CHAPTER 9

Preston Upshaw crushed another cigarette in the ashtray on his cluttered desk, folded his arms above his belly, and stared through a cloud of smoke at the mocked-up headline for his first issue of the Unionville Times. Advertising sales were running ahead of any old man Trammell ever generated but not hitting levels Upshaw expected.

“Those merchants will come around when they see this,” he said to Pearl Goodbar, his assistant. She had worked for Wilbur Trammel until he died and Upshaw had kept her on. She was having trouble learning to operate the new Linotype machine, but when she was not grumbling about the pile of loose boards and other mess the installers left after they tore out a wall to get the thing into the building, she was proving good at editing copy and writing local stories. Upshaw read the headline aloud, “‘Hell on the Way.’Yeah, that’ll do it,” he said.“We’ll run ‘Crisis in Little Rock’ as a subhead.”

This was exactly the sort of moment Upshaw had been waiting for. He assumed a lot of folks in southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana believed as he did that a growing number of northern do-gooders, liberal judges, and rabble-rousing black ministers were rallying around Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling to integrate public schools. He also figured his readers knew about the bus boycott started by some black woman named Rosa Parks over in Montgomery, Alabama, a year and a half ago and how this past spring Martin Luther King, Jr., led tens of thousands of followers on a march in Washington, DC. Surely, too, Upshaw guessed, all of this riled his readers as much it did him and, like him, they resented how the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference kept pushing harder and harder for all sorts of civil rights for black people.

On his sales rounds, Upshaw had heard enough talk to know that most people in Unionville assumed that the long-anticipated integration of Little Rock schools would take place in September. He also knew, however, that opposition was building in the capital, and he both welcomed it personally and saw it as something he could stoke in Unionville for profit.

“I tell you, Mrs. Goodbar,” he said, “folks around here are apathetic and I’m gon’ fix that. Integration can be stopped if people will just wake up. If they don’t, what’s happening in Little Rock is gon’ happen down here.”

“What does ‘Hell on the Way’ mean?” Pearl asked, coming over to his desk. She brushed a strand of brown hair away from her gold-rimmed glasses and picked up the headline sheet. Now in her early forties, she had taught high school English before leaving to raise two daughters. When the youngest entered sixth grade, she answered an ad from Wilbur Trammel because she liked to write. She had learned a lot from him but she was not accustomed to turning out headlines like these.

“I mean,” Upshaw said, “that if the Little Rock school board tries to go ahead with the Blossom Plan to integrate—Virgil Blossom is the superintendent of schools up there—some folks are gon’ fight to stop it.”

“Who said so?”

“Martin Smitherman. He’s a big-wheel lawyer in the Capital Citizens’ Council. Ran for Congress a couple of years ago. Knows what he’s talking about. He’s not the only one either. Brother Walter Paxson, that radio preacher over in Texas, said it too. The Citizens’ Council brought him to Little Rock earlier this summer. It’s all right here in my story,” Upshaw said, digging for a page of copy. He read aloud, “‘There are people left yet in the South who love God and their nation enough to shed blood if necessary to stop this work of Satan.’”

“He said that back in the summer sometime?”

“Yeah, June I think.”

Pearl sat down on a cane-bottomed chair, one of half a dozen scattered around the huge office and printing room. “Isn’t that old news?” she asked. “I remember Jim Johnson talking about it during the last gubernatorial election. You know about him, I suppose. He’s from Crossett, just over in Ashley County. It’s a lumber town, a lot like Unionville, only bigger.”

“Sure, I know about Johnson,” Upshaw said. “He might have won if he hadn’t gon’ around busting up Faubus’s rallies with bullhorns and calling him a communist. Anyway, this isn’t old news to anyone who’s forgotten about it or didn’t hear it in the first place. And I’ll tell you something else. I grew up watching my momma work beside coloreds in Mississippi cotton fields and I don’t intend to watch a whole generation of white kids going to school with them. People in Unionville are gon’ start thinking differently now. I’m gon’ see to it.”

“Isn’t this headline a little strong?”

“It’s nothing you need to worry about,” Upshaw snapped. “You just stick to editing. I’ll worry about the content.”

Pearl got up and went back to her desk. Whatever she thought about her new boss, she could not afford to talk back to him. She needed her job. Her husband worked for a wholesale grocery house in El Dorado, and sending their daughters to college was going to take every dollar their family could scrape together.

Upshaw lit another cigarette, took a long draw, and picked up the headline sheet again.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “this will stir things up.”