I cannot recommend “The Cherry Pit” as fiction to anyone. As a critical consideration of Little Rock, however, Donald Harington’s first novel has no equal.
“Critical consideration” might be too formal a description; Harington (in the voice of his main character Cliff Stone) makes a long and fearless examination of the body and soul of this town where he came from. On foot and by car, in friendships and in trysts, he probes Little Rock’s dark places and offers up his findings in language that is often overwritten but still honest and direct.
To begin to know a place at all, to begin to consider it, you’ve got to walk it. Or at least travel it unenclosed, without a loud motor, in fresh air. When “The Cherry Pit” was published in 1965, Harington already understood that the automobile was chewing up Little Rock and spitting it out in the form of developments in the far west.
One of the most historically illuminating excursions Cliff Stone makes is by car to the neighborhoods and shopping plazas we now call Midtown. That trip can be made on foot (it takes me two and a half hours to walk from downtown to Leawood), but for now I want to trace some of the walks that Cliff Stone takes in downtown Little Rock, starting with his walk home from Union Station, down Ringo Street.
The house where Donald Harington grew up is on Cumberland, east of the supermarket on Main Street. Cliff Stone’s father’s house is on Ringo, south of the Dunbar neighborhood. An assistant curator for a Boston organization dedicated to preserving relics of the Vanished American Past (VAP), Cliff comes back to Little Rock by train in the hope that “somehow some elements of the past, les neiges d’antan, might be recaptured.” I could not be more sympathetic to his search. (Les neiges d’antan–the snows of yesteryear–comes from the 16th-century poet Francois Villon.)
I’m not quite sure about Cliff’s description of Little Rock, or at least the Little Rock he imagines himself returning to, as “thoroughly masculine, a warm river town, rough, broad-shouldered, a little wild. …”
Thoroughly masculine? Is that why people are revving engines and discharging nine-millimeter pistols in my neighborhood on Saturday nights? Are they heirs to the brawlers and knife-fighters of the 19th century? Perhaps our masculinity needs a little civilized containment.
Cliff steps off the train at Union Station before dawn, and the first thing that hits him is the smell of baking bread: Colonial, Wonder, Myer’s, Mrs. Wright’s. Standing at the train station on a sunny afternoon in October, what strikes me is the panorama.
I was in a car, traveling fast along Cantrell, when I formed early impressions of the Packet House (MacDonald-Wait-Newton House, built in 1869) and the Lincoln Avenue viaduct (opened 1928), and while I was one of the lucky kids whose parents pointed out old things, it’s hard to get a good sense of a 19th/early 20th-century landscape when you’re traveling fast in a car.
But standing above the platform at Union Station, you can see, left to right, the last promontories of the Eastern Ouachita Orogeny where we built our blind and deaf schools, our waterworks, and (for better or for worse) our streetcar suburbs. You can make out the tiled roofs of the fine houses on Lookout and the clubhouse over the golf course that Deaderick Harrell Cantrell wanted to get to in his motorcar, which is why he got together a group of investors to pave the narrow dirt road up the hill that now bears his name.
Panning right, you can see the Big Rock quarry across the Arkansas River, and some newer additions to the landscape (Dillard’s headquarters and the Episcopal Collegiate School), then the Packet House and the Lincoln Avenue Viaduct, spanning the tracks that lead to Chicago via the Baring Cross Bridge.
To get from Union Station to the north end of Ringo Street, the modern walker must be alert and tread carefully. There are places where the charitable intentions of a few people toward a few others have the entirely uncharitable effect of rendering city block upon city block disorderly if not lawless, and therefore “dangerous” in the public mind.
When ordinary people are afraid to walk in an area, much less live there or engage in commerce, it becomes deserted, and opens up to further disorder. The physical and economic welfare of a city requires a walkable core, and a walkable core requires thorough, vigilant enforcement of the law. While I am wary of the area east of and uphill from the train station, it affords some more magnificent views of those fingers of the Eastern Ouachitas.
The Ringo of “The Cherry Pit” has “the little-known distinction of being, except for University Avenue, the longest north-south passage in the city, beginning in the mud of the riverbank and running over two miles to end in the scalloped-oak jungles beside the Rock Island tracks.”
When Harington wrote that, Ringo was already interrupted where “the limited-access LaHarpe Boulevard cuts rudely across its path.” (I cross LaHarpe/Cantrell on foot there in order to check out the Baring Cross Bridge from the new bridge on the River Trail and mill about the friendly campus of the Division of Arkansas Heritage, but I would not suggest that anyone else try it.) Now, of course, Ringo is far more rudely interrupted by Interstate 630.
I object to the term “structural racism” when it is used to represent shifty academic concepts and argue for the unequal application of the law, but I-630 is a structure whose creation devastated thriving, historic, predominantly Black neighborhoods. If ever a structure were racist, I-630 is it. I don’t know how any good liberal can continue to use it. (Please refer to the UALR Center for Arkansas History and Culture’s wonderful website Mapping Renewal for the story of I-630.)
Growing up in Little Rock and reading the papers, Harington must have known of ongoing plans for a cross-town expressway. The coming disruption of the old north-south streets by I-630 might have been something he felt in his bones. In any case, in “The Cherry Pit,” he uses Ringo to take a sort of tree-core sample of Little Rock’s racial composition in the early 1960s.
Cliff Stone complains that he will never understand “the gross hypocrisy” of Manhattan and Boston with their large ghettos, in contrast to Little Rock, where (by Cliff’s account), “apart from the pseudo-ghettos of West Ninth, the South End and East Side, Black and white live side by side in many places.” I have not studied census or city directory data block by block, but the Mapping Renewal website offers maps that confirm the existence of plenty of racially mixed areas in Little Rock in the early 20th century and their lamentable diminishment over the mid-century decades of federally driven “progress.”
Cliff’s long walk south toward home takes him from the corner of Ringo and Markham, where he surveys a busy commercial district (now mostly parking lots and soulless buildings of concrete, glass, and steel), and “on to West Ninth, the Little Rock Harlem, where for several blocks Ringo would be the exclusive property of the Negroes and would contain, at intervals, three Negro Baptist churches, the small shack of Ballard’s Bar-BQ … and the Dunbar Community Center and the Dunbar Junior High School …”
What Cliff walks through is life. A lively place, where for all the legal outrages and social humiliations of segregation, people could live. Go to school. Go to church. Buy and sell goods.
Now I stand at the corner of West Seventh, my walk down Ringo arrested by the barbed-wire-topped fence protecting the vehicles at MEMS, and the intersections of Ringo and West Ninth and West 10th vanished; all that life vanished or turned to ghosts sped through by electric cars bound toward Chenal.
I resume my walk down Ringo 10 days later. I walk out West Ninth Street toward its vanishing point at Izard and cross the bridge at State. I pick up Ringo again at West 11th. It’s interrupted at a couple more places, but down in the Dunbar Historic District lies hope: some good schools, a community garden.
Cliff’s father’s house is “on the other side of the Dunbar neighborhood, but in a block shared almost half and half by white and Black.” I don’t know if the simple house Harington had in mind still stands or if it ever existed, or on which block. Wherever it is, I keep going.
“Beyond it,” Cliff says, “Ringo becomes increasingly white again and stays white until it goes past Roosevelt Road, which is 25th Street, and gradually shades again from white to Black, and ends, entirely Black, no longer paved, almost like a country road lined with sharecropper-type houses, at West 36th.”
I think about heading back north at Roosevelt, but it’s a perfect day with thick gray cloud cover, falling leaves, and damp in the air. So I look both ways and scamper across. And here, south of Roosevelt, the view south opens up. The hills are rolling but gentle enough to accommodate a grid plan.
Most houses are in disrepair, but their age and design, their easy spacing on their lots, the sidewalks and the old trees all come together just so. It’s what my late husband would call pure Americana. It could be anywhere, but it’s in Little Rock. And it’s beautiful.