What could be more sacred to an American town than a fast-food restaurant? In Paterson, New Jersey, that question got the most unlikely of answers: an ugly, gravelly, overgrown vacant lot at the corner of Bridge Street and Broadway, a mile downtown from my own childhood home.
Five years ago, when the city government was ready to sell the site to burrito merchants Taco Bell, two mighty words were reverently murmured, then shouted, by the local African-American community: "Underground Railroad".
Now, although though Paterson led the US in manufacturing locomotives (among many other things) through much of the 19th century, no one has ever made a case for sticking trains in tunnels there.
The Underground Railroad of Paterson folk memory wasn't a subway but a network, a complex and shifting series of secret routes and safe houses, that led escaping slaves en route to asylum in Canada through the "free" northern states - where, for the decade before the Civil War of 186165, they were legally subject to capture and return to their owners down south.
"Station-master"
The house that had stood on that Paterson street-corner until 1983 (when it was demolished to make way for a city car-park that was never built) was a "station" on the railroad in the 1850s. Its owner, a wealthy coffee and spice entrepreneur and abolitionist called Josiah Huntoon, was the "station-master". A free black man, William Van Rensalier, who lived with and worked for Huntoon, was the "conductor".
In 1994, however, no one in Paterson knew that precise historical detail. It was in the sole possession of Dolores Van Rensalier, a California woman. So light-skinned that she had grown up "white", Van Rensalier had, as a young adult, realised her true black identity. Her genealogical curiosity had eventually led her to visit Paterson in 1984 to find out about her great-grandfather William, a man vaguely recalled in family history as "a conductor on the railroad" - the kind with a cap and a ticket machine, though Dolores soon learned otherwise. In the ensuing 10 years she collected a treasure trove of evidence, including census material, for her ancestor's link to Huntoon and for the house's significance. Much of it, like the speculation that the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass himself had stopped there en route to Canada in 1859, required a fair amount of inference; but the sheer volume of it, joined to the oral tradition, was convincing. When the Taco Bell controversy broke, she quickly lent the weight of her research to a growing neighbourhood coalition fighting to preserve the site.
Taco Bell, with an eye to its street cred, was ready to co-operate, up to a point: the Mexican-themed restaurant would have an Underground Railroad monument, designed by local schoolchildren, as the centrepiece of its car-park. And Taco Bell would be inclined in Paterson to play down the chain's national advertising slogan: "You'd better run for the border!"
Local blacks were divided about the offer.
"Nana Flavia"
In stepped the city's historic preservation commissioner, Flavia Alaya - the woman known to my children, assonantly and accurately, as "Nana Flavia". Inclined to follow whatever emerged as the local coalition's lead on the issue, and also concerned to protect whatever basement archaeology might remain under the bulldozed earth, she soon found herself fighting a rearguard action. Local bureaucrats wanted to be able to dispose of the site freely, and a couple of old-guard local historians decided to fight tooth and nail against the incursion of amateur and oral history personified by Dolores, this black woman. They vigorously denied the authenticity of the site.
The fight was public and bitter. This, after all, is the town where in 1966 the boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter - subject of the old Bob Dylan song and the new Denzel Washington film - was framed for murder by a racist police force. Racial tensions are never far from the surface, and they erupted again in February 1995 when an unarmed black 16-year-old was shot in the back of the head by a white policeman in the course of a drug bust. The four nights Lawrence Meyers took to die were long enough for the city to be riven by riots.
On the day after Meyers died, however, the demonstration in the city consisted of scores of people joining hands to encircle that vacant lot on the corner of Bridge Street and Broadway. With Dolores among them, solidarity was affirmed, ancestors were remembered.
Recognition of the site's sanctity gained momentum. Prof Clement Price, New Jersey's leading black historian, lent his support. Taco Bell gave up and pulled out.
Unpublished memoir
With the site finally about to receive its official designation from the city, in January 1996, Dolores Van Rensalier was back from California again and back at the library, nosing through the latest folder-full of Huntoon-related material just arrived from the state historical society. There she found a little piece of unpublished memoir - an addendum to a family genealogy - set down in 1906 by Louis Huntoon, son of Josiah and himself a professor of economics at Yale: "During the War," Louis Huntoon wrote, "my father's cellars formed a link in the `Underground Railroad' for the freeing of slaves."
Dolores will be forgiven if, just that one time, she broke the library's rules about making noise.
The fight she joined and won in Paterson looks modest enough: nowadays that empty lot just has a slightly hokey municipal sign on it. But this public struggle about public history may just have contributed a little to a city's reconstruction: in 1997, with rocksolid support from the environs of Bridge Street and Broadway, Marty Barnes was elected as Paterson's first African-American mayor.