“You know this kind of town — picturesque, with classic Victorian architecture and a central square. You know it from movies and old radio shows or sitcoms, or from the Thornton Wilder play “Our Town.” The town is neat and symmetrical. The streets are on a grid, with the courthouse at the center and the high school straight down a tree-lined boulevard.” —Bobbie Ann Mason

The day after Christmas, author Bobbie Ann Mason published an article in The New Yorker about her hometown of Mayfield, Kentucky, and what it was like before a series of tornadoes turned huge swathes of it into matchsticks. She wrote about her memories of working in the Rexall’s, the bustling downtown square of shops, the eccentrics that populate every small town, and her family farm, “her anchor,” even as she went to Lexington and New York City to become a famous writer.

A few days after that, she received an email in response.

“I’m glad that you have fond memories of Mayfield,” wrote Ruby Horton Thompson. “However, I have a different perspective on growing up in Mayfield. As a Black American, my experiences were quite different.”

Thompson went on to recount being one of three Black students at Mayfield High School who were totally ignored by white students, having to eat her ice cream on the curb outside the drug store, watching movies from the segregated Legion Theater, now destroyed. Mason’s article, she admitted, made her mad.

“Yes, I was mad because her piece seemed to picture Mayfield as a Mayberry where everybody got along in this picturesque painting,” Thompson said in a phone call from her home in Northern California. “But she was looking at it from a privileged white person and I was not.”

Mason knew the New Yorker would probably not publish a letter about an online story, so she contacted the Herald-Leader.

“It was so moving,” she said of Thompson’s letter. “She was expressing her experience after all these years, she gave a voice to what happened in high school, something that I didn’t understand at the time.”

Thompson, now 75, and Mason, 81, didn’t overlap at Mayfield High School, and Mason says she was largely unaware of what was going on at Mayfield High School, mainly a historic integration of the school just two years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that struck down segregated schools.

The Mayfield 10 were a group of ninth graders from Mayfield’s Dunbar Colored High School who decided they should take advantage of better classes and materials they could get at Mayfield High School. They came to school there, and despite protests by white students, who refused to go to class, the Black students kept coming back. They were apparently supported by Principal Paul Craig and city elders. This was very a very different situation in nearby Union County, where with the help of the White Citizens’ Council, the Board of Education voted to bar Black students from the Sturgis school. Some Webster County schools also tried to block Black students.

Mayfield had it own history of racial violence. In 1896, a crowd of whites lynched Jim Stone out of the Mayfield jail; rumors of revenge meant another mob killed three more Black men the next few days. In contrast, the desegregation of Mayfield High School was not violent, but hardly welcoming to Black students. By 1964, when Thompson graduated, there were just three Black students who made the choice to leave the all-Black Dunbar for the 10th grade, the first year they were allowed to attend Mayfield.

“We knew we’d get a better education at Mayfield High School; they had all the perks,” Thompson said. She’d already taken algebra at Dunbar, but almost failed it initially at Mayfield. “I realized I had not learned what I needed to learn.” White students were superficially nice, “but when they were out with friends they wouldn’t acknowledge you, they didn’t want anyone to know they knew a Black person at school.”

Both of them got out of Mayfield as soon as they could — Mason to school at the University of Kentucky and Thompson with marriage to a military man who moved them to Fort Riley, Kansas and then to Northern California, where Thompson got a college degree and became an IT expert. They had three children who became a lawyer, a doctor and another IT specialist, respectively, successes that Thompson says would not have happened if they’d stayed in Mayfield.

“I know because when I go back there and see the apathy and lack of incentive to do better, it breaks my heart,” she said. “People need to see other things outside their environment — if you don’t see what’s available to you, you don’t know what you can do. I wanted to expose my children to everything they could do.”

For example, she said her children couldn’t believe she didn’t know how to swim — “I never learned to swim because the swimming pool was not available to my people.”

For Mason, Thompson’s letter opened a door, both for her own interest in the Black experience of Mayfield and a way for others to understand what so many people with different skin tones from her own went through.

“It’s not news that people like Mrs. Thompson going to a white school would have experienced those things, and Mayfield was one of many many towns that went through this,” Mason said. “It’s not a unique history but when you have a voice coming out, you need to pay attention. I thought her letter opened up something; it provided a little light.”

We need light these days as Kentucky’s own lawmakers prepare to make discussing our own painful history against the law. For example, Clay School in Webster County barred Black students from coming in 1956, backed up by a mob of white people that included the mayor. The current Webster County representative is Republican Jim Gooch, one of the co-sponsors of House Bill 18, which would ban discussion of some concepts of race, sex or religion in schools, possibly preventing Webster County teachers from discussing this painful history.

In the end, that’s what both women want for the little town of Mayfield as it struggles to rebuild, not a recreation of a time fixed in amber that was unhappy for many, but something better, something that reflects the spirit of cooperation that came out directly after the tornadoes.

“I hope they will look into themselves and their memories, and then think of what’s going on around them, especially in the whole country, with the effort to undo civil rights and voting rights,” Mason said. “I hope they will do something brilliant.”

Thompson said that she wants to see Mayfield become a place that Black people no longer need to leave in order to find a better life.