When Ruby Cramer of The Washington Post drove up to Norfolk, Mass., it was in pursuit of a story that couldn’t be more timely — or timeless. Cramer had seen local news reports about the small town and fractures over an emergency migrant shelter to be opened in a former prison there. She wanted to learn more, and after several weeks of listening, note-taking and reporting, had a story that tapped into both current battles and ancient fears.
While there are anxious, angry outbursts from some town members opposed to the shelter, Cramer doesn’t let that tone dominate “The shelter and the storm,” instead wrapping it around a local — and normally conservative — elected official who takes a more open approach, noting: “People are afraid of change and differences.”
Cramer’s story, published Sept. 7, 2024, as a Washington Post Deep Read, includes opponents and supporters of the shelter, and those who are questioning but not strident. But the reporter didn’t confine herself to the town limits. She traveled to Logan Airport in Boston to speak to some of the migrants themselves, allowing them to tell their own story in their own voice.
All this took time, immersion and patience.
“My editor on this story, David Finkel, who understands the challenges of immersion better than anyone, says that you need to get to the point where you can be in a room with someone you’re writing about long enough so that they can feel comfortable with a long moment of silence without trying to fill it,” Cramer said. “I find it really hard to do.”
In the end, Cramer’s strides toward that state produced a deeply felt, deeply reported story that reified an issue too often painted in extreme political strokes, not nuanced personal ones. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Kurt Streeter of The New York Times took a different but equally successful approach to the same issue in a piece from Eau Claire, Wis.)
Cramer agreed to annotate her story for Nieman Storyboard. Her answers have been edited for length and clarity.
ANNOTATION: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Cramer’s answers in blue.
The shelter and the storm
What happened when the nation’s immigration crisis came to a small town in Massachusetts
Story by Ruby Cramer
Photography by Jodi Hilton
The Washington Post
September 7, 2024 at 3:05 a.m.
NORFOLK, Mass. — Here was the town where Kevin Roche grew up: empty sidewalks, a coffee shop, a pharmacy, two pizza parlors, two ambulances, two roundabouts and no grocery store. A small, quiet town, people in Norfolk said. Pleasant. Safe. Nothing much to do, and that meant nothing much changed from one morning to the next or the next, until this morning, when Kevin woke up and knew that the town would be different by the time the day was over. How did Norfolk’s shelter come to your attention? What made you see a story in it?The stories I’m working on this year are all about the idea of anger. Anger can be an expression of so many different emotions and states of change – fear, loneliness, outrage, isolation, loss, connection or lack of connection. My editor and I knew we wanted to do a story about immigration and the anger and fear it’s brought out in cities and towns across the country over the last few years. We thought about a few big cities: Chicago, New York, Denver. Eventually I found a few local news stories about Norfolk, Mass., a small town where the state was about to open an emergency migrant shelter in a vacant prison. At the time, the shelter had yet to open and the town was still pushing for more information. Residents were asking basic questions like when the shelter would open, how many families it would house, how it would affect town services like health care and the school system. But people in Norfolk were also trying to figure out in real time how they really felt about the news and what kind of town this was going to become. It was the most appealing kind of assignment. We didn’t know what was going to happen. The story was still unfolding. I happen to be reading a book titled “The Science of Storytelling” by Will Storr, and one of its topic is how wired humans are to perceive change. How did you land on this first paragraph to set a similar theme: The Norfolk its residents were used to, on the verge of perceived change?I wanted the lede to be a baseline I could return to at the end of the story: the visual of a small, quiet town. I wanted to establish a familiar sense of stasis that might be associated with any small town, while at the same time suggesting that that stasis was about to be altered and complicated in the mind of the reader, just like it would be for Kevin and the rest of the people in the story.
He got in his car and drove toward Main Street just before 7 a.m. Main Street ran from one end of Norfolk to the other, four miles in all, and it led to the auto repair shop where Kevin, 60, had worked since he was 12 years old, first for his father, and now alongside his own son. He passed the line of houses he saw every morning, which were the same, except for the ones that had new signs in the yard. “NORFOLK PRISON-SHELTER,” they read. “NOT SAFE FOR ANYONE.”
At the east end of Main Street, razor wire was being removed from a chain-link fence around Bay State Correctional Center, an unused low-security state prison half a mile from Kevin’s shop. At the foot of the fence, rows of thick coil lay in the grass. Security guards stood at the front gates. Cribs and diaper kits sat on the floor of the prison gym. Clean, white sheets lay on the beds.
Later that day, the state would reopen the prison as an emergency shelter for pregnant women and families with children, most of them migrants who had been granted parole at the border to legally enter the country and who were in the process of applying for asylum or temporary protected status. Twenty-four families, or about 75 people, would be the first to arrive. This is elegantly done — observing the visible changes on Kevin’s route, then explaining how they tied into the imminent opening of the emergency shelter. What do you remember about writing this opening, and what you were trying to accomplish with it?There was almost too much to establish in this first section: Kevin; the prison that was about to become a shelter; the migrant crisis in Massachusetts; the auto repair shop; the protest planned for later that evening; the sense of discord in town. I wanted to just keep it as simple as possible and take it step by step, using Kevin’s route to work as a framework I could use to my advantage.
“There’s only 24 of ’em,” Kevin told his son, Adam, when he got to the shop.
“Today?” Adam asked.
“Two buses, yeah.” You include dialogue throughout. How did you record and transcribe it? How challenging was it to determine what to use and what to leave out?I took notes and was often recording, but not always. I needed this piece of dialogue to get the reader inside the shop, and to establish that in a matter of hours, a bus would be coming down the road and the shelter would open.
Kevin had heard that the people coming would be Haitian migrants who were living in Terminal E at Logan International Airport, about 30 miles northeast in Boston. They had arrived among record numbers of people crossing the U.S. border since 2022 and had been placed on a wait list to enter the state’s overcrowded shelter system. In Massachusetts, caseloads of families seeking shelter had more than doubled since the year before, and now there were more people waiting at Logan Airport every day and no room for them all. The state had opened new shelters in towns across Massachusetts, but none so big in a town so small as the one planned for Norfolk, population 11,000.
By the fall, Kevin had heard, as many as 405 people could be living at the prison.
The door opened and a man handed Kevin a piece of paper about a protest scheduled for later that day on Main Street. “Signs will be provided,” it read. “Bring anyone you can.”
Kevin folded the paper in half and placed it on the counter. It had been six weeks since the state informed Norfolk about its plans, and he had never seen the town’s residents so angry, either about the shelter or at one another. Three days before the news, he’d been elected to the town’s small governing board, and since then, some of the anger had been coming into his shop. People wanted to know how the shelter would affect their school system, their taxes, their 911 call volume, their sewage, the houses and cars they liked to leave unlocked at night, and now some of them wanted to know if Kevin was going to the protest that evening at the center of town. One thing that jumps out is the story’s use of a “viewpoint character” of sorts in Kevin Roche. You include other people in the story, but Kevin is the clothesline the story hangs on. How did you encounter him, and how did you decide on his role in the story?I love the idea of Kevin as the line the rest of the story hangs on. I hadn’t heard of Kevin before I came to town, and I was still learning what a “select board” was — an old tradition of local town government in Massachusetts. On my first day in Norfolk, someone mentioned that the newest select board member was a guy named Kevin who ran the auto repair shop just down the road from the prison where the shelter was going to open. If all that sounded “perfect” for story-telling purposes, I absolutely did not realize it quickly. But I did think an auto repair shop sounded like a fun place to hang out, so I pulled up, introduced myself and tried to explain the story I wanted to do (not really knowing what the story was yet). The auto repair shop was in fact really fun and jocular. There were always a bunch of guys there, and people in town would stop by on a daily basis not to fix their brakes or whatever, but just to talk to Kevin. After about an hour there, I realized that because Kevin was a member of the town government (and the most conservative member of the town government), there were a lot of people coming into the shop to talk about the shelter. It was, luckily for me, a big topic of discussion in town, so I didn’t really have to prompt anyone to speak about it. Another thing I noticed quickly about Kevin was that even though he’d laugh at other people’s jokes about the shelter, he very rarely offered his own opinion about it. He was such a loud guy, just in terms of volume; if you listen to the audio version of this story, produced by my very talented colleague, Bishop Sand, you can hear this for yourself! But on the subject of the shelter, he seemed reserved and quiet. That was really interesting to me. We kept in touch after meeting and when I came back for a second week in the town, I asked Kevin if I could write about him and use his shop as a home base.
“Absolutely not,” Kevin told a man stopping by the shop.
“Let’s see how many people they can get,” the man said. “Never ends here.” Did everyone whose dialogue you recorded know they were being recorded? By this time, I was nearing the end of my reporting, so I’d spent about three weeks in the town and already talked with Kevin and the other mechanics about the story I was doing and the methods I was using. I’d also learned a lot about their lives and talked with each of them individually.
“You think they’re getting some walking-around money when they show up here?” Adam asked.
“Where are they gonna walk to?” a mechanic named Jack said.
“They’re gonna walk up to Dunkin’ Donuts and Walgreens,” Adam said.
Another mechanic who had been listening said, “Imagine if there was a sign saying, ‘Jesus loves you and so do we.’ You think the warm welcome will —” Sometimes you identify speakers; other times you just use brief descriptions but no names. What determined that? There was one mechanic at the shop who didn’t want to be named. Of course, I wanted to respect that, so we used this bit of dialogue anonymously. I wanted to include it because Jack’s quick and sort of waggish response gives you an immediate sense of how the guys are with one another. That was really important.
“Shut up,” Jack said.
“Norfolk Auto, this is Kevin speaking,” Kevin said when a customer called. In the garage, the car lift screeched, raising a truck toward the ceiling. “The wheels are junk?” Kevin asked, before the door opened and another customer walked inside to talk about a woman who had accused him of spreading paranoia and fear about the shelter. “She said, ‘We don’t need conspiracy —’ and, um, what did she say? ‘Xenophobia.’ Using all the right phrases.”
Kevin laughed but said nothing.
“You gotta go to the tribal model,” the man went on. “You take care of your own first, right?”
Again, Kevin said nothing. He kept his eyes on the window. Here was the town, about to make room for 24 new families. One facet of this story I appreciated as a reader is how the factual information about immigration, the shelter, etc. is parceled out in small doses. There’s no sense of running up against expository paragraphs. How deliberate were you in how you sprinkled the drier — but still important — information throughout the narrative? Thank you! I don’t like nut graphs and find them difficult to write, so I avoided one. Sorry to all my past and future editors. He watched the cars pass by, scanning the road for signs of a bus.
***
THREE WEEKS EARLIER, Kevin had looked out across an auditorium as people began to yell. He had told himself that as the newest member of the Norfolk “select board,” composed of three elected officials who set the policies for the town, his job at that night’s town meeting was to remain neutral and open. Seated on the stage, he tried to keep a blank expression on his face as a panel of four state officials took questions about the plan to convert the prison into a shelter.
In the aisle, people lined up for a turn at the microphone. “I am angry,” one woman said. Her son, who was disabled, had lost his health insurance, she told the state officials on the stage. “I’m an American citizen. Americans should get help first.”
Shouting filled the room.
Before the panel could respond, the next person approached the microphone and began to speak. “Answer the first question,” the woman who’d just spoken yelled from her seat. “Answer my question!” On the stage, the chair of the select board, Jim Lehan, rose from his seat. “Ma’am. Ma’am, please,” he said. “We’re gonna get nowhere if we act this way.” But the meeting went on just like that, for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, for more than an hour. Now another person was at the microphone, telling the state about her own son, who was 5 years old and allergic to bees. “What happens if Lucas gets stung?” she asked. What if the ambulances in Norfolk were busy at the shelter instead of tending to the town? “What do I say: ‘I’m sorry, Lucas, we tried’?” You capture this scene vividly. What do you want readers to understand — or feel — when they read this recap of the select board meeting? I wasn’t present for this meeting. The local coverage of the meeting was the reason I found Norfolk in the first place. The entire thing was available on YouTube and I later talked with all the characters mentioned to get a sense of what they were feeling at the time. I wanted readers to feel tense as they read it, and to hear the noise and anticipate it building. It was also important to us to present people’s concerns about the shelter as legitimate and to treat those concerns fairly.
“At this stage in the game, they’re coming in two weeks,” a man said. “And you can’t tell us —”
“— ANYTHING,” someone else shouted.
But there were some things the state officials onstage had been able to tell them: that these were families who “really have nowhere else to go.” That the site would be reserved for pregnant women and families, including children up to age 21. The occupants could include a combination of people seeking asylum and homeless Massachusetts residents. And the shelter being set up for them at Bay State Correctional Center would be temporary — open for six to 12 months.
“It’s a simple yes or no,” a woman at the microphone said now. “Can you, today, guarantee every single person in this room that within 12 months, this site will be closed?”
“Our plan is to close it within six to 12 months,” one of the state officials repeated.
“So that’s a no,” the woman said, and more yelling began.
“That’s a no,” one person shouted. “Well?” another said. “Yes or no?” another said. There’s a lot of yelling, a lot of cross talk, a lot of sheer verbiage from this meeting. How much did you work with an editor, if at all, to capture it?My editor really helped tighten this section. He helped me see that as tense as the meeting was, the scene needed to unfold with a sense of ease. I had originally spent way too much time introducing the other characters in the piece, like Taiese and Ron.
She wondered what kind of language the kids in town might be hearing from their parents. She thought of her own two sons, and worried that they, along with the children at the shelter, might be bullied at school. You’re able to get an insightful summary of how Taiese was feeling; when were you able to speak with her?Taiese was the first person I reached out to in Norfolk. I had seen her speak up at a bunch of town meetings online and we had many conversations.
Now she faced the panel on the stage. “I just want to apologize for the disrespect that you’ve received thus far,” she said. Behind her, some people began to clap and nod. Then shouting and booing broke out across the room.
The next woman to speak approached the microphone and turned around to face the town. “I would, as a White person, ask that this majority-White room think before we boo the single Black resident who has said that we have been extremely disrespectful,” she said.
Now there was groaning, and more booing, and a few people stood up to leave.
“I’m truly disgusted,” the woman at the microphone said.
People yelled back at her.
The meeting was nearing the two-hour mark. The select board chair stood again. “If we can’t be more respectful of each other, we’ll call this meeting off,” he told the crowd.
“People are angry,” someone shouted.
From his seat, Ron Tibbetts, 70, an Episcopal deacon, thought he’d heard the words “rapists” and “pedophiles” from somewhere in the crowd. When it was his turn to speak, he told the officials onstage that despite the anger in the room, there was a “quiet group of people” who were ready to welcome the families to the town. “They have decided to stand up and say, ‘These are families like our families, children like our children,’” he said.
“They’re not,” a man in the audience said, cutting him off.
“They are,” Ron said.
He turned to the audience now and asked that quiet group of people to stand up — “if you are courageous enough.”
In the back of the room, another man began to yell. “Anyone who doesn’t agree with what’s going on here, stand up,” the man said, and people across the room rose from their seats.
Through it all, Kevin watched from the stage. Then he felt the eyes in the crowd shift. A man in the audience was talking to him.
“The new selectman?” the man said. “Time to step up and fight.”
Some people started to clap.
“Any comment to that?” the man asked.
“Nope,” Kevin said. “Not one.”
Tell me what the reporting process was for this story — and any challenges that existed specific to it.I think my editor and I discussed the Norfolk idea for the first time on a Monday, and on that Wednesday, I drove to Norfolk. From watching a few news clips of local town meetings, I was able to reach out to a few people in town to meet with me. But we left it open-ended. The first week I was there, my only goal was to try to get an understanding of the town and meet as many people as I could. The good thing about a relatively small town (population 11,000) was that I was able to get around easily and establish relationships quickly. Eventually, people who were vocal about the shelter came to know me and even expected to see me around. I think most of them understood that I was trying to capture something in-depth and treat the town humanely. But it took a while to get there. The first week, I had no idea who I would end up writing about. The second week, I had a sense of who the characters in the story might be, but no clue as to what would come of it. By the third week, the shelter was about to open, and we had a good sense of the loose shape of the story and who we wanted to structure the piece around. Did this story change much from your first conception to what it eventually became?It did, in the sense that we left it so open in the beginning. At first, we thought the story would be set before and after the shelter opened. Eventually we made the decision to limit it to the three weeks leading up to the shelter opening, because it offered a natural structure for the piece and a lot of emotional possibility. I think if we went in with any idea of what the story might be, it was this idea of the “angry town.” Once I met Kevin, and especially once I spent time in Logan Airport, where dozens of migrant families were staying, it became (I hope) something more than that.
***
A FEW DAYS LATER, at the auto shop, Adam, Kevin’s son, pulled up a video clip about the meeting on his phone. Kevin leaned over the counter to watch, and saw himself seated on the stage, silent.
“Both of the other select men spoke and pissed people off,” he said, talking about his two colleagues on the town’s select board. “I sat there and was quiet the whole meeting.”
When he was at his shop, Kevin was loud. All the mechanics were, but Kevin was the loudest. “Hey, dumbass,” he would say, or “Hey, jackass.” In the garage, the mechanics had to speak over the sound of the radio that was always playing, or the hammering, or the car lift going up and down, or the bells that sounded every time the door opened or the phone rang. Kevin’s father, who’d started the business in 1977, had been even louder. If he had a disagreement, he’d throw people out of the shop, screaming mad, but Kevin didn’t do that.
“There’s a difference,” he said.
“There’s a difference between what?” Adam said.
“Being loud and screaming.” Kevin said.
“I’ve heard him scream,” Jack said.
“But not often.” I like this little bit of dialogue. Why did you choose to include it?I loved this exchange. I heard it from the other room (again, Kevin speaks very loudly, so that helped) and knew it could accomplish something useful. For me, it’s about the difference between being loud and being angry (“screaming”). Or between listening and reacting. I think Kevin was someone who was trying to navigate that line.
Kevin did not think of himself as an angry person, and he did not share the outrage he’d heard in the auditorium that night, though he knew there were some in town who assumed that he did.
It wasn’t that he didn’t have concerns about the shelter. He worried about how it would affect the already overcrowded school system. He didn’t know how teachers were supposed to accommodate dozens of new students who didn’t speak English. And he didn’t know what might happen to the town’s tax revenue if people decided to move away because of the shelter. Taxes were already high. People who’d lived in Norfolk their whole lives, when it was still a town of dairy and chicken farms, were being priced out.
But the migrant families themselves — “I wouldn’t really say it worries me.”
“I don’t feel they’re gonna be walking down the street with knives,” he said. “There are White people from America that are just as much of s—heads. But people are afraid of change and differences.”
When it came to politics, Kevin considered himself a conservative. He had run for office to keep taxes from going up year after year, and to stop what he saw as unnecessary spending. Now he figured he was probably the most conservative member of the select board. But his idea of government in a town this size wasn’t political. Kevin was attracted to the idea of service. He volunteered at town service clubs and did fundraising walks for breast cancer almost every year, once flying to 10 states to walk 600 miles at different Susan G. Komen events. He didn’t want to be known as “the Republican” on the select board. If he represented one side and not the other, he thought, “you’re not representing all the people,” and that was one reason he’d been so quiet at the public forum.
But now his silence had led to another invitation to speak. He had been asked to meet with the Norfolk Republican Town Committee, and he had agreed to the meeting, so long as they knew there wasn’t much more he wanted to say about the shelter, at least not until he had more information.
“I’m gonna talk about myself and all that. They want to know Kevin Roche.”
***
EXCEPT THAT WASN’T what they wanted to know. Instead, the Norfolk Republicans wanted Kevin to talk about why the state had “railroaded” and “handcuffed” the town. They asked whether the migrant families moving to Norfolk would be able to “just go out and roam the streets and all that,” and they wanted to know what Kevin was going to do about it. “We do not want this going on,” the chair of the Norfolk Republicans told him. “So, I mean, just don’t roll over and die.”
“Well, we’re not,” Kevin replied.
“We want somebody in there fighting for us.”
“Well, we are fighting for you, but we can’t fight out in the street,” he said. Tell me how you got into this meeting, and how you recorded dialogue there. Did you get any resistance?I had heard about the meeting when I first got into town and asked Kevin if I could go with him. Once I got there, I also introduced myself to the committee chairwoman and asked for her permission to be there. Journalists are often criticized for “parachuting into” a story that’s outside their geographic coverage area, but this story reflects that you took time to immerse yourself in the community. What steps did you take to understand as many facets of it as you did?I think you are always parachuting into a place, to a certain degree, even if it’s on the beat you cover every day. Your presence alone as a reporter affects your surroundings, no matter how much you try to disappear. I tried to immerse myself in the town as much as possible. I talked to plenty of people who never made it into the story, to try to understand the town and how it’s changed over the years. I spent hours at Kevin’s shop, so that he and the other mechanics there got used to me.
Now Bill Crane, 83, a man Kevin knew, stood up to address the room. He ran a local talk show on the town’s public-access television channel, and before that had been a teacher at a church, where the older students used to complain all the time about Norfolk. “It’s a stupid little town, and there’s nothing to do,” they would say, and he would tell them, “Now just hold your horses. You’re gonna grow up and, God willing, live here in Norfolk again and raise your family here — and you will find that this stupid little town with nothing to do is a safe oasis.” There was no crime here, he said. There were safe, open spaces.
“We want to keep Norfolk the way it is. We don’t want to see it degraded.”
Kevin nodded. “I agree,” he said. “We don’t want crime coming to town and everything else and all that.”
Bill seemed satisfied with the answer, and Kevin walked away from the meeting thinking that maybe all the town needed was another opportunity to air its frustrations. The next day, he drove to the town hall building to see Kate O’Brien, 39, Norfolk’s assistant town administrator.
“Is there any way we can schedule another public forum?” he asked when he got to her office.
Kate looked at him from across her desk.
“I mean, I can always bring it up,” she said.
“I feel we have to,” he said.
Kate, who had been onstage next to Kevin during the first meeting, had seen her job go from balancing budget items for a town of 11,000 to managing a small corner of the nation’s immigration crisis. At the meeting that night, she’d noticed herself shaking, and the physical response had surprised her. She had never thought of Norfolk as a liberal town, but that had never mattered before. It had been 10 years since she’d started to work her way up the ladder of municipal government, attending graduate school at night to get her master’s degree. I like that you included a small, relevant background sketch of Kate to place her reluctance in context; when did you have the opportunity to speak to her? Why did you choose to include the background you did?Similar to Taiese, Kate was someone I spoke to quite a bit. She had an office at the town hall building and I would stop by every few days just to say hi. I liked that she was someone who dealt with the nuts and bolts of running the town. She told me that she was a “West Wing” fan and pursued a career in local government because she really believed in it. I was interested in the way her ideals were being tested by what was happening in town.
Now the questions she was asking herself surprised her, too. “Why am I so affected by this? Is this worth it for me, mentally? Is this what I want? Do I want to be screamed at?” The morning after the forum, she’d found a voicemail waiting for her at the office. It was another angry voice, but instead of screaming, the man on the tape spoke calmly as he used racist slurs to talk about migrants and described scenes of sexual violence. “My mom always taught me not to wish bad things on people,” Kate heard the man say, “but I hope it comes out to every one of you motherf—ers.”
“I hear you,” she told Kevin now, but Kate did not want to hold another forum yet. It would just be one more opportunity for the people in Norfolk to show how angry they had become.
Across town, other people were getting messages, too.
Taiese Bingham-Hickman was home with her two sons one night when she got a call from an unknown number. When she answered, she heard a man yelling, “Get on your knees,” and then she heard him say the n-word, and then she hung up and called the police. When her kids asked why a squad car was parked outside the house that night, and the next day, and the day after that, Taiese didn’t want to tell them the truth. “Never in my life have I received or experienced anything like that,” she wrote on Facebook afterward. Did you learn about these slurs on Taiese from her Facebook page or from somewhere else? I heard about it while I was at Ron Tibbetts’s house talking with him about something else; he’d just seen her post about it on Facebook, and he told me what happened. I called Taiese as soon as I left Ron’s house.
The days passed, and across town, more Facebook posts came, followed by fights in the comments sections.
— “This ‘not safe for anyone’ business is a barely disguised anti-immigrant trope.”
— “Don’t lock your doors. It’s up to you.”
— “Thank you for clarifying your real issue is the nationality and skin color of those coming.”
— “Excuse me? Do you know how to read? Where did I say anything about skin color?”
A new feeling of anticipation and tension settled over the town. “If people want to reduce anger, which could lead to hate or crime, be nice,” one woman wrote online, suggesting people start offering one another a conciliatory smile or wave. Ron Tibbetts liked that idea, but when he’d written his own Facebook post about remembering to “see the people in all of this,” someone else accused him of “performance kindness,” a phrase he’d never heard.
Among the most vocal in town, two groups formed.
On one side, the Concerned Citizens of Norfolk began selling “Not Safe for Anyone” yard signs for $10 apiece. On the other, the Norfolk Welcome Wagon decided they should have signs, too, except no one could agree on a design. One person said they should be red, white and blue, because the “Not Safe for Anyone” signs were red, white and blue. Another person said that might appear adversarial. Another said a neutral color might be better. Another suggested that instead of making new signs, they should pull out the other signs in the middle of the night. This graf has a jaunty, the frogurt-is-also-cursed rhythm — this is a Simpsons reference, sorry — and ends with a morbidly funny sentence. What impression did you want readers to get from this paragraph? What do you remember about writing and organizing it? 100% on the reference! You’re right that the tone of this graph sort of stands out from the rest of the piece. I didn’t want to be flippant about it, but I also wanted the graph to have a sort of spiraling, tripping-over-itself feel. The shelter is about to open, whether the town is ready for it or not. There’s also the sense that even the “non-angry” people in town, those who were ready to welcome the shelter, had moments of becoming caught up in emotion or resentment.
Rumors were spreading that the shelter would open soon, but state officials still wouldn’t tell the town a date or time. They told Kate they were worried protesters might try to block the roads.
At the prison, contractors began working overnight. Razor wire began to come down.
More signs went up. Plans formed for a protest in the roundabout on Main Street.
Everyone had their own idea of who was about to come to town, including Kevin.
He imagined “a bunch of pregnant women and children,” mostly from Haiti, a country he didn’t know much about, except to think that it was a dangerous place. He didn’t know what language the families would speak, except to think that it wouldn’t be English. And he had only heard a few things on the news about what was happening at Terminal E in Logan Airport. But he had seen the inside of the prison. He knew it had a gym, a cafeteria and bedrooms that looked like dorm rooms, not cells, so he could at least imagine that, for anyone, it would be a better place to sleep than the floor of the airport.
“You know, it might be just totally fine,” he said.
***
THIRTY MILES AWAY, on the ground floor of Logan Airport, Terminal E, travelers were passing through a long alcove with floor-to-ceiling windows. There was not much in the alcove, except for a bathroom, two hand sanitizer machines, three trash cans and, along the wall, a row of crowd-control stanchion posts with retractable belts. The floors were clean and polished. Flight attendants passed by. An employee pushed a rack of luggage carts through the hall and disappeared through a back door. Everyone who entered was either arriving or departing, until a man, a woman and a boy walked into the alcove and stopped.
They put their luggage on the floor and sat on the radiator against the wall. The boy ran to and from a trash can. A few minutes later, another family entered and stayed. They took two of the stanchions and extended the retractable belts to create a border parallel to the wall. A few minutes after that, another family arrived and did the same. Soon, three families became three dozen. They opened their suitcases. They pulled out blankets and spread them in neat rows on the floor. They unrolled foam pads. They unpacked pillows, sleeping bags and more blankets. They dragged more stanchions into place, until they connected to create an aisle down the center of the space.
These were the people headed to Norfolk, and this was the place where they were living. Every morning, they woke up at the airport, packed everything they owned and were driven to one of the state’s “family welcome centers,” where they spent the day. Every evening, they returned to the airport, unpacked their things and slept. “Welcome to Massachusetts,” the governor’s voice said on a loop through a loudspeaker one level above. The “Welcome to Massachusetts” line is a great environmental detail. Do you recall when you realized it would make a worthwhile inclusion? I heard it on a moving walkway. I wanted it to be a discordant note – and a familiar one. It’s the sort of thing you hear in airports. The rest of what you read is not usually the sort of thing you hear in airports.
Along the wall, a 16-year-old girl named Nika watched the nightly routine unfold alongside her mother, her father, her younger sister, several suitcases and three layers of blankets spread out on the floor. She had been at the airport for 18 days now, she said. Her family had left Haiti for Brazil, and they had lived there for five years before beginning a journey she described as harrowing — north through the Darién Gap, across the U.S. border and eventually to Boston, where she had no idea what would happen to her next, outside of life in the airport and the cordoned-off living area that was erected each night and put away again each morning.
“Let’s say we are living a monotonous life,” Nika said.
At night, Nika sat against the wall or played cards with the other families at the airport. Or she stared up at the skywalk overhead, where she often saw travelers lean over the railing, taking pictures to post on the internet. Sometimes, she saw the posts on Instagram or TikTok, with “horrible comments” about “dirtying their country” and being “beggars,” she said. She knew that in life, there were people who tried “to make you believe that you’re not normal and you don’t fit into their world,” she said. “And when it happens, you kind of need to walk away.” But there was nowhere to go at the airport, so she found other ways. She liked to read romance novels and listen to music. She wrote her own stories and practiced her English by watching videos online.
When she saw the posts about the airport, she tried to believe that every person was inherently good, and that she was, too. Everyone was good at something, she said — only “maybe we are not in the right place to develop our talent.” Albert Einstein might be considered the most intelligent man of all time, but “think if he went to a city where he needs to fish to survive,” she said. “If he doesn’t know how, will he be considered an idiot for not knowing how to fish in a city where even children know how?”
Nika’s father placed her sister’s head on a pillow. At night, the airport got cold, and many of the kids staying there, including Nika’s sister, were sick, she said. “People are here out of necessity. It wasn’t a choice — ‘Then I woke up one day and I’m going to have an adventure and live in an airport.’” She hoped to get a job to help them. And she had other hopes, too: to go to school and to one day learn nine languages. She already knew Portuguese, Creole, Spanish, and some English and French, and she wanted to learn Italian and Mandarin next. Most of all, she wanted this trip to end, and for her, that meant “when I can finally sleep in peace. I was grateful when I realized you’d included Nika as one of the voices in this story after so much speculation, fearmongering and assumptions about the people on their way to Norfolk. How did you report this section? What do you remember most vividly about writing and editing it?I went to Logan a few times to try to understand the rhythms of the day for the people staying there. Every night, this remarkable transformation occurred every day from an empty terminal to a vast array of people and blankets and suitcases. It was difficult to find someone who spoke some English. A few other kids directed me to Nika, and she agreed to talk. We spoke for several hours. At points, when she had something longer she wanted to say, she would write down her thoughts in Portuguese. She was incredibly wise. The editing of this section was a big lesson for me. My editor understood, again, that the section and Nika’s story needed to unfold gradually.
“A house where I know I’ll rest after the rush of the day, you know?
“But I don’t think about it too much.”
Now it was dark outside, but the lights in the airport stayed on. Nika’s sister was asleep.
People walked to and from the bathroom to wash up. Flip-flops and sandals lay scattered on the floor. Pizza boxes were passed around. It was almost 9 p.m. Amid the sprawl of suitcases and backpacks, there was a boy holding a balloon. A girl lying on her stomach, her feet dangling in the air. A toddler rolling on the ground, trying to crawl. A man with pages of documents spread out in front of him. A mother and father lying down, a child between them. All around, there were families trying to get to sleep, and in the midst of them, a 16-year-old girl sat alone against the wall. “Some call me lonely,” Nika said, “but I feel more lonely when I’m in a place where I don’t fit in, so I prefer to be left alone, because true loneliness is when you’re surrounded by people who don’t value you.” Did this quote jump out immediately?Yes. Originally I had it higher. My editor suggested we end the section with it to give it time and space to make a deeper impact. He was right.
***
“HEY, JACKASS,” Kevin said.
“There’s only one jackass in this room, and it’s you,” a mechanic said back.
“Oh yeah,” Kevin laughed.
The phone rang. The car lift went up. The radio was on, as usual, as a bus pulled up at the prison.
Kevin didn’t see it, and if anyone else did, no one called or came by to let him know. Too far to be seen from the road, the bus came to a stop, and the families stepped off and looked around. No one could say for sure how long they would be in Norfolk. The families’ stays would be determined case by case, with families leaving and new families arriving on a rolling basis. The one certainty: The first of the migrants were here.
At the shop, Kevin kept working. He glanced out the window now and then, until it was late afternoon, and two miles away, at the center of town, people opposed to the shelter began to gather for their protest.
Some held “Not Safe for Anyone” signs. Others held new signs that read “No K!ds in Prison.” The plan was to stay until rush hour was over, then drive to the shelter to finish the protest there. People honked as they drove by. Local news cameras arrived.
There were several dozen people now, and across the street, on a hill overlooking the roundabout, Kevin stood, watching. He had decided to come after all. Some of the people in the roundabout he recognized. Some he didn’t. Some he heard yelling. Others stood quietly, waving to cars as they passed. There was a woman driving by, holding up her middle finger. “Bye, moron,” a protester said. There was a young man, waving through his open car window. “Love it! Love it!” he shouted. There was Taiese Bingham-Hickman, walking toward a police sergeant she spotted on the lawn to ask him for an update about the anonymous call. There was Ron Tibbetts, driving by with his wife, taking it all in. There was Kate O’Brien, driving away from town in the other direction, hoping to avoid the protest altogether.
On it went, and Kevin kept watching, reminding himself once more that however the town might change, it might be totally fine.
Now he turned away from the protest and looked up. He saw dark clouds gathering.
The rain fell lightly at first. Then harder. Heavy rain washed over the town.
It came down on the protesters’ signs, which they held above their heads for protection.
It covered the roundabout, Kevin’s shop and the prison down the road.
It pounded down on the roofs of cars parked nearby, where people at the roundabout were retreating. Some walked. Others ran. Cars drove off. The honking stopped. The protest never made it to the prison. As the migrants were settling in for their first night, the roundabout was empty. There was only rain now, and a few abandoned signs on the ground in a small, quiet town, where everyone was seeking shelter. What do you remember about developing this last line? What impression do you hope it leaves readers with?I knew I wanted to return to the image of the small, quiet town from the beginning of the story. I also wanted the pacing of the line to force readers to slow down, almost to a standstill, until it ends with something basic: the idea of shelter.
* * *
Trevor Pyle is a veteran newspaper reporter from the Pacific Northwest who now works as a communications officer for a regional nonprofit.
