A Yard Sale for Gideon

A Yard Sale for Gideon Jackie Burnside In Middlefield, black homeowners and renters are set apart from their white neighbors by the town's stockyards. Every Friday red- or gray-cabbed six-wheelers roar in and lumber out of C Street's loading docks, hauling farmers' cattle which have long been the town's economic anchor. Mixed in their diesel's wake is the pungent musk of fresh cow manure. Most whites on C Street live upwind of the stockyards. The blacks and poorer whites live downwind; they call their community "Middlefield," perhaps a vestige of the English settlers' fancy to designate the "middle" section of Lankford, the seat of government for Garth County in Eastern Kentucky. Had we arranged our yard sale in Middlefield, white customers of the aspiring middle class never would have deigned to stop, let alone shop for bargains among our clean stacks of used clothing, once-worn shoes and smokeaged pots and pans. Few whites, except for those who lived in housing projects on the southern hills, would venture so far along C Street as to pass the stockyards unless they had special business. They certainly would not have gone looking for unadvertised yard sales there. Our sale was to be held across town in Duncantown. It was not announced in the weekly paper, not because it was a spur-of-the-moment notion but because that's the way it was organized. We calculated we could get enough customers using the black community's "grapevine" and snagging curious white customers as they took the South Manning Street shortcut over to Derbyville Street. These drivers would have to pass my sister-inlaw Pearl's small white frame house, which is located about a hundred yards from the corner of Manning and Derbyville Streets. To Gideon, Pearl was not just one of his aunts, she was a second mother who had worked at home as chief cook and diaper changer for all nine of her two sisters' children; Gideon ranked number seven of their nine. Pearl and Esther, Gideon's mother, now hold sewing jobs at the local garment factory. Derbyville Street, one of Lankford's two major thoroughfares, runs parallel to Duncantown, the second neighborhood where more of the well-off working blacks lived. During its heyday, this community boasted the Negro school, several small businesses, and the mainstream First Baptist Church. Built to last with river rocks, the Negro schoolhouse is now a lonely sentinel occupying one western hill since its abandonment three decades ago in Lankford's school-integration plans. First Baptist Church, red brick and greenback-fortified, continues to thrive as the oldest surviving black institution in Duncantown. Only two black businesses remain—the beauty shop and a part-time cafe. Derbyville Street is actually a U.S. highway that runs a curving thirteen miles into Derbyville, a thriving little city well on its way to 20,000-plus population , according to figures from the 1990 census. Its advanced industrial growth— namely, three new industrial parks of low- and high-technology firms—and its 30 small prestigious college pose a stark contrast to agrarian Lankford's stifled development (construction of an industrial park never began) and decreased population (an estimated 3,000)—stifled, some say, by the landed gentry whose colonial ancestors are glorified as Lankford's founders. These descendants still own the stockyards and steadfastly refuse to consider removal to the town's outskirts. Others claim that the residents' lack of initiative (which may be an inherent trait of "incestuous blood"), coupled with insufficient education, is more to blame. Many black residents, in D'town or Middlefield, would pride themselves on having some initiative, especially my sister -in-law. After all, anyone could just look around and see important changes that had required somebody's initiative. For instance, her two-bedroom house, kept neat after a half-century, would have been described as being "in back of of the Big House in an area originally designated for slaves' quarters. The rear section of Derbyville Street, lying within the shadows of Garth County's courthouse , lets you know that these housing lots once had been staked out for the use of colored...