Susan Chira and Ellen Ann Fentress, The New York Times, Oct. 8, 2018
Image: Lovetta Green stayed away from President Trump’s rally last week because she dislikes him so much. “When he gets up to talk, I just change the TV,” she said.
SOUTHAVEN, Miss. — Crystal Walls and Lovetta Green have the easy warmth that comes with working together 23 years, Ms. Walls as a waitress and Ms. Green in the kitchen of the restaurant where everyone in town seems to gather.
They share a fierce loyalty to Dale’s restaurant, its signature chicken and dressing dish, and to the late owner, Dale Graham, who used to slip Ms. Green money to buy her children birthday presents when she was short.
But they agree on virtually nothing about politics, side by side in their separate Americas in the city where President Trump lit into Christine Blasey Ford and the #MeToo movement last week, to cheers from the crowd.
Ms. Walls, 60, who is white, was there with her 16-year-old grandson, rapt. Ms. Green, 45, who is black, stayed away from a president she dislikes so much that she grabs the remote whenever he appears on television.
“I don’t like everything to do with him,” Ms. Green said. “The way he was womanizing, talking bad toward women, I can’t respect him as a president. When he gets up to talk, I just change the TV. From the gate, he just struck me wrong.”
Ms. Walls’s verdict on the rally: “It was pretty awesome.” And on the #MeToo movement: “Any woman can say anything. You know as well as I do, they bring it on themselves, to get up the ladder, to destroy somebody they don’t care for. I think it’s something that should be kept personal. Sure there’s a lot of bad guys in this world doing a lot of things they shouldn’t have been.”
On cable news and social media, hurling insults across the political divide has become the background noise of American life. But in Southhaven, a more intimate and constrained dynamic is playing out. Here two friends do not have the luxury of sealing themselves off from those with opposing views. They navigate their differences as part of their daily shifts.
Their lives intersect even as their politics do not. When Ms. Green got her job at Dale’s, Ms. Walls had already been there 23 years, having started at the age of 14 working a 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift. The two women lived as children within a few miles of each other in Whitehaven, just across the Tennessee border. (When she was 7, Ms. Walls moved to Nesbit, Miss., just nine miles from Southaven.) They both spent years raising their children as single parents. They commiserate about crime and watch their grandchildren like hawks.
It took a while for them to open up to each other about politics, but that reticence is long gone.
“We can talk about it but sometimes it gets heated and we have to bring ourselves down to reality,” Ms. Green said. “Somebody might have to come out of the office and say, ‘What the heck is going on?’”
Take their sparring about President Trump’s comments about Dr. Blasey’s testimony. They agreed they couldn’t understand why women had waited so long to confront men they accused of assault, whether in the case of Bill Cosby or Brett M. Kavanaugh. And they both drew a distinction between rape and attempted rape.
Ms. Walls said her own daughter was raped, beaten and left unconscious in a motel about 20 years ago. That led her to be more skeptical of Dr. Blasey’s account of continuing trauma and gaps in memory, as well as any explanation that post-traumatic stress disorder might be to blame.
“PTSD, c’mon, get real,” she said. “Maybe she needs to talk to some servicemen that really understand PTSD. It’s not that I don’t understand rape, big time. But if it affects you that bad, which it did my daughter, you go to counseling, whatever you need to do. My daughter’s gone on just fine with her life.”
So when President Trump launched into an imitation of Dr. Blasey’s testimony, Ms. Walls found herself laughing along, if a bit guiltily. Ms. Green countered that when Dr. Blasey first testified, President Trump had told aides he thought she came across as sincere. Then he turned on her at the rally.
“And he got up there and they say he mocked her when he was at the center, that just doesn’t sit well with me,” she said. “That means you are flip-flopping on their side. As the president, you shouldn’t have mocked her, period, even though Kavanaugh is going up for judge.”
Ms. Walls: “Even though what he said was true.”
Ms. Green: “Shut up, C. Quit it. See, this is how we get started.”
But even as they square off, they are careful with each other, reaching out to pat an arm or clutch a hand, sometimes even backing down a bit. Ms. Walls told her friend that she agreed it was unseemly for a president to act that way. “He should have been quiet, showed a little bit more integrity,” she said. “But I did laugh, and I agreed, and it sounded from that crowd like everyone agreed.”
DeSoto County, where Southaven is located, voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, 66 percent to 31 percent for Hillary Clinton. It was a small hamlet until the 1970s, when the suburban population expanded as courts ordered busing in nearby Memphis. An explosion of Memphis-based freight services like FedEx and Southaven’s highly-regarded public schools drew more families, black and white. Now Southaven is the third-largest city in Mississippi. It’s a place of pleasant, if often treeless, subdivisions and large strip malls, with no central downtown. Dale’s, which opened in 1966, stands out for its bright pink exterior and is one place friends can find each other, along with church and school.
Southaven is 71 percent white and 22 percent black, according to the 2010 census. Because most of its housing was developed after the 1970s, neighborhoods are generally integrated, and so are schools. But political loyalties appear starkly divided by race — nearly every white person interviewed in the area backed Mr. Trump, and every black person opposed him.
Candy Jordan, a black office administrator, blames the president for incidents of racial hostility that she had never experienced before his election. She said her daughters’ friend was called a racial epithet by an elderly neighbor who accused the teenager of ruining her flower bed. “There’s a difference between following a person and following what’s right,” she said.
By contrast, Jill Gregory, who is raising three children in the nearby town of Olive Branch and is white, said, “Trump is the only president that’s been elected and he doesn’t have any other interest than serving the American people.”
And so it went at Dale’s, despite the evident affection of the staff for each other. Ms. Green said all the Trump supporters she knew were white, prompting an uneasy rejoinder from Melissa Thomas, the general manager. “What does that mean?” said Ms. Thomas, herself a fervent Trump backer. Last week, she and her daughter, Ms. Gregory, had made sure to be at the rally site by 6:30 a.m., nine hours before it was scheduled to start.
The day after the rally was particularly trying, as Ms. Green listened to the exuberant waves of co-workers and patrons who had attended.
“Just like y’all were tired of me talking about Obama when he was in it, I’m tired about y’all talking about what you did yesterday,” she said she told them. “And I walked out from the whole conversation.”
Image: Crystal Walls attended Mr. Trump’s rally with her grandson and agreed with his criticism of Chr[is]stine Blasey Ford.
Later she said she realized she may have been too harsh — after all, seeing a president was part of history. But that didn’t change Ms. Green’s opinion of Mr. Trump, despite the argument of Ms. Thomas, the general manager, that he was improving the economy.“We got more money in our checks,” Ms. Thomas told her.
Ms. Green was having none of it. “Do I? How do you know? You’re the boss lady. Really? We don’t see a change.”
Ms. Green and Ms. Walls differ on almost everything Mr. Trump has done — the separation of immigrant children from their parents at the border, even his posture toward North Korea.
But the two women cannot afford the rage that has consumed partisans these past weeks. They do not want to torpedo an affection that has deepened over the years. And so they were more modulated in their views when they were together than when they spoke separately.
“We can get into some throwdowns, but five minutes later we’re talking like we’re best friends,” Ms. Walls said.
For all her ardent conservatism, Ms. Walls has her own qualms about Mr. Trump. “I got to wait and see how he finishes this before I decide if I vote for him again,” she said. “He’s a loose cannon in a lot of other ways.”
But she is unyielding in her belief that the confirmation battle was a Democratic ploy to block a conservative justice. That has made her more determined to vote Republican in the midterm elections next month. Ms. Green is equally certain she’ll vote Democratic and that the country would be better off with a different president.
As the two women talked, Ms. Thomas drifted in and out, circling the room asking customers how they liked their heaping plates of food. The manager works seven days at week at Dale’s, which just won the “Spirit of Main Street” award from the chamber of commerce. “I cried,” she said.
Thinking back over the confirmation battle, listening to Ms. Green and Ms. Walls joke and joust, she allowed herself a plaintive question. It was about the country as much as the chatter at Dale’s: “How can we both hear the same thing and get something totally different out of it?”
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