Page 93 of The Reformatory

David Loehmann’s fingers tightened across his coffee mug when Anne Powell mentioned Robert Stephens’s name.

The son’s name carried his father’s every bit as much as Anne Powell’s name carried her late father’s in the circles he was navigating in Jackson, Gadsden, and Leon Counties. Rachel couldn’t stop talking about how kind Anne Powell had been to her, that they might actually have lunch at the Silver Slipper, like it was an invitation to the White House. Driving home from that meeting, they both had confessed they finally felt a slim claim to their community, a promise to the end of their sons’ misery at school, at least one day. Bit by bit, they might fit in.

His heart had soared at the sound of Anne Powell’s voice (“Wait until I tell Rachel!”)—until she said why she was calling and he realized her call might be related to the gossip about Klan activity and a fire in Gracetown last night. As he listened, Loehmann massaged his temples with his thumb and index finger. His heart quickened in his veins beneath his skin.

“Is that right?” he said, his mouth dry. “No, that’s not the procedure. She should have been able to get on the books by phone.” He hated his perfunctory words, as if the issue were banal bureaucracy and not the lingering stranglehold of the Confederacy.

“We’re hoping you can help us,” Anne Powell said. “This is a terrible ordeal for them.”

“Of course!” he said brightly. “Anything I can do.” Shit. He had made a promise now.

She went on: “Mind you, nothing has been proven about the accusations against his father.” Loehmann was shocked to hear his doubts about the case against Robert Stephens echoed by a woman, especially a white society woman. “Many of us here… believe he’s innocent. But that’s not even the point. This is a child, and he needs to see his family.”

“Understood.”

“Can you get her on the list for tomorrow?”

“Miss Powell, I certainly will try.”

“I’ve known him his whole life. He’s a good boy, Mr. Loehmann.”

“He seemed like a fine boy to me too.” Ask her. Ask her about it. His tongue felt bloated and dry. “I heard…” How could he put it? Were there polite words for siege and terrorism? “… there was some excitement last night?”

I heard there was a rainstorm. I heard the new DeSoto is out. I heard the Dodgers lost in extra innings. I heard the Ku Klux Klan nearly burned down the colored neighborhood in Gracetown and I’m afraid they’ll come for my family next.

“Yes,” she said, clipped, but did not elaborate. “That’s all the more reason we need your help. I’m worried about his sister’s safety. She looks like she hasn’t slept in a month. She only wants to see her brother and make sure he’s all right. I can go with her—”

“No,” Loehmann reminded her. “The visiting areas are segregated by race.”

For the first time, she went quiet. “Even if I want to see him too?” She’d grown up in the Jim Crow South her whole life, and she sounded like segregation was just dawning on her.

“Yes, Miss Powell,” he said. “You too. Colored means colored unless you want to apply for an exception from the warden, and I don’t recommend we involve him. Let’s try hard not to.” Too late, he thought to jump up and close his door, the receiver’s wire tugging across his neck.

His colleagues were fielding calls about other families’ miseries, but you couldn’t be too careful.

She sighed. “I can only imagine what you think of us down here.”

“Segregation isn’t unique to the South,” Loehmann said, thinking of how often he’d seen colored children chased from his Lower East Side library. “Just… more flamboyant.”

She gave a thin, sad laugh. “That’s a way of putting it, all right. I’ll tell you honestly, Mr. Loehmann… this doesn’t feel to me like the country we say we are.”

“No,” he said. His head slumped at the memory of the WHITE ONLY signs he’d had to explain to his boys, and they’d said, But isn’t that like the Nazis? And how could it be so? And why didn’t they just take the signs down? Loehmann would have said so much more to Anne Powell if he hadn’t been worried J. Edgar Hoover might be listening. Rachel thought it was a silly worry, but it wasn’t silly to him. His cousin Josh, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, had just been thrown in jail for refusing to testify for McCarthy’s witch hunt for radicals and communists. You’re a radical if you sneeze, Josh had complained at his father’s funeral.

“Anyhow, he doesn’t belong in that place,” Anne Powell said. “Maybe no children do. Locking up children is barbaric.”

“I agree.” He had so much more he could say! According to the files he’d studied after he was hired, the Gracetown Reformatory had been riddled with complaints since the day it opened. Loehmann realized he had lied to that child while he’d driven him to that place. He’d lied to himself. The Reformatory was still flogging children when the state had outlawed flogging adult prisoners years ago. Warden Haddock often lashed those boys personally—and he did far worse, if the whispers were true.

“I’ll call the warden’s secretary right now,” he said.

By the time Loehmann hung up, his nervousness had transformed to resolve. Smart people of good conscience lived everywhere, if only you looked for them. No wonder Rachel had been so excited when she showed him the bulletin about the meeting. He’d spent his childhood on picket lines with his father, but instead of feeling inspired like his brother, he’d noticed the toll at home. At his father’s funeral, trying to collect his favorite memories, he always came back to that Dodgers game because there had been only the Dodgers game, unless he counted the silent dinners with his father’s thoughts miles away. How could Loehmann have married Rachel if he thought he could do that to her? Or to their boys? If he were labeled a radical, God only knew what could happen to his family. The deputy in Gracetown practically had called him a commie on sight.

But doing nothing wasn’t a choice anymore. After a year of keeping most of his thoughts to himself, he had an ally. So he dialed the number for the Reformatory.

Doris, Haddock’s secretary, could be standoffish, but sometimes she cracked a smile when she saw him. Without any fuss, he would ask Doris to add Gloria Stephens’s name to the next day’s visitors’ log—and the old woman too. The log was on Doris’s desk, so all it would take was a flick of her pen. She might grouse about the short notice, and he would smooth it over with a joke. Like always.

The phone stopped ringing, but no greeting came.

“Hi, Doris, this is David over in Children’s Services,” he said.