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| James Dean |
They were closing the James Dean Gallery in March 2006 when Joyce and I drove over to see it in Gas City, Indiana, about 270 miles west of our home in Hudson, Ohio.
James Dean. What on earth caused this memory?
I don’t know. But a few days ago I woke up, and there he was, occupying my head. Dean died—a horrible car crash—on September 30, 1955. He was only twenty-four years old—but already a celebrity. He had appeared in East of Eden in 1955, a film based on the John Steinbeck novel. And two other films were “in the can”: Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956).
He was the embodiment of the teenage heartthrob. I’d never seen any of his films when we moved to Hiram, Ohio, in August 1956 (I was not quite 12). But I already knew how many felt about him. One of the girls who lived across the street from us in Hiram had a kind of memorial to Dean in her room (photos, etc.). She seemed still in mourning.
Anyway, thinking about Dean, I remembered the closed-museum visit in 2006. Joyce and I were not there because of Dean, however. We had driven over there because I was preparing to review a book for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and I wanted to visit the site where the subject of the book had happened.
Marion, Indiana (about six and a half miles north of Gas Town), is where, on August 7, 1930, thousands gathered to lynch two young black men—and from that lynching emerged one of the most infamous photographs in American history.
The book—Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America, by Cynthia Carr—appeared in late March 2006 (my review ran on March 26). It’s a powerful and wrenching book—not just because of the disgusting events but because the author of the book had recognized in the photograph her own grandfather.
The two young men (a third escaped) had been arrested for harassing a white couple on a lovers’ lane. An angry mob stormed the jail and dragged them across the street to the courthouse lawn and lynched them.
Before I finished the review, I wanted to see this place.
As I indicated, it’s an easy drive over there. We spent a couple of days in the area, but we found no public evidence that the event had ever happened. We went to the courthouse, the old jail, the historical museum. If there was any sort of marker, we missed it.
Even the tree is gone.
Of course, I could not help but think about the racial divide that still exists more than ninety years later. We still have unthinkable hatreds in this country—hatreds that have existed my entire life——and long before—hatreds that show no real signs of significant softening.
I see no simple solutions. And I’m just hoping that our grandsons’ generation will be able to make the sort of human progress that the issue demands. My generation has clearly failed.
The political-racial situation right now is not sanguine. In fact, it remains sanguinary.
**
James Dean’s fame was evanescent. Eventually the pictures came down from teenagers’ bedroom walls. The films no longer appeared on television. Soon, many did not even recognize his name.
A moving truck was outside the James Dean Gallery the day we were there. No other vehicles were in the lot. The J was missing from the gallery sign.
One of the movers told us they were taking the stuff to a museum in Indianapolis.
**
The final line in my review of the book: “Carr’s great accomplishment in her courageous, compelling work of reporting and reflection is to show with absolute clarity that bloody trees stood in more than one place in this country. They stood, and they dripped, in our own back yards” (H4).
And, of course, they still do.
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