Arlinda left Toxey, Alabama, in 1963. That was 63 years ago. But here I am, a White Gen-X immigrant, cold-messaging people in Choctaw County, asking them to remember what it was like when a Black girl grew up there during the Civil Rights movement

What Sixty Years Takes

Over six decades, things have changed in ways both obvious and insidious. The general store closed and was bulldozed. Without the physical reminders, memory evaporates like morning dew.

Was the general store on this side of the street or that one? One block up from the textile factory or down?

I wanted those details. The texture of the place. But as I started making social media post requests, I realized I was chasing the wrong thing.

What I Was Really After

The geography matters less than the atmosphere. I needed to understand how the tension of the Civil Rights era settled over this small town.

Toxey had a population that barely cracked 250 people in 1950, losing about 100 people over that decade. Everyone knew everyone, which meant everyone knew their place. What did it feel like to be a Black child in a town that small when the news was filled with Freedom Riders and church bombings? When Birmingham was exploding just 150 miles northeast, how did that reverberate through a place where you could not walk to the store without passing houses of people who might have attended a Klan meeting the week before?

These were not questions I could answer from census data or historical archives.

What the Landscape Remembers

I asked about the places Arlinda had mentioned. The church where her family worshiped had been demolished. The road to her house was still red dirt that turned to mud when it rained. No streetlamps. The school was eking out a meager existence for young students.

The violence was quieter in small towns. More intimate. When everyone knows your name, the threats do not need to be shouted.

What I Am Left With

I wanted street names and building locations. I got something more valuable and more disturbing: the emotional geography of a place where terrorism was so normalized it was invisible to the people enacting it.

Arlinda left Toxey in 1963, the same year Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi, the same year four Black girls were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. She was eleven years old.

Chatting with her former neighbors, I began to understand what that burden felt like. The hyper-vigilance she must have mustered to navigate daily life. The calculated risk of every interaction with White authority. The knowledge that one’s humanity was always up for debate, always conditional, always revocable.

The Work of Reconstruction

I did not create a perfect map of 1950’s Toxey. But I have something better: I have people who remember the fear and the resistance. They are the ones who recall the particular texture of Jim Crow.

By adding their perceptions to Arlinda’s childhood, I can therefore describe the psychological terrain. The invisible borders she had to navigate, the daily indignities that barely registered as noteworthy because they were so constant.