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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Lakeview Park

Lorain, Ohio

By Ashley Burge

As a teenager, I entered what Toni Morrison calls her narrative “village” through her first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), and I was pleased to see three young Black girls traverse the familiar experiences of home life while prodding the unfamiliar territory of adolescence. I found much comfort in these girls’ fantasies and fears, and I wept, as I still do, over their tragedies. I was also entranced by the way Morrison framed her beautifully tragic characters in picturesque settings of nature and growth and beauty. Any serious Morrison reader is well attuned to her complex and intriguing characters, sparse but rich prose, and “unspeakable” thematic materials. I remember sprawling on my bed admiring these Black girls amidst golden-brown autumn leaves or tight red rosebuds. To me, these snapshots of nature were a buffer to the hopelessly tragic story that would soon unfold.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses the backdrop of Lorain, Ohio, her midwestern hometown, to illuminate the traumas inflicted on young Black girls and women in the 1940s. Specifically, she represents the Edenic Lakeview Park, with its beautiful rose gardens, situated among the pristine beachfronts on West Erie Avenue, as a pathway to cathartic revelation and renewal. For Morrison, nature and the natural world are a catalyst for survival, so the book’s version of Lakeview, called Lake Shore Park, is an ideal space to anchor her vision.

Lakeview Park has become a landmark in Lorain County with its approximately 2,500 roses planted in a rotary wheel. The park sits on Lake Erie, its circular design symbolizing wholeness and rebirth. In a more just world, it would be the ideal space for Morrison’s tragic protagonists to transcend the confines of intersectional oppression. But in 1940s Lorain, Ohio, spaces such as these were inaccessible to the three Black girls who epitomize themes of victimhood and survival in Middle America. In The Bluest Eye, these girls, Claudia, Fredia, and Pecola, are accosted by the traumas of racism, sexism, and classism well before they have escaped the naïve joy and confusion of adolescence. The tragic character Pecola does not understand or question her obsessive desire for blue eyes, but she is awestruck when the green-eyed “high-yellow dream child” Maureen Peal enchants teachers, parents, and students. Portrayed as a type of Persephone embodied in Morrison’s season themed narrative, Maureen disrupts the equilibrium of the girls’ identities and symbolizes the overwhelming otherness of Black girlhood in America. In these young girls’ experiences with racism and sexism, Morrison interrogates the worst possible scenarios for those who are othered, marginalized, and dismissed, and she indicts the communities that are complicit in their annihilation.

In many ways, The Bluest Eye is an autobiographical rendering of Morrison’s own othered identity in the small Midwestern industrial town of Lorain, Ohio. Morrison adamantly affirmed her Midwestern roots throughout her career. In conversation with Collette Dowling, she said, “Everything I write starts there…. Whether I end up there is another question, but that’s the place where I start…. It’s my beginning, my ‘thing,’ and I have distorted it, piled things on, I have done whatever it is that writers do to places, and made it my own. So it is mine now.”  Even while claiming the Midwest as her own, she confessed to Robert Stepto, “I know that I never felt like an American or an Ohian or even a Lorainite.”

Morrison’s allegiance to the Midwest shows in her ability to carve out the validity of Black identity in a region that often silences diverse voices. Morrison’s family faced such disenfranchisement. Before relocating to the Midwest for better opportunities, they had deep roots in the South, with her mother being from Alabama and her father from Georgia. She often recounts the story of 88 acres of land that were legally taken from her Native American maternal great-grandmother to show how white supremacy and systematic oppression renders land inaccessible to Black and brown people.

Morrison emphasizes this extension of day-to-day oppression in The Bluest Eye as she traces the growth and then disintegration of Pecola’s character. Before a pivotal scene in which Pecola is rejected by her mother and humiliated in front of the little white girl who her mother cares for, Morrison details the natural beauty of the white neighborhood that these young girls cannot access:

“We reached Lake Shore Park, a city park laid out with rosebuds, fountains, bowling greens, picnic tables. It was empty now, but sweetly expectant of clean, white, well-behaved children and parents who would play there above the lake in summer before half-running, half stumbling down the slope to the welcoming water. Black people were not allowed in the park, and so it filled our dreams.”

Here, Morrison embosses the fictionalized Lake Shore Park onto Lorain’s own Lakeview Park, with its lush rose gardens, manicured lawns, and picturesque lakeside. The tragedy of its beauty is that these young Black girls in 1940s Lorain are denied access to the dream of smelling those rosebuds, playing on those lawns, or frolicking on that lakeside. They are shut out from its beauty in nature and, therefore, alienated from their community, which adds to the despair that leads to Pecola’s demise.

When I reflect on my first immersion into The Bluest Eye as a teenager, I realize that my delight in Morrison’s poetic rendering of nature points to the reclamation of spaces that have been historically inaccessible to the Black community. Within that legalized denial enacted prior to the 1960s there was not only the unspoken denial of the ecstasy of nature but also the disenfranchisement of property, wealth, and mobility that still plagues Black Americans today. I was not personally denied access to Lorain’s natural enclaves, but the tragic narrative of denial was a tangible specter that haunted my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama even in my adolescence.  

These are, perhaps, the sentiments that impressed upon me as I empathized with Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola. And these are, perhaps, the sentiments that many Black Americans must navigate as they encounter the traumas connected to public parks and natural resources in America. It would not be difficult to surmise that Morrison incorporates the tragic denial of Lake Shore Park in her narrative because her desire to access its beauty and nature also dominated her own dreams as a child. However, Morrison’s novels never persist in the tragic nor linger too long into despair. At their core, they are about healing that can lead to survival and subjectivity. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison took the pang of rejection and adorned the park with flourish and meaning and gravitas and three little Black girls whose voices would have otherwise been silenced. Now, Lakeview Park is forever hers, and through her reclamation, it becomes ours.

Dr. Ashley Burge is an Assistant Professor of African American literature at Augustana College–Illinois specializing in 19th and 20th century African American literature. Her research and teaching emphasize the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class. She also explores Black feminism and ecocriticism in her writings. Her essays have appeared in the North Carolina Literary Review, the Pennsylvania Communication Annual, the African American Encyclopedia of Culture, and the critical anthology Through Mama’s Eyes. Her current book project establishes a theoretical paradigm that transmutes trauma and fragmentation to wholeness and subjectivity in African American literature. 

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“Hearing Place will bring our Midwest humanities themes to life through vibrant programming that might remind you of your favorite field trips or TEDx events,” says Tina Casagrand Foss, executive director of The New Territory Magazine. A variety of activities will take place around Weston from 9:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m., with the main hub at Eventful at Locust Grove (25180 NW County Rd. JJ). University of Missouri scholars and New Territory leaders will engage participants in workshops and tours in the late morning and convene for an interactive moderated panel presentation in the early afternoon, with social time to follow for one-on-one conversation.

“The many different disciplines that are incorporating elements of sound across Missouri and the Midwest will deepen participants’ understanding of our place,” says Dr. Soren Larsen, professor of geography at the University of Missouri and organizer of the scholar panel. 

Presentation topics include ecomusicology, Indigenous soundscapes, folk music, creative writing centered on place, tobacco farming, and the Missouri River podcast River Town. “We believe words heal divides,” says Casagrand Foss. “And we look forward to working with Missouri Humanities to fulfill its vision of a more thoughtful, informed, and civil society.”

Following the Hearing Place event, The New Territory will host a fundraiser dinner to benefit the independent 501(c)3 nonprofit magazine’s narrative journalism, art and personal, natural and societal stories about the Great Plains, Ozarks, and Lower Midwest.

For more information on attending or sponsoring the event, please visit the Pageturner 2024 page at newterritorymag.com.

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About Missouri Humanities
Missouri Humanities’ programs remember the past by exploring Missouri’s Heritage, sharing Veterans stories, and preserving Native American and Civil War history. Visit mohumanities.org.

About The New Territory Magazine
The New Territory Magazine is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization on a mission to advocate and foster love and protection of the Great Plains, Ozarks, and Lower Midwest through publishing art and narrative journalism focused on personal, natural and societal stories. Visit newterritorymag.com.

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The post The New Territory Magazine Receives Missouri Humanities Grant to Support The Pageturner: Hearing Place Conference in Weston September 22 appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Ablah Library

Wichita, Kansas

By Abby Bayani-Heitzman

Filipino American writer Bienvenido “Ben” N. Santos had a complicated relationship with the Midwest. He first arrived in the United States in 1941 as a pensionado, or government-sponsored scholar, to study at the University of Illinois. After World War II, he settled into a career as an educator and taught as a Fulbright exchange professor at the University of Iowa before arriving in 1973 at Wichita State University. He served as a Professor of Creative Writing and Distinguished Writer in Residence until 1982, a period that coincided with his voluntary exile from the Philippines.

During the dictatorship of Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos (1965–1986), Santos’ 1982 novel The Praying Man was banned for its perceived criticism of the Marcos regime due to its depiction of political corruption. Although living and working in the Midwest kept Santos free from political persecution, it also distanced him from the country and culture he loved.

I first learned about Ben Santos and his writing while I was a student at Wichita State; as a Filipino American and aspiring writer in Kansas, his story really resonated with me, not least because of his ties to both the Philippines and the Midwest.

After learning about Santos, I started to look at the Wichita State campus differently. I imagined him frequenting Ablah Library, which holds a collection of his personal writings and was my favorite place to study and write. Although there is no sign or sculpture at Wichita State that visibly marks Santos’ time there, I felt that I was following in his footsteps whenever I walked along the path between the library and the English department offices. I also imagined how lonely it must have been for him while he was living so far from both his home country and the well-established Filipino American communities on the coasts.

Themes of geographic distance as well as the distance created by passing time permeate Santos’ stories set in the Midwest. In the 1955 story “The Day the Dancers Came,” Fil, an older Filipino man, eagerly awaits the arrival of a Philippine dancing troupe, planning to invite them to dinner and give them a tour of Chicago, where they are performing. Fil sees the young Filipinos as a way to reconnect with and relive the happy memories he has of his home country. However, his hopes are crushed when the dancers avoid and ignore his invitations.

Before the dancers’ performance, Fil gets the idea to record the audio of the performance—the stomping of feet, the shouting and singing in dialects—with what he calls his “sound mirror,” a portable tape recorder. In this way, he seeks to preserve the past forever, creating a way to immerse himself in his idealized memories through sound.

As a member of an earlier generation of Filipino immigrants, Fil is not only separated from the Philippines he left by a great distance but also by the cultural changes that happen over time. Having not been back to the Philippines since he left as a young man, Fil knows the country only as he remembers it and is reluctant to accept that that place no longer exists. For him, “time was the villain” because it creates a distance that can never be bridged. He knows that what is lost to time is lost forever, and that clinging to a memory can warp how a person perceives the present: “Like time, memory was often a villain, a betrayer.”

Fil records the performance, but in the end, he fails to preserve his sentimental memories of Philippines, its people, and its cultures. By accident, he partially erases the tape and is left with nothing but confused noise:

“Frantically, he tried to rewind and play back the sounds and the music, but there was nothing now but the full creaking of the tape on the spool and meaningless sounds that somehow had not been erased, the thud of dancing feet, a quick clapping of hands, alien voices and words: in this country… everything… all of them… talking eyes… and the scent… a fading away into nothingness, till about the end when there was a screaming, senseless kind of finale detached from the body of a song in the background, drums and sticks and the tolling of a bell.”

Santos seems to suggest that attempting to preserve the past according to subjective beliefs as to what is important is a fruitless struggle. His stories are often concerned with finding a sense of belonging amidst the changes of modernity, and Santos surely experienced these struggles himself while in the Midwest. However, he accepted the changes that life brought and became an American citizen in 1976, while he was living in Wichita. Eventually, he returned to the Philippines — one he may not have recognized but embraced nonetheless.

When I returned to the Wichita State campus to photograph Ablah Library, I was shocked to see all the construction and renovation going on around campus. The place was still recognizable, but I felt a little melancholy that some of my favorite spots might one day disappear or be replaced. Ironically, Ablah Library itself is an example of this kind of development; built in 1962, it was designed by John Hickman, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, and was modeled after Wright’s “Prairie Style” that reflected the expansive landscapes of the Midwest through a dramatic emphasis on horizontal lines. The original long, low profile and details such as a concrete cantilevered balcony over the entrance were eventually obscured by new additions to the building.

The world is a palimpsest, constantly overwriting itself. Like people, cultures, and countries, places change with time. It’s unavoidable, and it’s often necessary, but that doesn’t make it hurt less when we lose what means so much to us. Even so, while I struggle to accept change, I take comfort in the fact that no one can ever really alter the past and the impression that it has left on me. When I visit the places that hold special meaning for me, I see ghosts, traces that show: this was a person, this was a place, and this really happened.

Abby Bayani-Heitzman was born and raised in northeast Kansas, where she continues to live and work. She received her MA in English from Wichita State University and participated in the second cohort of the Kansas Creative Arts and Industries Commission’s Critical Writing Initiative. Since 2020, she has served as coordinator for the Filipino American community organization Malaya Kansas, a chapter of Malaya Movement USA

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Riverside Park

Independence, Kansas

By Autumn Finley

Growing up in a flyover state, I never much considered the literary merit of my home in the southeast corner of Kansas. Apart from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, the novels I read were never set here. Then, in my senior year of high school, my drama teacher, Heather Wilson, introduced our class to the works of playwright William Inge. We were performing Picnic for the spring play, and we also read snippets of his other plays set in a fictionalized Independence, Kansas. I knew that Independence Community College had the Inge Center and the Inge Festival, but I had never processed that there was a famous playwright born and raised less than thirty miles from my family’s farm.

Learning about Inge made my corner of Kansas feel important. Our class took a field trip, looking at the homes in the historic areas of Independence to gain inspiration for our set. The professors at ICC opened the Inge home for our class to tour. It was then used as a home for their Playwrights in Residence program, and we saw the staircase and landing which likely inspired scenes in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. We visited the Inge cemetery plot, paying our respects while marveling at how a literary giant rose to fame from our tiny corner of the lower Midwest.

However, the place I associate most with Inge is a small picnic spot by the Verdigris River, which can be accessed down a slight ravine beyond the larger picnic areas at the Riverside Park and Ralph Mitchell Zoo. A lone concrete table was nestled in the bottom of the ravine, time wearing it down to a pocked finish, but the area was well-kept and mown for park-goers.

As the spring semester of my senior year rolled to a close, with opening night looming, our cast met up for our own picnic by the Verdigris, overlooking the murky water and an old concrete bridge. We munched on our sandwiches, mulling the fleetingness of our youth, understanding that the innocence of our own childhoods was fading, much like the realizations many of the characters have throughout the play. Helen Potts, a middle-aged character, reflects on the juxtaposition of day-to-day life and the energy of the teenage and young adult characters, saying to her neighbor, “I feel sort of excited, Flo. I think we plan picnics just to give ourselves an excuse … to let something thrilling and romantic happen to us—” The play hinges on love, both romantic and familial, and how those bonds shape people’s choices and dreams. For me and my classmates, our own hopes and plans echoed around the picnic table, the sound eventually carried down the lazy Verdigris.

Now, all that remains of that concrete picnic table is the base that anchored it to the ground. The bridge has been reduced to its pillars, likely worn down by flooding and the passage of time. Despite the rubble and debris dotting a ravine along the bank, the area remains a serene spot to enjoy views of the park to the west and the tangled woods around the river to the east.

A few years after graduation, I took the time to watch the film version of Splendor in the Grass. I knew the screenplay was Inge’s, but I was impressed by how much control he managed to maintain over the set design. The film featured Natalie Wood as Wilma Dean (Deanie) and Warren Beatty as Bud, and there they were on my TV screen, cast into a familiar setting of clapboard houses and screened porches. In that technicolor Independence, Kansas, were the high school students clad like so many photos from yearbooks past, and there was that concrete bridge and picnic area, nearly identical to my childhood memories of the place. Although rendered a brighter green than I remembered, there was the park where I had played with my family before riding the carousel, which still only costs a nickel, the same place I had gathered with friends on field trips. That same place was depicted by the Hollywood-cast coeds, swimming, chatting, and enjoying the everyday pleasures of growing up in small-town USA.

The screenplay itself is a marvel—the storyline, plot, and dialogue rich with commentary about young love and lower Midwest culture in the early twentieth century, yet it was the set design that swelled my pride. Independence seemed so important and large on the screen, perhaps as important as the British settings I was used to studying in college. Inge saw the importance of those literary connections too, tying his work to William Wordsworth’s poem of the same title. In an early classroom scene, Natalie Wood as Deanie recites:

“Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass,

Of glory in the flower,

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind”

This universal truth of innocence lost, growth, and distance in time persists as grass withers, dies, and grows again each year. Time moves forward despite personal and communal setbacks. Park benches and picnic tables are rearranged; bridges crumble and fade into memories. Still, we can take strength in the shared understanding of our community places. Inge bridged a gap in my understanding—that my childhood places were worthy of being a literary landscape.

Autumn Finley grew up in Altamont, KS, but has lived and studied in various communities across Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. She is currently an Associate Professor of literature and composition at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO.

Photo by Liz Finley.

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Rural Kingman County

Murdock, Kansas

By Taylor Krueger

During Sarah Smarsh’s childhood, driven by poverty and necessity, she moved frequently between the Kansas prairie and nearby metropolitan Wichita. Born on the precipice of the 1980s Farm Crisis, Smarsh received an inheritance of generational poverty and a nomadic lifestyle. During her youth, she would move between Kingman and Sedgwick counties 21 times before she turned 18. Her experience of the Kansas landscape and the people who call it home deeply influence her work as a writer and journalist, highlighting economic inequality and culture in rural America and bridging the cultural divide between urban and rural spaces.

“The countryside is no more our nation’s heart than are its cities, and rural people aren’t more noble and dignified for their dirty work in fields. But to devalue, in our social investments, the people who tend crops and livestock, or to refer to their place as ‘flyover country,’ is to forget not just a country’s foundation but its connection to the earth, to cycles of life scarcely witnessed and ill understood in concrete landscapes.”

Like Smarsh, my roots run deep through the soil of the Kansas prairie. One side of my family has grown and harvested wheat in northwest Kansas for five generations. On the other, my grandfather was raised on a farm and began his career driving a Wonder Bread truck through southeast Kansas, delivering the final product to consumer’s grocery shelves. Intergenerational values of self-reliance, moderation, and grit are narratives that shaped my upbringing.

My first encounter with Smarsh’s writing was Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2018), which highlights the tension between rural values and the systemic issues that undermine them.

“I was raised to put all responsibility on the individual, on the bootstraps with which she ought pull herself up. But it’s the way of things that environment changes outcomes. Or, to put it in my first language: The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed’ll do ’er job ’n’ sprout, but come hail ’n’ yer plumb outta luck regardless.”

As a licensed marriage and family therapist, I’ve learned the context that shapes us is not evenhanded, contrary to the myth of meritocracy. The principles of self-reliance that have helped rural people endure harsh conditions for centuries are the same values that create barriers to mental health care. In a place where your value as a human being is dependent on being useful, shame becomes common. Many of my psychotherapy clients believe they are the source of the problem. My training in systems theory, however, leads me to highlight reciprocal relationships, emphasizing instead that individual problems are systemic, created by larger forces in the family, community, and society.

Smarsh describes her early years observing the doctrine of self-reliance in a trailer next door to a farmhouse owned by her Grandma Betty and her husband, Arnie. The farm was located west of Wichita in the lowlands of south-central Kansas, straddling the High Plains and the Red Hills, with distinct red-brown soil stretching across the horizon. To the north is Cheney Reservoir, a man-made lake used to provide a water supply to the people of Wichita, with boats bobbing on the surface and campgrounds lining the shore. The reservoir borrows water from the nearby Ninnescah River, which means “sweet water” to the Osage Nation, who would be driven off their land nearly a century before the reservoir was constructed.

On a winter afternoon, I drive slowly around unmarked roads near Cheney Reservoir towards Kingman County, witnessing the expanse of prairie earth, water, and sky. I park my car north of the unincorporated community of Murdock, population approximately 37, near a boundary of barbed wire. The sound of stillness familiarly greets my ears as I reorient myself to the “isolation of rural life,” that Smarsh describes in Heartland. In early February, the fields are hushed and hibernating. On an unseasonably warm day, the colors glare under the winter sun. The enormous sky is a bright, clear blue with sweeps of watercolor wispy white clouds low on the horizon. Red dirt sticks to the tires of my car. Green rows line wheat fields stretching forward to tree lines ahead, limbs barren until spring comes around again. I watch the roots resting quietly, pausing as the cold air sits still in anticipation. My father taught me that wheat knows intuitively in its cells the exact right moment to spring forth from the earth, green stalks transforming into waving gold strands for harvest. Undeterred by hailstorms, fire, and drought, the crop continues to grow and change. In this Kingman County wheat, I see the great mystery of knowing your roots are deeply planted, and still not knowing what will become.

There is a mystical relationship that ties Kansans to this land. Smarsh reminds us in Heartland that even in leaving, “no matter where you ended up, like every immigrant you’d still feel the invisible dirt of your motherland on the soles of your feet.” In the same way Kansans are connected to the land, she writes, we are also connected to each other:

“Of all the gifts and challenges of rural life, one of its most wonderful paradoxes is that closeness born of our biggest spaces: a deep intimacy forced not by the proximity of rows of apartments but by having only one neighbor within three miles to help when you’re sick, when your tractor’s down and you need a ride, when the snow starts drifting so you check on the old woman with the mean dog, regardless of whether you like her.”

Standing on the side of the road in Kingman County, with only the wind for company, I feel small in my skin. In this sea of grass and red dirt, I am engulfed by the beautiful, terrible, and uncontrollable earth. Yet, in my aloneness, I am comforted by the sight of farmhouses rising quietly ahead. Looking out at this wild, expansive ecosystem of the prairie, the generosity and gregariousness of small, isolated communities provide me with a sense of hope in the face of systemic ambiguity. Despite the great spaces between rural people, a unique camaraderie binds us together. I’m reminded of a principle in systems theory indicating how change in any one part of the system evokes change on a larger scale. Through her wisdom and writing, Sarah Smarsh calls for collective change in our communities by providing clear testimony about the people of rural America, the landscape, and the reality of systemic issues that affect us every day.

Taylor Krueger is a licensed marriage and family therapist providing psychotherapy to women and children in her rural community. She studied literature and psychology at Kansas State University, and received her Master of Science in family therapy from Friends University. She was raised in Rooks County, Kansas, and her writing is influenced by the places she has called home. She lives in Newton, Kansas, with her husband and two young sons.

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