It was just a suitcase. Well-used, medium size, dun-colored, nondescript. Sitting upright on the porch, not far from the low railing, out of sight of the sidewalk.
Why was it so unnerving? And what’s it got to do with America 2025?
We’ll get to 2025 presently. First, consider the location: 1315 Lapsley Street on the corner of Academy St., in Selma Alabama. A Black middle class enclave, single family houses. Respectable, not lavish, some tall trees. Mostly quiet, not much traffic.
Marchers re-enacting in 2005 the first crossing of the Pettus Bridge 40 years earlier.
Below is a black & white news photo from late February, 1965. It turned up a few years back (hat tip to the sharp-eyed Lewis Lewis): it was taken on the steps of Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama when John Lewis (center-left, with a tie) announced the plan to march from Selma to Montgomery.
The goal of the march was winning voting rights for southern Blacks, after three generations of formal disfranchisement; but the plan was sparked by the police killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson. I’m at the far right, behind Andrew Young (who is also in a tie).
I had been in Selma since the beginning of the year, and the active phase of the campaign, as a rookie member of Dr. King’s staff. I had marched often, served some days in jail, and was learning a lot very fast.
That was then.
Forty-three years later, one sunny day in April 2018, I woke up again in Selma Alabama, once more prepared to go to jail.
In 1992, I spent much of my free time planning a murder.
I mapped it out it out to the last detail: victim, weapon, motive, opportunity, covering the tracks, the whole meticulous homicidal mess. In the end, it went almost exactly according to plan, and was a complete success.
Almost.
Fortunately for all concerned, the murder was fictional: the plot of a mystery novel, Murder Among Friends, published in 1993. It sold out two printings; that was the successful part.
But I’m remembering it now for a different reason. One of its central plot elements, indeed the underlying theme — the reason I wrote it —was not the homicide, but the context: the murder was a portent, a forerunner of a larger real-life conflict, with a grim history and an ominous future. I could feel it coming then; two decades later, long after the novel ended with this part unresolved, it has moved from fiction to perilously close to fact.
Its history was our American Civil War (the first one): my tale was set in one of its most contested killing fields, the splendid and fertile Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, near Winchester. The Valley was fought over repeatedly, and changed hands between Blue and Grey dozens of times. Today its landscape is dotted with battlefield memorials and war cemeteries.
It seemed an apt locale for early warnings of a potential repeat catastrophe. Further, the Valley had the other feature I wanted for my story: a long and turbulent, but little-known Quaker presence.
Late one spring morning in 1986, I was creeping along the edge of Ox Road, Virginia route 123, driving with one hand, and shoving mail into the boxes on posts with the other. I was a substitute rural mail carrier, working a route just south of the seemingly nonexistent town of Fairfax Station.
FairfaxStation-VA-Sign
Beyond the mailboxes, prefab McMansions were going up on every side, as fast as the builders could hammer them together.
It was the second year of Ronald Reagan’s second term, and the woods along Ox Road were swarming with smalltime winners in the stampede for the billions that the Gipper and his cronies were shoveling into a grand military buildup. The new settlers were devouring the woods along Ox Road like nuclear powered termites. Their contract profits were pouring with the concrete under the rows of McMansions, markers of their status as suburban arrivistes.
My Malibu wagon, for postal work. (I didn’t wear a tie delivering the mail.)
Reagan’s frantic rearmament was meant to drive the Evil Empire of Communist Russia into bankruptcy and oblivion trying to match it.
The bankruptcy drive was ultimately successful, but the big plan soon capsized like the Titanic after the iceberg, sunk by the unexpected vigor of the aftermath: who could have suspected that the Commies’ dark oblivion would turn out to be a den full of new monsters?
Lately it’s been hard to find yard signs for the disgraced pizza-and-pornstar NC Republican gubernatorial candidate, Lt. Governor Mark Robinson. But this one was in Burlington a few days back.
Burlington is in North Carolina’s Alamance County, once notorious as a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan back in the day, Neo-Confederates now. A 35-foot statue of a rebel soldier still guards the county courthouse, and the monument itself is surrounded by a thick wrought iron fence and plenty of Don’t-Tread-On-Me attitude.
The county voted against Obama twice by ten-point margins, and for Trump in 2016 by 14 and in 2020 by 8.
During Covid it was a locus for pandemic mask and mandate defiance. When Hispanic Democrat Ricky Hurtado managed to unseat a Republican state rep a few years back, the supermajority GOP legislature promptly re-drew the district and pushed Hurtado out in 2022.
Nevertheless, to lift our spirits on Thursday, Oct. 3, the Fair Wendy and I drove straight into Alamance and then Burlington, to a modest storefront on the edge of downtown. If too much of the county is still stuck in a revanchist fantasy past, this was an outpost of a very different Alamance future that is beginning to unfold.
Alamance County NC Democratic Party office
Yes, Alamance has Democrats. And they’re on the move. Their monthly meeting is the first Thursday, and inside, the joint was jumping.
The session was predictably focused on the last climactic weeks of the current campaign; but there were a couple of important preliminaries :
First, a discussion of relief efforts for the hurricane-devastated city of Asheville and other communities in western NC. (My contribution was some bottled water.) The County Chair, Ron Osborne (above) knows such emergency work inside and out: he specialized in it for Duke Power as an electrical engineer, managing large crews who helped get the lights back on in the wake of dozens of the worst storms and floods from Katrina to Sandy. Osborne pointed out the safest and most useful ways for those of us who managed to dodge the deluge of Helene to do our bit.
Ron Osborne holds a prized possession, a book autographed by Jimmy Carter, as he speaks of the 39th president’s achievements at turning his religious faith into continuing practice.
Then he turned to a more pleasant landmark, the 100th birthday of Jimmy Carter. The 39th president was clearly a model for Osborne: another southerner, who publicly renounced his segregationist heritage, and overcame the experience of defeat in 1980 to build a long and uniquely productive post-political career with a multitude of projects, from building houses for the poor to preventing wars and reducing the toll of guinea worm disease from multimillions annually to thirteen (yes, 13) cases in 2023.
Seneca Rogers, a school board candidate in Burlington, addresses the session.
Osborne even made a pilgrimage which I long hoped to make, to Plains, Georgia, to join in the Sunday Bible classes Carter taught for more than 40 years whenever he was in town.
Then to the main business of the meeting, which was a series of rapid-fire short speeches by candidates for local offices, county commission, and district judgeships. The multicultural character of the lineup was a standing rebuke to the dogged whiteness of the rival party (does Mark Robinson count? Thats above my paygrade . . . .)
The enthusiasm level was high, and the candidates welcomed the intensity before them in the campaign’s frenzied final month.
Jaded pundits might still be noting that the Carolina GOP has been gerrymandering and suppressing votes nonstop for fourteen years (true) and is counting on the institutional bias it has been cementing to hold back the rising insurgency growing around the corner in their Alamance stronghold (true again.)
Your faithful blogger, with the sticker he was awarded at the meeting’s conclusion, since the supply of the ”Old White Geezers for Harris-Walz” stickers was gone. They accepted my solemn affirmation that I’m an emeritus member of the youth cohort.
And to further harsh my buzz, they can carp, “So Alamance is happening; fine. But there’s 100 counties in NC, and what about the other 99??” And true, I don’t get out that much.
Finally, they’ll repeat that the polls are all tight as a tick, margin of error, yada yada. (Undeniable.) So is my optimism just whistling Dixie??
Well, I’ve resigned from the Pundit Prediction Panel, so I’ll concede the prognosticators may turn out to be right. However, I’ll recklessly stick a toe back in this muddy pool, and forecast that, at least in Alamance County, the NC Democrats in 2024 will — wait for it — Do BETTER.
Will that be enough to save us?
Check back with me in a month.
[Note: Here’s the part for Quakers: Ron Osborne is a longtime member of Spring Friends Meeting, which has been in Alamance County for more than 250 years. He’s also a Quaker history buff, like me. He’s enjoying his retirement, and I don’t think he likes political campaigning much more than hurricanes, but like saving lives devastated by the latter, helping rescue democracy by the former is a part of his low-key but diligent and distinctive Quaker witness.]
In 1992, I spent much of my free time planning a murder. 
The enthusiasm level was high, and the candidates welcomed the intensity before them in the campaign’s frenzied final month.