Racism in Pennsylvania, Part 2

KB: A friend of mine is working for the Obama campaign and she’s got some horror stories of racism in central Pennsylvania. I’m not from Pennsylvania, so I really didn’t have any idea about things like that.

LW: You know, Ed Rendell a few weeks ago created a little stir with his whole thing that Pennsylvania wasn’t ready to vote for a black or to a lesser degree, for a woman. He was really pilloried for that because of this whole I think pseudo-civility in terms of race. The reality is that outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania might as well be Mississippi or Alabama.

I travel around Pennsylvania a lot, and I get to places that most people in Pennsylvania don’t even know exist. Little mountain towns. I’ve got a buddy, one of my oldest friends in life, when I go up to visit him, we go hunting—well, I go on an armed hike, because I’m not shooting anything but I have a gun, but he’s a hunter.  And we’re in these little bars, these little backwoods places that you don’t even see on a map, and I can tell you that what your friend is seeing, it’s not unusual, it’s not isolated.

I mean, listen, me and this guy, his name is Arthur. For one period we went hunting every year for twelve straight years.  The twelfth year we got lost, dead flat lost. We’d walked over a three mile range, didn’t know where we were, it was getting cold, it was getting dark, and we were fearful that we had really messed up and we were going to end up getting hurt, or dead that night.

We’re sitting there on this little track, it’s not a road but it’s kind of like a road. And we’re like, damn, man, this is f****d up. We don’t have any more food, we don’t have any more water. Nothing else to drink, not even liquor—that was part of the problem of why we were lost in the first place.

And it came to an issue of what is going to be left in the forest because we don’t have enough energy to carry everything out. And the guns had to come out. We got down to saying all right, the ammunition that we’re carrying, we’re going to have to leave it, because we had these big deer rifles and this big heavy ammunition that goes with them. The bottom line is this, that for twelve years, both of us had been carrying 40 rounds of extra ammunition in case we ran into some racists out in the woods and had to get into a shootout.

We have been in the woods and we have had people walk past us and chamber their weapons as they walk past us. So what do we do, we slide the safeties off of our rifles and kind of get down behind rocks. It’s just crazy.

People who live in Philadelphia don’t have any sensibility of that because there are people in Philadelphia who are born, live and die in the community that they were born in. People from Germantown couldn’t tell you where Belle Vista is in South Philly, and people from downtown couldn’t tell you where Chestnut Hill is, much less get there.

When I came to Philly in 1970, when I started reporting--I spent 20-something years as a street reporter in Philadelphia--I was amazed at the insularity of the city. People don’t move around. But then, too, having the good fortune of getting on the other side of City Line Avenue and having grown up in Pittsburgh and having traveled back and forth across the place, having been to places like Forest County and Erie and down to Green County in southwestern Pennsylvania, and Honesdale and Sullivan County.

I’m traveling with State Representative Dwight Evans, in the ‘80s he’s running for Lieutenant Governor, so my assignment was to follow him around eastern Pennsylvania, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, as he campaigned and do a story on it.

So we’re up in the Lehigh Gorge, ended up in this place outside of Honesdale, I think it was called Happy Hollow or something, a rest home. We go in and the old folks are sitting there, and one of the old people in the place was black. So Evans is going around shaking everybody’s hand, and one of them says, “You know, it’s incredible, I’ve never seen a real one in my life!”

Evans is black! So everyone kind of froze, so Evans just caught the ball and said, “Oh, you mean a real politician?” and the guy’s like “Yeah, yeah, that’s what I meant.”

Everyone knew what he meant, though. But that would be something you’d expect to hear in the Deep South, but it was right here in Pennsylvania, saying it with a straight face. And I can appreciate the guy, I’m sure he wasn’t out burning crosses or anything like that, it’s just the way people think. Amazing.

KB: In the South, though, they see black people. They have to deal with them. I suppose in places like that they really haven’t seen many.

LW: Or they have, but it’s just this mentality. Blacks and issues of race are perceived a certain way. There’s blacks all over the place, and now there’s Hispanics all over the place in Pennsylvania.

A couple of years ago, I had a student in my class and she did her final project on a mountain biking trip that she and her friends took at a state forest about 30 miles east of Penn State’s main campus. She said they were riding down in this place and they came upon this place called N**** Hollow Trail. And she said “Well, Professor Washington, it just scared me to death, I didn’t know what was going on.”

I said, “Hold on, what did it say?”

N**** Hollow Trail. And I said I’ve got to go see this. So who did I call but my best friend Arthur. I called him for two reasons. He had a four-wheel-drive truck, right, and I figured we’d have to drive deep into the forest, and he had a permit to carry a gun, because I figured we might have to do some gun business.

Because I thought, you know, it had something to do with the Klan, or lynchings, or some crazy stuff like that, and he’s an African-American studies professor so he thought it had something to do with the Underground Railroad. We were both wrong.

What happened was there was a black guy who lived on this mountain. And in the latter part of the nineteenth century, what was happening in Pennsylvania was that there was a lot of logging, and the logging industry was to get wood to shore up the coal mines, because coal was the big industry in Pennsylvania.

Many of the state forests we now have were privately owned places where they took all of the treets off the mountains and there was a serious erosion problem, so the state came in, purchased the land and started growing trees on it and made the state forests.

So this N*** Hollow Trail was named after a guy who lived on this mountain, and he owned mules, so when they cut the trees down, he and his mules were the only ones who could get the trees off the mountain. So he and his mules would drag them down to the train tracks, and the train would carry them off to the sawmill on the other side of the mountain.

And this guy was just called the N****. They didn’t know what his name was or anything.

So we go up there and I’m expecting to see Klan and Arthur’s expecting to see the Underground Railroad. As luck would have it, we ran into a park ranger who knew the whole story. He told us the whole background of it, he was an amateur historian and he told us where to find the foundation of the guy’s original house.

We hiked in there in the middle of the wintertime. We didn’t find the house because there was a lot of snow on the ground, but we did get down there and saw N**** Hollow Trail, of course we could only find it on the maps because the trail heads, there wasn’t one that said N***** Hollow Trail, but on the map it said N**** Hollow Trail.

I wrote a piece about it in the Philadelphia Weekly, and I ended the piece saying that I hope they don’t change the name of N***** Hollow Trail because that’s part of the history. Don’t turn it into something like African-American Memorial Forest Highway.

Arthur and I go back up about three years later, in springtime, because we really want to find the foundation of the house, we want to find out more information, really find out who this guy is, get a name for him.

We went back to the same park facility, the guy wasn’t there, he’s retired, and we’re talking to this lady.  Arthur says “We’re trying to find,” and we don’t want to say n***** because we’re the only two n*****s around, but he says, “We’re trying to find N***** Hollow Trail.”

And she’s like, “Oh, we don’t use that kind of language here!”

And I say, “Well, yes you do, here it is on the map.”

She says “Oh, that’s not what is on our map!”

And the state had changed the map, and the new name is Negro Hollow Trail.

So I said, “No, here’s the map,” and she said, “No, we changed it two or three years ago.”

So I get the new map, still kept the old map, and we get to talking to this woman. And here I get into this whole long story just to tell you about the attitudes of people. This woman said, “You know, my husband’s relatives, they’re from Florida and they just came here and stayed with us, and I really didn’t like them because they kept using that word. N-word this and N-word that. And it just really made me feel bad.”

And we’re like, ”Yeah, I can understand that,” letting her talk.

And she says, “You know, I just couldn’t understand why they were just using that word when the people they were talking about didn’t really do anything to them. Now if they had done something to them, then I could understand them using that word.”

Now wait a minute, if the word is wrong to use, then whether someone does something to you or not, it’s wrong to use. But in her mind if these N’s had done something other than just being N’s, then it would be alright to call them N’s. 

But that kind of psychological schizophrenia, it exists. And people who would do those sorts of things, some of them are clearly doing it for a malicious reason, but other people who see it and say nothing, it’s easy in their mind to see it and say, “Hey, it’s not me, I don’t have any responsibility for turning this stuff around, although I kind of sympathize with what the people are saying.”

I understand what’s happening. I’m not saying it’s right—heck no I’m not saying it’s right—but it doesn’t surprise me. And particularly in Scranton.

There’s a prison in between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre called Dallas. Dallas state prison.  And this place is so far out there, it might as well be out of a sci-fi movie, where people go to those frozen planets and they’re walking through the snow and then all of a sudden a door opens up and you go underground and you’re in this prison.

This prison is famous because there’re few escapes from this prison because any black person in that area, the likelihood is that they’re an escapee from that prison because there’s no blacks in like a 25-mile radius from that prison. So if someone runs away--unless they have a car and can get out of there quick--they’re running around the countryside, they know where they came from!

Every time I’d have to go up there and visit prisoners or something for stories I was doing, I’m like, “Please, car, don’t break down.”

Then about less than 20 miles from the prison is one of my favorite places in Pennsylvania, it’s called Ricketts Glen State Park. Down in Ricketts Glen there are 15 waterfalls on this creek, and they go from like 5 feet high to 95 feet high. It’s an incredible place. So I go up there, I haven’t been there in years but I would go, take my kids, and again when I’m going up there it’s like “Please, car, don’t break down because we will not get any help around here.”

PA is a very interesting place, starting from Old City all the way west and north.

KB: My experience in Pennsylvania was limited to Philly, and I’ve heard people say this stuff before. I grew up in Massachusetts, so I always pictured Pennsylvania as part of the north.

LW: It has that image, as being a part of the North, as not being tainted by the South, as having that Quaker tradition, being very genteel, as being founded by William Penn who left England for religious tolerance, and that’s all true but at the same time there’s this other element, this backstory, this parallel story that no one wants to talk about.

That business down there with George Washington keeping slaves, the National Park Service knew about that since the mid-70s and they tried to keep it buried.

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