By Trevor Scott Barton
Jan sat at her desk, staring at a blank page in her notebook. Her left hand was balled into a fist sitting in the palm of her right hand. She shrugged her shoulders deeply and lifted her head from the page.
She had pulled up the blinds on the large window facing Main Street, hoping to fill her office with light from the breaking day outside. Early risers, in heavy coats and gloves, hurried from frosted cars toward the warmth of the restaurant across the street. Vapor rose from their mouths with each breath, like puffs of smoke from a chimney, and disappeared into the gray morning sky. This would be a wintry March day instead of her much hoped for spring, when the first tulips break through thawing ground.
She thought about the previous night, wondering what would be said over coffee at the Scrambled Egg. When they looked at the front page of the Greenville News, when they saw the headline, would any of the words be good words, words that could heal instead of hurt, forgive instead of hate?
She tried to find these good words inside herself, believing her editorials could shape actions and thoughts in the tense days to come. Or did she believe?
She pictured her neighbors, listening to the morning news on the radio or watching it on T.V. Having spent her life in Southern towns like Greenville, she knew thoughts and feelings about immigration and immigrants were shaped long before someone read an editorial, long before that someone was born.
How could her neighbors—people who ate with her, people who went to church with her, people who lived a good definition of civility—so quickly lose that civility when faced with issues of immigration? What was it about immigrants that raised pulse rates, flushed faces, clenched teeth and pounded fists in anger in an otherwise friendly place?
She rose from the chair, leaving the notebook at her desk. Her knees creaked and groaned as she stood, laboring to lift her body up and away from her morning task of trying to answer unanswerable questions and to question unquestioned answers.
Trevor Scott Barton is an elementary school teacher and a writer in Greenville, South Carolina. Follow his work on Twitter @teachandwrite.
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