Kent Merritt

Because I was a little boy when that happened.  I mean it was just an emptiness.  It didn’t affect me as much as, say, if I were an adult or a little bit older.  But that’s where we went.  That’s where we went.  We went in the barber shop, Bibb’s Fish Market was there, even though Mr. Bibb was a white guy.  But he was a nice man.  Zion Union Church was there when we started church.  A lot of different little places that sold things were there.  So when that left it was just kind of an emptiness.  I mean it was kind of — but being a kid, of course, we kind of relied on our parents to take us where we needed to go and that sort of thing.  We didn’t really venture out on our own back then.  But it was like something that you expected to see was gone.  And it was just kind of empty.  It was just nothing there.  For a lot of years, there’s nothing there.