“There’s no town drunk here, we all take turns”

“There’s no town drunk here, we all take turns” is a comic expression of collective responsibility: no single person owns the town’s disgrace because everyone shares it in rotation. Repeated in ordinary conversation and a dreamlike historical scene, the line also resonates with the community’s habit of disguising exclusion and complicity as local custom.

The Saying and Its Recurrence

The expression appears first as a compact maxim in the narrator’s notes, then returns in the voice of an older man encountered in a vision of the past. In that scene, the man claps without looking at the narrator and rebukes him for meddling, insisting that the town has no permanent drunk because its residents take turns. The words are nearly the same, but the changed setting gives the joke a sharper edge: what first reads as folksy self-mockery becomes part of a confrontation with the town’s history.

The older man’s remark comes amid the narrator’s disorientation at the fair, where he carries a crying child and struggles to understand whether the experience is a dream. The tobacco on the man’s breath, the crowd’s smell, and the child’s weight feel real even as the narrator recognizes the scene as a dream. The saying thus bridges the town’s familiar idiom and a past that remains sensuously present rather than safely finished.

Community, Memory, and Concealment

The expression’s plural logic suits a town where responsibility and memory are distributed across generations. Discussing the death of little Kerry Auster, Bill Dean warns that such matters touch sore places and that, in small towns, lives are connected beneath the surface. The narrator understands the image as hidden cables and recognizes Bill’s further point: the past dies slowly. The rotating drunk is therefore more than an individual failing; the phrase suggests a community that shares its flaws while keeping their deeper connections out of sight.

That shared history includes the arrival of more than forty Black settlers at the turn of the century. Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops purchased Tidwell’s Meadow and nearby lakeside land after saving for ten years. Local residents protested their arrival, imagining a shanty town; instead, neat white cabins and a larger communal building appeared. The band played across western Maine for more than a year, perhaps nearly two, and became popular on the circuit. At home, the arrangement held under a narrow local peace: the settlers paid their bills, kept to themselves, and, above all, did not take charity.

The apparent accommodation did not erase racial hierarchy. Contemporary clippings praised the musicians in patronizing, racist language, styling them as genial curiosities rather than treating them as equals. The narrator’s account of the town’s unwritten standards makes the contradiction plain: acceptance is conditional on separation and self-sufficiency. Sara’s movement along The Street, including in her white dress and sometimes with her son, violated the expectation that she remain socially contained. The hostility directed at her exposes how a community can praise its own tolerance while policing who may belong in public space.

The Past Beneath the Joke

After Sara and the Red-Tops played a county fair or two in late summer 1901, the clan left the area. The cabins remained as summer rentals for the Day family until the 1933 fires destroyed them. The record of settlement and departure gives the saying a quiet historical undertow: the town can tell itself that everyone takes a turn, yet its account of the past also depends on what was omitted, softened, or left unrecorded.

The expression’s force lies in that tension. Its humor levels the distinction between one designated culprit and everyone else, while the narrative’s history shows that not everyone bears the same risks or receives the same welcome. The town’s genial language and its racial exclusions coexist; the joke about shared fault does not by itself undo that imbalance. Repeated across present recollection and a dream of the past, the line becomes a small, memorable measure of how local identity can acknowledge disorder while evading the history that gives it meaning.