All posts by Chuck Fager

Sample A Quaker Mystery: “Murder Among Friends”

Valley State College is just north of Winchester, about half a mile west of Interstate 81. The campus is compact and cozy, with nondescript red brick buildings ranged around a lush green oval lined with tall old oaks and maples.

“Welcome All‑Friends Conference,” read the hand‑painted sign at the north entrance, with a black arrow pointing toward Mott Hall for Registration.

“It was started by Quakers from Opequon Creek Meeting, in 1867,” I was telling Eddie as we turned in. “To train young women who were going South to teach former slaves. Lots of them went. After Reconstruction the meeting turned it into a normal school, for schoolteachers. It closed in the Depression, then the state picked it up.”

I pointed across the oval, toward a tree‑covered rise. “The Meetinghouse is over there, behind the trees. It goes back to before the American Revolution. Here’s Mott Hall.”

“That’s Lucretia Mott, I hope?” Eddie asked.

“Yep. This may be one of the few public buildings in the valley not named after a treasonous defender of chattel slavery or a segregationist governor. Not that I’m prejudiced about the Old Dominion. I’ll open the trunk.”

With the obligatory nametags soon pinned on our shirts, we were quickly assigned to a room on the dormitory’s third floor, and lugged our bags up the stairs.

From the doorway the room looked like an optical illusion, with two of everything: desks, beds, dressers and closets, arranged in sequence and exactly opposite each other.

I dropped my suitcase, flopped down on one of the beds and scanned the conference schedule, printed on a pink sheet in small type, while Eddie unpacked his bag. “There’s a steering committee meeting going on now, in the auditorium,” I noted. “I should get down to it, since I’m technically a member. You could come, too; it’s an open session. Hey, what’s that?”

I had glanced up and seen Eddie pulling out what looked like a sawed‑off baseball bat from his bag. He grinned and tossed it at me.

“It’s an authentic family heirloom and homophobia deflector,” he said. “Got it at a yard sale outside Pittsburgh, cost me a buck. Look on the other side.”

A Quaker Christmas Story: Candles In The Window

Christmas Eve, so called by the world’s people, was always a frantically busy time at the Woodhouse bakery. While the Woodhouse family, being Quakers, did not observe Christmas as a special day, almost all their customers did. That meant orders for dozens more pies than usual, plus hundreds of tarts and ginger cakes, and scores of extra loaves of their rich, thick bread.
So all the week before, the whole Woodhouse family were in the shop almost round the clock, mixing dough, sprinkling sugar and cinnamon, spooning out the cherry preserves, and tending the fire under the big brick ovens.
Abram did all of this, and more: he was often sent out with a basket full of pies or tarts for delivery to the better customers: beef and mincemeat pies to old Tilbury at the Golden Lion Pub beyond the square; or down the cobbles of South Street, through the narrow passage of the Ginnett and past the sturdy old Meetinghouse, with scones for the Blackburns and buns for the widow Kilburn. Sometimes he crossed the river Ribble to Giggleswick, where the vicar doted on Mother’s ginger cakes.
This evening he had been sent to the pub, where Tilbury wanted three more pies for his last round of customers, and it was from there that he had turned to climb the hill Castleberg.
Abram wouldn’t have thought of climbing Castleberg, especially in the cold, except for the candles–two in a window in every house and shop.
“What are they for, this time?” he had asked Father that morning.
“It’s a double illumination,” Father said, “for victories past and victories prayed for. George Cockburn’s troops burning Washington, DC is the victory past, and Wellington beating Napoleon before the end of 1815 is what they’re praying for.”
“That’s a fine thing to pray for, in what’s supposed to be a Christian country” his grandmother had snorted. Laying down her rolling pin, Gran had wiped sweat from her brow. “All it means is more dead soldiers, penniless widows and hungry orphans, from Paris to New York. Love thine enemies, indeed. A terrible, sinful waste.”
She sighed and picked up her rolling pin. With swift, expert strokes she flattened a thick lump of dough into delicate pie crusts. . . .

My Quaker 50th Anniversary (Already?)

This month, December 2015, marks the 50th anniversary of my coming among Friends. And much of that whole ongoing adventure can, for this purpose, be boiled down to four things:

A knock on the door;
Getting “The Letter”;
Riding the bus; and
Getting on with it.

The knock on my door came (as best I can recall) in early December, 1965, on Lapsley Street in Selma, Alabama.
Alabama in general, and Selma in particular, were extremely unlikely places for this to happen, among the least likely in the U.S. But it did, reflecting the recurrent tendency for Quakers to turn up where they are least expected.
My wife Tish, answered the knock, and then recoiled in fright. A young white woman stood there — and looked as scared as Tish did.
We were living in the black part of Selma, had been working with Dr. King’s staff in the voting rights movement for almost a year. There had been some violence, plus ominous, heavy-breathing phone calls to the house, that sort of thing. So we were cautious.
But as soon as the young woman spoke, her accent showed she was not a local, and Tish relaxed. In fact, she was a student with a group from a new Quaker educational experiment, Friends World Institute (later College).

At the school they studied problems (like racism) rather than conventional courses; and did this with a lot of “study travel,” trekking off in VW Microbuses to places far away from the school’s initial base on Long Island, New York. Places like Selma, where Dr. King’s office staff sent them out to canvass in black neighborhoods to find people of color who still needed to register. Which brought her to our door.

Survival & Revival: The Day The Smiles Are Well-Earned

This commemoration, while very personal, was not only about closure in Christine’s life. The fact that many women unknown to Christine or any of us showed up to join in as part of their own survival and revival, and underlining the fact of domestic violence as an ongoing issue in U.S. military culture.
And the 2007 event was not the end. Many more awful cases of domestic violence surfaced at and around Fort Bragg in my remaining years there (til November 2012). And the members of the Fayetteville NOW chapter, who had worked on this issue for man-years, and were powerfully moved by Christine’s witness, decided to make an annual event of laying a wreath at Beryl; Mitchell’s grave. They settled on early December, on or close to the day she was murdered.

And so they have. Each year since, in rain, in sleet, or cloudy and chill wind, they have gathered, sometimes few, sometimes more, and laid a wreath and taken both comfort and strength from this quiet ritual.