfurous and smoky, invades my memory of visiting my in Johnsonburg, Pennsylvania. I don't think anyone who lives in Johnsonburg notices it, and after a week I can't either —it's only manifestation is the soot on the buildings and the cancer clinic in the nearest city.
The small neighboring towns in western Pennsylvania where my grandparents live are really nothing more than large factories with houses built in circles around them. Like almost everyone else in town, my grandfather and great uncles all worked at the paper mill in Johnsonburg for most of their lives. Besides the mill, the other main community gathering place in town is the Catholic Church, an ornate cathedral whose marble entryway and stained glass windows stand in sharp contrast to the two-story wooden row houses of the people that support it.
My ancestors moved to Johnsonburg right off the ship from Poland sixty years ago and whole rows of houses are still filled with Gapinskis today. The smells of fried zucchini, sauerkraut, and the pickled herring called sledgie fill their houses as strongly as the odor from the mill. Whole days are spent in Johnsonburg sitting on the front porch or playing gin rummy on the back porch when the afternoon sun gets too hot. This great-aunt or that third cousin is always willing to serve Kool-Aid to us three girls and pop open a beer for my dad. Straub beer, brewed one town over, is as essential here as water.
My parents grew up in these blue-collar towns, dating through high school and then marrying right after college. My dad left his childhood of hunting deer in the mountains to attend college instead of following his classmates to the paper mill. My mother came from a strict, religious home; when someone is working no one is sitting was the family rule. She put herself through college when home economics was all the education girls could expect.
Now, every Fourth of July brings a trip back to God's Country, as my father calls it. Our Ford minivan sticks out parked with trucks and dirt-bikes on the Johnsonburg street. In my younger years I had looked forward to walking down these streets to the convenience store, or the barbecue at the county dam. By the time I was thirteen, though, all I could see was how lame and rundown the town was, how sadly uncultured the people in Elk County were. My grandmother scowled and called us citified even before I explained that I'm a vegetarian.
But years later, I've grown to appreciate Johnsonburg. Image is nothing in a small town like this. The people are humble and sacrificing, grateful for what they have. Family is their most important priority —two doors down, they're always there to help, to share, or to celebrate with. Working hard at an honest job is expected; laziness is not an option. They show their zest for life even when times are hard, relaxing with a beer after a long day or playing cards with a neighbor. The pride in community, the strong traditions —all of these values I take home with me when I return to life in Massachusetts. I can't wash them out like the paper-mill smell on my clothes, and I would never want to.
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