Ambassador Bridge
Michigan–Ontario

By Ramya Swayamprakash

I grew up in India. I have now lived in the United States, and in Michigan, for almost a decade. But I cannot claim to be from Michigan or India — it is hard to call a place your home when your connection to it is defined by a temperamental piece of paper. Emotionally and geographically, I feel like a vagabond, without a place to root me. As much as I feel that lack of place, my entire adult life has been guided by rivers. I have followed them to their sources high in the Himalayas, chanced upon some of their most magical beginnings in Tibet, and written about their entrapment in peninsular India. I grew up listening to stories about these rivers. Rivers have been home, intellectually.

Yet, when it came to the river that I have written and thought about for the past decade, I did not know of it until I met it. The first time I flew over the Detroit River in 2013 was the first time I even heard of it. Growing up in India, I was familiar with New York and San Francisco. Much of the Midwest was a blob, with the Great Lakes at its center. At the time, Detroit was just beginning to be in the news because of its financial situation. When the captain announced we were flying over the Detroit River, I did a double take and wondered whether this was a chicken and egg situation — which came first, the river or the city. The answer as I was soon to find out, was inconsequential.

The larger story has always been how this river strait has become what author Paul Vasey calls “a fabric” of our lives, a part of “our vocabulary.” I was recommended Vasey’s 2013 memoir The River: A Memoir of Life in the Border Cities by one of my advisors, and I read it during the summer of 2017 when I was in Windsor, Ontario, finishing up archival research for my dissertation. In the shadow of its more famous neighbor, Windsor was an interesting vantage point to be researching from and reading about. I used The River as a sort of guide to walk the city and get to know it better. The Detroit River looms large in Vasey’s imagination in ways that I had not factored until I read the book and walked the city myself. The river was as much a way-finding device as it was the edge of theater — you could watch an entire city go by on the other side if you sat long enough. There was a rootedness to the river that I had not yet found on the other side of the river and border. I spent a wonderous afternoon speaking with retired ship captains at the Marsh Collection in Amherstburg, understanding the river and specifically the infrastructures that I would then spend half a decade writing about—and continue to gush about.

The river was everywhere, and never too far that summer in Windsor. The air was muggy and humid, and winds blew little or no smoke from Zug Island. It reminded me of summers long ago, in Bombay, a lifetime and half a world away. That summer, as I kayaked across from Walkerville to Peche Island, it was breathtaking. The summer sun lit up the water into a magical shade of blue, and the ruins of Hiram Walker’s mansion seemed to come alive. If you squinted enough, you’d experience some time travel. From the main shipping channel on the other side of the island, the familiar but jarring sound of a massive laker — a ship that plies the Great Lakes — might wake you up from your reverie, just in time to head back to the mainland, and across the border.

These memories are perhaps just my rose-tinted glasses, but as I remember it, the river seemed more open, more welcoming, on the Canadian side. A decade ago, it was also just easier to get to the Detroit River from the Canadian bank and sit by it, watching it, just as Vasey did, “rolling past with ducks and gulls on its back, the ocean on its mind.” It was a centering experience. As trucks crawled by on Ambassador Bridge, standing under it at Assumption Park, I would gaze at the Michigan Central Station.

Walking under Ambassador Bridge along the riverfront trail, near some maintenance workers, I spotted a laker. This park, where Vasey talks about the history of Jesuits’ landing along the southern bank of the river. On that summer day, as I looked onto Assumption Church and the bridge, Vasey’s descriptions of the park swam in my head. It was the however the people of Windsor whose descriptions really occupied my mind. Vasey paints Windsor with the love of an insider-outsider, a feeling I understand deeply.

My biased view of the river may have been filtered by the political border, which while silent and unproblematic for most North Americans, remains an anxiety-inducing experience for immigrants and those individuals with “weak” passports like mine.  Taking a day trip to Windsor was a thrill, not least because I was crossing into another country with ease. I was even welcomed with a smile! Crossing back into the U.S. was a lot scarier. For those of us with weak passports, borders are real, and as much as I enjoyed The River, I found myself jealous of the author’s obliviousness to the barrier. I wanted to feel that obliviousness for a minute.

I do not quite know how to explain my relationship with this river. It is unremarkable on the surface but every time I am near, it feels like home. While I may never be oblivious to the border, the river has never judged me for the misfortunes of geography. Standing on its banks, geological time rolling by while I try and write about humans, I feel humbled, mesmerized by everything this body of water — which flushes every twenty hours or so — has seen. I have spent a decade trying to understand and tell these stories. These tales and their river have grounded and sustained me. As a person, I am very much a work in progress, but this river and everything it does are the closest thing I have to a “home,” at least one rooted in place.

Taking my toddler to meet the river last spring was a special homecoming, my worlds colliding in the best possible way. Yet, when my toddler asked to go to the Canadian bank where the parks looked cooler, I had to say no. My child holds a stronger passport than I do. The border that was immaterial to them was very much visible to me, with a weak passport in my back pocket. If we crossed over, my toddler could return at the drop of a hat, but I could not. One does not need a wall to see the border divide everywhere — you just need to carry a weak passport.

As I write this, sometimes my toddler wistfully asked for their passport to cross the border “home” to go shop at Target, since the Great White North lacks that convenience. For the first time in their life, the border has become visible. As a parent, I feel guilty about taking away their obliviousness. As a scholar, I hope this will enable more careful attention to and, someday, abolition of borders, at least in our minds. Either way, we will wait, gazing at the sun-kissed waters of the Great Lakes, thinking about making homes.

Ramya Swayamprakash is an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. A transplant to the Midwest, Ramya researches and writes about rivers, infrastructure, and borders. Her work has appeared in the Michigan Historical Review and Water History, among others. She co-hosts Heartland History, the podcast of the Midwestern Historical Association.

For further reading on passportism, the discrimination against people holding passports from certain countries and its uncritical acceptance by citizens of wealthier nations, see Shahnaz Habib, Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel (2023).

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Koi Garden Plaza
Branson, Missouri

By Matt Miller

Aside from his work as the editor of Black Elk Speaks, the poet John G. Neihardt is best known as the perpetual poet laureate of Nebraska — the legislature conferred that title upon him in 1921 and never retracted it, requiring later appointees to accept the lesser title of “state poet.” At the time of that commission, however, and for much of his life afterward, Neihardt in fact lived in Branson, Missouri, near the edge of the White River.

Neihardt remains quite a presence in Nebraska despite his departure from the state. A well-developed state historic site on the site of his former home in Bancroft offers education on Neihardt and Native American culture, and various structures (a park, an elementary school, a residence hall) bear his name.

The traces of his life in Branson are more muted. There’s a development in suburban North Branson called Neihardt Heights, which bears as much relationship to the man himself as any suburban development does to its eponymous weeping willows or hidden springs. However, with the help of my colleague, College of the Ozarks librarian Gwen Simmons, I was able to locate the site of the former Neihardt home, which was demolished in the 1980s, a Chinese restaurant put in its place. In 1989, the Branson Arts Council installed a monument: a modest boulder adorned with a bronze plaque. Today that monument sits, overtaken by Virginia creeper, just blocks from the excesses of the Strip on the corner between the Koi Garden Plaza strip mall and the Branson Visitors Center.

Branson isn’t much of a town for poets, of course, and even if it were, contemporary neglect of Neihardt’s poetry is probably justified. He wrote Orientalist lyric poetry based on Hindu mysticism and self-conscious imitations of European epic poems, complete with epic similes, but about the American West. Much of his work is in rhyming couplets in an excessively regular iambic pentameter — hallmarks of a poet lacking technical sophistication. And unlike even other quasi-European poets like Longfellow, Neihardt shows little ability for a memorable image or turn of phrase. Unlike his fellow Nebraska writer, the better-known Willa Cather, Neihardt’s poetry looks primarily to European creative models. Cather’s greater artistic accomplishment is that she created a distinctively American literary form, rather than imposing European models on a place that has its own life and culture.

Neihardt is justly remembered, then, less for his poetry than as the transmitter of Black Elk’s ideals: a vision of “the sacred hoop” uniting all creation in a holy order. And here Neihardt comes into his own. Even as he drew primarily upon the classical epic for his poetic form, he evinced an interest in an indigenous American social vision that Cather couldn’t match, one in which the first peoples of this land have an equal voice with those of us descended from settlers. For all the justifiable controversy around the authenticity of Black Elk Speaks, it’s undeniable that Neihardt sought a vision for the Midwest that had more to do with cross-cultural peace than settler violence.

I suppose one could see the conjunction of the Koi Garden Plaza and the Branson Visitors Center as a kind of crass instance of that cross-cultural wholeness. But I’m more inclined to contrast Black Elk’s vision with the ideals represented by the Branson Strip. However multicultural the Strip might come to be, consumer capitalism has little to do with the Sacred Hoop.

Like Neihardt, I’m a Nebraskan expat living in Branson. When I can’t avoid the Strip, I confess that I’m prone to contempt, to contrasting it with the vision of wholeness I sought in books like Black Elk Speaks. But I recall, too, that part of Neihardt’s interest in Black Elk arose from his Orientalism, and so I’m forced to acknowledge that Branson’s exploitative tendencies also reflect a side of Neihardt.

Neihardt has always represented a vision of what we could be, for good and ill; if that vision diverges from what we in fact are, it does not do so completely. Nor ought we to scorn such visions when they fail, as they must, to live up to what is best in us. Yes, settler visions of what could be gave us the Branson strip and Manifest Destiny. But it will only be through visions like Black Elk’s sacred hoop that we might found a Midwest that corresponds with the best in Black Elk’s, and in Neihardt’s, hopes.

Matt Miller, a native Nebraskan, now lives in Branson, where he serves as Assistant Professor of English at College of the Ozarks. His first book, a collection of essays titled Leaves of Healing, was published by Belle Point Press in late 2024. Find him online at matt-miller.org.

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U.S. Highway 30
LaPorte County, Indiana

By Dawn Burns

“My main interest is in making the ordinary strange and wonderful.” –Michael Martone, interview with David Hoppe, NUVO, 2013

On my basement wall above a small writing desk hangs a three-piece canvas print of Northern Indiana farmland with U.S. Highway 30 in the background. The picture’s not much to look at, yet when I found this triptych of ordinariness in a Lansing, Michigan, thrift store, I was overcome with wonder, feeling I knew the exact location — 4494 W. U.S. Highway 30, Hanna, Indiana, 46340 — an address as precise as my memories are approximate. An address to which I could mail a postcard because it once was my home.

Growing up, I watched all manner of vehicles drive by the intersection of U.S. 30 and County Road 450 West from my upstairs bedroom window. Traffic sped by in both directions as eternally as bread slices fall away from the giant Sunbeam loaf at 350 Pearl Street in Fort Wayne, the city 92 miles east where extended family lived and where Michael Martone was born on August 22, 1955, in St. Joe Hospital, one week shy of 18 years before me and, as he notes in Brooding (2018), in “the same year as . . . the commencement of the Interstate Highway System.”

Michael Martone in fours, like the four squared corners of a county township, like how Indiana looks flying over, like he writes in “The Flatness” (2000), a grid inscribed into the skin of the Midwest which “transmits in fields and waves,” which “is a place of sense”:

Growing up in Hanna, I knew no Michael Martone. Michael Martone’s whereabouts were no concern of mine. When I watched traffic, not once did I conjure a writer from Indiana who wrote about Indiana. Instead, I asked myself four questions: “Who are the people driving by? Where are they coming from? Where are they going? What if they break down?” Sometimes cars did break down and my dad would help. As travelers sat around our kitchen table, I’d hear the answers to my questions. I liked finding out these facts; I also liked daydreaming my own fictions.

I would not meet Michael Martone until 1997 (or was it 1998?) when he visited my Notre Dame MFA cohort of creative writers. By then I no longer lived on U.S. 30 and we did not meet because of unforeseen car trouble. Though I bought his 1990 collection, Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List, I would not fully read it for another twenty years, concerned I might be influenced. Still, simply by publishing a book with Fort Wayne in the title, he’d given me permission to write about Indiana.  

No doubt I’ve got my facts wrong about my thrifted picture. I would not stake my Hoosier credibility on the highway being U.S. 30 any more than I would on the landscape being Northern Indiana. About “the flatness,” Michael Martone writes, “They are thinking about Northern Ohio, about Indiana, about the long stretch through Illinois and on into Iowa. It is flat.” My picture could be from any of these states, or none. Who am I to say?

What I’ve long loved about Michael Martone — about all the Michael Martones — is how his writing both secures and blurs, for he makes Fort Wayne and all of Indiana as-real-and-not-real as Art Smith, “bird boy of Fort Wayne,” whom I can read about both on the Smithsonian’s website and in The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne (2020).

In Michael Martone’s mythologies, Dan Quayle will always be out snipe hunting, Jacques Derrida will always be eating an Awful Big, Awful Good pork tenderloin at a Winesburg café, and mayonnaise will always be pumped through the Trans-Indiana Mayonnaise Pipeline.

To his mythologies, I add my own. Dawn Burns, in fours:

Of all Michael Martone’s work, Winesburg, Indiana, a 2015 anthology featuring stories by more than two dozen Indiana authors, best illustrates how we patchwork our mythologies together but, like a highway mirage on a hundred-degree day, can never arrive at the places we seek.

When I asked Michael Martone if he’d ever driven from Fort Wayne to Chicago, he said he’d driven “many times up the old Lincoln Highway 30 that parallels the old Pennsy RR to see White Sox games and the art museum and Science and Industry Museum.” “That,” he said, “is why I put Winesburg, Indiana, near there near Columbia City.”

Funny to find out at last the happenstance of how Michael Martone came to place Winesburg smackdab in familiar family territory for me, my eight sets of aunts/uncles/cousins radiating out across Indiana from my two sets of grandparents — Burns and Tschantz — in  Whitley County, my own nuclear family of four the satellite flung out furthest to that rental home at the corner of U.S. 30 and 450 West where a postcard can no longer go, the abandoned house long gone, burned for firefighting practice by the Hanna Township Volunteer Fire Department in 2008.

I imagine my childhood home ablaze, black smoke rolling across all four lanes of traffic, every passerby slowing to notice, only I was not there to watch them from my second story window. I wonder if Michael Martone’s childhood homes still stand. I could find out by asking, but I haven’t. Maybe one day when visiting friends who live near Winesburg I will drive the extra twenty miles to Fort Wayne and find out.

I do not write much at my basement writing desk below the three canvases that, put together, show the height of summer in maybe-Indiana on maybe-U.S. 30. I thought I would, and I’ve tried, but most often I choose my second-floor home office where, if I stand and look out the window, I can view the fence separating my small yard from the backsides of Eastside Lansing businesses and the parking lot which packs full on the weekends for the bars and live music. From my window’s angle, I cannot see the Everybody Reads bookstore from where I ordered Michael Martone’s Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana (2022) from my good friend Scott, but it comforts me to know the bookstore lives beyond my sight.

I like the idea that I wrote this sitting in my basement where the picture transported me away from the sound of the washing machine, the smell of litterboxes, the sight of cinderblock walls surrounding me on three sides. I like the idea, but I don’t like to sit too long where dampness might settle into my skin, unlike the skin of Indiana where mildew blooms white, strange and wonderful across the landscape of the ordinary.

Dawn Burns is thoroughly Midwestern, having lived her whole life in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. Often her characters are Midwestern too, like Evangelina from Elkhart, Indiana, in Evangelina Everyday (2022) who may appear simple and uncomplicated but has a rich inner life. Dawn’s MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame prepared her for a lifetime of writing, creative community building, and teaching. Dawn is founder of the SwampFire Retreat for Writers and Artists, and a recipient of excellence awards from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the Ohio Arts Council. An assistant professor at Michigan State University, Dawn is committed to writing and storytelling as acts of personal and social change both in and beyond her First Year Writing classroom. You can find Dawn at dawnburns42.com.

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Arkansas River
Wichita, Kansas

By Amy Barnes

For thirty years, I’ve had the closing line of a poem stuck in my head: “snow fills all the empty graves.” My creative writing teacher at Wichita State University read the poem to an eager circle of young writers. It’s an evocative image of community, grief, emptiness, frigid midwestern winters in a way like no other poem or prose I’ve read. I periodically searched for the impactful words without success.

I spent my childhood in Kansas. School didn’t close when it snowed, and the mail came like clockwork through wind, snow, and sleet. My adult life, married and with children, has been in a series of Southern states, where a light jacket serves in January, and inches of snow keep the mailman away for a week.

My mother recently sent me a book of photographs from my colder childhood years in the Midwest — mostly images of me standing awkwardly next to boyfriends while wearing gaudy, poofy 80s prom dresses. My own adult children are now the same age I was in the photos. But there were also peripheral surprises in the snapshots: grandparents, my first car, first bike, first date, a Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor. 

In one image, I’m caught mid-twirl holding hands with one of those young men, in the middle of the frozen Arkansas River in downtown Wichita. It was more than a sheet of ice that winter. It was thick and turned into a temporary ice-skating rink for lovers and ducks alike.

For the first time since 1996, I recently went back to the region, in part to promote my Belle Point Press collection Child Craft at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, a creative writer’s conference in Kansas City, Missouri. In Tennessee, where I live, there was an unexpected seven inches of snow that paralyzed the area. By contrast, Kansas City was temperate and dry.

In 1991, I was still enrolled at Wichita State University taking creative writing courses from the venerable Albert Goldbarth as a 20-something with little writing and even less life experience. He spoke eloquently of snow, grief and people, read his own poetry aloud to the class, and critiqued our fledgling attempts at imitation. All in a circle. Like mourners around an empty winter grave that stood poetically in my head for decades.

While prolific, Goldbarth is resolutely reclusive. I went in search of that memorable poem, one that I thought was his. While I didn’t locate that specific poem, I came across something in my searches that felt more relevant. The non-fiction piece “These Quiet Poems” by Rick Mulkey and Susan Tekulve appeared in The Georgia Review. The authors open by talking about being Goldbarth’s students two decades earlier, perhaps even when I was also a student. They’re walking along the same Arkansas River that I once ice skated on with a long-ago beau. Goldbarth takes them to a series of his installed, poetic plaques etched in stone that read:

“Snow. Rain. Stream. Sea.

Dew. Mist. Boiled for tea.

The life of water never ends.

It merely has different bodies.”

Those simple words, lined up like a Burma Shave advertisement, summed up everything I felt once I got to AWP: a sense of place, different bodies of water/snow/self, poetry, a return to a new/old home, reading Albert Goldbarth differently three decades apart. Skating on an iced-over pond in my 20s. Writing in my 20s. Writing in my 50s.

At the conference, Goldbarth and I texted briefly, in the same state for a moment. We crossed paths — riding the pink Barbie trolley in opposite directions. We both had off-site readings ironically at the exact same time, a few miles apart. When I asked about the poetry that had eaten at my thoughts for years, he had a quick answer: Maxine Kumin.

I left Kansas City with that name. When I got home, I found myself entranced by not just that one poem I’d sought out, but also her other stunning work — on grief, loss, change, community, war, snow, and life. She died a few years ago, but I discovered so much exploring the profound words she left behind. It was a fitting end to my literary quest only a few hundred miles from where it began.

Those boys buried in plastic photo album sleeves are scattered like snowflakes now and I’ve mailed copies of my collections to the professor, before our empty graves are filled.

Amy Cipolla Barnes is the author of three collections: Mother Figures, Ambrotypes, and Child Craft (Belle Point Press, 2023). She has words at Spartan Lit, Leon Review, Complete Sentence, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, -ette review, Smokelong Quarterly, The Rumpus, and many other sites. Her writing has been long-listed for the Wigleaf Top50 in 2021-2024, included in Best Microfiction 2025, and The Best Small Fictions, 2022. She’s a Fractured Lit Associate Editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit assistant editor, Narratively Chief Submissions Reader and course instructor, and also reads for The MacGuffin. 

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358 Bus Stop, Torrence Ave. & Pulaski Rd.
Calumet City, Illinois

By Ava Tomasula y Garcia

“forgive my geography, it’s true i’m obsessed

with maps.” –José Olivarez, “Wherever I’m at That Land Is Chicago”

The Calumet Region coheres into shape and sense through the totalizing language of maps. The gridmarks through which reality has been arranged here for over two hundred years are that of longitude, latitude, scale, treaty boundary, x-marks-the-spot. Isn’t that the work that maps do, after all? They make the real, real. Chart, fix, occupy, extract. They make the given world seem inevitable.

I’ve been looking at these maps for a long time, trying to understand how land becomes resource and then gets thrown away. How people continue to live on it and love it.

José Olivarez is a poet from Calumet City, the city that takes its name from this Region. I think he gets it. His images always seem to return home to the Region. This is true even when he’s battling, word by word, the terms of that return: this is one of the most segregated and polluted areas in the lands now called the United States. Looking at the maps, the Calumet Region emerges as a total sacrifice zone; a waste dump for centuries of capitalism; an overdetermined and overburdened 90-ish-square miles stretching from South Chicago through Northwest Indiana along the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

A hard place to call home. Even harder not to go back to the map to describe it; harder still not to get trapped by the dense tangle of border lines and scale markers and RxR crossings which would choke you. To not feel like there’s no way out of the world its representations would have you believe are inevitable.

Blueprints to the city-sized steel mills, past and present. Hazardous waste containment sites marked out on a grid. So-called “early settlement” maps of Indiana and Illinois show how the Potawatomi Nation was rounded up and cornered by gunpoint. How Menominee himself refused to sell Neshnabé land even after he was viciously detained by settler militia men. See how quickly land speculation is mapped into reality in the wake of the Trail of Tears: limestone quarries marked out, coal veins sought, railroad lines laid down.

Chicago booms into existence on the map, literally constructed from the “raw materials” of the cleared Calumet: water, wood, limestone, coal, sand for cement, and clay for bricks. The world’s first refrigerated train cars, carrying meat from the Chicago stockyards across the country, cooled by ice cut from Calumet lakes and rivers and running the rail lines that crisscross the Region today. Plat maps showing how houses butt up against the Standard Oil refinery, now BP. 

My family’s history of living and working around the Region walks in lockstep with a history of illness: cancer and dementia from so much pollution, from day in and day out drinking in the soils and waters that industry has determined must be wasted for bigger profits. It seems like illness is hard baked into what it means to be from here, and, for me, so is leaving. When Olivarez writes, “i needed to believe suffering was honorable,” the line hits hard.

Yet what I love most about Olivarez’s work is that, while always being grounded in place, he doesn’t write about the map. He doesn’t “mistake the map for the territory,” as Sylvia Wynter put it. This poetry doesn’t go around, in Olivarez’s words “pretending the bones / are the real thing.” He’s after life, not its flattening. When I take the bus up Torrence Ave. through Cal City, past the train lines, past the scrap metal yard, past the recycler plant, I’m riding through territory which exceeds those bones. The land doesn’t give up. Look one way and you see intermodals speeding by on miles of burnt-out rail lines. Look the other way and you see sand cranes and egrets burst out of the dune grass. A cloud of starlings flits through the sunset. Marsh water floods the road. Heavy industry mixes with the watery, oh-so-alive earth.

Olivarez finds the little cracks in the totality. His images of life in Calumet City mix with my own memories, peeling themselves off the map: Olivarez in “Cal City Winter” as a kid on another frozen winter morning, “jumping up & down at the bus stop / trying to warm up.” My own memories, waiting in the car for Berta to get off work at the Burger King at River Oaks Mall, breath curling in the December air. Biting into a gordita from Loli’s, steaming hot down my throat. Springtime bugs gliding back and forth on the Little Cal River, weaving a gossamer haze, summer heat shimmering, a thousand mirages. People always say that we have the prettiest sunsets, then joke that it is because of the pollution. The road the car snakes along was once the shore of an ancient lake, was taken over by settler stagecoaches, was a sand mining pit, was paved over for scrap trucks to traverse. You settle into place.

This is what no map will ever show but sometimes a poem does: the way individual lives layer up moments of anger, pain, and love — how these emotions sediment themselves into place as tracks for others to walk whom you may never meet. This is what living in the Calumet means, too. Olivarez’s poetry has become my map to the Cal Region. Not a map as in chart, fix, occupy, extract. A map as in “i’m always out south / of somewhere. i know the sun rises / in Lake Michigan & sets out west.”

With it, I’m trying to navigate those questions that I haven’t been able to figure out for my own life: “I want to learn what the birds know— / to love a home when it is abundant / & to leave when the love stops.”

Olivarez’s map is a question in answer to my questions. Where does a person begin and the place they’re from end? Can you ever leave a home? Can a home ever cease to be that — can it be ground out, like a cigarette butt on a cold winter morning? When you leave, do your memories go with you? Or do some of them stay behind, settling into the landscape?

Surely, some mark of the love a place gave you and that you gave back stays in the soil. Surely.

Ava Tomasula y Garcia was born in 1994 in Chicago and grew up in South Bend, IN. She currently lives in New York City, studying medical anthropology as applied to the so-called “undiagnosed” illnesses of the Calumet Region. Before, she worked at the Southeast Side of Chicago’s Centro de Trabajadores Unidos.

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It is late July 2021. I have driven my daughter an hour northwest to reach swathes of Minnesota sunflowers, the novelty of crowds of head-high plants taking our minds off the crowds of people we are still avoiding. We turn off the main road onto a rutted, grassy drive, where we pause more than once to watch small creamy butterflies dancing double helixes around each other. Once on foot, we can hear the fields before we can see the flowers. So many bees are feasting from the blooming yellow heads that the world has become a living hum. We make a contest of looking for the sunflower with the most bees on it at once (five). We marvel that there are not just bumblebees and honeybees, both of which we can identify, but also several otherbees, which we cannot. All going about their bee business, and each contributing one fizzing note to the chorus that vibrates on the wind.

Sunflowers reliably face east. As young plants, they shift their gaze over the course of a day to continue bathing their cheeks in direct light. But when they mature into impressive giants, their heads become too heavy to move. It feels vaguely sentient, their resolute turn to the rising sun. In an open prairie, all the other flowers appear lackadaisical by comparison.

When arrayed in farmed rows that spread over acres, every flower stands at attention, saluting the sun. Soldier-like symmetry in plants is a little disquieting, especially from the back where the flowers’ heads wear huge, spikey green cups that look oddly like helmets. But viewed from the front, the illusion of a battalion disappears. Broad leaves dissolve rigid spacing. The flowers’ pebbled centers — in fact hundreds of tiny blossoms — are ringed by densely overlapping petals that splay outward until each edge is differentiated by the sun. Ray florets, they are called. Because what else would you name such golden magnificence? As the light filters through, every flower gets its own halo.

We have had so little rain this summer that at least one of these farm fields has been allowed to die back, presumably to preserve water for the others. Stunted stalks tilt in the dusty soil, sharp contrast to the adjacent field that thrums with insects. I find myself wondering what the untouched prairie looks like right now. Are its sunflowers wilting before they can bloom? Or do ones that seed themselves naturally have roots impervious to short-term drought, roots that press deeper to locate small bits of sustaining moisture? I assume uncultivated plants are more resourceful because they have not been coddled — although perhaps that is anthropomorphizing and wrong. Possibly their seeds simply remain dormant, nestled into today’s too-dry earth, quietly waiting for a rainier summer. That, too, is a kind of resourcefulness.

~ 🌻 ~

It always seems to be winter when I pick up Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Even so, the scene I cling to is not the one where the family digs tunnels through snowdrifts to get to the barn for chores. Instead, I find myself beguiled by the moment her protagonist reminisces over his first immersion into sunflowers. Newly-orphaned at the age of ten, Jim Burden is sent from Virginia to his grandparents’ farm in Nebraska in the 1890s, which, as an adult narrator, he recalls exploring:

Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seeds as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had a sunflower trail to follow.

Cather’s novel is redolent with the wonder of this young boy, fresh from the Virginia woodlands, learning to understand the prairie’s splendid, wide-open skies and appreciate its promised freedom of movement. I love how his fascination with sunflowers as route markers casts them in the familiar mold of fairy tale: they function like a magical trail of breadcrumbs, perpetually renewing themselves to guide successive seasons of settlers safely west. Fuchs’s cherished story has an added ring of truth, tapping as it does into sunflowers’ power as a directional sign. It must have reassured countless drivers of horses and wagons across the plains that as long as they headed towards those sunny faces, they were moving in the right direction. Jim’s rhapsody takes a turn, though, to end here:

I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake’s story but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

Despite the corrective that this is merely a legend, I find this last clause breath-taking. What a heady image — roads marked by towering flowers that proffer benediction over the movement of persecuted souls into a space where they could find religious freedom.

This passage mentions nothing of the people who were native to those plains. Of their relentless persecution. Of the incalculable damage those white settlers did in claiming land and displacing people and disrupting ecosystems and destroying long-established harmonies between humans and the earth. And yet, if read carefully, it admits to us that the flowers’ sanction of westward expansion is merely the stuff of legend, invented no doubt by white settlers. If read carefully, it might remind us that those roads were “bordered” by sunflowers because sunflowers were everywhere on those plains except where the roads, gashed through by wagons that scarred the land, prohibited the flowers’ growth.

How can we admire these breath-taking lines while doing justice to the truth that some people gained freedom by denying it to others? Where, in this complexity, does that leave the flowers? What is our relationship to the adulation and the promise, to the sheer joy of the beaming sunflower in its own right? Can we disentangle that from human history? Should we try?

~ 🌻 ~

May and June are normally rainy, plant-greening months in Minnesota. Grasses wake up. The monochrome of winter becomes variegated, lush. The state’s abundant water — 10,000 lakes! — is the stuff of legend, but it is also the winter snowpack, high water table, and abundant spring rains that makes Minnesota a promising location for the inevitable flood of climate refugees we know time will produce. Those living through years of devastating droughts to our west have periodically argued for the right to siphon off some Great Lakes’ water to slake their regions’ thirst. There are profound ironies in proposals to send natural resources west, as people contemplate fleeing east across North America seeking a more hospitable bit of earth.

But for the second summer in a row, Minnesota’s lot seems cast with the burning western half of the United States. In early July, grassy boulevards were simply tufts of brown. As I sit writing in August 2022, St. Paul, MN, is almost 7” below its normal year-to-date precipitation accumulation. Last year at this time it was even worse: some 80% of the state was marked Severe, Extreme, or Exceptional Drought.

My lilac hedge, some fifteen feet high and fifty feet long, droops. The soil is so dry, so deep, that any water you offer to flower gardens seeps far away from the roots before plants can slurp up enough to sustain themselves. Things I have never had to water — the rose that’s taller than my garage, for instance — are suffering. Small trees look pinched. Today I drove by several adolescent maples, not mere saplings, whose leaves were browning around the edges. Next year, they may be skeletons. If this landscape were a Dickens character, it would be described with a narrow face and pursed lips and a perpetually pained expression.

The perilousness of our situation feels ominous. A gossamer thread binds us together over our shared craving for water sources whose perpetuation we cannot command. I sense myself wilting too, these hot summer afternoons, under the weight of that concern.

~ 🌻 ~

By mid-August, none of us can recall accurately the last time it rained. One night, I dream that someone is outside throwing dried beans onto my roof. I awake in the dark, confused. Bags and bags and bags of beans clatter down, and I cannot figure out where they are coming from. Drowsily, I realize I am hearing the rattle of raindrops. I am nonetheless still baffled by the sound. When I wake up more fully, I register a deep sadness: it has taken just a few months to turn the sound of rain into a stranger.

Later that morning, I find myself holding my breath, afraid somehow to jinx the rain and make it stop if I celebrate too much. And yet I am ecstatic. I want to dance. It is raining. Not just a few half-hearted drops. But a persistent soaking that produces a smell lightly metallic and earthy — petrichor, it is beautifully named — a breeze wet with a wetness you can taste through an open window. It rains for hours before it clears. Miniature pools glisten on broad leaves in my garden, and I can breathe deeply once more.

The next night, it rains again, and I wake to a morning gloom that feels like celebration, a dawn overcast and damp. The heat has finally broken.

Out of town, driving through a downpour the following day, I get the giddy news from a friend: there has been a third night of rain! “Everything is saturated,” she writes. I do a little jig in my seat as I think of my trees, my roses, my enormous hedge, finally having their thirst quenched. I imagine them restored to a green as triumphant as the hills I am driving through: Wisconsin, the national map tells me, has experienced only Moderate Drought in one very tiny corner this year. I do not know how the drought knows where the state lines are.

~ 🌻 ~

I have quipped more than once, since moving to Minnesota, that I am grateful not to live in a sod house on the prairie when the winter winds come shrilling around the eaves and the snow mounts. But as I think about sunflowers and drought in this third summer of curtailed human connection, I find myself realizing how we are all tied to the land, even if we no longer live in shelters composed of it. We bear witness to the slow suffering of giant trees whose canopies become strangely translucent as leaves begin to shrivel. When rainless days extend to rainless weeks, we feel the tension in the air, the need palpable and parched, even if we do not consciously register it.

It only gives way when the rain comes, often in a powerful combination of disorientation and relief. I, too, was less wilted for a few days. The land was less gasping, the strain in people’s voices quieted itself a little.

And so, sunflowers. Reminders of our earthly obligation to coexist. They serve as map and guide, as exuberant marker and sober memento. We cannot command the rain, but we can be more conscious of that collective feeling of reprieve carried on the damp wind. We must take practical steps to combat drought in our children’s lifetimes. We also should lean more fully into the things that connect us despite a burning world. Morning sun on our faces, the relief of rain. The bees, the sunflowers, the wonder of seeing it all for the first time through our daughters’ eyes.

Read this in print by ordering The New Territory Issue 14 or get a PDF copy.

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Euclid Ave. Mural

Cleveland, Ohio

By Monique Wingard

In the tapestry of life, sometimes the threads that pull us away are the same ones that guide us back home. In 2013, the job market in Cleveland had left me feeling shut out, unwanted, unworthy. I hit the road for a job in Chicago, in pursuit of a better life. After ten years away, I came back to be closer to home. When I returned, while walking through downtown Cleveland, a striking mural caught my eye. There, prominently displayed on the side of a building at 334 Euclid Ave., alongside LeBron James and Tracy Chapman, was the face of Toni Morrison — Nobel laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and Ohio’s own literary giant.

As I stood before Morrison’s portrait on that Euclid Avenue wall, it was her smile that ignited my renewed sense of purpose and belonging. The mural, commissioned by Browns player Myles Garrett and created by Glen Infante, welcomes visitors near Destination Cleveland, and it now served as a powerful reminder of Morrison’s legacy and the potential within every Black woman from Ohio to persevere in the face of adversity.

After nearly a decade away, I felt a surge of emotions as I stood before Morrison’s mural. The vibrant colors and bold lines captured not just her likeness, but her spirit — unapologetic, fierce, and inspiring. As I gazed at the mural with my mother by my side, I was struck by a sense of homecoming and responsibility. Morrison’s watchful eyes seemed to ask, “What will you contribute to our shared legacy?”

This mural takes on even greater significance in light of recent statistics. In 2020, Bloomberg CityLab published a report analyzing the livability for Black women in 42 U.S. cities, based on health, education, and economic factors. Shockingly, Cleveland — with its nearly 50% Black population — ranked dead last. This statistic is sobering, but it’s crucial to understand its context. While the label of “worst city for Black women” holds some truth, it also leaves room for change and renaissance. It should prompt us to demand that Black women and organizations in Cleveland remember their power and responsibility to advocate relentlessly for each other and for a better life in the city.

Morrison once told an audience of college students, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” Her words resonate powerfully, encapsulating the responsibility we have as Black women in Ohio — to lift as we climb, to create opportunities for those who come after us, and to transform our communities. The mural reminds us of this responsibility. It challenges us to stand up, be counted, and hold ourselves and our community accountable. It urges us to be persistent in our pursuit to change Cleveland and uplift the entire state of Ohio.

As we look upon Morrison’s face on that Euclid Avenue wall, we must ask ourselves: How can we embody her spirit of unapologetic Blackness and unwavering determination? How can we weave our own threads into Morrison’s tapestry of Black womanhood?

We can start by:

1. Supporting and uplifting other Black women in our communities
2. Advocating for policies that address the disparities highlighted in the CityLab report
3. Creating and supporting spaces for Black women to thrive in business, arts, and education
4. Mentoring young Black girls, ensuring they see the potential within themselves

The Toni Morrison mural in downtown Cleveland is more than just a beautiful piece of art. It’s a beacon of hope and a call to action. The mural entitled, “Cleveland is the Reason,” was created by artist Glen Infante in April 2021 to remind the world that he and others are proud of the people who have shaped the city. The mural reminds us of the power of imagery, our words, our actions, and our unity. As Black women in Ohio, we have a responsibility to change the narrative, to rewrite Cleveland’s story, and to continue the work that Morrison began. Let us stand tall, speak boldly, and act with purpose, knowing that we carry within us the same strength and resilience that Morrison embodied. By doing so, we honor her legacy and create a better future for all Black women in Cleveland and beyond. As Morrison would have done if she were still with us, let us be relentless in our pursuit of justice, equality, and empowerment for Black women in our city and our state.

My exodus in 2013 was born of necessity and hope — a pursuit of better opportunities in a job market that seemed to have no place for me. At the time, I couldn’t have known about the harsh realities that would later be quantified when CityLab named Cleveland the worst city for Black women. Yet, as I stood before Toni Morrison’s vibrant visage on that Euclid Avenue wall, I felt a renewed sense of purpose and belonging, despite the sobering statistics that had emerged during my absence. Chicago had been great, and D.C. okay, but neither quite felt like home. There’s a unique rhythm in Ohio that resonates in the souls of those born here, whether in my birth city of Dayton or my adopted home of Cleveland. It’s a cadence of perseverance, a melody of pride, and a harmony of shared identity that calls us back, no matter how far we roam.

Now, as I gaze up at Morrison’s unwavering eyes and electric smile, I feel a surge of determination. This has been more than a homecoming; it is a reclamation. A reclamation of my place in this city, of my identity as an Ohioan, and of my responsibility to weave new threads of hope and opportunity for others into the tapestry of Cleveland’s future and beyond.

The city has changed since 2013, and so have I, but one thing is certain — I am home, ready to stand firm and forge a new path in the state that shaped me and Toni Morrison. Armed with the knowledge and experiences gained during my time away, and inspired by Morrison’s unapologetic celebration of Black womanhood, I’m determined to be a beacon for young women — our future leaders. My mission is clear: to ignite a fierce pride in their Ohio roots, a pride so deep that it becomes an unshakeable foundation built by trailblazing Black women like Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, activist Mary B. Talbert, philanthropist Dr. Zelma Watson George, and educator Louise Troy.

Together, we’ll rewrite Cleveland’s story, just as Morrison rewrote the narrative of Black women in literature. We’ll transform this city into a place where Black women not only survive but thrive, where every young girl can see herself reflected in the success stories around her. This is our home, our legacy, and our future — and we will make it shine with the brilliance of every young woman who dares to dream here, carrying forward the torch that Morrison and countless other Ohio daughters lit for us all.

A proud Buckeye and doctoral student at Kent State University’s College of Communication and Information, Monique Wingard is a digital transformation consultant who amplifies the digital footprint of women-led organizations by shaping effective communication strategies. Her research focuses on news and media literacy among adolescent girls, with the goal of developing curriculum that enhances their critical thinking skills. She is a member of the Coalition for Independent Tech Research and the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE). Visit moniquewingard.com for updates on her research, speaking engagements, conference presentations, and published works.

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Chesapeake Bay

Northeast Maryland

By Alice Sundman

We are driving southward on I-95, toward Washington, D.C. I am trying to take in the landscape around us, a landscape I have never seen before, but that I still, somehow, know in my mind. Here, in the midst of gray concrete and endless numbers of cars, I finally get a few glimpses of parts of Chesapeake Bay, of patches of verdant vegetation — and of a landscape in which Jacob Vaark, a character in Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy, makes his way toward the slaveholder D’Ortega’s plantation in Maryland in the late 1600s.

For someone who grew up on a small island in the Baltic Sea, the enormous highway and the great distances are quite a contrast to my childhood windblown pines, low cliffs of red granite, and thousands of tiny islands in the archipelago of the Åland Islands of Finland. I am used to short distances ideal for cycling, to walking in the forest, to picking berries, to going for a swim in calm, shallow bays — to experiencing the place concretely, through my body and thus to get a sense of actually being in the landscape.

In the car on the highway, I am at a distance from everything. I can see water, trees, parts of the ground.… But how does it feel to actually be there, in the place?

In A Mercy, Jacob is travelling by boat, on foot and on horseback. Having sailed down the river into Chesapeake Bay, he is now struggling with the water, the sand, and the mud as he tries to find his way through the fog toward land:

“The man moved through the surf, stepping carefully over pebbles and sand to shore. Fog, Atlantic and reeking of plant life, blanketed the bay and slowed him. He could see his boots sloshing but not his satchel nor his hands. When the surf was behind him and his soles sank in mud, he turned to wave to the sloopmen, but because the mast had disappeared in the fog he could not tell whether they remained anchored or risked sailing on.”

For Jacob, the place evokes a sense of chaos, but this is due to political skirmishes and shifting territorial claims rather than the landscape itself, whose Indigenous inhabitants give him a sense of stability and of life lived in accordance with nature and the land.

Seeing the vastness of the landscape and the long distances of seemingly interminable highways, I wonder how Morrison managed to create the sense of immediate bodily experience of the landscape that Jacob experiences. For even if she most likely knew this place far better than I do, her experience from the late 1900s and early 2000s differs considerably from Jacob’s 17th century ditto.

Perhaps part of the answer can be found in her archived manuscripts, the Toni Morrison Papers, at Princeton University Library. It is well known that Morrison did thorough research for her novels. She studied reports and books of facts, and she used places she had visited or lived in as inspiration for her fictional places. But how did she create this particular fictional landscape, through which Jacob is travelling? Her archived research material for the novel includes information about Native American place names and their relation to topographical features that have most likely informed her writing. Facts about and descriptions of actual places thus form part of her creation of the fictional landscape. But more important, I think, are two crucial skills: her crafting and her imagination.

Early drafts I studied in the archive suggest that the landscape in this passage was not a priority at the beginning of her writing process; in these drafts, she focuses on sketching the contours of Jacob as a greedy settler. In later and more elaborate versions, the landscape is gradually given a greater role as she develops it into a thematic feature that becomes part of a human-place relation, which also allows her to develop Jacob into a more complex character. In her final, published version of this passage, as in other textual moments involving other characters in the novel, human-landscape interactions are crafted into complex thematic features that enrich both setting and character.

In her essay “The Site of Memory,” Morrison comments on the significance of imagination for her writing: “memories and recollections won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of the imagination can help me.” In addition to her drafting and crafting the landscape, she imagined Jacob walking in these regions in 1682. Her imagination enables her to create a story that invites the reader to feel a closeness to the place, despite the chronological, and sometimes geographical, distance. She invites us to experience the place along with a 17th century settler: “he took delight in the journey. Breathing the air of a world so new, almost alarming in rawness and temptation, never failed to invigorate him. Once beyond the warm gold of the bay, he saw forests untouched since Noah, shorelines beautiful enough to bring tears, wild food for the taking.”

In the car on the highway, I realize that despite the traffic, despite the concrete, despite the radically changed place, the landscape I see is also the one Jacob is sailing, walking, and riding through. This actual place, marked by the imprint of today’s humans, is interwoven with the fictional place Jacob traverses in another century. Along with these watery landscapes, I see my childhood Baltic archipelago with its narrow fairways on which thousands upon thousands of vessels have sailed through the centuries — some out fishing between the islets, others on their way toward the world’s oceans as part of a growing shipping industry — all on a sea that binds together the continents. In my mind and through my imagination, fed by my childhood island landscape, I can now experience this co-existence of times and places. For this, I thank Toni Morrison, whose drafting, crafting, and imagining made this amalgam of placescapes possible.

Alice Sundman was born on the Åland Islands of Finland and lives in Stockholm, Sweden, where she is working on a project exploring places of and between water and land in Anglophone literature. She is the author of Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place (Routledge, 2022).

Image: “A New map of Virginia, Maryland, and the Improved Parts of Pennsylvania & New Jersey.” Originally published by Christopher Browne, 1685. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

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Childhood Home

Lorain, Ohio

By Tara L. Conley

“This region (Lorain, Elyria, Oberlin) is not like it was when I lived here, but in a way it doesn’t matter because home is a memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory. But equally important as the memory and place and people of one’s personal home is the very idea of home. What do we mean when we say ‘home’”? –Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard

In astronomy, there’s an idea that describes how displacement and difference observed in a perceived object depends on the viewpoint, or the location from which the object is observed. Parallax, from the Greek word parallaxis, or change, is a multidimensional way of seeing. In literature, and by extension film, parallax is a device sometimes used to tell a story about a single event, place, or person through the perspective of multiple characters. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920) employs parallax, as does Netflix’s Kaleidoscope (2023) and Knives Out (2020-2022), as well as David Fincher’s 2014 psychological thriller, Gone Girl. 

In my classroom, when I discuss the idea of social difference, I hold up a marker. I ask students to describe exactly what they see from their vantage point. Each description is slightly different: “it’s plastic and round,” one student says. “It’s hard to see from where I sit,” says another. The story of the marker, as told by my students, contains multitudes. The point of this exercise is to show how perceived differences depend on perception, and to demonstrate how the relationship between subject and object is mediated. Perception is never truly unidirectional, and affected by our memory, ways of knowing and being, and a sense of place and environment. We don’t so much observe objects out there as we become affected by the experience of seeing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about parallax lately as I revisit previous writings on Toni Morrison, fellow Ohioan and Lorain County native. During the summer of 2019, I published a piece for CityLab/Bloomberg about visiting Toni Morrison’s childhood home in Lorain a few days after she passed. My article was among others published at the time that highlighted Morrison’s legacy as a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and cherished luminary on the Black American experience. I took a different approach, writing instead about the shape of borders, real and imagined, that make up the regional landscape both Morrison and I call home.

In The Source of Self-Regard (2019), when Morrison asks, “What do we mean when we say ‘home’?” I think about our shared home region of Lorain County, the shape of its borders, and the houses that hold memories of growing up during eras of radical social and political transformation. Born mid-February 1931 during The Great Depression, Morrison’s early life in Lorain was marked by an era of cataclysmic economic downfall. Born on the first day of February in 1981, amidst an economic recession, my early life in Elyria was marked by the rise of neoliberal economic reforms and New Right political movements. Despite the half-century gap between us underlined by different eras of social and political strife, Morrison and I belong to a shared ancestral line of Black American travelers who migrated to Ohio, seeking an escape from the south, what sociologist Karida L. Brown (2018) calls “the battered womb of the Civil War.”

The decades spanning roughly 1910-1970 transformed Ohio’s landscapes. During this historical period, known as The Great Migration, Black people left the South to seek opportunities in Midwestern cities like Elyria and Lorain. Once bustling, the region gradually decayed as industries left, businesses shut down, and economic progress stalled. For many, including my own family members, this fostered a visceral sense of being stuck in time. Amid the circumstances, Black people were especially vulnerable to the repercussions of these changes and subject to racial resentment as social institutions crumbled around them. 

Even the Black River, a natural tributary that flows into Lake Erie and connects Elyria and Lorain, was once a thriving center of commerce. As time passed, however, it became known for its polluted and treacherous waters that claimed the lives of those who ventured too close to its shores. The story of the Black River became a parable of the sower — once-vibrant, then weathered by time, reflecting the place and dispositions of the people surrounding it. 

Black travelers have always been keenly aware of landscapes that bend and close in on us. We also recognize when it’s time to leave. Morrison understood this too. She left Lorain in 1949 to attend Howard University in Washington, DC, and soon realized the price Black Americans pay when leaving home. During an interview with Colette Dowling in 1979 Morrison says, “if black people are going to succeed in this culture, they must always leave.” She continues: 

“Once you leave home, the things that feed you are not available to you anymore, the life is not available to you anymore … So you really have to cut yourself off.”

I left Ohio at a young age, but unlike Morrison, I returned to live, teach, and make stories about home. One of those stories is my documentary film called Dry Bones, about Ike Maxwell and the summer of 1975 when Elyria erupted in protest after Ike’s brother, nineteen-year-old Daryl Lee Maxwell, was shot and killed by a White police officer. Regardless of where I lived geographically, I always remained tied to northeast Ohio. The reason I returned isn’t merely rooted in being born and raised in Lorain County; rather, it’s the region’s story of social difference that draws me back.

In 2019, when I returned home to Lorain County, I noticed how neighborhood symbols and historical landmarks came to represent racial and social division. For example, while driving towards Toni Morrison’s former childhood home—a modest two-story pale blue colonial at the corner of Elyria Avenue and East 23rd Street—it was difficult to miss the house across the street adorned with a large Trump 2020 banner waving on the porch. It stood as a clear and intentional symbol of White racist attitudes and beliefs in one of Lorain County’s most heavily populated Black cities, along with Elyria. It also served as a reminder that within shared landscapes, disparate realities exist. Four miles away in Elyria, sits the YWCA building, an historical landmark located across the street from my childhood home. When I learned Daryl Lee Maxwell was arrested in the YWCA parking lot during the summer of 1975, bleak visions emerged of a young man I never knew heading towards the end of his life. Less than one month after Daryl Lee was arrested in the YWCA parking lot, a White police officer named Michael Killean shot and killed him outside a local bar, igniting a three-day protest and uprising. These moments, separated by time and space, and imbued with rememory, reveal the legacy of White power in America, persisting through its symbols of supremacy and authoritarian acts of violence.

Morrison’s childhood home in Lorain and mine in Elyria provide vantage points to reflect on the perpetual shadow of racial subjugation in our home region. Through a contemporary political symbol of White resentment and a nearby historical landmark of a haunting past, the answer to Morrison’s question about home crystalizes for me; home isn’t merely a broken place of shared memories or a place where Black travelers come and go. Home reveals a way of seeing with searing clarity Black people’s enduring resilience across cruel landscapes.

Tara L. Conley is an Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Journalism at Kent State University. Her writing on Morrison and living as a Black woman in the Rust Belt have appeared in CityLab/Bloomberg. Conley is currently working on a book and a film about her hometown of Elyria, Ohio. For more information on Tara’s research and creative projects, visit www.taralconley.org. 

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Thayer Hall

West Point, New York

By Trivius Caldwell

Born Chloe Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison was the second of four children and a precocious reader. She attended Howard University in 1949 and, later, taught there for seven years. In 1965, following the birth of her second son, Morrison moved to Syracuse, New York, to work for Random House. There, she edited work by African American writers Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, and many others. Morrison’s oeuvre is replete with aspects of African American vernacular and themes of race, gender, and sexuality. Her tenth novel Home (2012) is a departure from much of her ephemeral work and centers around a male protagonist, a war veteran. Portraying Frank Money as a protagonist grappling with profound troubles and trauma, who embarks on a journey back home after the Korean War, underscores the significance of delving into complex notions of home while reevaluating the concept of family. It seems odd Frank Money and cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point might have something in common, yet the tragedy of war is but one way of straying from home.

The academy is nestled in the Hudson River Valley, north of bustling New York City. The old fortress, West Point, is home to almost 4,300 cadets from across our nation and territories. They represent the best of us as they prepare to lead our Nation’s sons and daughters. The Cadet Corps calls the Academy home, and along the Hudson river, they prepare to defend liberty. In the spring, the sun peaks over the adjacent mountain range, toying with cadets as they scuttle to classes under the final chill of winter. On the clearest day, the cityscape of the Big Apple appears like a distant mirage.

Sometimes, cadets travel by train toward the city’s glow. Unbeknownst to them, the river flowing broadside of their locomotive was also home to perhaps the greatest literary genius of our time, Toni Morrison. She too called a portion of the Hudson’s bank home. Morrison lived in the village Grand View on the Hudson, a quiet place to write while staring into the river’s reflection of that passing train. Her novels — including classics like The Bluest Eye (1970)and Beloved (1987) — represent the reality of the American African interior by depicting an Africanist presence in America’s soul. Teaching at West Point, I often admired cadets as they reflected on their future military service while gazing into that same soothing water. The Hudson River is more than just a canal to the Big Apple; it is an artery of the imagination.

Follow that river north and the gothic architecture of Thayer Hall emerges from the rolling hills of the Hudson highlands. Thayer Hall stands as a testament to both history and transformation. Originally conceived as the Riding Hall for the horses, this architectural gem proudly showcases the Gothic Revival style, mirroring the grandeur seen in other structures at West Point from the same era. Its robust exterior, crafted from gneiss masonry in random ashlar coursing, is accentuated by limestone parapets, window and door surrounds, and elegant belt courses. Granite additions, particularly at the bridges leading to its west side, further enhance its stately presence.

On March 22, 2013, Toni Morrison shuttled a short distance north to lecture to the Plebe (freshman) class in the Roscoe Robinson Jr. auditorium in Thayer Hall. Her work on depicting the totality of our American experience is all too familiar to cadets — those charged with reading Home as they reflect on the inner turmoil and implications of their service — especially given the experiences of Morrison’s protagonist Frank Money.

The acoustics in the auditorium transformed her writing into a symphony, harmonizing the rustle of a thousand pages turning simultaneously with the mellifluous cadence of Morrison’s jazzing voice. At once, the soundscape transformed the room into both canvas and cave, capturing the collective breath of anticipation and the energy of a captivated audience as cadets immersed themselves in Morrison’s literary imagination. The ethereal fusion of turning pages, coupled with Morrison’s voice resonating in the air, created a transcendent experience wherein the written and spoken word converged with an almost orchestral precision, inviting listeners to navigate her narrative. The auditorium, alive with the resonance of storytelling, became a sanctuary where the magic of literature unfolded in a captivating and immersive symphony. After all, Morrison makes fiction an oral art form. She is a master of manipulating sound by employing jazz characteristics in her writing.

Interestingly, that auditorium is named after a St. Louis native who ascended the military hierarchy to become the first African American four-star general in the United States Army. The formerly known “South Aud” served as a lecture facility for the Corps of Cadets long before the 1958 commemoration of the auditorium for General Robinson, who is emblematic of the pride that motivates Cadets to serve in times of war. However, the purpose for renaming it demonstrates the same exigence motivating Morrison’s fiction — belonging.

The Cultural Affairs Seminar (CAS), a cohort of cadets of color at West Point, petitioned for the auditorium’s name change because they were not satisfied with their lack of reflection in the gothic stone. Like others seeking to join the Long Gray Line to defend freedom, they wanted to be represented at the historic military mainstay. As with Morrison’s depiction of the Korean War veteran Frank Money — not to mention Shadrack, Paul D, and the Harlem Hellfighters in other novels — the cadets were willing to scratch the calcified scab of national history by using voice and action to assert their place.

Long landscapes like the Hudson River, the stone Riding Hall, and the auditorium and its acoustic flair served as the setting for the writer’s tutelage. Everyone awaited her voice, loud like the silence itself, signaling a legacy and ghosts of the past. On the hallowed grounds of West Point, she whispered Frank Money’s thoughts: “I only remembered the horses. They were so beautiful. So brutal. And they stood like men.”

Trivius Caldwell is an active-duty Army Infantry officer. He served as an Assistant Professor of English at West Point from 2011-2013. Trivius is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Duke University where he studies African American literature, sound studies, and hip-hop literature.

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