Stamford
’76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race and Feminism in the 1970s, by
JoeAnn Hart (U. of Iowa Press, 2019)
Peter Anastas
“A black
drug dealer almost certainly killed his white girlfriend, then got killed
himself by a police officer during an armed robbery. What could I possibly hope to accomplish by
writing that story? Nothing. I had to
shape meaning out of what seemed be to meaningless violence.”
--JoeAnn
Hart, Stamford ‘76
Among a
writer’s books there are those that come to us naturally. But almost always there is another kind of
book. It is not the book we write, but the book that writes us. We may be at the keyboard or with pen in
hand, but there is another force driving us to put down words on a page. It may
be a voice from the past urging us on, or the pressure of a traumatic event,
the outlines of which are still unclear.
It may be a story we have long wanted to tell, if only we could find a
way to tell it, or we could discover certain details that have remained hidden
or even unknown to us.
When we
do tell this story, we often discover that it is a story as much about
ourselves as its elusive subject or characters. Often we find out that we are trying to learn
more about who we were at the time of the story and, as a consequence of the
telling, who we are now—who we have become.
Hence, we are written as we write.
This is
one of the themes of Gloucester writer JoeAnn Hart’s stunning new book, Stamford ’76, published in April by the University
of Iowa Press.
It is a
book that works on many levels. As
memoir, Hart is writing about herself and her nuclear family in the context of
an interracial relationship she embarked on after dropping out of college in 1975,
at the age of 18, and moving to Stamford, Connecticut, where she found work in
bars and restaurants, and eventually in a bank.
Stamford ’76 can
also be read as a true crime story. Hart
and her black lover Joe Louis were friends with another interracial couple, both
of whom died violent deaths. The white
woman, 24 year old Margo Olson, was found in a shallow grave in an abandoned
potter’s field in Stamford, her heart pierced by a steel arrowhead. Her partner Howie, who may have killed her,
died at the hands of police during a botched liquor store robbery. The circumstances of their deaths remained a
mystery that haunted Hart for decades.
As Hart
writes: “Leaving behind the memory of Margo had meant forgetting parts of
myself, and I needed that eighteen-year-old by my side as I faced the challenge
of getting three children through their teenage years. I wanted to gain some wisdom from that girl,
who was both reckless and brave to a fault, and to do that I had to open the
box marked Fragile.
“In
that box,” Hart continues, “nestled along with all my stored emotion, was a
three-pronged mission, (1) figure out what had happened to Margo, (2), remember
what had been going on with me, and (3) try to understand why her death made me
so wary, for so long.”
This,
then, is the thrust of a narrative that is as revealing as it is riveting. It is here that Hart employs her superb
investigative skills in attempting to solve the question of Margo’s death as a “study
in silence,” and the abandonment of her body in a makeshift grave. Here, also, she uncovers the couples’
entanglement with drug dealing and organized crime. Equally, Hart unearths a
parallel story whose outlines were unclear to her at the time of her
involvement with Margo and Howie. And
that is the story of the growing presence of organized crime in Stamford, aided
and abetted by the local Democratic Party establishment and the participation in
criminal activities of certain key members of the Stamford police force,
including the drug trafficking that led to the deaths of Margo and Howie.
Having
published two novels (Addled, 2007,
and Float, 2013), along with numerous
essays, short stories, and works of journalism, Hart is an accomplished writer of fiction and
non-fiction. Everywhere in the narrative one experiences Hart’s novelist’s eye
for detail, which helps to give the book its powerful sense of immediacy.
Hart’s story
also has social and political implications.
At the time of the events described (and during the country’s
Bi-Centennial Celebrations), Stamford was undergoing extensive Urban Renewal,
so that the city could lure major corporations out of the nearby crumbling New
York City. In order to achieve this,
blacks and other minorities had to be pushed out of neighborhoods that had long
been theirs to make way for the high tax payers. As a consequence, race relations, strained during
the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, worsened, housing problems escalated,
and Stamford became a more problematic city to live and work in, as it turned “whiter
by the hour,” as Hart describes it.
Some of
this Hart learned while living and working in the city and involved with Joe
Louis, his family, and his friends, including Howie and Margo. There is a particularly affecting picture of
Joe’s jazz and gospel singer mother Georgia, with whom Hart remained close even
after Joe’s death. Though Joe had
graduated from Columbia, much of his income came from gambling, drug dealing
and flipping used cars. He also ran unsuccessfully
for public office. As a consequence,
Hart’s paychecks kept their often unstable living situations afloat. Joe also became an increasingly heavy drinker. A significant part of the narrative involves
Hart’s attempts to come into her own as a person and a woman under the aegis of
second-wave feminism, while trying to remain in a committed relationship. Though Joe did not readily speak about it,
the couple remained haunted by the deaths of Howie and Margo.
After
the couple finally separated and Hart was living in Colorado, about to meet the
man she eventually married, the story of Margo and Howie continued to affect
her. Her search for clues about their
deaths, particularly Margo’s, as Hart traveled back to Stamford during the
intervening years, searching through police records and the archives of the
Stamford Advocate, tracking down
people to speak with, and eventually writing about the case and her life in
Stamford, constitutes one of the most dramatic dimensions of a book that will
keep readers in suspense.
In the
end, after all of her careful research and brilliant detective work, Hart
returns to the potter’s field where Margo’s body had been found by
picnickers. It is there that she finally
experiences a sense of closure.
“I had
found Margo and with her, my younger self,” Hart concludes. But in the process of this act of recovery, readers
have shared the journey of a writer, who is as unrelenting in her pursuit of
self-knowledge as she is redemptive of her lost friends, who, in part, enabled
that important discovery.
_______________
JoeAnn
Hart will be reading locally from Stamford
’76 at the Gloucester Lyceum, on April 18, from 7 to 9 p.m. and at the
Gloucester Writers Center (Rocky Neck Cultural Center), on May 22, from 7:30 to
9 p.m. with discussion
