A Stranger in the Kingdom (44 page)

George Quinn submitted a long-winded treatise to the
Monitor
pointing out to “downcountry muckrakers and other rabble-rousers” that not only had Vermont been the first state in the union to outlaw slavery, it had sent the highest ratio of soldiers per capita to the Civil War of any northern state. And numerous other Kingdom County natives wrote to remind readers that Pliny Templeton had been a Negro and that neither his students nor neighbors, nor anyone else, for that matter, had seemed to give his race any thought one way or the other.

Yet one had to wonder. There were other letters, ugly ones, mostly unsigned, which my father did not print but filed away along with clippings from the out-of-town papers. Some of these anonymous diatribes were postmarked Burlington or Rutland or Montpelier; but some had been mailed in the Common and Memphremagog. One averred that Kingdom County had gotten along very nicely for a century and a half without “the colored element that was stirring things up and causing trouble in the big cities,” and there was no call to change matters now. Another reiterated Mason White's earlier speculation to my father that Reverend Andrews had come to the area as part of a nationwide Communist-Negro conspiracy. Many people seemed to assume that the murder charges against the minister had already been proven, and as the days went by, fewer and fewer visitors went up to the Memphremagog jail to give him even the slightest support.

As angry as I still become when I look through that yellowing file of anonymous hate mail, I am sure that my father was even angrier when he received them. Of all the Kingdom County natives affected by the Affair, I think Dad was the most distressed.

I should stress here just how deeply my father believed himself to be free of romantic illusions about country living. How could he harbor illusions, this newspaperman's newspaperman who routinely flailed the town for its anti-intellectualism and provincialism and shortsightedness?

And yet, in the end, I believe that my father was the most incorrigible idealist I have ever known. For at the heart of every single one of his excoriations was the unswerving belief that for all its flaws, Kingdom County was a basically good place to live and work. Flog the Kingdom the old man did, relentlessly and tirelessly, much as our stern Scottish ancestors had flogged their own offspring, and for approximately the same reason: He believed most of its failings were correctable.

Dad's great dilemma in the late summer of 1952, however, was that until now he had never believed that such deep-seated and widespread racism was among the village's evils. True, from the start he had recognized the existence of a certain latent prejudice in the Kingdom. But he was genuinely shocked to discover that, at least in the instance of a sizable number of anonymous letter writers and perhaps some members of the congregation as well, he had underestimated its prevalence. So he found himself in the almost impossible position of attacking the bigots yet at the same time trying to defend the village as a whole against the blanket charges of outside reporters and editors who labeled it a northern pocket of rampant racism—a “little piece of Mississippi in northern New England,” as one editorial in the Boston Globe put it.

It was at this time that Dad, following his own advice to me about the “sealed globe”—that a newspaperman's job is not to solve crimes but to report what is or is not happening—wrote his famous “Conspiracy of Silence” open letter in the
Monitor.
It appeared in the August fourteenth issue and was immediately reprinted in dailies throughout New England and far beyond.

“A Conspiracy of Silence,” an Open Letter by Charles Kinneson, Sr.:

 

For many years, the United Church of Kingdom Common has experienced difficulty recruiting and retaining qualified full-time ministers.

Our church is far from unique in this respect. Small congregations in outlying rural areas of northern New England have always faced the same problem. This past spring, however, a remarkable clergyman came to our town to live and preach. Almost as soon as he arrived he started to make himself a part not just of the church but of the town as well. When the high school baseball coach fell ill, he stepped in and took over. When he perceived that there were factions in his congregation, he rallied everyone to a wonderful common cause, organizing the first annual Old Home Day Celebration in honor of the church's sesquicentennial anniversary. Yet so far from imposing his ideas and convictions upon us, he listened to our concerns and needs, our plans and desires, even to our history, which became the theme of Old Home Day. His sermons were concise and literate, his counsel witty and humane. Within a month of his installation the size of the congregation, the Sunday school enrollment and the choir had more than doubled. He visited sick people and elderly people, and not just those belonging to his congregation but from the entire community.

Who, precisely, was this remarkable clergyman? His name was Walter Andrews. He was a former Olympic athlete, an outstanding scholar at his college and theological seminary, and a brave and decorated chaplain in the Canadian armed services. He was also a widower, who had known tragedy and sorrow in his life but transcended it through a wholehearted commitment to his spiritual beliefs and work and his son—for whom, naturally, he wanted a normal and happy life. It was in part so that his son could enjoy such a life that he had chosen to come here to our beautiful Kingdom, which (as we all assure one another constantly) is “a fine place to raise kids and have a family.”

Now this will no doubt come as a very great surprise to some members of the United Church Congregation and local Rotary Club, but Kingdom County, for all its virtues, is still not quite a perfect place. We have our shortcomings, as well as our strengths, from the sewerage we hourly pump into the Lower Kingdom River to the novels we sanctimoniously deem “unfit” and ban from the hallowed rooms of the Ira Allen Memorial Library. Chief among these shortcomings is an innate suspicion of strangers, outsiders, and, if the truth be known, almost anyone who is much different from ourselves. So it is all the more remarkable that Walter Andrews was so quickly able to win our trust and acceptance and admiration. For not only was he a stranger, from another country—he was the first Negro to live in Kingdom County in more than fifty years.

Yet soon after Reverend Andrews' arrival he and his son were subjected to racial slurs and outrageous behavior on the part of some local bigots whom most of us failed to take very seriously, saying to Walter Andrews and to each other, “Ah, yes. It exists everywhere, even here to a degree. But it isn't a big problem. These unfortunate instances are only the exceptions that prove the rule that there is next to no serious prejudice in this fine place to live, this bastion of traditional New England ideals so remote from the teeming cities and the steamy South. Not here in God's Kingdom where (nearly a century ago) more than half of the men between 18 and 40 years of age enlisted to preserve the Union and put an end to an institution founded on the very bigotry and contempt for human rights we claimed to abhor. After all, wasn't the founder and first headmaster of our very own Academy himself a Negro? (Of course, our prejudice, or lack of it, had not been tested in over fifty years, since not a single member of the Negro race had lived in Kingdom County in that time.) Besides, Walter Andrews and his son seemed able to handle the isolated instances of prejudice very well themselves. So in general our reaction, when, for instance, our Negro minister and his son were obliged to defend themselves from town drunks and bullies, was silence. Better to let them handle these difficulties themselves, we thought.

Then Reverend Andrews did something that many of us neither totally understood nor totally approved of. He opened his home (and
our parsonage
—we were quick to point this out—his home was
our parsonage
) to a homeless French Canadian girl who came to town with one of the infamous tent shows at Kingdom Fair. She was not a member of the show; she had been picked up on the road into Kingdom County, had been offered a ride by people who said they were performers. The young gid was also a performer—a mime like her famous, deceased father. Pretty and confused, she was told that she could repay the kindness of the ride by “performing” with them at the Kingdom County Fair. Little did she know what they were up to, but when she found out—the night of the performance—she fought to get away and ran. Many of the people from whom she was forced to run were our own townsmen. Yet in opening “our” parsonage to this waif, Walter Andrews outraged and offended many of us almost unforgivably, and from that very day began to lose standing in the eyes of the community for taking in a confused and needy minor—for doing his Christian duty!

A few of us complained directly to him, and a considerable number murmured one to another. But most of us expressed our disapproval by simply remaining
silent
in a sort of unspoken agreement to wait and let events run their course. Certainly no one else stepped forward to help the girl, the outcast, the stranger. Oh, we didn't form a mob and try to stone her or ride her out of town on a rail. Those aren't our tactics here in God's Kingdom these days. We just said to each other, maybe a little baffled, “But what has she to do with us? A girl from the tent show? What has she to do with us and
our
minister and
our
parsonage?”

Then soon afterwards, when one of our local ruffians fired upon our parsonage, breaking our windows and leaving buckshot in our furniture, and Reverend Andrews fired back, actually taking up arms to protect his home, more of us broke our silence, going to him and saying, “What are
you
doing with a gun? How is it that you, a minister, have broken the peace and silence of our streets by firing a gun?”

True, some few of Reverend Andrews's close friends and supporters thought that perhaps he
might
have had a right to defend himself and his son. But even then most of us maintained our silence—even after the local outlaw who fired on the parsonage was charged merely with disturbing the peace (and, temporarily, the silence) of our town; even after the local sheriff went to our parsonage, as directed by our local prosecutor, and questioned the minister about
his
past, and why
he
had a gun and had the temerity to use it (never mind in defense of his life and our property) addressing the Negro minister twice as “boy”!

And though some few of us considered “boy” an improper form of address for our minister, the vast majority of us still maintained our silence, though with considerable curiosity to see what would happen next, because by now it was clear that this affair was fast turning into high social drama of a sort not usually connected with the Kingdom or Vermont or New England.

We did not have to wait long. Three days later the unfortunate homeless girl turned up shot to death at a local quarry. The gun with which Reverend Andrews had had the temerity to defend himself was found nearby, and the minister was arrested on his church steps, during her funeral and charged with murder.

And now it must be acknowledged that at last many of us did break our silence, though only briefly, to repudiate the charges in the out-of-town newspapers that a Negro minister in Kingdom County had been systematically persecuted, fired upon, harassed by the law and finally framed for a murder no one really thought he committed or could commit.

Then we lapsed back into that constitutional taciturnity for which we Vermonters are renowned (for the most part erroneously, since we are laconic only with strangers), and no one except for a reporter or two and the minister's lawyer went to the sheriff and said, “Can't you see that this man has been framed? That it's inconceivable that he would murder the girl with his own gun and then throw it into the water beside her body?”

And although most of us know there are at least five other possible suspects in the case, none of whom our sheriff (who does not deny calling Negroes “boy”) has chosen to question, we have thus far remained silent on this point too.

And where, you may well wonder, are those who undoubtedly could come forward with information about this case?

They are silent.

And why hasn't the sheriff questioned local people who had access to our parsonage? No doubt he has his own good reasons, for he too has remained silent.

And what of those leading members of the congregation who literally applauded the arrival of Walter Andrews and might now at least visit and comfort him in his travail? From them we hear, mostly, silence. And I am here to tell you that this conspiracy of silence is, in kind, if not degree, every last bit as heinous as the conspiracy of silence that caused us to stand by for years and do nothing while Nazi Germany was murdering millions of its own citizens in cold blood, not to mention the conspiracy of silence that has allowed an opportunistic and mendacious politician from our own Midwest to destroy the careers and lives of thousands upon thousands of good and loyal American citizens, who are supposedly entitled to freedom of thought and expression.

We may counter these charges by saying, “Yes, but now there will be a trial. Now justice will prevail.”

But how can justice prevail if those of us with information continue to remain silent?

We may say, “But only a very few have actually persecuted this man.” To which I say that persecution takes many forms. Our fault here is that the majority of us have been more or less indifferent to him, except, of course, as Reverend Andrews's plight embarrasses our town or provides diversion to us. Why? Because like the poor girl he tried to help, Reverend Andrews is an outsider, and still, essentially, a stranger himself, despite all he has done for us.