Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots by Howard Fast Page A

normalcy.
    Mrs. M——said little; this was an old trouble for her people, and deep inside of her, and even though she knew so little of the night before—only confused, fragmentary bits—it was perhaps more real to her than it was to me.
    When I said that I was taking Rachel with me, she asked, “Will there be more trouble?”
    â€œNot today. Would I take her with me if there was going to be more trouble?”
    â€œYou wanted to take her last night.”
    â€œNobody could have anticipated last night,” I protested. “Last night was something that doesn’t happen and can’t happen.”
    â€œBut it happened.”
    What had happened, and when and how? Rachel and I drove up to Mohegan Colony. She was wearing a pink sunsuit as a little girl should in the pleasant summertime, and I kept thinking, what had happened? And why? We drove over the same roads I had taken the night before, through the same little valleys, and Rachel chattered in her most charming and disconnected manner of a dozen different things. Had Paul sung well? And what had Paul sung? Did he pick little girls up in his arms when he sang? Her talk was full of Peekskill, her own Peekskill. Peekskill meant that Paul Robeson, who was so tall and grand, was singing his songs somewhere.
    We came to Mohegan and already there were twenty-five or thirty people present, sitting on the lawn and talking of what had happened a few hours ago—but seemingly a thousand years ago. Here was a representative group of summer and year-round residents of Mohegan, Shrub Oak, Peekskill, Croton, Yorktown and many other villages in the vicinity, professionals and small business men. Here were also some of the workers who had been with me the night before, some of the young people whose lives were being threaded with fascism from the very beginning, and here were some of the women and some of the children too of last night. They sat on this lovely lawn with banks of flowers behind them, and I joined them and listened to them talk. Rachel had taken off her shoes and was racing over the lawn, trying to catch a kitten.
    Their talk was uneasy and troubled. They were trying to understand what had happened, what had changed, what was the meaning of the evening before. A pervading difference had come to the place; they had to know what that difference was. Also, they were frightened; and that was most understandable, for fear came in direct proportion to recollection of the details at the picnic grounds. I guess I listened for almost an hour, trying to comprehend how it must have felt to them. Here were their homes, not mine. They were people in very modest circumstances, yet all I had to do was look around me to see what love and care and patience had been put into these places where they lived. Yet I think they sensed, all of them, that something had started which would never stop if they retreated. Mingled with all the other horror of the evening before was a stink of burning flesh, a smell of gas chambers and abattoirs, a memory of horror thrust aside, another world not ours. Small memories intruded. There had been in the ACA galleries in New York City some months before, an exhibition of undistinguished, greenish cakes of soap. They happened to have been made in Germany of human fat and ashes, otherwise they were soap. The pervadingly normal was off balance. The newspapers would write considered editorials warning that such excesses as those at Peekskill, while commendable in purpose and understandable in the light of communist actions, etcetera and ad nauseum, were nevertheless not the “American way” to handle such matters, better left to J. Edgar Hoover and Company; but not sufficiently would such editorials erase. It is hard to convince decent and good and moral people that they are indecent and bad and immoral; the world of normalcy and reason was wobbling off balance, ready to tip. But when you are underneath you have to be