03.02.08
The Epiphany
When Armen was just learning to walk, his father Judge Adroushan had his epiphany.
The Judge might not have seemed ripe for change, as he had developed quite a career in law as a judge in his hometown of Fresno. He was not only the only Armenian judge on the County Superior Court, but he was also the only blind member of the court as well. Many thought that he made a bit too much of the circumstance, going so far as to wear a white blindfold, not only at court, but reportedly at all times. It certainly made for good stage, particularly in the justice system, but he played down the drama with statements like “some men wear sunglasses; some wear eye patches. I’m more comfortable with this.”
He would occasionally say that he resolved many years ago to wear his blindness with the dignity of choice rather than the shame of circumstance. He was not a victim of anything. A judge determines as much from the tone of a person’s voice as the look on their face, but as to the latter: he had his spies. A well-trained blind ear can pick up nuances that the most perceptive dramatist might miss.
“The job of a judge is to listen,” he would say, and he’d occasionally add, “the human race is not set apart by its powers of vision.”
The attorneys were not oblivious to his perceptiveness, and generally felt themselves at an unfair disadvantage. To many, dealing with a blind man was something like dealing with a faceless man. Though those that had some experience with the judge felt they had a leg up on the competition, none of them felt that they could ever sustain any sense of control of the momentum of a trial.
It happened one sultry evening at a new Cajun restaurant in Fresno. The special that night was Frogmore stew, a spicy concoction of leftovers along the lines of paella, goulash, and pizza, featuring shrimp, crab, potatoes, sausage, and corn cobs. The dish struck the judge somewhere deep down, and it would later become obvious that he would never be the same. The Adroushan family began eating at the new restaurant regularly—as often as the judge could manage without embarrassment. One night he could no longer resist asking the waiter about the history of the dish. He sensed a soul in the dish that he felt compelled to get to know intimately. A dish is, to some extent, an extension of a people. The judge had a sense that this was particularly true for Frogmore stew, and there was something about the soul of this dish that spoke to him.
“No frogs?,” inquired the Judge.
“Frogs, sir?”
“In the stew.”
“Oh, no sir.”
Mrs. Adroushan let out a sigh.
“Then why the name?”, continued the judge.
The waiter could not provide an immediate answer, but after consulting with the chef, he returned to the Adroushan table to explain that the dish originated with a fishing village by the same name in South Carolina.
The town is no longer on the map—not, by that name anyway, for the demands of the tourist trade eventually forced the village to be renamed to Saint Helena, after the Island on which it is situated.
Judge Adroushan quickly developed a sense of remote commonality with the people of Frogmore from that stew. It was as if they were kindred spirits; as though he had lived a previous life there. The town gave his life a new sense of direction; a kind of mission. This was quite in the spirit of the village itself, as it had a missionary history. It was the place where Laura Matilda Towne and Ellen Murray moved to serve the population of freed slaves and establish the Penn School in 1862.
By the time the Adroushans arrived in Frogmore, over a century after Penn School was founded, not much had changed. Frogmore remained to all appearances a largely autonomous colony of freed slaves. Some things had changed. There were of course the modern conveniences like plumbing, though such modern conveniences were largely dysfunctional. The boxer Joe Frazier, himself a native of nearby Beaufort, was reported to have called Frogmore the slum of the South.
It may be rightly said that Frogmore was also the Geneva of the South in 1966. It was in Frogmore, at Penn Center, that Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, Jessie Jackson, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference met every year. Locals, including the judge and his family, were invited to attend the November 1966 conference, during which much debate took place regarding the pros and cons of nonviolent activism. It was at this conference that King expanded his vision from civil rights to human rights. Frogmore was at once nowhere and the place to be, but that was neither here not there to the Judge.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
