This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [37]
“Commies,” the more conservative locals muttered about the Nearings. “Pinko lefties.”
“Choose your enemies carefully,” Scott liked to say, “for you will become more like them than anyone else.”
We now know it was President Truman who set in motion the National Security Agency, or NSA, to keep tabs on citizens in ways very similar to what we deemed the Soviet Union’s evil KGB. One of the jobs of the NSA was to systematically intercept and monitor the phone, mail, and telegram communications of millions of regular Americans. During the 1970s, these efforts were focused on citizens identified as “unreliable,” such as civil rights leaders, antiwar protesters, teachers, and union leaders, as well as some politicians and church officials. It would later be acknowledged in the 1975 Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee investigations that the Nearings and many of their friends were on this short list of “unreliable” citizens. Scott believed this was because anyone who championed human rights in favor of the free acquisition of wealth was a threat to capitalism—and hence the government—which he saw as banking in the back pocket of big business.
“When we left the city, we sought to provide, by example, an alternative,” Scott said. In his view, this disengagement was also threatening to the government because people living outside of society could no longer be controlled. Dot Crockett, it seemed, was a means of keeping tabs.
Trips to the post office were darkened by a childhood intuition that Dot Crockett might cook me for dinner. The post office was located in an annex attached to an old mustard yellow farmhouse on the main road in the quiet hamlet of Harborside. We’d enter a small room with dusty wooden floors, a wall of individual brass-plated PO boxes, and a teller’s window that dominated the back wall, with a ledge that was just a little too high, so Mama had to reach up in order to hand through the outgoing packages. The imposing figure of Dot Crockett blocked the light of the window, her cropped hair musty and uncombed, her equally dark eyes rimmed by glasses. If she spoke to Mama at all, it was to criticize something about the mail, or the way in which it was packaged, in a voice leathery and raspy from smoking.
“This package’s not taped right, you’ll have to redo it.”
“Only books can go book class.”
“Wrong zip code.”
One time the postmistress actually slammed the window shut when she saw Mama coming with a larger than usual stack of packages.
“Some people are easily threatened,” Papa said, when Mama told him about the incident. “Work as well as you can and be kind,” he added, quoting Scott’s favorite saying.
There was one small store on Cape Rosier, Perry’s Store, located in a white New Englander on the road near the turn to Dog Island. Perry had a gas pump out front, and a selection of packaged and marked-up processed foods lined the dusty shelves of the dim interior. We usually drove the half hour to Blue Hill, or forty-five minutes to Ellsworth, where we could find a wider range of products for less, but every so often Papa stopped at Perry’s Store in a pinch to pick up batteries or buy gas.
“A-yuh,” Perry responded to Papa’s hello.
Most of the locals on Cape Rosier had lived in the area for generations. The previous generation might have survived without electricity and flushing toilets, but this one had fought (and paid money) to get electrical and phone wires brought to their remote roads. Why in the hell someone would want to live without these luxuries now was beyond them.
“Queer folk,