Childhood Home

Lorain, Ohio

By Tara L. Conley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lazy T Ranch

Manhattan, Kansas

By Traci Brimhall

Gravel crunches beneath my tires as I approach Lazy T Ranch, home of the Kansas Poet Lariat Ron Wilson. It’s an unseasonably warm February day, and birds punctuate the silence with their twitters and trills. The deep cerulean sky is cloudless and seems even brighter against the beige of the Flint Hills in winter. Quilt square designs decorate the outbuildings of Lazy T Ranch. The house is tucked in a horseshoe curve of hills.

Ron pulls up and greets me with a white cowboy hat and a kindness as bright as the day. We survey the land and buildings in front of us and make a plan for our afternoon. The winter mud had been nearly constant for weeks, but today is warm and dry, so we get in Ron’s work truck and head out to take in the best views.

As we drive past each pasture and hill, Ron names the peaks and points out where weddings have taken place. We talk about our favorite seasons in the Flint Hills, from the great sledding of his childhood to the gorgeous greens of new grass after a controlled burn takes out last year’s big bluestem. It’s astonishing that they can storm back so quickly after a fire. Nature performs such a hopeful metaphor for us if we choose to see it that way. A hawk wheels above and wind rustles last year’s grasses, and we agree spring’s renewal is one of our favorite times to love this place.

Although the ranch is not far from the stoplights and strip malls of Manhattan, KS, it feels a world away. The Flint Hills are often a retreat for me. I love to walk the trails and admire the gentle light of the prairie and insects lounging on the latest blossoms. But I always feel like a transplant to this ecology. I am still learning the names of wildflowers and how to identify bird calls, still tucking the meadowlark and prairie chicken into poems to feel myself more tied to place.

Ron Wilson’s family has been rooted here since 1968. The limestone barn is even older. But the front meadow is the oldest of all. It is still the original prairie sod, never plowed. Even as a boy, Ron’s mother spoke to him about commitment to the land.

As we leave one lookout point for the next, we begin talking about our love of poetry. Ron heard his first cowboy poet when he was in Colorado and got a kick out of it. That sparked something in him and when Kansas cowboy poet, Dr. Jim Hoy, put out a call for cowboy poems, Ron tried penning his first poem. He’s been crafting verses from his life ever since.

Cowboy poetry certainly sings on a page, but it’s originally an oral art form. The performance of the poem is part of its power. As we make our backroad turns and I wait for him to open gates for us to drive through, we talk about the beauty of this immediate connection — to speak your poem and immediately see and hear your listeners respond. For me, poetry has had more of a private sense of audience. I read other people’s poems and feel a connection, but I may never tell them. People often encounter mine on a page or computer screen, and I may never hear from them either, though I still believe an asynchronous intimacy happens.

Ron and I nod as we listen to each other describe our writing process. We find we are opposites in many ways. He was born here, and I still feel like an unrooted stranger after a decade in the same spot. He’s a night owl, and I’m the blackbird, singing even before the dawn gets too purple. I whisper my poems to myself as I revise, and he performs for audiences at bonfires.

Although we find so many differences, our inspirations for our poems almost sound the same. “Sometimes it comes from a moment,” Ron says, “A night thought.”

“Yes!” I agree. “Sometimes there’s a thing in my brain, like itching the grit inside an oyster and that becomes a pearl.”

“Sometimes it’s a twist,” Ron says.

I nod, understanding the strangeness of the world at times. The unexpected ways that what is right next to you is also hidden. I love poetry because a day can hide its details, and poetry helps us pay attention to them.

“When something goes badly on the ranch, we say, ‘Well, if nothing else, at least I can get a poem out of this.’”

I understand this truth, too — how it’s the storms, the accidents, the smoke from a prairie fire, the night’s quiet astonishments that bring us our poems.

We get out of the truck again once we are in the high pasture. Ron points out another popular wedding spot next to a lone tree. Below we can see a small bend in the river reflecting the stunning topaz of the afternoon sky, moving like something alive. It makes me ache with gratitude to be a guest on this land.

As we get into the truck to circle back to where I parked my car, we talk about what keeps us both coming back to poetry, decade after decade, loss after loss, and for me, home after home.

“The best compliment I could ever hear is that something I wrote made someone feel less alone,” I tell Ron.

“Yes,” he agrees. “The best part are those rewarding moments when you connect at the heart level.”

We turn on the gravel road headed back to the barn where we started. The afternoon shadows lengthen and dapple the Lazy T Ranch sign that reads “Happy Trails.” We complete our circle having learned each other a little better, knowing our different relationships with poetry still rhyme.

Traci Brimhall’s newest book, Love Prodigal, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2024. She is also the author of four other poetry collections, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry.  She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Parks Service. Brimhall lives in Manhattan, KS, and serves as the current Poet Laureate of Kansas.

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Edwards County Historical Museum and Sod House
Kinsley, Kansas

By Joan Weaver

Starting in Washington, D.C., you can drive U.S. Highway 50 all the way to San Francisco. Along the way is the small Kansas town of Kinsley with a towering sign that announces you are “Midway” across the continent. Contrary to being just the “midway” of a journey, Kinsley has been the desired destination for many people. Some came on the Santa Fe Trail, others on the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railroad, or, more recently, like I did, on a modern highway.

The sign also invites you to visit the Edwards County Historical Society Museum to see how the pioneers lived on the prairie. You can go inside a reproduced sod house built in 1958 by men who still remembered the process. On exhibit are the tools they used and pictures taken during construction. The house contains period furniture and artifacts donated by the descendants of the early settlers. Because the original open-air sod house required continual upkeep, in 2001 the Edwards County Historical Society preserved the house by building a structure to encase it.

Among the early immigrants were the Maxey family from Galesburg, Illinois. On October 1, 1886, George and Clara Maxey gathered their six children into a covered wagon pulled by two horses to begin the 650-mile trip to Kinsley. Penelope “Nellie” Maxey was twelve and very excited and a little frightened. The day before, some mean boys had jerked on her braids and told her that Indians would scalp her.

“Our wagon was very well built and warm,” recalled Nellie in an interview celebrating Kinsley’s 1973 centennial. “Father had it built wide over the wheels so beds could be arranged sideways and that is where we slept. And don’t forget to mention my dog Bounce. He trailed the wagon, walking all the way from Illinois.”

Despite his wife’s warnings to not be swindled, in Missouri George traded their faithful horse for a mule “with more endurance.” It was a long, hard trip, and the family arrived at Clara’s brother-in-law’s brickyard on November 7. “We slept in a tent that first night we were in Kinsley and nearly froze,” Nellie remembered.

The following day, they headed nine miles south to homestead next to Clara’s sister. Remembering her mother’s warning, Nellie said, “When we got halfway there, the mule, Jack, laid down and died. Father walked to my aunt’s place and brought back a horse to team with the other to take us on our way.”

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered “free” land to settlers if they would build a house, make improvements, and farm the land for five years. The Maxey’s claim was ancient sand dunes covered with short buffalo grass and a few thorny plum bushes – no tree in sight. Regular prairie fires and grazing buffalo herds eliminated trees in the prairie ecosystem.

In this area, building with sod was the quickest, most inexpensive way for settlers to improve their claims. Sod blocks should not be confused with the dried adobe bricks of the Southwest. With sod, thick buffalo grass roots held the soil together, and blocks could be cut and lifted intact. Typically, blocks were 24 inches long, 12 inches wide, and four inches deep. They weighed 50 pounds each, and it took 3000 blocks to build a 16-foot by 20-foot house.

There are no pictures of the Maxey house, but a family of eight would have needed shelter quickly. The sod would have been broken with a plow, cut into blocks and stacked. For some families, red clay from the banks of the nearby Arkansas River was mixed with sand and used as mortar. After this mortar dried, it became almost as hard and durable as cement. The same mixture could also be used to stucco the inside and outside of the house.

Sod homes often were topped with rafters covered with tarpaper and a thinner layer of sod, grass side up. Sometimes boards were laid loosely, covered with several layers of asphalt roofing and left exposed.

Living in a soddy had some advantages. The insulating, two-foot-thick walls offered coolness in summer and warmth in winter, aided by burning buffalo chips. However, housewives found many disadvantages. Bugs, mice, and snakes, including rattlers, liked to move in. Dirt floors were hard to keep clean. Heavy rains eroded walls and leaked through the roof, leaving wet furniture and muddy floors.

After the Maxeys settled in, Nellie learned there was no need to fear Native people. The U.S. government had called for the eradication of the buffalo in order to defeat the Plains tribes who resisted the takeover of their lands by white settlers — including the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche. No buffalo meant no food and no Indians.

The next summer’s real threat came from hot winds and drought. The sun beat down every day. Their corn crop withered despite all efforts to carry buckets of water from the well to every stalk. The land was lonely and harsh, threatened by grasshoppers, rattlesnakes, hail-storms, and occasional cyclones and prairie fires. At night, Nellie would lay in bed listening to coyotes howling.

One hundred years later, in 1989, I too found myself moving to the sandhills. I was luckier than the Maxeys, as we purchased an existing six-room, one-bath frame farmhouse built by homesteaders in 1907.

Our moving train consisted of a U-Haul truck, two cars, two pickups, and three trailers hauling our riding horse, two miniature horses and a1959 Ford tractor with implements. The dog rode in the car with our two teenaged sons.

Our entourage took one long day to move 500 miles at a top speed of 50 mph. Compared to the Maxeys, my hardships were minor. I broke a finger loading the horse into the trailer. We arrived after dark to find the barn full of eighty years of detritus. When I put the riding horse into the corral, four-foot weeds obscured my view of an open back gate. She escaped into the dark. Fortunately, the pasture fence was intact, and she appeared back at the barn in the morning, covered in biting flies. When I applied fly repellent, it must have stung, because she reacted by landing a good back-kick on my knee. All I could do was crawl out of the corral, driving sharp sandburs into my shins. Less than 24 hours in Kansas, and I was ready to leave.

In time, life became more manageable for both Nellie and me. She would marry a lawyer and live in a large Victorian house as one of Kinsley’s leading ladies until her death at age 85 in 1959. After thirty-five years, I still live in the old farmhouse, which has since been remodeled with a large master bedroom and bath.

Now, I go to the sod house museum to discover stories like Nellie’s. The names on the donated artifacts I see there are familiar surnames of my friends who are their descendants. I spend time talking to those friends and researching in the old newspapers and the library archive. I suppose I’m a little like the sod house museum, as I too want to preserve and share the stories of the early people who settled midway across the continent.

Joan Weaver has been the director of the Kinsley Public Library for twenty-seven years.  She has a passion for discovering, preserving, and making the stories of her adopted prairie community digitally accessible. Currently she is working on a book about Kinsley’s role as the regional center for culture and the arts in the early twentieth century.

Photo by Bob Obee.

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1909 Annie Malone Dr.
St. Louis, Missouri

By Marc Blanc

Peter H. Clark lived in St. Louis when it felt like its brightest days were still ahead. Relocating from Cincinnati to the north St. Louis neighborhood called the Ville in 1888, the teacher and political orator found a river town on the brink of becoming a national metropolis. Starting in the 1880s, St. Louis would add 100,000 residents to its population every ten years for the next half-century, arguably reaching the peak of its cultural power in 1904 when it hosted both the World’s Fair and the Summer Olympics. Part of this growth was driven by Black migrants from the unreconstructed South, many of whom began to settle in the Ville shortly before Clark’s arrival.

Clark’s neighborhood was also home to St. Louis’s significant German and Irish populations, and the social mixing between the European emigres and Black migrants was often tense; by the 1920s, most whites had left the Ville. However, some residents labored to build relationships across the color line. Clark, a Black socialist who had been collaborating with German radicals in Cincinnati since the days of abolitionism, was well prepared for the task.

Known just as much for his work on behalf of racial equality as he was for his activism in the German-dominated socialist movement, Clark was in the rare position of having the ear of both Black and white Midwesterners. He used his platform to mend ethnic divisions sewn by racial capitalism, reminding workers that the boss was not their friend even if they shared the same skin tone. “Go into the South and see the capitalists banded together over the poor whites,” he implored an overflow crowd at Cincinnati’s Robinson Opera House in March 1877. Invited to the opera house to give a stump speech for the Workingmen’s Party ticket ahead of local midterm elections, Clark seized the opportunity to address what he saw as intersecting national crises: monopoly capitalism in the North and the re-entrenchment of a racist caste system in the South.

In the same speech, Clark showed how the postbellum marriage of southern plantation power to northern financial capital weighed particularly heavily on Black sharecroppers, who in 1877 were more vulnerable to virtual re-enslavement than at any point since the Civil War. For Clark, the same wealthy landowners and financiers who lorded over poor whites “carefully calculate[d] how much, and no more, it will require to feed and clothe the black laborer to keep him alive from one year to another. That much they will give him for his hard labor, on which the aristocracy live, and not a cent more . . . Not a foot of land will they sell to the oppressed race who are trying to crowd out the degradation into which capital has plunged them.”

Clark’s orations reveal a man who was aware that people experience economic exploitation and political domination differently depending on their race and region. At the same time, his speeches attempt to make these different experiences of oppression legible across the diverse groups that he addressed. We know that Clark was thinking about Cincinnati’s and St. Louis’s sizable communities of German revolutionaries in his March 1877 speech because he pointed out that “capital,” the same force that German socialists knew to be dominating industrial laborers in the North, was also weighing heavily on Black farmers in the South.

Clark thereby legitimized Black agricultural labor in the context of the early Marxist movement, which too often considered the factory and its generally white proletariat as the sole sources of revolution. Similarly, his description of Southern planters as an “aristocracy” appealed to the Midwest’s Irish immigrants, starved and subjugated by the English monarchy. While Clark seems to have been the only Black member of the Workingmen’s Party, he never separated anticapitalism from antiracism. With varying degrees of subtlety, all of the speeches that he delivered on behalf of the Party encouraged Europeans and white Americans to understand and ally with his race in the struggle for freedom.

Clark exhibited a striking hope that his efforts to build an interracial coalition of political radicals would pay off sooner rather than later. On July 21, 1877, when the United States was in the throes of a national railway labor strike, Clark delivered his most famous oration, “Socialism: The Remedy for the Evils of Society.” He predicted that “twenty years from today there will not be a railroad belonging to a private corporation; all will be owned by the government and worked in the interests of the people.”

This, of course, did not happen. The railroad monopolies coordinated with the federal government to violently crush the strikes, and today a handful of behemoth corporations continue to dominate the country’s major freightways. Knowing that Clark believed the U.S. would nationalize its railroads by 1900, it is difficult to stomach our twenty-first-century economy’s acceleration of privatization and deindustrialization.

Today, as I drive north from my inner ring suburb to the Ville, I survey a city that has been hollowed out. Clark’s house, like many structures from St. Louis’s boom years, has crumbled and disintegrated. However, traces of it remain. The foundations of a brick facade guard the edge of what was once Clark’s property, with two concrete steps ascending into a now clover-covered lot. If his house resembled the few that still flank the empty lot, then it would have been a modest shotgun-style abode, perhaps with a small front porch for Clark and his wife, Frances, to talk and watch their neighbors stroll by on languid summer evenings. The home kept Clark within walking distance of the school where he taught, the stately Charles Sumner High, which looks as magnificent today as it did during Clark’s tenure.

Shortly after Clark’s death in 1925, his neighborhood began to prosper. In the mid-twentieth century, the Ville was a crucible of Black wealth and talent. For such a small square of urban land, the number of famous figures whom the neighborhood raised is astounding. Josephine Baker (b. 1906), Chuck Berry (b. 1926), and Rep. Maxine Waters (b. 1938) are just the beginning of a roster stacked with cultural, political, and athletic luminaries; I could pull three different names as recognizable as these from the neighborhood’s historical census. Partially in recognition of the Ville’s sterling legacy, Clark’s street, Goode Ave., was renamed in 1986 after Annie Turnbo Malone, a twentieth-century entrepreneur and philanthropist who was one of the first Black women millionaires in American history. With names as prominent as these, it’s not surprising that Clark does not often turn up in lists of the Ville’s famous residents.

However, with national trends of economic precarity amplified in Black Midwestern neighborhoods like the Ville, the words of America’s first Black socialist may once again command people’s attention. To read Clark in present-day St. Louis is to experience temporal vertigo. Although the speeches that he delivered a century and a half ago anticipate an egalitarian future, his critiques of inequality remain as applicable to the 2020s as they did to the Gilded Age. But what if the 1877 labor strikes had resulted in a victory for the workers? Would Clark’s speeches from that fiery July have been recorded in history books? Would Clark’s house have remained standing, preserved to honor its visionary resident?

That is not the present we’re living in — Clark’s political and oratorical contributions belong to the American people’s dissident counterhistory, not the dominant, institutionalized historical narrative. This is not necessarily a reason to despair. The inequality and unrest of Clark’s time did not prevent him from believing that he would live to see peace and prosperity prevail in every region of the United States. In his nearly 100 years of life, Clark witnessed slavery and its abolition, Reconstruction and its betrayal, racist massacres and cross-racial labor solidarity. Through it all, he maintained faith in the possibility for a social order that was not simply better than what presently existed, but even ideal. What reasons for political hope might I glimpse in a sleepy postindustrial city, or an empty lot? It will take some searching, but I am confident that signs of the cooperative spirit and human perseverance that led Clark to believe in a better world are still visible in St. Louis, like the brick foundations of a house waiting to be rebuilt. 

Marc Blanc is a Ph.D. candidate in American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Growing up in the shadow of factory smokestacks in northeast Ohio fostered his passion for working-class literature of the industrial Midwest, which is the subject of his dissertation. His other writings on the region’s radical literary history have appeared or are forthcoming in Belt Magazine, African American Policy Forum, and College Literature. You can connect with him on Twitter, @marcablanc.

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1724 S. Trenton Ave.
Tulsa, Oklahoma

By Michael Helsem

“Everything, including dreams, is meteorological.” – R. A. Lafferty, ”Narrow Valley”

A couple of years ago, my wife and I were visiting my young niece and her husband in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they had moved — a place I had never been. At first all I could think of was that immense, windswept plain, many times traversed by me, with speeding wheels, with wings, never stopping, the very incarnation of a blur. Then it dawned on me that the science fiction author R. A. Lafferty, whom I had idolized in the ‘70s), had spent almost his entire life in Tulsa. In the same house.

I had no luck finding any of his books in a bookstore there to show them, but at one point we were out on a walk, and I had summoned up from the Internet a not-quite-exact location of the house he had lived in. According to Natasha Ball on “Lafferty Lost and Found,” the house is “a shaded brick bungalow where Trenton comes to a T.” We went looking and found what seemed to be it, the corner house at 1724 S. Trenton Ave. I didn’t have a camera along, but it was satisfying to have seen it, anyway. It was a quiet, slightly gentrified neighborhood of older houses near a small lake, with good-sized trees on every block, which reminded me of the place in Oak Cliff I myself had grown up in — a good place to be a kid running wild on bicycles, where it seemed nothing bad could ever happen.

“Their brains differed from ours, their concepts must have been different, and therefore they lived in a different world.” – The Devil is Dead

Who is R. A. Lafferty, you may ask? He has fallen into obscurity but seems to be making a little bit of a comeback these days, praised by the likes of Neil Gaiman. To know him better, first run out and grab a copy of Nine Hundred Grandmothers. That’s a good start. Lafferty is best known for his inimitable short stories, which are only incidentally concerned with the tropes and themes of regular science fiction, and told in a jocular but slightly jarring voice that is a little like a tall tale and a little like a homegrown surrealist who has some really important things to say that he absolutely will not divulge, except in hints and sideways jokes. If you read enough of him, you start to dimly discern the vast, convoluted architecture of Lafferty’s universe—not an easy task, since so many of his books are out of print and not a few of them were published by small presses that never printed a large run in the first place.

To my understanding, there is a highly esoteric Thomist-Catholic aspect to it.  He apparently also believes we inhabit a multiverse in which time and space are sometimes illusory and sometimes not; survivals from the distant past (such as Neanderthals) or visitors from the future are not unheard of—and they’re not often used for the science-fictional story, they’re just THERE. He often makes reference to obviously bogus works, yet he’s also curiously erudite in real ones. There’s a wild Zen side, too, but you never can be quite sure when he’s being serious & when he’s pulling your leg.

“I was always for the underdog, and, doggy, you’re way way under.” – Fourth Mansions

It’s been said that aspects of the surrounding town are always seeping into his works, and not only the more ostensibly realist ones. But by and large, Tulsa is not present in any immediately named way — any more than the environs of the great mystical poets—unless you count the almost complete absence of that most-20c. experience: riding in a car (Lafferty didn’t drive). But two things I know. One is that Lafferty always identified with the underdog, the misfit, the underclass, and the socially disfavored; he has some striking stories and one historical novel (possibly his masterpiece, Okla Hannali) about Native Americans, whom he invariably credits with greater perception of reality.

In his many worlds, there is a pervasive, bone-deep precarity: the irruption of personal and/or apocalyptic violence is never out of the question, at any moment. I have to think the terrible 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which happened about three miles from his house (although he was only seven at the time) must have been something he couldn’t not have known about and reflected on.

“We are living in the narrow interval between the lightning and the thunder.” – Arrive at Easterwine

And then there are the tornados — 98 since 1950, according to the National Weather Service. Idyllic the place might be, but hardly peaceful. On that particular, mild, sunny afternoon, we drove past two blocks of torn-up buildings that hadn’t yet been rebuilt, havoc from the last big one. It looked like a bomb had gone off, levelling everything; the car fell silent. You see such scenes in newsreel footage, latterly Ukraine maybe: never in these States, not like this. All the other cars kept right on rolling, on to their intended destinations, untroubled and I daresay sound of sleep. They raise their families, go to their neighborhood churches, my niece and her new husband among them. This is where they choose to live.

“We could always make another world,” said Welkin reasonably.
“Certainly, but this one is our testing.” – “Sky”

M. H. was born in Dallas in 1958. Shortly afterwards, fish fell from the sky.

Photo by Abby Boehning.

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H House

Comstock, Michigan

By Lisa DuRose

The Kalamazoo River flows right through the center of Comstock, Michigan, behind the library and township hall and the 24-hour gas station. Past Merrill Park where people feed bread to ducks. It floods every spring, drowning the playground equipment. Comstock was never on my “must see” list, but Bonnie Jo Campbell convinced me otherwise.

As Bonnie and I trudged through the late spring mud, twisting through tall oaks and cherry trees, we arrived at the site of Bonnie’s childhood home, where her mother, Susanna Campbell, greeted us. Built in the shape of an H (to represent the first letter of Bonnie’s maternal grandfather’s last name, Herlihy), the house appeared like a spacious cabin, set in the deep woods. Once inside, we sat on an enormous worn couch, an occasional leaf poking out behind cushions, the artificial boundary between the outside and inside blurring in the springtime afternoon sun. The high ceilings and huge wooden beams accented the 4-by-10 picture windows, one of which overlooked a creek. Susanna entertained us with stories about her house (the expansive ranch-style cottage was built by her father in 1947), her animals (milk cows, horses, donkeys, pigs, goats, and chickens), and raising her five kids as a single mother. Stacks of magazines, books, and newspapers occupied a large portion of the room, which was warmed by tongue-and-groove wood paneling, a limestone brick chimney, and a wood-burning stove. Susanna seemed to know everyone in Comstock — store owners, local contractors, township officials, the postmaster — her connections stretching as far as the creek beside her house.

While the rural aspects of Comstock felt unfamiliar to me, having grown up in a working-class urban neighborhood in Saint Paul, Susanna’s stories rang true. That walking tour and Bonnie’s deep connections to the place evoked a sense of home in me during a time of pervasive homesickness. I was attending graduate school at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, just a few miles west of Comstock, and, when I arrived in August 1993, I couldn’t have been more disappointed.  Everything felt lackluster and limited — the restaurant choices, the bookstores, the queer community.  I was a 22-year-old snob from the Twin Cities who disguised my homesickness in the veil of cultural arrogance. And so, it was easy for me to dismiss the appeal of a place like Comstock. I suppose I just needed the right tour guide. 

One day in 1995, in the hallway outside my office, Bonnie appeared — a six-foot tower of cheerfulness and good humor. She struck a deep contrast to the rest of our graduate student flock, panicking over workshops and papers and commiserating about difficult students.  Bonnie had just abandoned her sensible plan to complete a Ph.D. in mathematics and — with the encouragement of her mathematics professor — decided to pursue her life-long passion to write.  She had already shed her doubt and misery, crying over mathematical proofs. Now here she was, confidently landing back on the familiar soil of southwest Michigan. Bonnie would spend the next three years in Western’s MFA program, transforming family stories, town legends, and her razor-sharp observations on Comstock into her first major publication: Women and Other Animals (1999), a collection praised by Publishers Weekly, for its portrayal of “misfits in middle America’s economic and social fringe with subtle irony, rich imagery and loving familiarity, describing domestic worlds where Martha Stewart would fear to tread.”

Getting a glimpse into Comstock — its modest, sometimes dilapidated homes, occasional dirt roads, ponds, woodlands, and railroad tracks — and meeting the formidable Susanna, any observer could see that the spark and material for Bonnie’s writing lay right in front of her, ready for her to harness.  A passage from her 2011 novel Once Upon a River demonstrates how carefully she depicts the impact of local industry upon the rural beauty of southwest Michigan: “They all fished the snags at the edge of the river for bluegills, sunfish and rock bass, though they avoided the area just downstream of the Murray Metal Fabricating plant, where a drainpipe released a mixture of wastewater, machine oil, and solvents into the river — some of the fish there had strange tumors, bubbled flesh around their lips, a fraying at their gills. On certain windy days, the clay-colored smoke from the shop wafted along the river, reached them on their screen porches, and even when they closed their windows, the smoke entered their houses through the floorboards and the gaps around their doors.”

Decades since her first publication, Bonnie has remained steadfast in her devotion to write accurately and lovingly about places like Comstock and the people who occupy these rural spaces. Her novels and short story collections, including the National Book Award finalist American Salvage (2009), are inspired by Comstock’s landscape and industry. And nearly every character she has crafted, including those from her forthcoming novel The Waters (W.W.Norton, October 2023), emerges from a rural Michigan terrain.

On a recent trip to Comstock, I would have astonished my 22-year-old self: nostalgia washed over me. I arrived in late spring, into the lush green Michigan landscape, lodging at the Campbell homestead, guarded by donkeys Jack and Don Quixote. The presence of Susanna Campbell, who died of cancer in September 2020, still presides. H House, as Bonnie now calls it, has undergone some major cleaning and restoration. She hopes to transform the house, and its eight-acre lot, into a retreat for writers, musicians, and artists. A few yards from the house, just under a patch of pawpaw trees, Bonnie has set two memorial stones, one for Susanna and one for Susanna’s sister Joanna, who died in 2019. “She loved & was loved & she read a lot of books” is inscribed on Susanna’s stone — so fitting for a mother who inspired a writer who sings the songs of Comstock and its people.

Lisa DuRose is the co-editor of Michigan Salvage: The Fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell (MSU Press, 2023) and a faculty member at Inver Hills Community College where she teaches in the English department. Despite earnest efforts to become a New Yorker in her twenties, she resides in Saint Paul, just two miles from where she was born. She now visits Comstock annually and is writing a biography of Campbell.

Photo by Christopher Magson, a Boston native who moved to Michigan for the parking and wildlife and stayed for his wife, Bonnie.

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4633 Westminster Place

St. Louis, Missouri

By Devin Thomas O’Shea

Tennessee Williams called St. Louis “cold, smug, complacent, intolerant, stupid and provincial,” in a 1947 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, playing the heel to his childhood home as he was on his way to becoming one of the most influential and celebrated American playwrights of the twentieth century.

Williams’ relationship to the Midwest is the antithesis of The New Territory’s ethos, “Here is Good.” For Tom, as he was known as a young man, here was very bad. But the repression St. Louis represented was a creative pressure cooker, according to Henry Schvey in Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams. Wild birds would become a ubiquitous symbol throughout Williams’ work: “I feel uncomfortable in the house with Dad when I know he thinks I’m a hopeless loafer,” Tom journaled. “Soon as I gather my forces (and I shall!) I must make a definite break… I have pinned pictures of wild birds on my lavatory screen — significant — I’m anxious to escape — But where & how? — . . . What a terrible trap to be caught in!”

Williams nicknamed his river city home “Saint Pollution” and indeed, the city had a few characteristics of a sulfuric runoff swamp. In the 1920s, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America, following New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and it was one of the most polluted urban spaces on the planet, culminating in “the day the sun didn’t shine,” in November 1939.

On “Black Tuesday,” as it came to be known, a weather pattern trapped coal emissions close to the ground, blanketing the entire city in a thick smog that smelled of ash. The streetlamps were lit all day, and in his poem “Demon Smoke,” written in 1925, Williams captured the noisy, smelly, industrialized hellscape:

crash and clap of Olive Street

Where nature and man’s work compete

For mastery in the dingy sky;

Where clouds of smoke

And jets of steam

Defy pure air and sunlight’s gleam.

Saint Pollution was no place for wild birds, though as Schvey points out, Tom’s true antagonist lay “not in the physical city, but within his own family.” His father, Cornelius C. Williams, was either absent, drunk, abusive or some combination of all three. Tom’s mother, Edwina Williams, was a repressed socialite never contented with her station in St. Louis society. Tom’s older sister, Rose, was schizophrenic — diagnosed with “dementia praecox” and confined to a mental institution in Farmington Missouri. “She is like a person half-asleep now,” Tom wrote of his sister. “Quiet, gentle and thank God — not in any way revolting like so many of the others.”

All three members of the Williams family were inspiration for various characters throughout Williams’ writing career. “So much of this writer’s work was forged in a crucible of anger and self-conscious rebellion against both family and home,” Schvey writes.

The smokestacks poisoning downtown with demonic coal ash caused all kinds of people to flee west, touching off St. Louis’ westward suburbia as early as the 1880s. The rich built mansion neighborhoods in the clean air, at the periphery of the city, like the Central West End where the Williams family lived for a time, which is now the site of the Tennessee Williams Festival.

In 2021, confronted with COVID-19 restrictions, the festival staged a production of The Glass Menagerie outside of Williams’ childhood home on Westminster Avenue. The production made use of the fire escapes that Williams once walked on, which inspired scenes in the play, as part of the outdoor theater set.

When the Williams family moved out of Westminster Place to their residence on South Taylor, Tom noted the “radical step down in the social scale, a thing we’d never had to consider in Mississippi; and all our former friends dropped us completely — St. Louis being a place where location of residence was of prime importance.” A sensitive, shy Tom Williams seemed to adopt many of his mother’s opinions of the city. “Social status in St. Louis depended on how much money you possessed,” Edwina Williams complained in her memoir Remember Me to Tom. His mother’s inveterate disdain for the city was based largely on her failure to find a social position equivalent to what she possessed as the rector’s beautiful daughter in her previous homes, Columbus and Clarksdale.

Meanwhile, Tom’s father Cornelius was often drunk and fighting with Edwina — complaining loudly about his wife’s disdain for sexual intercourse, warring over the bottle hidden behind the bathtub. Williams describes a Cornelius-like figure in his short story, “Hot Milk at Three in the Morning,” noting that his father often entered the house with “the intention of tearing it down from the inside.”

With this kind of family life, surely a bookish young man could find sanctuary in school, right? As the historian David Loth points out, St. Louis was a booming metropolis known for the “best city school system in the Midwest, and by several years of national ratings, it was considered one of the best school systems in America.” In University City High, Tom learned Latin and received a classical education in art, reading, and writing, but he was teased for his southern accent and “effeminate” manner.

College was not much better. Williams was so ashamed of failing to graduate from Washington University that he omitted mention of his enrollment from his memoir. “I was a very slight youth,” Williams describes himself. A young man beginning to come into his queer sexuality, he writes, “somewhere deep in my nerves there was imprisoned a young girl, a sort of blushing school maiden.”

“Williams was addicted to escaping St. Louis from first to last,” Schvey writes in Blue Song. “It was the great triumph of his life that, unlike his sister, he did manage to literally leave it behind.” After a lifetime of flight, it seems ironic that Williams would be returned to Missouri and buried in Calvary Cemetery alongside his family, but as Schvey notes, “Williams remained tethered to the city for the rest of his life… It was his tragedy that for all his desperate attempts, Tom Williams never really left home. The imagination and willpower that allowed him to devote his life to writing also kept forcing him to return home again in his imagination.”

The restrictive turmoil of the city is a symbolic throughline in William’s work — a wound he returned to over and over.

The Tennessee Williams Festival now carries on his legacy in the Central West End, projecting the author’s words from the cast iron balconies of his former home. A sculpture of the writer decorates the corner of McPherson and Euclid Avenue, across the street from the historic Left Bank Books, capturing a moment in bronze of Williams emphasizing something profound with a cigarette. But St. Louis still owes a debt to Tom Williams — an obligation to prevent yesterday’s traumas and protect the city’s LGBTQ+ community, its wild birds, and its artists.

Devin’s writing is published in Slate, The Nation, The Emerson Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. @devintoshea on twitter, @devintoshea on instagram.

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River Cabin
Blackhawk Island, WI

By Shanley Wells-Rau

I was the solitary plover

a pencil

______for a wing-bone

What more solitary place than a small off-grid cabin on an island that’s not really an island jutting into a lake that’s not really a lake. The cabin was a writing sanctuary for Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), said to be America’s greatest unknown poet, who will forever be linked to Blackhawk Island in southeast Wisconsin.

Look at Blackhawk Island on a map and you’ll see it’s actually more of a peninsula that points into what is called Lake Koshkonong, an open water area that is really just the Rock River being messy all over its flood plain. The river likes to outstretch itself and in its flood-prone ways created a recreational haven for boaters and fishers.

Placed less than 100 feet from the Rock River, Niedecker’s cabin was bought as a kit from a catalog and assembled by her father in 1946. He sited it closer to the road than the river in hopes of preventing displacement during the regular floods of spring. Elevated on concrete feet, the 20×20 one-room house hovers over four cement steps. The front and only door faces east, away from the river, as if to shrug off the idea of annual flooding. This one room contained her life: bed, books, table, typewriter, sink, pencils, hand-held magnifying glass. With no running water, she hauled buckets as needed from her parents’ house across the road. That was the house she grew up in. The house she needed to escape.

Her father, a congenial carp seiner and fisherman’s guide who was inept with finances, was carrying on an affair with a married neighbor close in age to his daughter. This neighbor and her husband were milking Henry Niedecker of property and money. Her mother, Daisy, had lost her hearing after her only child’s birth and turned her head away from her husband. Her “big blind ears” couldn’t hear what her eyes couldn’t see. A lifetime of fighting flood mud, “buckled floors,” and increasing poverty seem to have settled around her like a mourning shawl.

Niedecker left the area a few times—for college until the family’s finances made her quit (early 1920s), for artistic and romantic companionship with a fellow poet in NYC (early 1930s), for work as a writer and research editor for the WPA in Madison (1938-1942), and finally for Milwaukee in 1963 when she married a man who lived and worked there. But that spit of land brought her back after each exodus. Once married, Niedecker and her husband, Al Millen, returned to the river every weekend, eventually building a cottage riverside just steps from her cabin. They moved into the cottage for good in 1968 when Millen retired. Niedecker lived there until her death on Dec. 31, 1970.

In the opening lines of her autobiographical poem “Paean to Place,” Niedecker submerges herself deep inside a location she said she “never seemed to really get away from.”

Fish

____fowl

________flood

____Water lily mud

My life

____

in the leaves and on water

My mother and I

_________________born

____

in swale and swamp and sworn

to water

Painted green when built, the cabin today is chocolate brown. Sturdy wood, unfinished inside. A brass plaque by the door shines with the lines: “New-sawed / clean-smelling house / sweet cedar pink / flesh tint / I love you.” Her signature is embossed below. When I visited, it was hot and dry. The riverside window was open, allowing a breeze to push stifling July heat into the plywood corners. A lovely space. I could see myself writing there. I told myself I could even manage life with “becky,” as she called her outhouse.

It’s not hard to imagine the constant cleanup from the river’s yearly ice melt and flooding. Tall maples and willows accustomed to watery life block the sun over a dirt yard that would easily mud with rain. The only access to sunshine seemed to be on the riverbank or in a boat on the river itself. The tree canopy jittered with life, a “noise-storm” as Niedecker once wrote to a friend. I looked to see what birds were holding conference, hoping to meet one of the famous plovers so linked to her work. I saw none. Just movement, shadows, and chittering, and I thought of her technique to overcome her own failing eyesight by memorizing bird song. She could see birds as they took flight. Sitting still, they were invisible to her except through their calls and conversations with one another.

I grew in green

slide and slant

_____of shore and shade

Neighbors saw her walking, always walking, stopping to peer in close at some flowering plant. She bent in—nose distance—to see past her own bad eyesight. Before her marriage to Millen, she worked as a hospital janitor in Ft. Atkinson. Her failing eyes required that she work with her body, no longer able to serve as a librarian’s assistant as she did in in the late 1920s or a magazine proofreader as in the late 1940s. Her eyesight wouldn’t allow her to drive. If a ride wasn’t available, she walked the four miles to work. Four miles home again.

Out-of-place electric guitar riffs float past underbrush the afternoon of my visit. Someone is listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” seemingly not at peace with bird song or tree breeze. The blaring music makes me think of Lorine’s struggle with disrespectful vacationers and rude neighbors. She persisted in centering poetry inside her hardworking life in a community slowly turning blue-collar loud. Her neighbors didn’t know she was writing her way into the poetry canon.

The current owners are descendants of the couple who bought the property in 1986 from Millen’s estate. They kindly allow poets on pilgrimage, and they seem to care lovingly for the property. As I walked to the river to meet it up close, the owner appeared with a genial greeting. He asked if I’d noticed the 1959 flood marks on the wall inside the cabin. I hadn’t. Eagerly, he guided me back to Niedecker’s “sweet cedar pink” to show me that and other details. After friendly conversation, I decided to head back to town. I didn’t need to meet the river up close. I’ve already met it many times in her poetry.

After a career in the oil industry, Shanley Wells-Rau earned her MFA in poetry at Oklahoma State University, where she served as an editorial assistant for Cimarron Review. Her poetry has been published or forthcoming in The Maine Review, Bluestem Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, and Plants & Poetry, among others. She teaches literature and writing for OLLI and OSU and lives with her husband and a clingy dog outside town on a windy hill, where she wanders the prairie to visit with native flora and fauna.

_____

For further reading, digital archives, and more, please visit the Friends of Lorine Niedecker. Special thanks to Amy Lutzke, who spent a very hot day driving me around and showing me Niedecker’s personal library.

Photograph by Jim Furley, April 1979. Permission granted by Dwight Foster Public Library.

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3448 Pinkney Street
Omaha, Nebraska

By Ashley M. Howard

My 1980s childhood included reading to my Cabbage Patch Kid in a neon bean bag and practicing my moves so that I could dance with MC Scat Cat. I was (am) a nerd. I loved school. And with exception to the week set aside for standardized testing (shout out to Iowa Test of Basic Skills), field trips reigned as the most exciting occasions.

In Omaha, where I grew up, trips to the railroad museum and zoo were standard. Once when we visited the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery, I tripped and fell face first into a spiked wrought-iron fence. Relatively unscathed, I returned to the school cafeteria where my third-grade classmates and I shook a mason jar filled with cold cream until our little arms turned to mush.

It was a good day. We ate fresh baked bread and homemade butter. I didn’t lose an eye.

Another time our plaid-clad mob loaded onto a yellow bus bound for Hastings. At the end of the two-hour drive, we met global legend, well at least People magazine feature fowl and Tonight Show guest, Andy the Footless Goose.

These trips reinforced the mythologized stories taught to me about Nebraska history. Wide-open prairies, bustling stockyards, brave pioneers, and wholesome Heartland values. Absent were the stories of the displaced Pawnee, Ponca, Omaha, and Oto-Missouria Peoples. Erased were the Black, Asian, and Latinx workers who butchered livestock and built railroads. The state’s ugliest moments, those that challenged claims of Midwestern meritocracy, were swept under the rug.

Both within the popular imagination and much of the scholarly discourse, the Midwest is normalized as an exclusively white place—frozen in the past, albeit one dissociated from actual historical reality. Politicians, journalists, and everyday citizens regard the region with deep nostalgia; a “museum-piece” of a bygone era in times of great uncertainty.

I was in my thirties and a professor of African American history when I finally took my own field trip to the birth site of Malcolm X, Omaha’s oft-forgotten native son.

The opening pages of Malcolm X’s autobiography, and arguably his political radicalization, begin in Omaha. In the chapter “Nightmare,” Malcolm shares a vivid description, recounted to him by his mother, Louise Little. One evening the Ku Klux Klan rode on their home to intimidate the family into fleeing. Heavily pregnant with her fourth child, while her husband was travelling, Mrs. Little stood her ground as the terrorists “galloped around the house, shattering every windowpane with their gun butts. Then they rode off into the night, their torches flaring, as suddenly as they had come.” The Littles welcomed their son, Malcolm a few months later and remained for two more years. Although Omaha is not mentioned again in the five-hundred-page book, the violence his family experienced throughout the region looms large.

In death, as in life, Malcolm X is a divisive figure. An admitted hustler, convicted felon, racial separatist, Muslim, and provocative orator, his brilliance resonated deeply with millions across the African diaspora. Yet the memorialization of his first home at 3448 Pinkney proceeded at a near glacial pace, due in part to his political views and skepticism that one of the nation’s most prominent Black leaders hailed from Nebraska. This delay is especially stark when compared to Atlanta’s 38-acre Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park, consisting of dozens of buildings managed by the National Parks Service.

If we consider that physical sites promote our most sacred historical myths, this really should come as no surprise. America now embraces King and the sanitized narrative of his activism as proof of this nation’s redemptive, triumphalist narrative arc. Narrators distill racism as contained to the south and eradicated through the efforts of activists and federal legislation. The blocks-long King site affirms this illusion.

The Littles’ Omaha experience and the on-going struggle to create an adequate memorial of their son challenges this framework and breaks open the comfortable history of the Midwest. The Klan threatened the young family on account of Earl and Louise Little successfully organizing with the Omaha branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914, the pan-Africanist organization promoted Black economic independence and racial pride, representing a freedom agenda distinct from the integrationist model.

The struggle for recognition of Malcolm X’s home is a continuation of this tension. The city razed the modest house on Pinkney in 1965, the year Malcom was assassinated. That building’s destruction was the result of ignorance, not malice. But the wholesale demolition of homes on the surrounding blocks is indicative of the inherent racism of urban renewal.

In 1970, activist and former resident of the home Rowena Moore began the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation. While the Nebraska Historical Marker Program quickly approved the sign, another two decades passed until it was placed. On May 19, 1987, on what should have been Malcolm X’s sixty-second birthday, the official state marker was dedicated. When I visited over a decade ago the marker stood, a lone sentinel in an overgrown lot, isolated from Malcolm X’s activism and the vibrant community.

Today, that spirit is renewed. In 2018, artist and land activist Jordan Weber constructed the 4MX greenhouse, conceived as a place to nurture seedlings and people. When standing in the greenhouse with its double doors open wide, the marker is perfectly framed between them. Its final four words read “His teaching lives on.”

What might schoolchildren learn from a visit to this site? By reinscribing Malcolm X on to the landscape, his legacy comes to the fore. Put simply, this means a radical retelling of Omaha’s history. That retelling includes stories about Moore’s work organizing women meatpackers as well as Black high school students staging a walkout on May 19, 1969, demanding racially affirming educational experiences.

These histories also generate new questions: What were the work and educational experiences of Black Omahans? Why are there no local streets, government buildings, or schools bearing Malcolm’s name? Why were 311 historical markers erected around the state before one honored the contributions of a Black Nebraskan?

Neighborhood divestment and stigmatization ensures that no one will happen upon Malcolm X’s birthplace. One must intentionally seek it out. And like the physical marker, Omahans must also journey to seek answers to the above questions.

Through a deep engagement with Malcolm X’s Omaha experience, students will locate the rich social, intellectual, cultural, and political life of the city’s Black residents. In (re)visiting these sites, a more complex portrait of the construction and maintenance of Midwestern mythologies emerges. Such field trips to the past provide a roadmap to a more inclusive history and future. To supplement the white bread snack (and history) of my youth with colorful, community grown veggies is delicious indeed.

Ashley Howard is an assistant professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. A proud Omahan, her research interests include violence, social movements, and the Black Midwest.

Photo by Chris Machian.

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Smith Lake Camp
Herman, MI

By Ray E. Boomhower

Writing about the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in his classic regional history Call It North Country (1944), John Bartlow Martin described the expanse as “a wild and comparative Scandinavian tract—20,000 square miles of howling wilderness on the shores of Lake Superior.” Like numerous fishermen, hunters, and hikers before him, Martin was attracted to the UP by its “magnificent waterfalls, great forests, high rough hills, long stretches of uninhabited country, abundant fish and game.”

From his introduction to the region in the summer of 1940, selecting it as a suitably remote site for a honeymoon, to Martin’s death in 1987, the reporter, freelance writer, diplomat, and Democratic presidential speechwriter found himself drawn, again and again, by the UP’s quirky charms. As he warned would-be tourists: “You will have to do nearly everything for yourself. The region is not geared to make your visit painless.” The lack of modern conveniences and the clannishness of the locals could be maddening, he pointed out in Call It North Country (tattered, well-thumbed copies of which can still be found on bookshelves in many UP cabins), but if an outsider adjusted his thinking and fit into the region’s ways, he could find “no better vacation spot.”

The UP, however, became more than just a regular tourist stop for Martin. In January 1964 Martin and his wife, Fran, purchased a 180-acre site outside of Herman, Michigan. Not far from the water’s edge on their property they discovered the ruins of an old trapper’s shack, which they used as a temporary shelter. They constructed a camp (as cabins are known in the region) on top of a high, granite cliff sixty feet above the lake. Enormous white pines towered over the hemlocks located on the cliff, sheltering and shading the cabin.

Martin oversaw the construction by Finnish carpenters of a thirty-foot by thirty-foot log cabin with a large living room, kitchen, bedroom, indoor bathroom, and an enormous fireplace built out of fifty tons of native rock. As Martin’s son Dan noted, his father and mother loved “the wildlife, the remoteness, the sense that they were in touch with nature.” His family remembered that Martin did not believe in cutting down trees or their branches on his land, even if they interfered with the view of the lake from the cabin. “If you want to see the lake,” Martin insisted, “go get in the boat and see it.”

During his family’s summer stays Martin fished, tried his hand at carpentry, did some writing, and relaxed in a sauna that later featured the front page of the New York Times announcing the resignation from the presidency of his longtime political foil Richard Nixon. “No television, no telephone, once a week to town for mail,” he said of his routine. The cabin also became a sanctuary for Martin, a place where he could retreat to when tragedy, as it often did in the 1960s, struck, as when his friend Robert F. Kennedy fell to an assassin’s bullet in June 1968. At night, Martin, when troubled, could look up and see the Milky Way, appearing like “a white river,” with every star “blazing” as he witnessed “man’s satellites slowly tracking across the firmament.”

I decided while working on a biography of Martin that I needed to visit his Upper Peninsula retreat to get a better sense of what this wild place had meant to him. Martin’s daughter, Cindy Coleman, graciously offered to show me the cabin on a visit I made in September 2013, just before it was shuttered for the upcoming winter. I knew I was in the Upper Peninsula when, upon stepping out of the truck to open a gate so we could proceed along a rugged former logging road to the cabin, a large black fly saw its opportunity and delivered a vicious bite to the back of my neck. The spot still hurt when we passed a small, wooden sign with white letters affixed to a tree near the road that read: “J. B. Martin / Smith Lake.”

Reaching the end of the road, I could barely make out Martin’s cabin, nestled as it was among the trees. Although I did not stay long enough to hear coyotes howling in the night as Martin had done, I sat on the screen porch attached to the cabin, enjoying its dark-wood floor, sturdy beams, and simple, rustic furnishings. Relaxing in one of the wooden chairs, I was stunned, at first, to see that, with Martin’s death, there now was a clear view to the lake through the trees. Watching the waves from the porch as the wind rustled the branches of the nearby trees, I reflected that Martin had made all the right choices when it came to his cabin’s location, but maybe, just maybe, had been wrong about the lake view.

Ray E. Boomhower is a senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press. He is also the author of more than a dozen books, including Richard Tregaskis: Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam, John Bartlow Martin: A Voice for the Underdog, and Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary. His next book is about Malcolm Browne, Associated Press Saigon bureau chief in the early 1960s, and his famous photographs of the burning monk.

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