Where History Lingers: Reading and Seeing Rocky Mount Anew

On my I-phone camera I keep trying to take the perfect photo of this iconic view that I have grown to love. When we first arrived here I found myself thinking, where am I, and what in THE hell am I doing here? Though living in Nashville, Rocky Mount became my north star that I oriented myself around. Time went by and sitting at The Smokehouse one late afternoon, after being away, I heard someone say, “Welcome home, Stepheny.” It was dear Mae Parker. I thought about what she said and reckoned that maybe she was right; maybe I was finally at home. Nonetheless, when writing the blog I refrain from saying our Main Street knowing that the essence of this place belongs to those born and raised here. I can’t drive along a street and tell you who lived in each house or about the changes that have occurred that as a kid I experienced while riding my bike here and there. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate and extoll what I have come to find in living here now.

I find myself expanding what knowledge I’ve acquired about Main Street and surrounding areas by using my imagination and ‘seeing’ the ghosts of the past drifting along around me. My reading life is often the backdrop for these blog posts and how I try to frame for you what I see sitting on my Main Street bench.

At the moment, Harold Evans, a former editor of the Sunday Times and The Times of London, and a former president of Random House colored what I was thinking when I tried this latest photo above. I’m reading for a second time My Paper Chase – True Stories of Vanished Times. There is no better read or fascinating social history of what true journalism is about. “Evans recounts the wild and wonderful tale of his newspapering and publishing odyssey, which would take him from Manchester to London and finally to America.”

I think we can safely agree that Rocky Mount, NC is representative of ‘small town America.’ In the photo above, the beautiful architecture, the ghost sign still readable on the side of the building, our American flag waving, Harold Evans words came to me while I gazed up once again at this view.

“But in 1956, Smalltown USA was epitomized for me by Paris, Illinois, a township of thirteen thousand people with fifteen churches of fifteen different denominations, all the races thoroughly integrated as Americans. They lived in white clapboard houses overhung with maple and elm trees and fronted by unfenced lawns and pole-perched mailboxes…devoutness, simplicity, patience, deep independence of thought, and neighborliness.“

As grown up as life has become—with its complications, pressures, I’m concerned about the gradual fading of American values—I insist that beneath our trees, with a porch swing gently swaying in the breeze, or the soft blue glow of the TV from the room beyond the window, the good people of Rocky Mount still belong in Harold Evans’ reflections on America. We must ensure this remains true.