The colour line at the desk: the Green Book, run edition by edition — absence printed as absence

1940 · 1949 · 1947 TRANSCRIPTION · THE NEGRO MOTORIST / TRAVELERS' GREEN BOOK

The Green Book was opened for this ground and run site by site, in the NYPL/Schomburg scans and their full-text twins, for Granger, for Mishawaka, and for the State Road 23 corridor — and the corridor's honest answer is that the book never comes here. The editions read whole at their Indiana pages — the 1940 Negro Motorist Green Book, the 1949 edition, and the Smithsonian-transcribed edition of the same era — agree exactly. Indiana's lodging listings in them stand in Anderson, Angola (Fox Lake Resort), Elkhart, Evansville, French Lick, Gary, Indianapolis, Jeffersonville, Kokomo, Marion, Michigan City, Muncie, New Albany and Terre Haute. South Bend appears in every edition read, and appears only as a restaurant: "Smoke's Place — 492 Chapin St." (1940; 432 S. Chapin St. in the later readings, the address variants printed as the editions give them) — a place to eat, and not one hotel, tourist home, motel or rooming house where a Black traveller could sleep in the county seat itself. Granger does not appear. Mishawaka does not appear. No listing stands anywhere on State Road 23, Cleveland Road, or any road inside the Granger line, in any edition read. The nearest Green Book bed to this ground in those editions is Elkhart's: "Miss E. Botts — 336 St. Joe St.," a tourist home one county east. That is the colour line at Granger's desk, stated at the record's strength: for the whole Green Book era this ground had no public lodging of its own at all for most of that era (its first hotel opened in 2014), and for the traveller the book was written for, the county around it offered a restaurant in South Bend and a tourist home in Elkhart, and nothing else the book could print. The absence is printed as absence, with its editions named: it proves what the book did not list, and the book's own prefaces warn that thousands of willing places went unlisted for want of agents — but a desk that was never built cannot be tested for whom it turned away, and no refusal, exclusion or admission incident at any Granger lodging appears in any source reached, for the sufficient reason that there was no Granger lodging to have one at.

Sources: The Negro Motorist Green Book, 1940 ed. (Archive.org full text): Indiana pages — South Bend, restaurant only (Smoke's Place, 492 Chapin St.); no Granger, no Mishawaka. The Negro Motorist Green Book, 1949 ed. (Archive.org full text; NYPL/Schomburg scan): South Bend — "Smokes — 432 S. Chapin St.," restaurants only. Smithsonian Transcription Center, NMAAHC Green Book transcription: Indiana pages — Elkhart tourist home (Miss E. Botts, 336 St. Joe St.); South Bend restaurant only. NYPL Digital Collections, The Negro Travelers' Green Book, Fall 1956 ed. (Schomburg Center): the edition consulted for the motel-era span; its Indiana lodging geography is the same — no Granger or SR 23 listing surfaced in the run. Editions named; absence printed as absence.