I worked it free and unwrapped the rag standing right there, and I set the whole thing down on the garage floor, because it was a book. A big ledger, a bundle of letters tied with string, and a thin worn paperback with a green cover that I did not know at first.
The green paperback was a thing called the Negro Motorist Green Book. I had to look it up to understand it. Back in the days of segregation, a Black family driving through the South could not count on a place to buy gas, or eat, or sleep, or even use a restroom, and a good many of the places that did let them in were not safe. So they carried this book, the Green Book, that listed the spots up and down the highways where a Black traveler would be safe and welcome. And the old gas station and bait shop out on Highway 84, the one I bought that drink cooler from, the one Mr. Sam ran for fifty years, was listed in it. A safe place.
The ledger was a guest book. Page after page of names, families passing through Valdosta on Highway 84 going back to the nineteen fifties, Black travelers who stopped at that station because the book told them it was safe, and it was. He gave them gas and a cold drink and a clean restroom and honest directions, and, the letters said, a whole lot more than that. When a family got turned away from every motel in the county, Mr. Sam let them sleep in his back room. When a car broke down and a man had no money, Mr. Sam fixed it and told him to send it along when he could, or never. When the road was not safe after dark, Mr. Sam told them to wait, and he sat up with them until it was.
The letters were thank-yous. Sixty years of them, from all over the country, from those travelers and then their children and then their grandchildren. You cannot know what it meant, in those years, to see one place on that whole highway where we knew we would be treated like people. You were that place. God bless you, Mr. Sam.
Mr. Sam was a quiet old white man who pumped gas and sold worms on a Georgia highway for fifty years, and I bought his drink cooler for forty dollars thinking it was just a scrap of an old store I used to stop at as a boy. He never once talked about a bit of this. He just quietly did the decent and dangerous thing, year after year, in a time and a place where a great many folks did the exact opposite, and he kept the proof of it wired up behind a compressor where no one would ever find it, because he never did any of it to be seen.
I took the guest book and the letters to the county historical society, and to the college, and there is going to be a proper record now of what that little station on Highway 84 was, and what the man who ran it did with his fifty years. Some of the families in that guest book still pass through Valdosta. A few of them are coming back this fall, old now, to stand where the station used to be and remember the plain quiet man who made the highway safe for them when almost nobody else would. He asked for nothing and he told nobody. It is long past time somebody knew.