2 June 2025, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2755: I don’t want criticism

Image by Nile from Pixabay

Capt. R.E. Ludlow had a thing about knowing he had to do something … he had known for weeks, and was gathering in his mind how best to do it, constantly, even doing anything and everything else.

Mrs. Ludlow always knew when he was getting close to doing it …

“Robert,” she said one early morning, “you are reciting what sounds like the Gettysburg Address in your sleep.”

“Yeah, I gotta get this letter I gotta write done,” he said. “It's pacing around in my head.”

But it didn't come together until he overheard ten-year-old Glendella Ludlow talking with eleven-year-old Velma Trent next door.

“Yeah, criticism definitely hits different when you know the adult doing it actually wants to help you get better,” Glendella was saying.

“I think some adults don't want criticism either,” Velma was saying, “and I don't know if they are sure anybody loves them, and that causes major problems because then they can't ever hear that they wrong in time to correct themselves.”

“Yeah, because that thing at Bayard Heights was way louder than anybody needed to hear,” Glendella said.

Capt. Ludlow went to his improvised work desk in the Tinyville home his family was staying in, and started writing. The following day, his open letter was published in the *Big Loft Bulletin,*and reprinted in both the Veteran's Lodge newsletter and the Lofton County Free Voice, the latter of which made this statement about it: “The Free Voice will not normally platform White men, but when such a man speaks the truth, he furthers the cause we are also in.”

The captain's letter was as follows:

“As the only surviving son of Edwin Ludlow, and as the person tasked to go into the family archive and retrieve and make and distribute copies of such documents as are necessary to determine what the intent and original plans for the Bayard Heights neighborhood were, as opposed to the disaster it has literally collapsed into, I feel that it is necessary for me to stand in my father's place and offer something by which things in Lofton County can be built better in the future. Edwin Ludlow, and his son my brother Edwin Ludlow Jr., gave their entire lives to the betterment of this county. I cannot be silent in the face of such a complete failure of architecture, engineering, and good sense that the destruction of Bayard Heights neighborhood is and still say that I honored their memory.

“About the physical causes of the destruction of Bayard Heights, and the 1,967 homes there, too much is known and there is more still to learn that could make any head of household in Lofton County concerned about the security of where his or her family lays their heads. I have to my charge the care of Edwin Ludlow's great-grandchildren and a beloved cousin of their generation, and I have such deep concerns. However, because I was born in 1962, not this century in which we like to pretend we are so much more advanced, I can do better than most in saying where the trouble starts from, and who we must remove from public life to be safe again.

“When I was a wee lad of five in 1967, there was a rule among certain men that they were not ever to be criticized. To do so meant death. To even be darker than them, and think you had the right to look them in the eye and walk straight ahead as though you also might have a right to the curb was death. My uncles, with one of them holding me in his arms, murdered three Black men in the street simply because those men dared not to instantly clear the entire block as my uncles were walking down. These men, if you followed them home, engaged in various forms of ruling by economic and personal terror over the women and children in their households. I mentioned that I was made to witness a triple murder, and I was not even their child. I was blessed to go home to Edwin and Helena Ludlow.

“My father, in considering what I had been made to witness, realized that such men who would expose his baby son of all people to such cruelty must not have been of sound and trustworthy mind, for by this time the federal government was looking to force all Southern states into compliance with civil rights, and Lofton County would come under firm and damaging enforcement. These men were destroying the very order they wanted to uphold in their hubris, and my father realized they must have been like that in other aspects of their life and work. Their hubris, their arrogance, their lack of regard for the presence of children, their centering of their own need to play at godhood at the expense of human life – that was a tell for my father, and he used his influence to force them out of public responsibility. 53 years later, I finished the job. I had those three uncles arrested for murder and testified against them.

“The men responsible for the destruction of Bayard Heights bear the same signs that my father noted in the men who indelibly damaged my childhood: hubris, for they were warned by my father and brother for a combined 38 years; arrogance, because in the face of clear evidence that Bayard Heights needed to be evacuated and definite action taken to save the houses that could be saved, they refused to listen. Those houses were family homes, so the people responsible had complete disregard for the presence of children. They only cared to keep sitting in a political or corporate office, collecting fat lobbyist checks, and pretending they were gods over their little kingdom built on a sinkhole over an ancient creek. We already know the results.

“I speak to admonish Lofton County to finish the job. The people who are fully responsible for this tragedy are known. It is time for them, and those who support them, to be removed from public life. We can do this through the peaceful transfer of power we can enact at the ballot box, and we can so this through boycotting the construction companies that did this criminally shoddy work, so that every individual and family who lay their head down in Lofton County in the future can do so without fearing for their lives.

“I do not believe the dead are troubled by the failures of their heirs to uphold their legacy. Edwin Ludlow and Edwin Ludlow Jr., my father and brother, acquitted themselves of this responsibility long ago and are long past being concerned with what we do. I now also, as the heir of my father, caretaker of his great-grandchildren, have now discharged the first part of my duty, and will continue the second part until every person responsible for this is out of office and every company is out of business.

“Capt. Robert Edward Ludlow Sr., U.S. Army, Retired.”

16-year-old Tom Stepforth Sr., intrepid young reporter for the Free Voice who had done the voiceover for the Bayard Heights livestream, had gotten the scoop again when he heard the Free Voice was going to run that letter too…

“Capt. Ludlow,” he said, “could you just let me mic you up as you sit at the desk and read your letter? The people need to see and hear how much this really matters – can you just use your white privilege real quick?”

“For the safety of Edwin Ludlow's great-grandchildren, and their beloved cousin, and also you and your beloved cousins, Tom, because I refuse to forward my uncles' evil legacy, I'll do whatever is necessary.”

So he read it, in his deep, penetrating basso profondo, with his white hair and beard and military bearing reminding Virginia of a certain ancestral Lee uncle of his, and shook up not only Lofton County, but the entire United States, because … .

“Are any of us safe if that's the measurement we need to look at?” Mrs. Maggie Lee said to Mrs. Velma Stepforth.

“We've been tellin' y'all,” Mrs. Stepforth said, and then added, “now, not necessarily your family for 400 years because Italian Americans do have a different story, and Nabucco Milano your grandfather literally was out there marching with us in the 1960s and 1970s. But when it comes to the United States, we've been tellin' y'all that the type of people that would sacrifice anybody's children for their profit ain't safe for nobody. Lofton County has been really hard of hearing, but it heard the collapse of Bayard Heights, and it darn sure is hearing Robert Edward Ludlow Sr.! The truth is going to be heard – all we get to do is pick whether it's a reasonable conversation or a yelling match we'll always lose.”