Born and raised in the diverse and highly populated Dallas, Texas, I had no intentions of moving. I felt blindsided by my lack of choice and the mere three months I had to prepare. I was anxious about leaving my family and experiencing such a huge shift in demographics.

During the ride there, as the city streets I’d grown accustomed to faded and dirt roads became the norm, my apprehension multiplied. How could a city girl like me adjust to this new world? And how would I find community when my research indicated that less than 2% of the population in the entire state was Black like me? I secretly wished for a call from my husband saying he’d changed his mind or — better yet — that it was all just a practical joke.

The first couple of weeks were spent in denial. I’d arrived on a long weekend, so my husband and I were able to enjoy our honeymoon phase we didn’t have while living with family. But when I finally stepped out into the brutal Wyoming winter, I could no longer pretend that nothing had changed. The snow and the people were all foreign to me, and I longed to return home. I was both literally and metaphorically surrounded by whiteness.

The demographics weren’t much better on the base. There were many military spouses, but few of them cared for my conversations on the Black experience or my feelings of loneliness as a Black woman. I remember crying my eyes out after walking into Spencer’s at the local mall and seeing a wall adorned with a wide range of Confederate flag paraphernalia. I was resentful towards my husband for having brought me here and angry at myself for coming.

By the third month, I’d given up on making friends or feeling like I would belong. But I refused to stay in the house. The quaint layout of downtown reminded me of the university town where I’d spent the last four years, and I was curious about what secrets hid behind the weathered buildings.

It took over a year before I ended up at the Wyoming State Museum and found its best-kept secrets.

The bulk of the museum was dedicated to retellings of settling the West and its rich history of natural resources. Yet the milestones of women’s suffrage and the inspiring stories of Native resistance piqued my interest, though I didn’t feel either was thoroughly covered in these displays. I wanted to know more about marginalized people who made it despite being othered. My curiosity led me across the hall to the Wyoming State Archive.

Ten members of the Black 14 at the University of Wyoming, fall, 1969. Front center: Earl Lee Second row l-r: John Griffin and Willie Hysaw; Third row l-r: Don Meadows and Ivie Moore; Fourth row l-r: Tony Gibson, Jerry Berry and Joe Williams; Fifth row l-r: Mel Hamilton and Jim Issac. Not shown are Tony Magee, Ted Williams, Lionel Grimes and Ron Hill. American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

Members of the 9th Cavalry practice shooting at Fort D.A. Russell outside Cheyenne during World War I, about 1917. By this time the War Department, despite the evidence of the previous 50 years, had decided that black troops were unfit for combat. Wyoming State Archives.

I began by flipping through images and newspaper clippings related to women’s and Native histories in Wyoming. After a short time, I gathered the courage to ask if there were records about Black people. The volunteer laughed at my question and replied, Of course! Within minutes I was nose deep in stories and photographs of Black Americans in 18th-century attire who inhabited the Midwest. My heart raced with joy upon realizing I was far from the first Black person to reside in the Plains. Not only did we exist — we often thrived.

For Black Americans, the West offered an opportunity to work in isolation from the rest of the nation. The region was so underpopulated that work ethic could potentially outweigh race, and Black settlers took advantage of the opportunity. There were photographs of Black landowners who even sustained full communities. It was impossible not to see my connection with these early Black settlers. My husband and I were also seeking a better life and had hoped to gain financial independence and to start a family in the sparsely populated state. With each image, I started to feel less like a random demographic dot and more like the continuation of a long thread of Blackness.

Despite being called “The Equality State,” things weren’t equal for Black Americans. However, I was also shocked to find that, in some ways, Wyoming’s treatment of Black Americans had been less harsh than other regions. For example, in November 1869, Black women in Wyoming Territory became the first black women in the nation to gain the right to vote¹. I also learned of the Buffalo Soldiers², the all-Black 9th and 10th cavalries whose earliest members were mostly ex-slaves, and how they accomplished noteworthy missions despite fighting both a war and racial adversity. They are even memorialized as statues right outside the military base.

But the mid- to late 1800s were long before my time, and I craved more recent examples of our footprint on the territory. It didn’t take long to find it. I quickly learned the Black citizens of Wyoming didn’t allow their low numbers to shock them into silence.

Harriett Elizabeth “Liz” Byrd³, whose grandfather, Charles Rhone, arrived in Wyoming Territory as a child in 1876, was the first example. A fourth generation Wyomingite, Byrd went on to be the first fully certified, full-time black teacher in Wyoming and the first Black woman elected into the Wyoming legislature, having served as a state representative and later serving in the Senate. Her husband, James Bryd, was retired military and served for 16 years as the state’s first Black police chief.

The Byrd family legacy is a long list of noteworthy accomplishments and community first. But it’s vital to mention that the road was far from easy. It included intense encounters with those who adamantly resisted racial equality and change in the Midwest. Liz and James Byrd had three children, one of whom is currently involved⁴ in Wyoming politics.

On top of that, long before Colin Kaepernick, The Black 14 and several other Black students at the University of Wyoming were expelled after wearing armbands in protest of several political issues⁵. I felt pride knowing that regardless of where we were, we found ways to take a stand against injustice. Wyoming might have been mostly white, but the history went far beyond whiteness.

I’d been lost in the archives for hours. Just hearing the stories gave me a sense of belonging, and my willingness to find my place was renewed. I knew the thread of Blackness hadn’t stopped in the ‘60s, so I started looking for the remnants of Black social change in Wyoming today. Coincidentally, I heard about the Black Heritage Month celebration and, a few months later, I finally found the community I longed for. When I entered the church-held event, I saw pew after pew of Black Wyomingites. I started to cry. Like most places, faith was what held the Black community of Wyoming together.

Former educator and politician Harriet Elizabeth “Liz” Byrd poses for a portrait at her home in 2010. Byrd graduated from Cheyenne High School in 1944 and became the first black teacher in the state of Wyoming during the 1950s. Byrd also served eight years in the Wyoming House of Representatives and four years in the Senate, becoming the first black person to serve in both houses. During her political career, she sponsored legislation establishing a state holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1991. MICHAEL SMITH, courtesy of the Wyoming Tribune Eagle

I began meeting more Black elders and asking their stories about migrating here. Many had been here for three or four generations. Their parents and grandparents came seeking opportunities with the railroads, military and agriculture. For them, Wyoming was the only home they’d ever known. I began asking myself why I thought I didn’t belong here — and why I felt my presence here needed to be explained. My predecessors and these living elders had already explained their presence, so I didn’t need to explain mine.

With time, I started seeing more young Black military migrants navigating the same things I’d experienced. I’d tell them that it gets better, let them know we are not the first nor the last, and I made it a priority to suggest they visit the State Archive, too.

Almost five years later, I’ve met so many people and heard so many stories. I still see the occasional Confederate flag, but now I know they have no ties to the territory of Wyoming. My people belong here just as much as anyone else. And as my husband and I raise our two children here, I look forward to passing on that message.

Wyoming isn’t home for good. But it’s a good home for now.

FOOTNOTES

1. Tom Rea, “Right Choice, Wrong Reasons: Wyoming Women Win the Right to Vote,” https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/
   right-choice-wrong-reasons-wyoming-women-win-right-vote
2. Tom Rea, “Buffalo Soldiers in Wyoming and the West,” https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/
   buffalo-soldiers-wyoming-and-west
3. Lori Van Pelt, “Liz Byrd, First Black Woman in Wyoming’s Legislature,” https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/
   liz-byrd-first-black-woman-wyoming-legislature
4. Joel Funk, “Cheyenne Democrat James Byrd to run for Wyoming Secretary of State,” Wyoming Tribune Eagle, https://www.
   wyomingnews.com/news/local_news/cheyenne-democrat-james-byrd-to-run-for-wyoming-secretary-of/article_0b336600-0d69-
   11e8-ad2c-4fe44ed691bf.html
5. Phil White, “The Black 14: Race, Politics, Religion, and Wyoming Football,” https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/
   black-14-race-politics-religion-and-wyoming-football

The post A Thread of Blackness appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

While reading Jon Lauck’s essay, “Regionalist Stirrings in the Midwest,” (The New Territory Issue 01), I was struck by the author’s argument that the past century’s literary critics largely ignored Midwestern writers. What, I wondered, about the timeless and award-winning work of Toni Morrison? Morrison, like other African American literary luminaries (Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and Gwendolyn Brooks, to name just a few) was born in the Midwest and like them she has devoted a significant portion of her career to examining African American lives in the cities, small towns, hills, valleys and rivers of the region. We miss out on much that is important about the Midwest when we fail to consider the complex narratives of African Americans here.

Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye is set in her birthplace, Lorain, Ohio. She returned to Ohio in Sula (1973) and Beloved (1987) while also contemplating African American life, history, and memory in Michigan in Sula (1973) and Oklahoma in Paradise (1997). Reading Beloved is necessary not only for its own sake, but especially when considering the 19th Century history of the Midwest.

Set on the banks of the Ohio River just outside Cincinnati, Beloved’s inspiration was the tragic history of Margaret Garner. In 1856, Garner and her family escaped from slavery in Kentucky by crossing over the frozen Ohio River. They were discovered and, while cornered, Margaret Garner determined to kill her children and herself rather than allow any of them to be re-enslaved. She succeeded in killing one child before being captured and imprisoned. Her trial determined neither guilt nor innocence in the death of her daughter, but rather that her Kentucky owner had the right to pursue and recoup his property (the Garner family) even after they had escaped slave territory (Kentucky) and had found refuge in free territory (Ohio). As a result, she and her surviving family members were sold further south.

Morrison uses Beloved to create voices for enslaved women like Margaret Garner who were rendered voiceless by laws that denied them the right to read and write, to testify in court, to benefit from their own labor, to legally wed, to control access to their own bodies and to claim their children as their own.

Through the novel, Morrison also helps her audience better appreciate that the histories of slavery and freedom in the United States are neither confined to the American South nor constricted by simplistic Northern-Southern geographical and cultural divisions. Instead, Morrison brings to life the reality that some of the most pressing issues surrounding slavery
and freedom in the United States played out in the Middle West.

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN THE LOWER MIDWEST

For much of the early to mid-1800s, the Lower Midwest was a battleground upon which the future of slavery across the nation was fought. The conflict over slavery was hastened by the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, through which the United States acquired territory that eventually became Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. The first clash, taking place between 1818 and 1820, was over Missouri’s admission to statehood as a slave state. It resulted in the Missouri Compromise. The Comprise allowed slavery in Missouri but drew a corner around the area that would one day become Kansas and Nebraska. That corner would be closed to slavery. Like Missouri, however, Arkansas and Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) would also be open to slavery. As a result, between 1810 and 1860, the slave populations in Missouri and Arkansas ballooned from 3,011 to 114,931 and 188 to 111,115, respectively. Oklahoma did not become a state until the 20th Century, but in 1860 more than 8,000 blacks were held in slavery in Indian Territory.

Thirty years later, America’s crisis over slavery was again exposed in the Lower Midwest. First, free blacks, including those like Margaret Garner who had escaped slavery and settled in free territory, were put in danger through the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. The law allowed anyone to be deputized to aid in capturing any black accused of being a slave. It denied the accused the right to testify in their own defense and provided monetary incentives for courts to determine that blacks were slaves rather than free.

Then in 1854, Congress nullified the Missouri Compromise by passing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The legislation allowed for citizens of each future state to determine their slave status through the principle of “popular sovereignty,” meaning through the electoral process. As a result of the law, pro- and anti-slavery partisans flooded into Kansas and engaged in bloody warfare in order to gain control of the territory in advance of statehood. After years of violence and political battles, Kansas entered the Union as a free state in 1861. Nebraska became a state in 1867, two years after the Civil War settled the question of slavery in the United States.

While important, statistics, legislation, and political battles over slavery only tell a portion of the story. As Toni Morrison reminds us, the human element of slavery can never be overlooked.

DRED SCOTT AND THE PURSUIT OF FREEDOM

Among the hundreds of thousands of individual stories about slavery, Garner’s is just one—lucky to be preserved by Morrison’s talented pen and ultimately ending in tragedy. Dred Scott’s story, while tragic, endures of its own accord. His lawsuit, filed in circuit court in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1846 and decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1856, the same year that Garner attempted her own bid for freedom, made him one of the most important figures in 19th Century American history.

Born in Virginia around 1799, Dred Scott was owned by Peter and Elizabeth Blow. Seeking better fortunes, the Blows moved, with their slaves, first to Alabama and then in or around 1830 to St. Louis, Missouri. In 1831, the Blows sold Scott to Army surgeon John Emerson. Between 1831 and 1842, Dred Scott served Emerson in Missouri, Illinois, and at Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory (now Minnesota). The practice of slavery was illegal in the latter two places. During this 12-year period Scott married Harriet Robinson, an enslaved woman. The couple raised two daughters while serving Dr. Emerson and his wife Eliza Irene Sanford, primarily in free territory. The Scotts returned to St. Louis with the Emersons in 1842, and the surgeon died a year later. For several years, Mrs. Emerson hired out the Scotts in St. Louis.

In 1846, however, the Scotts filed suit against Emerson for their freedom and the freedom of their daughters on the grounds that for more than a decade they had lived in territory where slavery was illegal. The Scott family had reason to hope for a successful outcome to their lawsuit. Missouri courts had long been known to follow the doctrine of “once free, always free” in deciding similar cases. Indeed, the Scotts won their initial petition. But an appeals court reversed the decision. More appeals and many delays followed. In the meantime, Emerson remarried and transferred ownership of the Scotts to her brother John Sanford. Finally, a full decade after the original suit was filed, Dred Scott v. Sandford (a misspelling of Sanford originating at the time the lawsuit was filed) was argued before the United States Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court heard arguments on the case in 1856 and, on March 6, 1857, it ruled that the Scotts were to remain slaves. In its decision, however, the Court went beyond simply determining the legal status of the Scott family. Instead, it used the ruling to issue a sweeping statement on race and slavery in America. Writing for the Court’s majority, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney penned a blistering opinion meant to permanently declass African Americans by denying them U.S. citizenship rights. He also declared that Congress did not have the right to determine the slaveholding status of any portion of the United States. This final opinion further stoked the flames of sectional division over slavery in the Lower Midwest and the across the nation. This fire would not be extinguished until the conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865.

BLACK FREEDOM IN THE LOWER MIDWEST

Although the Scotts lost their legal case, allies purchased and then freed them soon afterward. Having enjoyed scarcely a year of freedom, Dred Scott died of tuberculosis on September 17, 1858. Originally buried in Wesleyan Cemetery in St. Louis, he is now interred in St. Louis’s historic Calvary Cemetery.

Harriet Scott, who lived another eighteen years, remained in St. Louis after her husband’s death. Pre-war St. Louis was a close-knit community of free blacks and urban slaves. In 1860, half of Missouri’s free black population, some 1,800 people, lived in the city. Together they and the 4,340 blacks enslaved there worked hard to create lives for themselves. The urban setting allowed for the creation of valuable community networks. Among these networks were churches like the First African Baptist Church, which operated a secret school even after the Missouri legislature banned education for slaves. For free blacks, St. Louis also provided a measure of safety in the form of safe houses where blacks could hide from slave catchers and kidnappers emboldened by the Fugitive Slave Act.

Harriet Scott lived to see slavery’s end. She died on June 17, 1876, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in St. Louis. In 2010, a memorial pavilion was constructed on the cemetery’s grounds in her honor. In the years immediately following Harriet Scott’s death, St. Louis again became a refuge, this time for African Americans seeking to escape anti-black violence and economic and political oppression in Arkansas or the Deep South. The city also became a gateway for blacks heading to Kansas, Nebraska, or other parts of Missouri to homestead, reside in all-black communities, or to live in other urban areas. A separate stream of black people moved directly from the South into Indian Territory in search of the same freedoms and opportunities.

Although African Americans have been minorities for the entirety of their history in the Lower Midwest, their presence and experiences in this space brought forth some of the most critical debates, conversations, and issues that gripped the nation in the nineteenth century. It was the place where questions about slavery and freedom pushed the United States to the brink of war. It was also the place blacks traveled to in search of freedom before and after that war. In short, although the histories of African Americans in the Midwest are widely divergent, taken together they tell a quintessentially American story about the unceasing struggle for freedom.

In Morrison’s Beloved, Baby Suggs, former slave, matriarch and preacher, says to her congregation, “In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.” Baby Suggs’s message is important for contemporary Midwesterners, writers, historians, and critics, as well. It is incumbent upon all of us to acknowledge, embrace, and—dare I say—love all of the people that make up the Midwest. In this way we fulfill the freedom dreams of Margaret Garner, Dred and Harriet Scott and all of our Midwestern forebears.

The post Slavery, Freedom and African American Voices in the Midwest appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

“This is what racial profiling looks like in person.”

On a sunny April Sunday afternoon in Columbia, Missouri, an innocuous trip to watch a Mizzou versus Louisiana State softball game took on the shade of something far cloudier, and it had very little to do with the competition on the field. In the stands during the third game of the weekend series, an African American male LSU fan was being accosted by multiple middle-aged white Missouri fans because he’d committed the heinous crime of being too spirited for too long within their earshot. Loud and passionate though he was, he wasn’t being rude, engaging other fans or even denigrating Mizzou at all; it was as if he were cheering in his own living room, except in public. His incessant chatter may have been somewhat annoying, but he was doing what sports fans do, and I’d seen Mizzou fans do the same thing at this very stadium on multiple occasions. To wit, Mizzou has an official cheering section at many sporting events called the Antlers, whose only job is to heckle opposing teams and fans, routinely saying things far worse than anything he said. So what made him different?

I’d missed games 1 and 2 but had learned beforehand that some variation of the same scene had unfolded in those games as well: A guy’s stereotypical “loud blackness” eventually grates on a few other fans in seats around him — and in some cases, not even around him — and these fans then find a trivial complaint to levy against him to the ushers, which in turn creates a scene. He in turn protests the sudden negative attention, and the aforementioned fans can now say what they really feel about him behind the wall of an authority figure.

The sudden rush of indignity that hit me was foreign yet all too familiar as an African American. This was not an experience I’d ever personally had, which I acknowledge is atypical in the life of minorities in 2021 America. Seeing how easily it snuck up on me in a place I’d been many times before, I couldn’t help but feel guilty that I’d taken my personal privilege for granted for so long. I never forget that such naked discrimination is always just an arm’s length away from me at best, but I’d been operating under the hope — nay, the naive assumption — that sports were the great equalizer. It seems that what I’d mistaken as warm acceptance of my fellow fandom all of these years had really only been tacit compliance under probation.

Missouri has long had an issue with racial relations, even in a seemingly politically blue city such as Columbia. But what happened at that game was more than just a disagreement between fan bases. It was, in many ways, an encapsulation of the power struggle and racial dynamic that has come to the forefront in America in the last decade or so: white privilege and discomfort leveraged against the boldness and existence of minorities in spaces previously thought to be predominantly white. This is not the first racially charged incident I’ve seen at Mizzou, but it’s also not the Mizzou family with whom I’ve come to associate myself for all these years. It stands as an enormous credit to the friends I was sitting with, along with a smattering of other Mizzou fans, that they spoke up vehemently in the gentleman’s defense when he was being harassed, despite his allegiance to the opposing team. The whole scene was dumbfounding to watch, and I couldn’t fathom how poorly it must have gone for this gentleman in the previous games, though I was very proud of those who showed themselves to be true allies. The strength and fortitude it must have taken for that man to eschew his apprehension from knowing he was likely unwelcome — or even potentially endangered — after the first heated game are far beyond what anyone could have reasonably asked. I can’t applaud him enough for having the courage to show up again and be so unabashedly himself, time and again — damn the consequences.

It is entirely possible that this was an isolated incident. But to assume so makes it easy to do nothing about them. To disregard these incidents as pure coincidence is dangerously cavalier at best and infuriatingly flippant at worst. Yes, one objectively could look at the events that day and say, “Why play the race card? No one there said it was because he was Black.”

But that’s just it — these things are often unspoken so as to shroud the true prejudice. Defenders of the status quo ask why we must often conflate the two things. But as an African American man in 21st-century America, I’d ask them how they could possibly divorce the two.

I attended high school at a mostly-white private school in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy; I’m not new to the proximity of racial prejudice in my life. But for better or worse — and at this point, I’m beginning to think it’s the latter — I’ve been fortunate enough to not have seen many instances in broad daylight with my own two eyes.

How ironic, then, that it would be when I was so far away from my home that I’d have an experience that would hit so close to it.

The post So Far, And Yet So Close appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

River-Horse Pavilion
Columbia, Missouri

By Kit Salter

In March 1995, my wife Cathy and I went to wish Godspeed to Columbia, Missouri, resident William Lewis Trogdon as he was leaving for New York City to begin a 103-day nautical journey, which he would chronicle in the 1999 book, River-Horse: A Voyage Across America, under the pen name of William Least Heat-Moon.

Trogdon called his newly acquired boat Nikawa, which means “river-horse” in the Osage language. This 22-foot C-Dory with twin engines was nestled in a solid towing trailer. As the author prepared to ease both his boat and his hopes into motion, Cathy presented him with an ivory amulet of a sea otter. I handed him a Timex Expedition watch that had been my trusty travel companion. On that spring day, little did we know that the C-Dory being carefully pulled into traffic would later stand in a bold wooden pavilion just outside Columbia.

Today, as you drive north on Highway 63 just coming into Columbia from the direction of Jefferson City, the massive red metal roof of the Boone County History and Culture Center catches your eye. Then you see an open structure next to the parking lot. This is the River-Horse Pavilion, built in 2006 to celebrate Heat-Moon’s journey in Nikawa, the very boat we saw leave his home some years earlier.

Heat-Moon wrote on the final page of River-Horse that he had ridden Nikawa “5,288 watery miles from the Atlantic.” At the very end of that trip, to celebrate arrival at the Pacific, he reached for a pint of Atlantic water he had safeguarded for 103 days. He writes, “I raised the bottle  high, sunlight striking through the glass, salt waves rising to it as if thirsty, and I said, ‘We bring this gift from your sister sea — our voyage is done. Then I poured the stream into the Pacific and went back to the wheel of our river horse, and I turned her toward home.”

Some years after completing that adventure, Heat-Moon presented his already fabled C-Dory to the Boone County Historical Society.  The Society was proud to have such a fine bit of Missouriana from one of the state’s most productive and creative authors, but they had to ask, “How do we display it?”

The historical society wanted to make Nikawa available 24/7, yet protect it from the weather and potential pilfering. Local architect Nick Peckham (himself a marine engineer) worked with volunteers to design and build the wooden pavilion that stands adjacent to the Society’s main building.  This open structure provides easy viewing of the boat (behind plexiglass), a map of Nikawa’s route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and photographs of the craft and the author. Nikawa, in fact, was now home, resting and lending its stature to all of Boone County.

But the backstory of this literary landscape possesses two more elements. In 1978, Heat-Moon was teaching at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, when it had to let him go because of declining enrollments. At the same time, he and his wife decided to divorce.

Heat-Moon reacted to that pair of events by undertaking a 13,000-mile solo trip in his 1975 Ford Econoline van. That 90-day journey (which began on Earth Day in 1978) resulted in the 1982 book, Blue Highways: A Journey into America, which spent 42 weeks on the NYT Best Seller List and has never been out of print. In the early pages of Blue Highways, Heat-Moon declares, “A man who couldn’t make things go right, could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life.”

With Nikawa’s historic voyage across the continent, William Least Heat-Moon showed again that he “could at least go,” and this time he took contemporary travel exploration to a new level of innovation. To complete the circle, I have my Timex back — but the amulet remains with the author.

Kit Salter lived in 22 different places by the end of high school. He graduated from Oberlin College and took his Masters and PhD at Berkeley. He is professor emeritus of geography at the University of Missouri and taught for UCLA, the University of Oregon, and National Geographic. He has been married to writer and geographer Cathy Lynn Salter for 38 years.

The post William Least Heat-Moon – Columbia, Missouri appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

4232 McPherson Avenue
St. Louis, Missouri

By Michaella A. Thornton

The Central West End neighborhood where Kate Chopin spent her final year boasts some of the loveliest homes in St. Louis, Missouri. Dormers and cornices and stained glass, lush gardens bedecked in hydrangeas and peonies, birdsong and wrought-iron fences.

4232 McPherson Avenue isn’t far from the domed, devout beauty of the Cathedral Basilica or the local coffee roaster who prides himself on not using computers to roast the beans.

I haunt Kate Chopin’s last earthly home on the weekends I don’t have my child, death all around us. I want to know how to continue writing through a pandemic. Here’s what I would love to ask Chopin as I sit on the front steps of this historic home: How did you do it?

How did you write two novels and numerous short stories and poems and support six children as a single, widowed mother? How did you remember your worth as a writer and human being when polite society shunned you after The Awakening was published in 1899?

Before your death at age 54, you suffered many fools. How did you put up with T.S. Eliot’s bore of a mother for two years in the Wednesday Club? You were right to roast the hell out of “club women” in your writing.

We didn’t deserve you, Kate.

But I’ve loved you since I taught “The Story of an Hour” to my community college students. Intuitively, readers understand the feeling of being trapped, the lure of freedom. We recognize “the joy that kills,” which is why I’m taking notes at this underwhelming two-story brick house.

Did you need smelling salts or brandy, as your friend Lewis B. Ely joked you might, when the local newspaper printed a bad review of The Awakening? How about when Willa Cather wondered out loud in a Pittsburgh newspaper how you could waste “so exquisite and sensitive … a style on so trite and sordid a theme”?

I mean, how dare she? Trite?

You studied Guy de Maupassant. You revolutionized flash fiction. Plot twists? Hello, “The Storm” and “Désirée’s Baby.” Realistic fiction? You debunked the saccharine stench of motherhood as martyrdom, and you wrote women’s sexuality as ripe, rich, and complicated as any man’s.

Only after your death would the literary world realize your brilliance. What a fucking shame and also so typical. Even now, there’s no plaque marking this house.

Did the critics make you doubt what you had to say? That kills me. Some say you wrote less because of the criticism. The Awakening was out of print two years after your death. It took more than 60 years for scholars and readers to rediscover your prose.

Many days, for me at least, it feels impossible to write in the margins of one’s life, especially as a single mother. To care for my child, myself, and my home, let alone my art, is hard. There are Zoom meetings and work in 10-minute bursts and snacks and walks and groceries to buy and a face mask to secure to my 3-year-old daughter’s nose and mouth.

And I am one of the lucky ones.

But also like Edna Pontellier, many days I’m drowning.

I cannot imagine doing what you did, Kate. You began a writing career at age 40. You navigated the straightjacket of women’s social conventions at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. You were the first to write unflinchingly about sexuality, divorce, and a woman’s desire to govern herself. As literary scholar Per Seyersted wrote in your biography in 1969: “She was the first woman writer in her country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken fiction.”

As a former farmgirl who once dreamt of secret gardens and women who refused to remain silent, I sit on these cracked, crooked steps, and breathe. If homes hold onto a small piece of their former inhabitants, I feel respite here. I can finally catch my breath.

Kella’s prose can be read in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Complete Sentence, Creative Nonfiction, Midwestern Gothic, New South, The Southeast Review, and a few other places. When she’s not chasing her toddler daughter, she savors digging in the dirt, kayaking, and second acts. You can find her on Twitter at @kellathornton.

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