Common Ground (19 page)

In 1854, Charles’s second son, Hiram, struck off for Boston, where he found a job clerking in a clothing store. At his Salem Street boardinghouse he encountered another clothing clerk, named Myron Wilmot. One can imagine their conversation at the boarding table—their complaints about tyrannical bosses, their boasts about the kind of store they themselves would run. In 1856, they got their chance. Myron had raised some money and invited Hiram to come in with him—on one condition. The 1850s were an era of massive Irish emigration to Boston, the passenger lists filled with McNultys, McBrides, and McLaughlins, and Myron feared that his new partner would be mistaken for Irish. So he prevailed on him to spell his name in the Scottish manner. When the new enterprise opened that autumn at 332 Hanover Street, the sign above the door read “Wilmot and Makechnie, Gents’ Furnishings.” The stratagem didn’t work—after three years the store declared bankruptcy—but the change of name stuck. Henceforth, every member of the family who found his way to Boston adopted the Scottish spelling.

In 1871, another brother arrived. George Makechnie took a salesman’s position at Chipman Brothers, a well-known clothing store, but, like his brother before him, George dreamed of his own business. In 1883, he and Frank Ames launched Ames & Makechnie, Men’s Furnishing Goods. This too was short-lived. By 1886, George was back as a salesman for Chipman Brothers, where he remained for a decade.

Soon after reaching Boston, George had married Sarah Ann Cram, the straitlaced descendant of a Revolutionary War officer. Settling in suburban Everett, they became stalwarts of the Baptist Church and the Republican Party while they raised three sons and two daughters. The oldest son, Charles, was a tennis star at Everett High, but intellectually undisciplined and apparently without ambition. He served for a time in Everett’s Fire Department and managed the Standish Shoe Co. in downtown Boston. By then, his father was a
salesman at a nearby clothing store, and twice a month father and son lunched at the communal tables of the Durgin Park Diningrooms, exchanging gossip of the trade over the clatter from greengroceries and meat stalls.

But all was not well between father and son. Charles had married a lively young woman named Mabel Downing, with whom he formed a dancing club for married couples. By secular standards it was innocent enough, but to devout Baptists like George and Sarah Makechnie it was outright blasphemy. Moreover, neither Charles nor his wife was a regular churchgoer. As the years went by, the older Makechnies grew increasingly concerned at their son’s “immoral” behavior.

In January 1907, the young couple produced their only child, whom they named George, perhaps as a peace offering to his grandfather. That September, Charles Makechnie contracted typhoid fever, which the doctors blamed on “contaminated oysters.” Six days later, at age thirty-one, he died. His parents put their own construction on his final hours. Shortly before his death, Charles had gazed up at a vaguely religious painting and muttered something unintelligible. Convinced that his mumbling constituted an act of contrition, George and Sarah proclaimed that their son had made his peace with God.

Unable to accept her in-laws’ piety, Mabel became increasingly estranged from orthodox Christianity, eventually joining Charles Taze Russell’s International Bible Students’ Association. Russell had broken with his Presbyterian-Congregationalist faith to preach a millennialistic Christianity which eventually evolved into Jehovah’s Witnesses. If the elder Makechnies had condemned their son’s casual disregard for Christian dogma, they were horrified by Mabel’s overt break. Soon young George Makechnie found himself a pawn in the spiritual tug-of-war between his mother and his grandparents. The elder Makechnies insisted that he attend the First Baptist Church, where he shifted uneasily through apocalyptic sermons. Meanwhile Mabel took him along to the Bible study association, where he wondered at the renegade faith of these fervent malcontents. Before long, his curiosity focused on the Irish and Italian Catholics then moving by the thousands into Everett’s working-class neighborhoods. Ignoring his grandparents’ admonitions, he sneaked into Mass at Immaculate Conception, where he was strangely stirred by the solemn Latin cadences.

Mabel Makechnie never remarried; somehow she supported herself and her son by stitching tennis balls and taking in lodgers. When George entered Boston University, he worked his way through as a custodian in a private mausoleum. After taking a master’s degree in education, he served successively as assistant to the dean, registrar, and professor at the School of Education, ultimately becoming dean of the university’s Sargent College of Allied Health Professions. Along the way, he married one of his students, Anne Schonland, a descendant of William Prescott, the colonial commander at Bunker Hill. In 1952, they moved to an eighteenth-century clapboard house a musket shot from the Lexington Battle Green, with their three children: Norman, Arthur, and Joan.

Although George Makechnie had long since left the Baptist Church, spiritual questions remained central to his life. In Lexington, he gravitated to the Hancock Congregational Church overlooking the Battle Green, but even that flexible doctrine seemed only a marginal improvement on Baptist dogma. When the black minister, Howard Thurman, became dean of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel in 1953, George went to hear his colleague preach.

Almost from the beginning, he was intrigued by Thurman, who that very year had been named by
Life
magazine as one of America’s twelve greatest preachers. His homilies were unlike anything George had heard before, utter departures from the rigid screeds of his youth. Thurman preached what he called “the love ethic,” a mystic vision of an intimate relationship with God. His faith transcended all boundaries, it was “neither male nor female, Black nor White, Protestant nor Catholic.” Soon George Makechnie resolved to attend Marsh Chapel and gradually his family followed suit. After the Sunday service, blacks and whites mingled informally at a coffee hour, where George and Howard Thurman—already professional colleagues—discovered that they were kindred spirits. The two couples began exchanging visits. Finding that each had been married the same day—June 12—they held an annual anniversary dinner. Before long, their families developed a profound rapport.

Thurman rarely preached on racial issues or urged his congregation to overt action. His lesson was more oblique—the unity of all mankind, indeed of the entire natural world. But those who listened closely detected a fierce commitment to equality.

George Makechnie was a willing listener. Just as he had broken with his Baptist heritage, so he had cut the moorings to his grandparents’ hide-bound Republicanism. To him, the Makechnies’ revolutionary heritage implied a commitment to New Deal-Fair Deal liberalism and racial equality. In 1945, when he became dean of Sargent College, he had quietly passed the word that Negro students would no longer live in the Cambridge ghetto, but would share college dormitories with whites. Southern alumnae and conservative faculty raised the roof, but the dean held firm.

George’s second son, Arthur, felt the heavy weight of the past on his shoulders. Growing up a ten-minute walk from Lexington’s Battle Green, Arthur had been steeped in his community’s sacrifice for freedom. In 1965, seeking a subject for his master’s thesis in history at the University of Wisconsin, he was browsing through Vernon Parrington’s
Main Currents in American Thought
when he was struck by Parrington’s description of Theodore Parker, the abolitionist minister from Lexington. Arthur knew that Parker was the grandson of the very Captain John Parker who had commanded the minutemen on the Battle Green. But not until that fall did he realize how Parker’s abolitionist fervor grew from his sense of being rooted in Lexington’s revolutionary tradition: “When a small boy my mother lifted me up, one Sunday, and held me while I read the first monumental lines I ever saw:
SACRED TO LIBERTY AND THE RIGHTS OF MANKIND
. Gentlemen, the Spirit of Liberty, the Love of Justice, was early fanned into flame in my boyish heart. That monument covers
the bones of my own kinfolk; it was their blood which reddened the long green grass at Lexington. It is my own name which stands chiseled on that stone; the tall Captain who marshaled his fellow farmers and mechanics into stern array was my father’s father.”

Arthur had found his subject. All through the late sixties—through the agony of Newark and Detroit, the Kerner Report, and Martin Luther King’s assassination—Arthur Makechnie labored on “The Anti-Slavery Viewpoint of Theodore Parker.”

Not only was New England the wellspring of the Puritan “instinct for democracy,” the birthing ground of the American Revolution, it was also for Parker the home of the “free idea.” Parker regarded the Revolution as “a continuing undertaking, a New England crusade to implant the spirit of liberty throughout the continent.” But the “free idea” wasn’t merely an American doctrine; it was part of what Parker called “the higher law,” rooted in the medieval notion of “natural law.” When a man-made law like the Fugitive Slave Act came into conflict with “the higher law,” Parker had no doubt what the moral man must do. “You cannot trust a people who will keep the law because it is law,” he wrote, “nor need we distrust a people that will only keep a law when it is just.”

Arthur’s thesis breathed a sympathy for Parker’s stands on human rights, though it frankly confronted his prejudices, notably his contempt for the Irish immigrant. Parker recommended that the Irish newcomers be quarantined for thirty-one years: “Certainly it would take all this time to clean a paddy on the outside…. To clean him inwardly would be like picking all the sands of the Sahara.” Nor did Arthur disguise the central contradiction in Parker’s world view: his zeal for the black man’s abstract rights, his intense distaste for the Negro as a particular person. Despite these glaring paradoxes, or perhaps because of them, the abolitionists intrigued Arthur. When the time came for him to select a Ph.D. topic, he focused on yet another of them—Gerrit Smith, the wealthy New York farmer who helped arm John Brown for his raid on Harper’s Ferry.

Surprisingly, for a man so obsessed, Arthur took no part in the civil rights movement of the sixties, attending to his studies while other Northern whites went South to participate in Freedom Rides and sit-ins. But he came to admire the demonstrators’ courage, for Arthur had a tenacious will and a fierce determination on matters of principle.

This caused him great pain after his marriage to Heather Kellenbeck, a member of the Mormon Church, which at that time did not permit Negroes to enter the priesthood or participate in the sacraments. Nevertheless, so deeply did Arthur believe in the unity of the family that he determined to become a Mormon. In August 1971, he was baptized and for nearly three years he remained in the Church, even holding a series of minor offices. But he couldn’t live with himself, particularly when he remembered that the abolitionists had called for people to “come out” of proslavery churches. In the summer of 1973, Arthur became so preoccupied with the matter that he couldn’t study or
sleep. Finally, that autumn, he told the bishop that he no longer considered himself a Mormon.

Few of the Makechnies could match Arthur’s commitment. Through her high school years, his younger sister Joan was absorbed by cheerleading, glee club, field hockey, and student council. Even the Makechnies’ switch from the suburban tranquility of Hancock Congregational to the more urgent ministry of Marsh Chapel didn’t stir her to action. To Joan, Howard Thurman was “Uncle Howard,” more a spiritual mentor and revered family friend than a prophet of social justice. But she wasn’t immune to the mythology of her famous village. In school she studied the battles of Concord and Lexington in excruciating detail. Her parents took her to the Buckman Tavern, where the minutemen had convened; to the Battle Green, and the “rude bridge.” Very early on she was conscious of being “special,” of being rooted in this terribly important place, this spot where it all began.

Each April 19, Lexington commemorated “the shot heard round the world” with a day of solemn festivities. Every year since she was nine Joan had participated in those Patriots Day ceremonies, rededicating herself to the “self-evident truths” for which men had shed blood in that place. In the dim moments before dawn, the old town bell would sound the alarm. Soon church bells joined the clangor. But Joan had been up for hours, washing her hair, pulling on her Girl Scout uniform, then running to join her troop at the Monroe School. Promptly at 7:00 a.m., the Sunrise Parade stepped off along Massachusetts Avenue, led by the “Spirit of ’76”—a hardware store clerk and an eighth-grader rapping on drums, an insurance man piping a wooden flute. Behind them came row upon row of Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Brownies marching to the beat of high school bands.

Later in the morning, the modern company of Lexington minutemen massed before the statue of John Parker, dressed in leather jerkin and breeches, grasping his old musket and gazing sternly down the road toward Boston. At 1:00 p.m., two horsemen clattered up that road, impersonating Paul Revere and William Dawes, the colonists who had carried word of the British attack. Another horseman, playing Dr. Samuel Prescott, galloped off to Concord. Joan Makechnie liked that moment best of all, for her parents had told her she was related to Prescott—as well as to William Prescott, the colonial commander at Bunker Hill.

By then the town was filled with spectators, come to watch the afternoon parade with its military outfits from nearby bases, its “minutemen” in breeches and tricorns who streamed in from Acton, Chelmsford, and Tewksbury. Later that afternoon, as orators thundered from the bandstand, volunteers handed out souvenir “birth certificates.” Joan invariably filled in her name so it read: “This is to certify that a certificate of birth was recorded for all Americans in the name of Liberty and Justice for all at the Birthplace of American Liberty, Lexington, Mass., on the 19th of April 1775. I, Joan Makechnie, American, do reaffirm my faith in the glorious tradition born that day.”