“Hi, I’m Marcy Smith, I’m a sophomore in high school, and I’ve been assigned to write up the first black teacher in town for a Black History Month project. Do you by any chance remember a Mr. Sibley who briefly had an apartment on Shell Road when you lived there?”

“Yes,” the man said.

“You do?”

He called his wife to the phone.

So she was on the phone with Mike and June, and they were saying, “Well, Marcy, it wasn’t a pretty thing. Doubt if folks are proud of how they behaved. Why, the banker that lived down there wouldn’t let the black guy open an account. ’Course, that had to be stopped right away, wasn’t legal, didn’t want people to think we were Southerners or something. So people spoke harsh to him, and he let the black guy have a bank account after all. But they were really fussed about it, that couple. They said it would ruin property values and wasn’t good for the children.”

Macey was writing it all down. She had started a notebook after talking to Stella Miller, so she could check later to see exactly what had been said. “What else did people do about the black teacher?”

“Talked a lot. There were church meetings, to get people to talk about their feelings and be Christian. That was back before you talked about feelings, remember. In the fifties, you weren’t supposed to have feelings, let alone talk about them.”

“Although you were supposed to be Christian,” said June dryly, on her extension.

“I was up in the apartment once,” said Mike, “because I’m a plumber, and I redid the plumbing. Sweet little place. Cute little cabinets with little green apple handles. Wonderful view. Would have liked to live there myself.”

“Every fall,” said June, “it was a struggle finding housing for teachers. You’d have all these new teachers, because back then, if a woman had a baby, she stopped working, so there was more turnover than there is now. And here the best apartment is going to a colored man.”

“Did you ever meet him?” said Macey.

“Just the night of the fire. Everybody met him then.”

“Would you tell me about the fire?”

“I ran down there, of course,” said Mike, “to see if I could help, and the guy was standing alone in the road, kind of froze up, and I remember not knowing what to say to him. Place burned to the ground. They didn’t save nothing. And his car, it was an old VW Beetle, you don’t hardly see those around now, and the fire marshal said the fire was set, he knew because of the way the car burned. An accelerant had been poured all over the car. I remember because I never come across arson before.”

An accelerant had been poured over the car.