JEFFERSON CITY – The New Territory Magazine recently added three new directors to its nonprofit board: Leslie VonHolten of Lawrence, KS; Sara Maillacheruvu of Chicago, IL; and Cheyenne White of Topeka, KS. 

“Our directors share true passion for telling new stories about the Lower Midwest,” says board president Emily Render. “The new directors bring skills that will not only help foster writers, editors, and artists in our region, but also help send a high-quality magazine to our readers’ mailboxes.”

The 13-person board supports the organization’s mission to advocate and foster love and protection of the Great Plains, Ozarks, and Lower Midwest through publishing art and narrative writing focused on personal, natural and societal stories. 

This year marks the 10th consecutive year of publishing the biannual, full-color print magazine. 

“I am thrilled to welcome Sara, Leslie, and Cheyenne to our leadership in time to celebrate a big milestone,” says Tina Casagrand Foss, The New Territory Magazine founder and executive director. “Sara was a top-level editor with us for many years, so she knows the magazine intimately. Leslie and Cheyenne have both been champions of regional storytelling and are experts in art and material culture. They’re also expanding our reach across Illinois and Kansas, bringing us closer to fully representing a regional scope to which we aspire.”  

For more information, visit The New Territory Magazine nonprofit board page.

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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.

The post The New Territory Magazine Welcomes Three New Board Directors appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

My stepfather, Amos, pulled out a stool, and I followed him to the porch with a doormat. There we sat and waited for a long wind funnel to take us to one kind of Oz, where a version of Ma was sitting on a golden stool, a brass crown on her small head and loyal subjects at her feet. After all, if Amos the physicist thought Kepler-186f could be heaven, out of reach in our current form but possible in another, then I could escape to an Oz of my imagination, maybe call it something else, something new and mine. Mine alone. We waited and waited, and when the storm didn’t come, when it scattered into air on the houseless plains, we decided to leave the porch and find ourselves a goat.

If anyone asked, we were surviving on long walks, goat meat, and canned tomatoes. The walks kept our blood flowing out of the other’s radius for as long as possible. I kept long nights roaming the woods, Amos kept long nights on the road, and we didn’t ask each other questions. We only spoke to discuss necessities: What are you making for dinner? Where did you put my favorite socks? Why didn’t you go to school today? The goat reminded Amos of home, his mother’s pepper soup. While he scalded his dying taste buds with habanero-spiced meat, I blended Ma’s tomatoes and stewed them with shrimp for my mild tongue. We were surviving on memory, the good kind, and all our good memory was tied to food. Food that was not easy to get in the middle of Kansas.

After the storm died on the fields, I worried we would not find a goat. It was darkening, for one, the sky a map of bruises.

The Miller farm was our first stop, just off a gravel road across from Dairyland. They had a llama and an alpaca, three hens, a rooster, five guinea fowl and five goats.

“They’re not for sale,” said Mr. Miller the first time we asked, months ago. “I’m sorry for your loss. But they’re family.”

When she was home, Mrs. Miller offered everything for sale, anything we wanted: chicken, guinea fowl, goat. They were not her family, she said. She needed the cash, she said. For her real family. (Not that we asked.) She would deal with her husband later. As far as I knew, Amos and I were the only customers for goat meat. Others might want pets, but I had yet to see anyone walking their goat on a leash.

But today was a lucky day for the Miller goats. Mrs. Miller was not home. The housekeeper, a college student with purple hair, met us at the door. She had firm instructions from Mr. Miller: no sales, no visitors. I heard voices behind her, a flashing television and laughter over two familiar TV voices. I almost asked if I could join them.

Amos stood frozen at the gate. I peeled myself away from the door. When I reached him, I pulled him by the elbow to the aging Camry.

“They’re going out of business,” I said. He grunted at my attempt at an excuse, gripped the leather of the steering wheel and dug his nails in. I winced. For a moment, I felt a pinch at the back of my head. The one I felt when Sam Chester scorched his thumb on the Bunsen burner during chemistry, the one I felt just before the basketball slammed my distracted face during practice. The one I didn’t acknowledge the morning my mother was gasping in the next room.

I took a breath, ushered my thoughts away from Ma and remembered Sam’s family had a farm, too, very close by.

“Keep right,” I told Amos, when he started to turn us back to the highway, to the Dillon’s
Market for tilapia fillets. “One more try.”

I didn’t want to go to the Chester farm. Not since Ma’s funeral. Sam Chester spent half his days there. Sam Chester was vulnerable there. Open, as close to happy as a halved spirit could get. I had been open once, too, at the farm. Now I couldn’t remember how. Sam was becoming a memory, too, and I wanted him to stay that way. An old escape, a kiss in the fields while my mother died in the cold house. But living memories were harder to shake.

At school, I kept my eyes down, away from his inquiring gaze. He tried to share lab stations and benches between games, all the while mimicking my silence. I requested a new lab partner, quit basketball and then debate when he joined. I didn’t speak, not even when his dimples grew shallow, not when they vanished into hard cheeks. His eyes paled, but eventually he took the hint. I was alone with myself, what I wanted, what I deserved.

Then the teachers started sneaking cards and notes into my locker, invitations to games and tournaments. It’s been a year, I heard them say in the space between one letter and the next. About time you returned to life. But I would not return. School had become a market of faces stuck between the desire to help and the desire to leave me to my grey clouds lest they migrated over. I was surviving. I didn’t have energy to figure out who was real and who was pretend.

Amos parked between Tracy Chester’s muscled truck and Sam’s green Audi. He eyed the luxury car, asked me if I knew the owner. I didn’t answer. Tracy Chester opened her door, wearing pink flip flops, jean shorts and a sleek shawl, her skin blotching at the cold. She wasn’t Mrs. Chester anymore, but everyone still called her that, so I did, too, in my head. She greeted us on the porch, door held open, Sam behind her. Her face bloomed, an invitation from a kind neighbor. Sam’s darkened: What are you doing back here?

“I’m Tracy,” she said, ignoring her son’s shadow. “It’s cold out. You all should come inside. I’ll make tea.”

“No need,” said Amos. “We’re here for a goat.”

“Fine,” she said. “Give me a smile, and I’ll sell you a goat. I can’t have you walking on my property all grumpy.”

“Ma,” Sam groaned.

Amos turned to leave.

“Wait!” said Tracy. “Gee, I was only pulling your leg.”

She stepped down from the porch and started a brisk pace to the barn, gesturing for us to follow. I knew this path well. The goats were fenced beside the barn. They were napping and defecating and munching on hay.

“Which one would you like?” Tracy asked, one hand on her waist, the other on the fence. The farm dog circled us, sniffing for bones.

“The friendly looking one,” said Amos, pointing. “With the two white feet.”

It was my turn to freeze.

“No,” I said.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” His voice was a blade kissing stone. Amos and I weren’t blood, but we had at least one thing in common. No one got in the way of our meal, just as no one got in the way of our grief.

“A goat is a goat,” I said. “You don’t have to be picky.” A goat was not just a goat. Not if you and your mother named him Wilson, fed him apples and promised to one day adopt him. But two truths could clash at a crossroad and remain true. A goat was still more than a goat if you hadn’t eaten all day, if you craved the meal your mother fed you when you returned home after lonely days abroad, the meal you tried to emulate to remember her. I knew this. I also knew hunger eroded his patience, so I stood firm. My hands clenched in my pockets. I stared at the poppies in Mrs. Tracy’s shirt. I tried not to look at Sam standing behind us, his face a canvas of confusion. I tried not to look at Amos, his face a growing storm.

“You can give orders when you’re paying,” he said.

I could pay for it, but if Amos knew I had money, he would ask where I got it, and it would be gone before a year passed, spent on expensive liquor, maybe even a down payment on a new car. My punishment for keeping Ma’s secrets. I looked at Tracy. Her face, glossy only a moment before, was blooming red, green eyes flitting from Amos to me. I tried not to panic.

“Tell you what,” she said. “Let the girl work here once a month, and I’ll give you a goat a year. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds good,” I said. I kept my voice flat. I couldn’t sound too eager.

Sam, finally catching our ruse, shook his head and went back inside. If Amos wasn’t on the road as often as he was, he would know what Sam and his mother knew. That Ma and I worked on Tracy’s farm when he was gone, that we spent summers here, while Amos crossed other states in the name of research, searching for new homes away from this one. Because ours was not a home anymore. We didn’t ask questions. We let him have his dreams, we let him have his time with his proxy wives and proxy children, painting pictures of perfection, at least until the day the picture slipped, and he saw a flash of fear in their eyes. Then he would return his gloom to us. Meanwhile, Ma and I found new dreams. Without Amos’ cloud above her, Ma borrowed Tracy’s seeds and built a garden of her own.

The garden made a beautiful picture. One he couldn’t know. Because we saved, to run, to build a new home. Ma hadn’t asked to come to the U.S. Amos had painted a picture of family, an irresistible portrait for the hungry, and so she had arrived with me in tow, not knowing how things worked. School allowed me an escape. All she had was an old house that yawned cold and empty save for spiders and long shadows. She went on walks to get away, but walking wasn’t enough, was it?

Amos frowned at Tracy’s offer. He sniffed, nose pinched, smelling suspicion. I waited for his tension to evaporate, breathed when his shoulders fell. Good thing he no longer asked about my life. Good thing his grief kept his eyes inward, clouded. Safe to assume Tracy was offering her condolences and only that.

“Two goats,” he said.

“What?” Tracy wasn’t used to bargaining. I hoped she would catch on quickly.

“Two goats a year.”

“Deal,” she said.

Still frowning, Amos nodded. “Give me another billy then. So long as he’s not too young or too old. I don’t have time to cook an old goat.”

The billy Tracy offered was old. But one problem at a time.

“Sam!” Tracy called. “Come here and help.”

Amos grunted. “We’re good.”

The last time one of the Millers had helped, killing the animal before we could argue, the goat died slow, too slow, so slow I recalled every breath and locked myself in the closet whenever Amos packed to kill another.

Since then, Amos didn’t like anyone peering over his shoulder. His kills were clean, he didn’t like to be questioned. I was only here because extra hands meant less time in the cold, because I lived with him and saw everything, almost everything. I still didn’t know how exactly my mother had died.

A spider, Amos had said. A spider on her pillow.

A brown recluse, said the doctor, too late.

I didn’t understand how the woman could survive a famine and a drowning, cobras and pythons and who knows what else only to die from a spider bite. I didn’t want to believe it. I disappeared into myself when I recalled my unbelief.

“Careful with that knife,” Amos growled. “Don’t want your blood in my meat.”

I handed him the knife. I bent down to hold the shuddering animal, locking one hoof over another, pressing down. Amos whispered a prayer, gauged the heart.

“Get the flamethrower,” he said when he was done.

He singed the hair off. I warmed my hands at the flames. I felt Sam’s knife-gaze at the back of my head. I didn’t turn around.

Amos scraped the goat and chopped off the limbs. He did almost everything himself, wrapped the head separately, re-sharpened the knife. I let him. I knew better than to put myself in the path of his rage. I cleaned out barrels and prepared the cooler, quiet, efficient. Until he dug a hole to throw away the entrails.

Ma would have cleaned it.

“What?” He stilled.

I hadn’t intended to speak. Unless I did. I had been misplacing my intentions of late.

“She didn’t like to be wasteful,” I said, barely a whisper. But he heard.

With those words, I saved the stomach and the liver. I couldn’t save any intestines—they were already in the ground, the chickens pecking around the farm dog, the dog licking at the blood. I wrapped what I could save in three bags, stuck them in the cooler above Amos’ meat. We packed. We washed our hands and feet at the outdoor tap. Tracy waved us out of the driveway; I waved back. Sam did not come to say goodbye.

Back in the cold house, Amos left me in the kitchen. My punishment.

I took my time. His punishment.

I cleaned both meat and entrails with lime, changed the water three times. I put them on the stove, lidded the pan, leaving room for steam. Then I left it all to boil. I walked out the back door and sat on a stump, overlooking Ma’s garden, what was left of it. If I closed my eyes and focused hard enough, I could see her on her stool, hunched over a potato mound, hacking at a difficult root with her hoe. I could see a younger version of myself pestering her about dinner. I could smile now, recalling that stubborn girl standing behind her mother with hands akimbo, bracing for the irritated, “You know very well how to make your dinner.”

I could stay here in this moment at least until Amos yelled at me to return to the kitchen. But if he forgot, if he, too, was trapped in a cocoon of tears, I would stay until my toes threatened to freeze, a reminder that most of my warmth had been lost to a summer long gone, a summer never returning. Even if the sky and the storms remained in denial, the earth stayed honest. The hibiscus petals had shrunk. Twigs that sagged like scarecrows were all that remained of Ma’s garden. Only the spiders persisted. An exterminator came every other month now to spray Raid in every corner of the house. He highly recommended renovating the basement. The landlord sent emails periodically, checking in, offering to move us to a new house, no need to worry about the rent, you’ve got so much on your plate, I’m so sorry for your loss.

We said no. We kept saying no. We couldn’t move. There was no memory in a new house.
This was home now, our punishment.

The post Sorry For Your Loss appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

1.

count; computation; calculation

I used the word reckoning on the phone with Marlene in Brooklyn before I heard it bandied about on the news. She and I have been counting and recounting racial incidents since 1990 when she invited me to be godmother to her son Travis. We’ve talked about what Travis goes through as a young Black man in American: being racially profiled when he drives, harassment on the street and at school. We talk about the microaggressions Marlene experiences at work, her daughters’ distresses, the terrifying night her husband was beaten bloody by white Brooklyn policemen: her husband handcuffed on the ground in a dark parking lot in Flatbush, the thumps and thuds and grunts as the cops beat him with batons and flashlights, and Marlene, restrained by a female officer on the far side of their car, helplessly screaming, Don’t kill him! What are you doing? Are you just going to kill him for no reason?

Every assault, emotional and physical, metaphorical and literal, public and personal, recounted one by one by one over thirty years.

In the beginning, when Marlene first invited me into her family, I believed America was past this sort of racialized violence. My white ignorance allowed me to think that. Three decades later, I recognize the lie at the heart of that ignorance.

I live in Oklahoma now, so we have to reach across miles to do it, but our count continues, seemingly endless, like counting stars. But I’d never heard the kind of despair I heard in her voice that day. It was the morning after the killing of George Floyd and the viral video of the white woman in Central Park calling the cops on the Black man who’d asked her to leash her dog.

“It’s getting worse,” Marlene said. “You can’t know what it’s like, Rilla. What we go through every day.”

“I know,” I said. “I mean, I know I don’t know.” And I don’t, not in the same soul-killing way. I’ve stood witness to the assaults Marlene and her family go through, never suffering the same kinds of assaults myself, because my skin color is not a marker for suspicion and violence and death.

“I cry every time I watch it,” she said. “I know there will be more deaths like this. It’s getting worse! I don’t know what to do!” Watching the slow, torturous murder of George Floyd caused her to relive watching white cops beat her handcuffed husband; her grief and anguish were beyond bearing, choked and plaintive and sorrowful, to the very heights and depths of the world. And yet she couldn’t not watch.

I knew the details of the video, had seen the still photographs, the white cop’s nonchalant gaze as he crushed the life from the Black man on the ground, but I could not bring myself to watch. Nine minutes and 29 seconds eking out in real time the nightmare of our nation’s history. I think about that now. I couldn’t watch, and Marlene couldn’t not watch, and this delineates as clearly as anything just how our lives are corralled on either side of the racial divide.

This, then, is part of my computation, one small item of my privilege: I can choose to avert my eyes if I want. I can tell myself it would be voyeuristic to watch that slow, tortured death, I’d be like those white faces turning toward the camera in old postcards of lynchings. I tell myself it’s more respectful not to watch. But Marlene has lived this same white-on-Black violence, she has cried out to white cops to stop murdering her husband, she’s watched her son arraigned in criminal court for the crime of being a young Black man who looks, to white eyes, like any other young Black man. In uncountable ways, overt and covert, Marlene and her family live it every day. They don’t have the choice to turn away.

What I did not turn away from that day was the video of the white woman in Central Park calling 911. I watched it over and over. “There’s an African American man threatening me!” The woman’s fake strident fear, her rising hysteria, the very use of the term African American — such a privileged, middleclass Caucasian thing to do. She knew precisely what she was doing, and yet she would have said then, and indeed did say afterwards, I am not a racist.

That white woman is the one I write about in fiction and nonfiction; she’s the one I know from the inside. I hear her voice at book clubs and church socials, in line at the grocery store. I don’t see color. I don’t have a racist bone in my body. She’s embedded in white America, whether we want to claim her or not. She’s embedded in me.

She’s the one I need to recognize, and own, and cut away. It seems to be taking a lifetime.

This, too, is part of the count.

A few days later, as Black Lives Matter demonstrations roiled across the country, Marlene and I spoke again. This is when I first used the word. “Maybe we’ve reached a tipping point,” I said hopefully. “All these white people marching in the demonstrations. Maybe we’re finally really reckoning with this stuff.”

I wanted the marches to be authentic, not performative, not a passing got-woke fad but evidence of the deep, true racial reckoning the country has needed. I’m not sure I believed it, even then, but I hoped it could be true. To my small white hope that day, Marlene answered nothing. Whatever I wanted those marches to be, I believe she knew better.

2.

an accounting, as for things received or done

“So let me ask you this,” my friend Catherine said one roiling day in midsummer — yes, that same summer: the summer of the pandemic and the ascendance of Black Lives Matter and the wrenching open of our superficially scabbed wounds. “What do you think will actually shift white consciousness?”

That white consciousness needs to be shifted is a given in our conversations. That it equates with white supremacy, fear, implicit bias: all givens too. Catherine writes about the African diaspora and Black culture and consciousness, and I write about white consciousness and bias, not in theory but in memoir and fiction, and we were colleagues at Oklahoma’s flagship university, where racial scars run deep as the bloodred soil in this part of the state. I fumbled around on the phone, offered something about love being the only force I know of that can really change people — but love alone sounds so sentimental and inept. So I told a story. And Catherine told one. In my story, white consciousness is changed. In hers, not so much.

“What’s the difference?” Catherine said.

In my story a white woman goes into Black spaces. She loves a Black child and becomes a part of that child’s family. In Catherine’s story, a white woman loves a Black child but raises the child inside her white world. We talked about this paradox: that white bias isn’t simply about skin color, though in white folks’ shamed hearts we believe that it is. But we are perfectly capable of loving or liking or admiring an individual Black person — a grandchild, athlete, music star, coworker, friend at church — and still loathe and fear, often unconsciously, Black America itself.

I know I was conditioned as a child to react to skin color, to see Black people as different, alien, an unknowable “they.” I’ve tried to describe this to Catherine, but I can’t pinpoint specific moments. Who taught me? When? How? I want to trace back the words, recreate them so I can own them, repudiate them, but it’s like trying to grasp air. If I cannot remember the precise ways white supremacy was instilled in me, how can I make an account of things received or done?

The time and place where I grew up, Oklahoma in the 1960s, was little different from the old Jim Crow South: we were radically separated. White people did not live in the same neighborhoods as Black people; we did not shop in the same stores, play in the same parks, swim in the same pools, attend the same churches, eat in the same restaurants, drive the same streets. Our lives intersected at no juncture that I can recall, except the hallways at our high school.

And yet most white folks I know from those days would swear ours was not a racist town, we loved our Black athletes, we never had any racial trouble: we were not like the Deep South. They would truly believe this, despite reality. One of the deadliest white assaults on a Black community in the nation’s history, the Tulsa Race Massacre, took place only fifty miles and fifty years away, and we knew nothing about it — and this is only the tiniest part of what we didn’t know. And still don’t.

Once, when Catherine and I were talking about how the reckoning has got to be white folks’ work, white folks’ journey, I said, “Yes, and reparations are important, I absolutely believe in them, I know nothing will change until we make restitution. But reparations aren’t going to change things if we don’t do the internal reckoning. White folks have got to own the whole truth, we’ve got to understand in our hearts what’s been done here, and our part in it.”

Catherine laughed. “Believe me,” she said, “there won’t be any reparations unless that happens first.”

Then we both started laughing, because we both know white folks won’t be turning loose of any money unless there’s a deep soul turning first.

I mean, it’s true, isn’t it? It’s true.

3.

a settlement of accounts: a day of reckoning

I tell my white friends I’ve been grappling in new and deeper ways with slavery as America’s origin story. Yes, we know slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples are the nation’s original sins, and I’ve long thought of it that way, but this wrestling now feels different, more acute and wretched, though it’s hard to describe what I mean, because there’s no story here—no characters, actions, setting, plot. No event. It’s just me reading, talking with white friends and Black friends, feeling things, watching the news.

I think, how do we settle our accounts? What constitutes our day of reckoning?

In the Baptist churches of my childhood, the preachers talked about “coming under conviction” as the first step on the road to Salvation. You can find similar principles in Twelve Step programs, self-help books, and reconciliation panels, because the process of spiritual regeneration seems to follow a certain path.

First comes the awakening, the acknowledgment, the “coming under conviction” about one’s own responsibilities, or defects of character, or, if you will, sin.

Next comes repentance, the turning away from that defect with knowledge. We have to know precisely, in acute detail, in all honesty, in full ownership, the harm/sin/wrong we’ve committed, and then choose, willingly, to turn away from it.

After repentance comes atonement, amends, actions we take to try to set things right. This includes going to the ones we have harmed and making amends. This includes restitution. This includes reparations. This includes sacrifice. In Old Testament days, it was blood sacrifice. Now the sacrifice is time and money, privilege and treasure. The harmed ones are telling us how to do this — if we’ll listen.

In this path to regeneration, it is only after atonement (read: restitution; read: reparations) that redemption begins. Lots of white folks I know want to skip right to redemption; we’re anxious to put that old stuff behind us, get to reconciliation, forgiveness, peace. We want to reach kumbaya, right here, right now, when we haven’t even fully reckoned the cost. When we’re only just now, just barely, just beginning to take account.

Or are we even doing that? All this time later, and I’m thinking: what have we really accomplished? Who’s talking about racial reckoning now? Besides those who still suffer this country’s racism and racialized violence, that is. Where are the hashtags, the Black Lives Matter profile-picture frames?

4.

an itemized bill or a statement of an amount due

Sometimes I feel as if I carry the whole country inside me: America’s hard history, our promise and guilt. My novels are about this hard history, but not that alone. Maybe being steeped in the King James Bible all my young life gave me a belief in the sins of nations, this notion of collective guilt. Growing up in Oklahoma, where the threads of America’s white supremacist narrative came together in such dramatic and violent ways, gave me awareness of my people’s place in the nation’s collective sins. And by my people I mean myself, my own family, and I mean Oklahomans. I also mean, in general, white folks.

I listen to what white people say: my friends, kin, and others. From even the most progressive I hear words that glide right past reckoning. What we want now is inclusion, equity, a peaceable kingdom, a nonracist culture. We say to the disenfranchised, “Come on in,” but we don’t say, “I’ll move over.” We think there’s room for all of us. We don’t want to give up anything — none of our privileges, perks, hegemony. But I don’t think it works that way. I don’t think we can redeem five hundred years of devastation without personal and collective pain, without sacrifice. I’m overwhelmed sometimes when I think of what it’s going to take to turn this country. But when I think as an individual, I know there’s work to do on my own.

I consider decades of mindlessness on my part, a lifetime of presumptions and assumptions that are my birthright as a white American. I think of jokes I’ve made, people I didn’t see, others I saw only through the prism of my whiteness. I think of the devastations in Tulsa in 1921, the thefts of land and oil from Natives and freedmen in my home state, how my father worked for Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville and raised us on a paycheck from an oil company born of coercion and theft. I think how my family could not have transitioned from hardscrabble lives as sharecroppers and coal miners to middle class educators and landowners without the privileges of whiteness, the inequities baked into the system. This is only a partial list, only the beginnings of the computation.

The work of racial reckoning belongs to those of us who’ve benefited all these centuries, and this work has to be done before we can begin to get to reconciliation. How do I, personally, reckon, repent, repair? I’m willing for the sacrifice, I tell myself, willing to make restitution through donations and taxes, beginning, most personally and close to home, with reparations for the victims and descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

I keep returning to the conversation with my friend Catherine that summer of reckoning. I believe in reparations, I told her, but white folks have got to understand what’s been done here, and our part in it.

Believe me, she said, there won’t be any reparations unless that happens first.

The post Rĕk’e-nĭng appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN THE LOWER MIDWEST

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

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

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

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

DRED SCOTT AND THE PURSUIT OF FREEDOM

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

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

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

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

BLACK FREEDOM IN THE LOWER MIDWEST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having strong relationships on both sides of the aisle doesn’t prevent Martinez Wright from getting angry. To watch her give testimony during legislative hearings is to see passion embodied — she knows what she wants to say, how she’s going to say it and all the right points to hit. Still, she manages to surprise even herself. In one moment of catharsis in February 2020, she came out as a transgender woman during testimony for a proposed bill that targeted transgender youth participation in sports. In high school, she had come out as gay, and then gender nonconforming toward the end of college. Her official testimony was the first time she named herself as a transgender woman to anyone but herself and her immediate family, and it brought a unique depth to the phrase “the personal is political” — the bill had been sponsored by Martinez Wright’s own senator, Cindy O’Laughlin of Missouri’s 18th District.

While Martinez Wright established a reputation in Jefferson City, her visibility soon exploded beyond the capital city: In December 2020, she announced her candidacy for the Missouri House of Representatives’ 5th District, which includes her hometown of Palmyra. From Missouri public radio stations to The Hill to the UK-based news site The Independent, Martinez Wright was lauded as the first transgender woman and Afro-Latina to run for state office in Missouri.

Missouri’s House District 5 is a rectangle whose eastern border is the Mississippi River, just across from Illinois, in the northeast part of the state. The district’s most populous and well-known city is Hannibal, an idyllic destination with cultural sites and events such as the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, the annual Folklife Festival and the Hannibal BBQ Jeep Show. With just under 18,000 residents, it is larger than the combined populations of neighboring Shelby and Monroe counties, which also make up District 5. Rep. Louis Riggs, a Hannibal resident and Republican, was elected to his first two-year term in 2018.

Just 13 miles up the road from Hannibal on Highway 61 North sits Palmyra, population 3,606, which serves as the Marion County Seat. The town boasts sprawling, impeccable multi-level homes with manicured lawns and flower gardens. There is also a large mobile home park and several modest apartment complexes, like the one where Martinez Wright lives with her mother on the edge of town. A drive through Palmyra is to cross between worlds in just a few blocks.

“I grew up in Palmyra, and I noticed that when it comes to rural communities, sometimes they can be overshadowed,” Martinez Wright told the Missouri Times when she announced her candidacy, going on to note that while rural communities as a whole are marginalized, people within rural communities are, too. “With me being a very blunt minority — African-American as well as Puerto Rican and trans — I want to show individuals that no matter how you identify or where you are, your voice should always be heard,” she said.

Martinez Wright has a long history of making her voice unmistakably heard. She had visited the Capitol in high school through her involvement with extracurricular activities. But it wasn’t until December 2014, four months after the murder of Michael Brown, that Martinez Wright realized her calling. She was a student at Lincoln University, an HBCU in Jefferson City, and vice president of the school’s NAACP chapter when she co-led a student march to the Capitol to demand justice and policy change. As she marched with the NAACP national and Missouri chapter leadership by her side, something shifted. After that, she simply never stopped showing up. She began attending progressive marches, rallies and lobby days at the Capitol. As her comfort navigating the building and her understanding of the legislative process grew, she started showing up during her free time between work and school. She showed up and engaged with as many elected officials, legislative aides and lobbyists as she could on policies related to racism and policing, LGBTQ issues and access to mental health care. During this time of self-discovery, she changed her major from nursing to political science.

Soon, Martinez Wright became a fixture in the statehouse. Although she considers herself a progressive Democrat, she managed to forge genuine friendships with Republican elected officials, legislative aides and lobbyists. Even Gov. Mike Parson, who is solidly conservative, knows her on a first-name basis and goes in for a hug when he sees her at events.

Sen. Holly Rehder, a Republican who represents the 27th District in the southeastern corner of the state known as the Bootheel, is struck by Martinez Wright’s doggedness. “She really stays in for the long haul,” Rehder said in an email, recalling how Martinez Wright would remain late into the night if the Senate was debating a bill on her radar. “I would say she’s incredibly dedicated.” Yet Rehder sees more than just Martinez Wright’s work ethic. Though the two have vastly different stances on key policy issues, Rehder says, “you’re never going to agree with anyone 100% of the time. However, in politics, you often find that it really bothers folks when you don’t. Kendall checks in with our office and is always a joy to be around. Her kindness is unmistakable.”

Martinez Wright’s relationships with elected officials and staffers go beyond obligatory pleasantries. After she graduated from college and moved back to Palmyra, she was still committed to being present during the legislative session. She doesn’t drive, so she had to get creative with the two-hour commute. While she stayed with family members in Jefferson City for two-week intervals, she also arranged a carpool with an unlikely friend: the lobbyist for the Missouri chapter of Concerned Women for America, an organization dedicated to the promotion of “Biblical values and Constitutional principles through prayer, education, and advocacy.” The lobbyist lived in neighboring Warren County and gladly assisted Martinez Wright with transportation.

It’s hard to really imagine what their bi-weekly two-hour car rides were like. There’s no escape in a car. You can’t scurry away to the bathroom or pretend that you’re running late to an urgent appointment. It’s just you and your fellow passenger, trapped in a moving box — maybe it’s a microcosm of what it’s like to grow up in a town like Palmyra. But Martinez Wright was unfazed. “Our conversation would range from how we’re doing to, you know” — she uses air quotes here — “super ‘controversial’ topics,” she says. “We formulated a really good friendship and I cherish it, actually.” She pauses with a hint of a smile on her lips and takes a long drag of her cigarette. “The way social media, and media in general, will villainize one side or another … It’s like, I can sit there and have a conversation with a person, and we may be feeling we have our hardline beliefs. But at the same time, we’re taking that chance.”

It makes sense that Martinez Wright is gifted at forging connections with people she disagrees with. For an Afro-Latina transgender woman to grow up in a majority white, highly conservative town like Palmyra, getting along with others becomes a matter of survival. She doesn’t have the option to retreat to a progressive activist-run coffeeshop or an LGBTQ community center. There are no Palmyra equivalents to Action St. Louis or One Struggle Kansas City, two city-level organizations dedicated to building local Black political power. In a town the size of Palmyra, it’s simply not possible to avoid coexistence, even some amount of community-building, with people from the other side. To even find a bit of joy in it is nothing to feel guilty about, nor is it politically selling out. For Martinez Wright, the joy she manages to tap into with her opponents makes life a bit more bearable in a place like Palmyra, Marion County, House District 5.

To spend a day with Martinez Wright in Palmyra is to feel like you’re with a celebrity. Everywhere we went — the restaurant where we had lunch, her high school where she took me on a tour, even the gas station for a fountain soda pick-me-up — she was greeted with big smiles and open arms.

Martinez Wright, now 28, was born in Chicago. She moved to Palmyra with her family when she was 3. While they moved to be closer to family members in the area, leaving the predominantly Black Chatham neighborhood in the South Side of Chicago for a town that’s nearly 90% white was a culture shock. “I didn’t have that representation growing up. I didn’t have anyone showing me that it was OK to be trans. That it was OK to be Black,” she says. “This area is very conservative. It was controversial when my mom was hired at the school,” she says, referring to her mother’s 25-year tenure as a special education paraeducator. In 2020, 74% of Marion County presidential votes went to Donald Trump.

The lack of representation in Palmyra hasn’t deterred Martinez Wright from purposefully taking up space she knows she deserves. One small example is reclaiming her ancestry. Both her mother and father are Black; her father was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He died when Martinez Wright was young. As a way to honor him and her Latin-American ancestors, a few years ago she decided to start including his last name, Martinez, as part of her own.

The most constant source of love in Martinez Wright’s life has been her mother, Patrice Wright. When Martinez Wright was kicked out of the family’s church after she initially came out as gay, her mom left, too, no question. When she came out as gender nonconforming, and soon after as a transgender woman, her mom was unwaveringly supportive. Her mom was admittedly surprised when she learned that Martinez Wright had grown an interest in politics during college, but asked questions, learned along the way and championed Martinez Wright’s candidacy for the House of Representatives.

Her mother has modeled leadership and an ability to remain steadfast in her own identity and political life for as long as they’ve lived in Palmyra. Wright describes the pressure she’s felt at times to assimilate to, or at least passively accept, the conservative status quo of the town: “Everybody’s like, ‘Come on, Patrice, why don’t you ….’ No. Just because I live amongst you, I’m not you,” she says. “I’m Patrice Wright. African American. Proud to be a Democrat. Mother of a transgender child. I’m not a follower. I try to be a leader.”

Another source of transformative love was Diane Crane, who goes by Nana because, Martinez Wright says, “she’s everyone’s Nana.” While Martinez Wright’s mother expresses her resistance to the conservative status quo only after you get her talking, Nana drives an SUV sporting “Fuck Trump” and “Black Lives Matter” bumper stickers. About 50 feet up the road from her mobile home, a Confederate flag billows in the wind from the front stairs of another trailer. Martinez Wright first met Nana when she was a customer at County Market, a grocery store where Martinez Wright worked during high school and summers between college semesters. Their friendship really kicked off when they ran into each other as neighbors at the apartment complex where Martinez Wright still lives. “In a sense, we became family,” Martinez Wright says.

“I prefer her as family more than I do a lot of my blood relations,” Nana adds with a smile.

On the surface, Nana and Martinez Wright don’t have a lot in common. Martinez Wright is 28, single, childless, Afro-Latina, a transgender woman and deals with bipolar disorder, anxiety and Crohn’s disease. Nana is 57, divorced, has five kids plus a few grandkids, white, cisgender and deals with an array of chronic health problems. What they share, beyond a familial love for each other, is how it feels to be politically isolated.

“In a way, we’re yin and yang,” Nana says, “but at the same time we’re the same in a lot of ways. And this community here is so judgmental.”

“It’s nice to have someone you can trust,” adds Martinez Wright, who’s been adding emphatic “mmm-hmmms” as Nana talks.

One day, several years ago, the two hopped into Nana’s SUV to grab a few things at the grocery store. “So I pull out on Main Street,” Nana says. “I got a guy behind me. ‘Pew, pew, pew.’ You know, doin’ that little gun thing with his fingers toward us. Pew, pew. Like that’s going to hurt us or something. We were in the middle of the damn Trump parade!”

They were stuck in slow-moving parade traffic, surrounded by vehicles decked out in Trump gear.

“I loved every minute of it,” Nana says, accompanied by a belly laugh. “I just put my finger out and waved.”

“I was having a meltdown, internally,” Martinez Wright chimes in through her laughter.

“We both were in a way,” says Nana. “We had a lotta people in from outta town. A lot of people in town, they know me, and they already know I’m that way.”

“Mmm-hmmm,” says Martinez Wright with a bit of an eyeroll, insinuating that Nana is making an understatement. She cracks up all over again.

While Nana shares her wisdom and stories with Martinez Wright, listening through every step of her coming out process, Martinez Wright has provided hands-on caregiving and helped with household tasks as Nana’s struggled with her health. “If it wasn’t for Kendall, I’d probably be in assisted living,” says Nana. “She was there for me when my blood family wasn’t.”

Through conversations with Martinez Wright and her loved ones, it’s clear there are two Palmyras.

“Now, I’m dirt poor. Dirt poor,” Martinez Wright says. “But it’s expensive to live here. We pride ourselves with a very good, outstanding school district, and it attracts folks with money.” Around 18% of Palmyra families earn more than $100,000 per year, while just under 19% live below the poverty line. The Palmyra School Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to raising private donations to support the elementary, middle and high schools, announced in March 2022 that it sought to establish an endowment by raising $50,000 by the end of the year — a striking goal for a town of fewer than 4,000 residents.

Martinez Wright felt uniquely isolated as a youth, particularly during adolescence. Not only was she a low-income student navigating the culture of a well-funded school district, she didn’t see herself, or anyone like her, when she looked around. High school was the “best-worst time” of her life, she says. On the one hand, she was discovering herself and growing into her femininity. And yet, with no possibility models to turn to, she felt alone. Some school educators and staff in Martinez Wright’s life, sensing her feminine self-expression before she had fully formed the words for it, looked out for her. Martinez Wright recalls how her P.E. teacher embraced what she describes as her “fabulousness” and made sure she was safe and secure in gym class.

There was also a school nurse Martinez Wright calls “one of her guardian angels.” After she initially came out as gay and was kicked out of church, a teacher encouraged her to start attending the Cornerstone Church of Marion. Martinez Wright was excited to learn that the church had a summer camp just 10 miles outside of town. Before long, and before she could fully process what was happening to her, Martinez Wright found herself the subject of prayer circles as her fellow campers tried to “pray away the gay.” Confused and terrified, but unaware of what “conversion therapy” was and that advocates across the country were working to ban the practice, she hid what was going on from her mother, afraid of drawing attention to herself. She didn’t want to get kicked out of another church for who she was. It was common for the pastor at this new church to espouse racism; Martinez Wright remembers the pastor making comments supporting George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin in 2012. When the school nurse found out Martinez Wright had been attending that church — and in particular that church’s camp program — she pulled Martinez Wright aside and carefully yet firmly suggested perhaps Martinez Wright should stop going.

It was the love and support she received throughout her life in Palmyra that drove her desire to represent Missouri’s 5th District. Because Martinez Wright could see issues facing the multiple Palmyras — the wealthy and the poor, the conservative and the progressive, the queer and trans and the cis-heteronormative — and she knew how to engage with people across all of these dualities, her platform intentionally centered the needs of her whole community. She describes her approach as one that is both “pragmatic and empathetic,” and emphasizes how important it is for a candidate’s priorities to benefit her own personal platform yet maintain a commitment to look outward, beyond herself. She promoted educational policies that would guarantee effective public schools for all residents of the 5th District, not just the well-resourced Palmyra schools. Her commitment to improved infrastructure for rural communities reflected her awareness of how important physical connections are among isolated townships. With many jobs in the 5th District tied to agriculture, she championed the needs of family farms. Among her human rights priorities, she focused on support for people re-entering society after incarceration, more funding for social safety net programs and passing the Missouri Nondiscrimination Act, which would protect LGBTQ people under Missouri’s Human Rights charter.

If she could find a way to truly see, love and find community with everyone from her own mother and beloved Nana to the lobbyist for Concerned Women for America and the Republican governor, surely her community at large could trust her to represent Missouri’s 5th House District.

Martinez Wright’s ability to connect with her political allies as well as her opponents is not lost on her. In fact, she has some strong feelings about performative activism she observes coming from larger cities. “I call it, you know, ‘actor-vists,’” she says, making air quotes with her hands. “Yes, they want to act like they’re activists. But when it comes to the work, the true work, they’re nowhere to be found,” she says, referring to the reluctance of many activists to engage with the state-level political process. “I can go down to Jefferson City from little Palmyra, Missour-uh,” she says wryly, “and go to various events at the Capitol where there won’t be a lot of Democrats, the places where people are like, ‘What’s she doing here?’ It’s because I want actual change. I’m doing the nitty-gritty work that people don’t want to do because it gets them out of their box.”

Martinez Wright’s lived experiences, demonstrated tenacity and strong relationship-building skills, along with her political science degree, uniquely qualify her for policy work. Yet none of this has been enough to convince Missouri-based progressive advocacy organizations to hire her permanently. While the occasional short-term contract with the ACLU of Missouri or temporary gigs with candidates’ campaigns would pop up, the majority of her work was pro bono. She started to notice she was being taken for granted as she watched employees at these organizations come and go, yet a steady paycheck was always out of her reach. “I have a sense that I was a convenience to them because I’m Black and Latina. I’m trans. I’m disabled. I’m from a rural area. I check all these boxes,” she reflects. When I asked whether she felt taken advantage of, she replied immediately, “Oh, yeah. Yeah. But at the same time, I realized, I had big enough balls to show up when other people wouldn’t. There would be protests, and people would come out to those. But when it comes to having an actual meeting with electeds who are proposing horrible legislation or who are fighting good legislation, you don’t see them.”

She holds both progressive activists and organizations to task when it comes to her tokenization. The contemporary progressive zeitgeist is full of messages such as “Trust Black women!” or “Trans women of color threw the first bricks at Stonewall!” Yet Martinez Wright sees a disconnect between progressive messaging and the material reality of her world. “Because I know for sure when everything’s said and done, when you get your X amount of likes on Facebook or Twitter or, you post something and it gets you viral, you’re onto the next thing that’s trendy,” she says. “And in reality, my life isn’t a trend. My life deserves more than a two-second blurb. My life is something that is serious. And my experience is something that needs to be seriously considered because there are other people out there that are hurting.”

A few months into her campaign, Martinez Wright’s mother began to observe dramatic changes in Martinez Wright’s behavior that seemed out of character. Her mother, worried for her daughter’s health, encouraged Martinez Wright to step down. “At least for the first few months, I thought she had a staff that was in her corner. Next thing you know, later on that summer, I was like, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening here?’ It looked like Kendall was doing everything herself,” Wright says. She says it was painful to watch her daughter seize such an incredible opportunity, only to see people not follow through on their commitments of support and watch donations dry up. From a place of love, her mother made it clear: “Just suspend. Close it out. And take care of yourself.”

It wasn’t just her mother’s concern that influenced Martinez Wright to step down. Despite her ability and intentional effort to connect with conservatives who disagree with her “lifestyle,” hate-filled comments flooded her campaign’s social media feed. During a fundraising visit to St. Louis, she was sexually assaulted. To cope with these compounded traumas, she abused alcohol and substances. Eventually, she made an attempt at suicide. Shortly after that, in September 2021, Martinez Wright publicly announced the end of her campaign. She subsequently received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. While many news outlets were eager to cover Martinez Wright’s run for office, there was considerably less coverage — one story, by St. Louis Public Radio — when she suspended her campaign 10 months after she announced her run.

After taking time to tend to her health, Martinez Wright returned to her independent lobbying and advocacy work. Yet as she reflected on everything that had happened, she knew she had to get out of Palmyra, and out of Missouri. She set her sights on Washington, D.C., having felt that pull since she’d gone to the International LGBTQ Leadership Conference there in December 2021. She’d attended as a Victory Institute Fellow, taking part in a leadership program designed to support LGBTQ people who pursue roles as elected and state appointed officials.

She accepted the role of government relations and policy associate with Treatment Action Group, where she will broker relationships between elected officials and people impacted by HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis C. After everything she’s given to Missouri and everything she has fought for, it was not a decision she took lightly. “I talked with my mom, I talked with everybody, and they all said, ‘Kendall, you do what is gonna make you feel good, what is gonna make you feel safe.’”

The things that will make Martinez Wright feel good and safe in D.C. are numerous. For one, she’ll have much easier access to gender-affirming healthcare than she does in Missouri. Yet other things are incredibly important to her that can’t necessarily be quantified. “I won’t have to constantly be concerned that I will be killed for being an Afro-Puerto Rican trans woman. It will mean not having to deal with constantly giving my blood, sweat and tears and possibly not seeing real results. Or recognizing mainly the fact that the world of politics here in Missouri is very toxic, very toxic,” she says. She directly attributes her alcoholism and substance abuse to the stress of running for office.

When I ask Nana how she feels about Martinez Wright’s big move to D.C., she says, “I’m very happy. I’m very excited. And I’m very sad and very scared.” She pauses to consider her words. “I’m getting older. I’m one of those worrywarts. What happens when no one’s here with me? She’s the one who’s been here for me every time. But I know I’ll make it.” Turning toward Martinez Wright and leaning forward, she says, “I know it’s gonna be a new transition where you can grow even more.” Her voice turns forceful, eyes unblinking as she goes on. “And it’s about time. It’s about time that you get recognized for all the work you’ve done.”

This is not the story of triumph we might wish for. We don’t get to celebrate Martinez Wright as the first transgender elected official in Missouri state government. We don’t get to celebrate her as a hometown hero for winning over her largely conservative, pro-Trump district. Nor do we get to applaud a commitment that she’ll bite the bullet and run for office in Missouri again. Yet to bear witness to Martinez Wright, and the people who show up for her, is to see love — radical, urgent love — as an act of everyday resistance.

The post Somebody Has To Be First, but Nobody Has To Be a Martyr appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Chad Onianwa: It’s really cool to talk to somebody who’s interested in talking about it. It really feels like weird and surreal, I guess.

TC: I love talking about magazines and the Midwest. Have you seen The New Territory?

CO: Um, no, I haven’t.

TC: OK, so this is our most recent issue, so it’s just a little bit larger. [stacks magazines next to each other]

CO: OK, wait, yes, I have seen that. So did you know what size you wanted it to be before you started?

TC: No. When I visited the printer, I asked what would waste the least amount of paper. Turns out The New Territory is a millimeter shorter than a National Geographic, which I didn’t know until after I saw it printed. How about you?

CO: I had a pretty good idea. I really wanted region to be a specific kind of trade size book. It’s convenient. I didn’t want it to be super thick. Or if you were to hand it to somebody, they wouldn’t be like, “Oh, God.” Initially, I just wanted to give them all out for free. And then after a while, you know, the reality sets in and then it’s like, OK.

TC: Why not do a zine?

CO: Initially, when I was wanting to do it for free, the idea was to be more zine. Later I was like, OK, I think what I actually want is just a fucking book or something like it. I wanted to put together work from people that I knew or that I like. While I do appreciate getting the word out there, part of what I’m trying to present is something a little bit more polished. Specifically, I want to pay my respects to the people whose work I respect, you know? Even if it is just this initial issue, being specially printed and perfect bound and full color, it was important for me to display it in this way that could be presented as such.

TC: Awesome. I respect that a lot. That’s what we’re trying to do as well, you know, same sort of idea with, like, the Midwest kind of being written off like it was backward or …

CO: Nonexistent.

TC: Yeah, yeah, nonexistent, not cultured. That kind of thing.

CO: Right.

TC: When you started making region in 2018, was that your goal, to push back on the idea of the Midwest as nonexistent?

CO: It speaks to the hyper invisibility of being a person of color, you know. For me, a Black person, but also a child of immigrants in the Midwest. We’re here, you know? But when you think about how you’re talked about, how where you are is talked about in the national conversation, you don’t feel seen. Anytime I’ve been other places, 1) nobody really ever knows where Wichita, Kansas is. And then 2) it’s like, “Oh, there’s Black people in Kansas?” Or, “There’s Nigerians in Kansas?” It’s like, yeah, we have a whole Nigerian Association of Wichita, and it’s been functioning since 1994, which is kind of a cool thing to think about. But you don’t see or hear about those kinds of things unless you’re literally there. And even when you’re in the spaces, you don’t always hear about those things. So to have a place to tell our stories, having a physical object or location, a manifestation of our thoughts and ideas and visions and dreams — archiving that kind of thing is important, especially when it comes to archiving different communities, like marginalized communities.

TC: In the first issue, you interview Heinrich Toh (whom our creative director invited to this issue, by the way). You talk about an unfortunate conflict among artists of questioning whether you’re liked for your work or your representation of “diversity.” The NT tries to not publish the same people all the time. I don’t want the voice to get stagnant in that way. But it’s tricky. I’ve only been to Wichita three times. I would feel like an interloper to drop into, say, the Wichita Nigerian community and say, “Hey, where are your artists and writers?” Because we do want to publish their work, you know? I’m paralyzed sometimes by feeling afraid it would feel inauthentic or tokenizing.

CO: Yeah.

TC: Yeah. Also, well, and whenever we are asking our networks for connections in underrepresented communities, we end up running into a lot of people who get a lot asked of them.

CO: So they’re like the person to go to.

TC: Yeah, they’re just so busy, you know? I don’t know. I know nothing’s a monolith.

CO: I think that’s where it becomes difficult. Because it’s like, dude, I was born in the United States. I was born in Wichita, Kansas. I’m not a refugee. None of my family are refugees. My parents came here legally, you know what I mean? So I’ve never had to even deal with issues of, say, having any of my immediate family deported. I still have a passport, I still have a Social Security number. I’m not going through the processes of trying to resettle my family in a new area. So, like you were saying, nothing’s a monolith. And so even within region, I have difficulties trying to figure out how to represent these different people and also come to these people without being exploitative. I’m not just trying to get a story of someone who came to this country fleeing a conflict, you know? I want people to share their stories, yes. If that’s what it happens to be and that’s what they want to share, then that’s cool. But I want it to be organic. And I think finding the communities in a way that feels natural and comfortable and not exploitative is definitely a struggle. I’m still figuring it out, honestly.

TC: Who have you been able to reach with the magazine so far? What’s the reception been?

CO: A lot of the people who initially got it through Kickstarter were a mixture of people who are of migrant communities and people who aren’t. The reception has been pretty good. Just trying to not let it all just fade, you know?

TC: It’s the promise and the challenge of a periodical magazine, right? You’re on the hook to keep up the momentum. But I think there’s something really important about having a platform for discussing these ideas as they evolve instead of just having a one-off object and saying, “Oh, this is region, and it was published once in 2020.”

CO: Actually, my goal wasn’t to just make a print magazine. We’re definitely more interested in the platform, the discussions. If it could be a talk show, I guess that would also be cool, too. Not to say I’m making a talk show. Just saying, yes, I wanted to create a print publication, but I’m more interested in what we’re talking about and how that evolves and how we’re expressing and deconstructing all of these ideas.

TC: Ooh. So let’s talk about that deconstruction. In the text of region I was really struck by all the slashes you use. I think it’s such a fantastic expression of exploring ideas in a very simple, written-characters kind of way. Like on page 15, you say, “What are borders with which we maintain/ establish an allegiance?” And there’s another part where you write about, “borders/ boundaries.” There are so many.

CO: I guess sometimes you can express similar ideas through the use of commas, but I don’t think it has exactly the same feel, you know? People explore the structure of writing in different ways. For me, slashes express the simultaneity of things, things happening, things equally important at the same time. So it’s not like, “This and then this and then this,” it’s just like these two things. When you structure it in certain ways, even using a comma, it can also present a sort of hierarchy of what you’re trying to say. Or there’s implied importance associated with it.

TC: Or a choice.

CO: Right, exactly. Or even just the word. I think it’s easier to not insert unnecessary things that might obscure the language of what I’m trying to say. Sometimes it does lend itself to being very confusing, I realize. And so sometimes I do have to clarify, sort of edit a little bit.

TC: Yeah. Well, OK, so here’s your own question back to you, since it’s not answered on the page: “What are the borders with which we maintain/establish an allegiance?”

CO: Well, were you born in Missouri?

TC: Me? Yes.

CO: Right. And so to some degree, you would identify as a Missourian. And also with the city where you live. And also the United States. And maybe if your family is originally from X country, you know, then it’s like you would also say that you have X roots. All of these things are ways that we’d learn to talk about ourselves, essentially. So Kansas isn’t actually Kansas, you know, it was something before Kansas. Native peoples had it as something else. And it wasn’t even recognized within the same lines that we understand it to be. But me, as a Witchitan and a Kansan, born within those borders, those designated areas, it’s like, that’s how I grew up learning to talk about who I was, you know? I mean, in the context of being someone who’s the child of immigrants or who is an immigrant. My parents are from Nigeria. But it’s the same thing. Nigeria isn’t Nigeria, Nigeria is a colonial idea. We only have Nigeria today because of the established boundaries. The boundaries are established by the British, unfortunately. But it’s turned into this way that we’ve unified as a people to understand our collective experience within this given area, even though it encompasses more than 200 different groups of people who identify differently, you know what I mean?

TC: Yeah.

CO: So what does it even mean for me to identify as a Nigerian, given that I actually would like to continue rejecting ideas of colonialism and assessing how it’s affected my life today? Am I supposed to continue identifying as Nigerian? Is the right thing to do to identify as Igbo, which is actually my ethnicity? There’re all these different ways that we’re informed to identify ourselves and a lot of them are based on borders. I’ve just been thinking a lot about how it’s hard to talk about yourself outside of the lens of colonialism, and that’s a very stressful thing, you know?

TC: Yes! I’ve been getting really hung up on that sense of colonial/state identity lately. I can say I’m an eighth-generation Missourian, which could be a source of great pride. On the other hand, I have this hyper awareness that we are occupying land that was cared for by the Osage people, who then got pushed to Kansas and then to Oklahoma. I sometimes feel weird or uncomfortable claiming my so-called deep roots in Missouri. In a sense, it’s such a privilege to be able to know I have these deep roots here. But I’m also aware that it came out of violence, and the same for colonialism elsewhere in the world. And so I want to be proud that I have this long Missouri heritage. It comes back to those slashes, right?

CO: It’s like trying to reconcile all these different aspects of how we’re forced to identify, and what that means in terms of our family history and our memory. And I guess our connection to ourselves. Heritage, and history and roots — all of those things are very important. They are part of what grounds us as individuals.

TC: Like, my grandfather on the Casagrand side came to the St. Louis area from Italy. I have their name and know their history, and that means something to me. But I wasn’t raised by that side of the family, I don’t share the culture. Do I really get to claim Italian roots?

CO: What is a home, and where do I actually claim, and why do I claim it? You can get lost in it. At some point, it sort of makes you want to be like, why does any of it matter? And on some level, it doesn’t, and on some level, it has to. You can’t ignore it. That’s a lot of the stuff that was being sorted through in the initial creation of region.

TC: I think one thing that does unite us is that we’re all here together right now, in the Midwest. And we’re figuring out what that means.

CO: It’s a constant conversation. Everybody’s different. All of us, depending on who we are, will have different conversations with it.

TC: There’s another concept that I wanted to talk about, this idea of the American dream. What do you see as the American dream? That’s a huge question.

CO: I guess what I understand the American Dream to be is the idea that you can establish success in the United States based on what is provided to you as being on American soil.

TC: Do you think it’s attainable?

CO: I think to some extent, it’s attainable. But I think it’s also a matter of, like, what’s your ideas of success? If your ideas of success are having a house and a yard for your family to run around in and play with their fucking dog? Then, I mean, I guess it’s attainable, but that doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed. Within the context of America, there’re always strings attached. You may find success. You may have a house and a yard, and your kids are playing with your fucking dog. But you’re still tied the colonial legacy of the United States and what it would have meant to get to the point of having a house and all that stuff. I don’t think it’s necessarily worth it, achieving or chasing an American dream. Like I said, my parents are immigrants, they moved here before me and my siblings were born. I’m the youngest of four. My parents have been here longer than they’ve been in Nigeria at this point. We’re working class. My mom was a teacher and worked in an adult home. My dad had a cleaning business. So very regular, I guess. Well, regular, it’s subjective. So that’s my background. The whole American Dream shit I didn’t really start thinking about until after I left for college. I guess just recognized that, like, dude, my parents have worked, like, literally since they came here. My mom just was able to retire last year, and it wasn’t even by … it wasn’t even just being able to retire. It was being forced to retire. But since I left for college and was forced to view my siblings and my family and who I am, my trajectory and all that sort of existential shit, outside of the context of my family’s home … it’s just forced me to consider the fact that to be in the United States is to dedicate your life to working, to this idea of attaining a certain socio-economic status. So you can work your whole life, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be financially secure. But to live here is to dedicate your life to constantly working in search of some sort of stability, financial or social or otherwise. And that’s never guaranteed. And I think it’s just used more as the ploy to monetize our bodies, monetize our labor. It’s attached to American ideals of financial wealth and attaining capital in being a part of a ruling upper class of people. And I think that it damages the psyche of people who are in pursuit of that. So, yeah, the American Dream is possible, but it’s conditional, extremely conditional.

TC: Definitely. Even if you choose not to participate, inescapably, you’re still judged by those standards.

CO: The American Dream doesn’t just speak to immigrant populations. It’s how everybody sees their life in the United States. Culturally, it’s ingrained in us to think about ourselves as in pursuit of certain class signifiers. And that’s ultimately just a way of devaluing ourselves as people.

TC: Do your parents know what you’re doing with your creative projects?

CO: I mean, kind of.

TC: Have they seen a copy of the magazine?

CO: No, they haven’t seen a finished copy, which is funny. Because, I mean, I was telling them as I was doing it, I told them when I had the idea … I was updating them with everything. They got that I was doing magazine stuff. But they haven’t seen an issue. So it’s like, Oh, you know, whatever you’re doing, have you found a job yet? Can you still pay your rent? And I’m like, actually, the magazine doesn’t pay my rent. So that’s the thing. Their interest is measured. Sometimes they’re willing to hear more about it. Sometimes they’re like, oh, cool, cool.

TC: What did you go to school for?

CO: I went to KU. Originally, I wanted to do environmental studies. But then I failed intro to environmental studies and wanted to be a bureaucrat, you know, like a diplomat or some shit like that. And so I ended up doing an international studies major with an emphasis in political and social systems. My area of specialization was Africa. My major was in international studies and then also French. That’s what I ended up studying, and then at some point, I was like, yeah, I definitely don’t want to fucking be a diplomat. I don’t want to work for the government. And then I kind of honestly wanted to do international journalism, it’d be so cool. And then I’ve just kind of been doing whatever since. I worked the radio station at KU. KJHK. And that was pretty significant because we had an arts and culture staff, and I was on that, and then I was director, and that was cool. It helped me to continue making stories and writing.

TC: Yeah, I went to Mizzou, and I knew that I wanted to do journalism, but I also thought I wanted to do international journalism. But then, yeah, international studies somehow morphed into anthropology. Looking back, I really had vibed the most with the geography department, because it’s anthropology with maps.

CO: Right.

TC: You know, which is cool, but nobody explains that to you in high school, so.

CO: Oh, my God. One of the things I was initially wanting to do was geology because a lot of the stuff that I’m interested in now is learning about the natural world.

TC: Are you going on hikes? What do you do?

CO: I’m definitely not a hiker. I don’t usually go out like that. But I’m definitely down to do that kind of stuff.

TC: You’re open to the elements.

CO: I’ve always been really interested in nature and the natural environment, animals specifically. I don’t think it really shows up much in the final issue of region. But in these zine versions that I have, you’ll see these black and white graphics, and a lot of those are maps that I find online and was editing or distorting to use as graphics. It was related to the conceptual part of region, just thinking about borders and what they mean. A lot of the original region graphics are based on maps from various Midwestern states, whether topographic maps or hydrogeologic maps. Or just ones showing the different aquifer systems within different areas of the Midwest or like the different levels of bedrock within them. They look pretty sick, but there’s also this idea of thinking about how else we can look at the lands we’re on. Rather than a regular state map that shows the 50 states and all their borders, which is very clear-cut, I’m thinking about the different ways that we’re able to think about the natural world, specifically the areas that we live in. Thinking about region as something representing the Midwest, how can I connect those ideas of our natural environment to this 2-D or digital representation? And also just the idea of maps and borders and identities overlapping, and that kind of shit. The maps were a kind of creation of that.

TC: I mean, we can get really caught up and in our heads about differences and historical implications of identity and things like that. But, like, whenever you take a deep breath and look around, we’re here, all sharing this land.

CO: Yeah. Yeah.

TC: So that’s what we all have in common, and it requires multiple maps and multiple versions of what a landscape is to even begin to hint at what that means. Because what is the Midwest, you know?

CO: Exactly. We initially came at it, like, Hey, we have a lot of thoughts on immigrant identity and what that even means, and being in the Midwest, but you don’t want it to end as just an art publication, you know? I wanted to be a little more involved in connecting people to things that can help them.

TC: What does that look like, beyond using the publication as a space for conversation?

CO: My friend Erick is our technology director and he’s working on creating our website, which will be a good start. Part of what we want to do with region is create a network for communities, individuals and ideas around the Midwest and hopefully make it a space for collaboration and resources. Whether it’s organizing for a cause or supporting a local business, partying or a combination of all that shit. We’re trying to translate those big lofty ideas into smaller projects and connect more with our people. The publication is just one physical piece of that.

TC: Well, if you put as much craft into that aspect as you have the physical magazine, I can see region making a meaningful difference. Good luck, Chad. I look forward to whatever the next phase is for you. Where can people find more?

CO: We’re on Instagram: @regionjournal. That’s where you can find announcements about future issues and our new website, once it’s out.

The post Shop Talk: The Borders/Boundaries of a Region’s Shared Archives appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Mermaid House
Lebanon, Illinois

By Ryan Byrnes

For someone who only ever lived in Midwestern suburbs, I rarely encountered anything pre-dating World War II. Mine was a world of strip malls and gas stations and Arby’s drive-throughs (the quintessential post-church activity). But as a second grader, after packing into the minivan with my siblings for a thirty-minute haul to nearby Lebanon, I could travel two centuries into the past. It felt like what the Celtics used to call “thin places,” where the boundaries between the ordinary and the magical meet.

You see, Lebanon is a small but historic town. With just under 5,000 people, it boasts the oldest university in Illinois and a preserved nineteenth-century main street complete with verandas and gothic windows and four blocks of red brick-paved streets. There, I first saw the Mermaid House.

According to the Lebanon Historic Society, in 1830, retired sea captain Lyman Adams built the Mermaid House, which he named after his professed belief in mermaids. A squat two-story house of hand-sawed oak, it is the ideal rustic prairie home.

Charles Dickens spent a night at the Mermaid House during his tour of North America from January to June 1842, when he traveled by steamboats, railroads, and wagons to speak at major American cities. During his visit to St. Louis, he made a quick excursion to the prairie country in Lebanon. He praised the inn in his travelogue American Notes for General Circulation, writing, “In point of cleanliness and comfort it would have suffered by no comparison with any English alehouse, of a homely kind.” Unfortunately, the nearby prairie did not leave such a lofty impression on him. He described the landscape as “oppressive in its barren monotony” and “scarcely one … to remember with much pleasure.”

Given the historic buildings and the town’s connection to Dickens, the main street took on a Victorian character in the local imagination, so it was only fitting that every holiday season the town put on a Victorian Christmas parade referencing Dickens’ most famous story, A Christmas Carol. Local high school drama clubs would sing carols in period costumes. Shopkeepers would decorate their facades with wreaths. As darkness fell, the town would ceremoniously switch on the Christmas lights, turning the whole street to gold.

One such Christmas, when I was a senior in high school, I took my then-girlfriend to the parade. We rode in a horsedrawn carriage, then I insisted on lining up to see Santa along with the local five-year-olds. In a shed behind the antique store, Santa would sit on his throne, and parents would take their kids to sit on his lap, say what they wanted for Christmas, and snap a photo.

At age eighteen, emboldened by my embryonic frontal lobe, the idea struck me that it would be really funny to get a picture sitting in Santa’s lap, so I dragged my unenthusiastic girlfriend with me. Dickens would have been proud. After waiting in line I finally reached the Big Man’s throne, and we ended up getting a portrait with Santa — me sitting on his knee and my then-girlfriend standing in the background looking like she was about to yell “Bah humbug!” (We did not stay together long.)

After seeing Santa, we walked to the Mermaid House, which the Lebanon Historic Society had preserved and furnished with donated period-pieces like chairs and dressers. Members of the historic society gave a guided tour, recounting the events of Dickens’ stay.

I had read Dickens in school — A Christmas Carol in seventh grade and A Tale of Two Cities in tenth grade — and I always regarded him as so high above me in skill and fame, from another plane of existence. But when I stood in his bedroom just as he would have seen it, I felt connected, as if I might turn around and see Dickens hovering like the Ghost of Christmas Past. At that moment, I came to understand that the Mermaid House is one of those thin places straddling the border between this world and the otherworld, where if you listened carefully, the indelible whispers of the spirits occasionally broke through.

Ryan Byrnes is a book editor in the New York City publishing industry and the author of two books: Royal Beauty Bright and My Dear Antonio. Readers can also find his work in LitHub, Fine Books and Collections, December, National Catholic Reporter, and more. He also contributes to the show The Saints on Relevant Radio. Follow him on Instagram at @ryan.byrnes.writes.

Photo by Edward Moore, 1935. Courtesy of Library of Congress, HABS ILL,82-LEBA,2.

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Harvey Pekar Park
Cleveland Heights, Ohio

By Joseph S. Pete

The modesty is the point at some landmarks such as Michael Jackson’s shoebox-sized childhood home in Gary, Indiana, or the small brick ranch home where Pope Leo XIV grew up in Dolton, Illinois. Harvey Pekar celebrated this modesty — he championed the average, the everyday, the quotidian. Known for the long-running American Splendor comic he wrote with the help of rotating guest artists, he was the bard of the banal, the elegist of the everyman, the master of Midwestern mundanity. It’s only fitting that the local landmarks where fans can pay homage to Pekar in his native Cleveland would be unassuming.

Pekar lived in the inner-ring suburb of Cleveland Heights, which posthumously honored him with Harvey Pekar Park at the corner of Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry Road, a drag he often frequented. The modest park, located at the end of a sidewalk, has some benches and painted beach chairs, a small plaza, concrete steps that double as amphitheater seats for outdoor performances, and a few banners featuring panels of his comics. It could easily be overlooked by a passerby.

Pekar’s old stomping grounds lie far from I.M. Pei’s glittering, glassy Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum on the Lake Erie lakefront or Frank Gehry’s splashy avant-garde building on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. Pekar’s native Cleveland is a humble Rust Belt burgh that inspired the Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video to joke “come and look at both of our buildings.”

The city has been so snake-bitten by misfortunes like the infamous Cuyahoga River fire that there’s an entire book called Cleveland’s Greatest Disasters. The “Mistake by the Lake” has produced some great comic artists, including Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and Derf, who penned the alt-weekly staple The City.

A Veterans Affairs clerk by day and graphic novelist by night, Pekar advanced the art form of comics like Superman had before him, even though he only did the writing and not the illustrations, penning scripts the cartoonists brought to life. Superman propelled flights of superhuman fancy to new heights of popularity while Pekar grounded comics in gritty novelistic autobiography that appealed to adult readers, helping pave the way for future generations of confessional zines and graphic novels often both written and set in coffee shops.

He was inspiring to fledgling writers like me, showing that it was possible to be ordinary in daily life and extraordinary on the page, that everyone’s story could make for compelling writing.

Pekar collaborated with accomplished artists like Robert Crumb, Gary Dumm, Alison Bechdel, and Ed Piskor to elevate the pedestrian into the epic, imbuing lofty meaning into stories of workplace drudgery, vinyl record hunting at garage sales, and trudging through the snow with a haul of library books. His work reached a wider audience with the American Splendor biopic that starred Paul Giamatti and featured a scene of haunting melancholy in which Pekar stood hunched over the rail on a pedestrian bridge, watching the river of headlights flow on the highway below.

I’ve visited many of the landmarks associated with Pekar over the years. As a lifelong Midwesterner, I usually visit Cleveland at least once a year and once swung by both Cleveland and Detroit in a weekend.

I’ve seen the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center where he worked, the Lee Road branch of the Cleveland Heights–University Heights Public Library where he read and checked out books almost daily, and the grand Lake View Cemetery where he is buried near tombstones commemorating the likes of Elliott Ness and President Andrew Garfield.

But the best place to pay homage is Coventry Road, his old haunt where one Redditor described him as “just another guy you’d see around the neighborhood doing normal stuff.” It’s not only home to Harvey Pekar Park, but also to two of his favorite hangouts: Tommy’s Restaurant and Mac’s Backs–Books On Coventry.

The neighboring businesses are connected, so one can browse the stacks for books in the three-level bookstore while waiting for a table. The funky bohemian restaurant blends classic deli favorites with hippie-ish vegetarian fare. When I visited the restaurant, I could imagine Pekar grousing in his cantankerous, curmudgeonly way over a corned beef or tuna salad sandwich. Mac’s Backs has crowded floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves crammed with used books on every subject imaginable. Fliers, posters, and zines plastered on the stairwell down to the basement serve as a cultural history of concerts, plays, author appearances, and other bygone events.

One can envision Pekar hunting for new reading material or gathering material over coffee and conversation next door. One can picture the disheveled everyman striding stoop-shouldered down the sidewalk, absorbed in whatever mundane matter he would next alchemize into art. It’s almost like a living history museum for one of America’s most splendid graphic novelists.

The descendant of steelworkers, author and award-winning journalist Joseph S. Pete hails from the Calumet Region just outside Chicago, where the oil refinery flare stacks burn round the clock, and the mills make clouds. His literary work and photography have appeared in more than 100 journals, including Proximity Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, O-Dark-Thirty, Line of Advance, As You Were, Chicago Literati, Dogzplot, Proximity Magazine, Stoneboat, The High Window, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, The First Line, New Pop Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, Junto, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch Magazine, Bull Men’s Fiction, Rising Phoenix Review, Thoughtful Dog, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, The Rat’s Ass Review, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, and Vending Machine Press.

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