Not One of Us

Odyssey is buzzing. City Councilman Philip Glossman has said something about the Japanese that he never should have said, and now he stands in front of the cameras insisting his comments were taken out of context, that he is not a racist, and that some of his best friends are of foreign extraction. Then he resigns the chair he has held for seven years and announces he is moving to Chicago.

Miss Medloff watches the news footage again with Lucy Cunningham-Schultz and sees a story in it. She does not want an interview with Glossman. She wants an expose for the Odyssey Owl about bigotry in the town itself. Everybody is prejudiced against somebody, she tells Lucy, and the real question is what it feels like to be on the receiving end of it. Lucy has one week.

She starts with John Avery Whittaker, mostly because she cannot think of a single bigot she knows. Whit tells her that almost nobody admits to the word, but that everyone carries prejudices of some kind, himself included, and that he works on his by trying to see people the way Jesus sees them, from the inside out. What a person looks like on the outside does not last, he says. The soul goes on forever.

Tom Riley remembers being a boy and going with his family to a church in the next county, where his father's patient was the pastor. The church would not let poor people inside for the service. They sat on the grass under the window and listened from there. Tom still remembers the grass stains on his trousers, and he still cannot understand how Christians could do that to each other. Maude Walton is sure she is not prejudiced, though she tangles herself up trying to say so and cannot quite keep Lucy's name straight. Bart Rathbone thinks the whole Glossman business is a shame, a good councilman down the tubes over one honest remark, and that back in his day people knew their places and nobody made a fuss. He is certainly no bigot, he says. But if Lucy really wants to meet folks who know about discrimination, she should drive down to Sloughburg, a few miles across the state line. He used to work with a man from there.

The article Lucy turns in is tidy and fair, and Miss Medloff says so before saying the rest: it has no heart. Nobody in it has actually suffered. When Miss Medloff floats handing the story to another reporter, Lucy digs in and mentions her lead.

Sloughburg is not on the gas station map. Connie Kendall finds it in Whit's road atlas, a couple of miles off the interstate, and offers to drive, curious herself about who would be prejudiced against a whole town. Bart is away on business, so there is nobody to ask what they are driving into.

The road is unpaved and the houses are little more than shacks, which only convinces Lucy she has found her story. Then the owner of the general store refuses to sell Connie so much as a soda. He does not serve sitters, he explains, meaning city folk, and Odyssey is worse. Sitters are dumb, lazy and sneaky, and he knows all about Lucy's writing without having read a word of it. He points at the sign reserving his right to refuse service to anyone and tells them the police are on his side.

Outside, there is a parking ticket on the car. At the town office, Matilda explains that sitters park out back, that the fine is fifteen dollars, and that the thirty days printed on the ticket apply to townfolk only. Connie and Lucy have eleven dollars between them. The store owner strolls in to agree that sitters cannot be trusted, and Matilda mentions that he is also the mayor. His name is Henry, and he offers a choice: scrub the jail floor at sixty cents an hour for six hours, or spend a week locked up scrubbing for nothing. Lucy tells him they are flesh and blood, mind and spirit, people created by God who ought to be treated with compassion and respect, and that in the long run he is the one who will suffer from his bigotry. Henry asks how she would like to spend her six hours.

So they scrub. Connie keeps refusing to believe it is happening; Lucy's knees insist that it is. They do the math on the fine, worry about parents who will start wondering soon, and agree that Lucy now has more material than she ever wanted. Then Matilda tells them they are free to go. Lucy asks why, hoping the speech landed. It did not. A fellow out front paid the ticket.

The fellow is Bart Rathbone. He checked in at home, heard from Rodney that Lucy had called, put two and two together and swung by on his way out of town. He admits he should have warned them about the place. He also admits the rescue cost him nothing, because the man he used to work with is the one who owns the general store, and for some reason the people of Sloughburg like him. He is practically an honorary citizen. He cannot imagine why. Neither, exactly, can Connie.

Back at the Owl, Miss Medloff calls it one of the best articles she has ever read and says Lucy captured the sting of bigotry firsthand. Lucy says she felt it in her knees, too. Asked to explain to the other reporters what she learned, she is not sure she can. Some things about bigotry, she says, you cannot really know until you have been there.