A Riot in Town

On the hard evidence of newspapers and their place in fiction

I have been busy traveling with my family and mostly limited to doing drawings to keep up an artistic practice. Have had little time for any real writing; am hoping that will change soon. During a brief stopover in London, spending a morning at the India Office archives, I found the above newspaper report from my hometown, Patna. I was interested in looking at railways and this was a report (from November, 1946) gleaned from small railway stations around Patna. “Giving the description first of the three Railway Station viz Simra, Poonpoon, and Taregna (formerly Masaurhi) it appears that in these 3 places and in bastees adjoining the railway line, over 600 Muslims have been killed and almost all Muslim houses have been burnt.” This newspaper report also gives details of horrible violence in the town itself. Here is a Wikipedia entry about the 1946 riots in Bihar, several months before the Partition in 1947. Just a few months ago, in January this year, I had driven past the railway station in Tarengna twice one day. What histories even small places hide! In the above report there is mention by one survivor of a panicked crowd going to the railway station in Taregna because there a rumor had been floated about a relief train. Instead of the train, a big, armed mob arrived at the station. Some of the Muslims took refuge in the station master’s room but they were shot at. The mob broke the windows of the room and then set it on fire.

In a couple of weeks or so, I’ll be leading a nonfiction writing workshop for school teachers at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. After examining various pieces of nonfiction each day, I want to turn at the very end to William Maxwell’s marvelous novella, So Long, See You Tomorrow. I have acquired from the Maxwell archives at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign the early incarnation of the novella, the drafts of the short story that Maxwell wrote with a desire to publish it in The New Yorker. What Maxwell was trying to narrate was a story of a murder that had rocked his community when he was a boy. (The story wasn’t accepted by the magazine, but years later, when he had written the novella, it was published in the magazine’s pages in two parts.) Maxwell’s early fictional attempts were drawn from memory, and the story didn’t quite work; as Maxwell narrates in the pages of So Long, See You Tomorrow, he had to write to his stepcousin in Springfield, Illinois who acquired blurry microfilm copies of the Lincoln Courier-Herald. When he read the newspaper accounts, Maxwell realized that he had misremembered what had actually happened so many years ago; crucially, he was now freed to invent what the newspaper couldn’t reeval and, in a rather postmodern gesture, he could take the reader into his confidence. “What I couldn’t find in the newspaper account or what nobody could tell me, I have permitted myself to imagine,” Maxwell explained later, “but the reader is given fair notice I am doing this.”

In an effort to be a diligent researcher of Maxwell’s artistic practice I have been reading his biography by Barbara Burkhardt. And just today I read about a riot that took place in Springfield, near Maxwell’s birthplace, during the weekend that he was born. Burkhardt writes that a white mining engineer has died of razor wounds inflicted by a black man and then, a few days before Maxwell’s birth, the young wife of a white streetcar conductor claimed that she had been dragged from her bed into her back yard and assaulted by a black man. A riot broke out. Angry mobs of whites lynched two black men, destroyed the small black business district, and burned forty homes in the a black neighborhood. The accuser, Mabel Hallam, later confessed to a special grand jury that she actually had not been attacked by a black man but had been beaten by her white lover. Which is to say, even when you are writing nonfiction, there is no escape from fiction.