Boyhood Home
Central City, Nebraska

By Nathan Tye

For Wright Morris, home was both a physical place and emotional ache. Born in Central City, Nebraska, in 1910, Morris made his life elsewhere, but returned to the Platte Valley in his writing and photography. His childhood home remains, now a museum maintained by the Lone Tree Literary Society and in it I find a shared weight of homecoming. Like him, I was born in the Platte Valley, built a life elsewhere, and returned. Morris’ labor to excavate the home’s memories resonate as I uncover connections fallen into disrepair and begin to build a new life on the old.

Carefully restored, this single-story white frame house, built amidst the Panic of 1893 by a real estate agent, carries the faded wealth of a small-town businessman. Certainly, it must have felt like that when a widower, his son, and housekeeper moved in two decades later. Morris’ earliest memory of “lampglow and shadows on a low ceiling” is likely tied to this home. A window topped with a row of colored glass faces northeast. Bedbound with pneumonia, Morris traced the colored beams as they moved across his sheets in that room. In his first memoir, he admits that such memories left him with “the ache of a nameless longing,” which he threaded through his work until he died.

In The Home Place (1948), Clyde Muncy returns to Lone Tree, a stand-in for Central City. Nearly 30-years gone, Clyde has a new family, a new place, and memories ill-fit to Lone Tree’s present. Clyde’s futile attempt at placemaking is framed by images of debris and empty farmsteads, a subject Morris’ first explored in The Inhabitants (1946). In both books he captures a world worn over — abandoned homes, barren storefronts, football-worn carpets, frayed familial ties — and finds those spaces inhabited by absence. These homebound texts are all the sharper in our homebound epoch, for our own places are now populated with days upon days of unbroken living.

Morris relished patina, the worn, and the lived-in. For him, abandonment closes distances in time. Or, as the art critic and novelist John Berger found, “Home is the return to where distance did not yet count.” What though, does home mean, in Central City and the elsewheres we find ourselves ordered in? Where do our ties to the past take us when the future is so uncertain? Morris returned to escape, and by documenting these visits laid the foundation for the preservation of his home. The connection to the past, “was the important thing. It had to be established,” Wright wrote in The Home Place, “I had to be born again.” Morris’ texts and images commingled the present and past to forward a vision of living nostalgia.

The Lone Tree Literary Society has reversed the decay Morris documented and made his childhood home available to curious publics. And while what Morris called “the inhabitants” of these structures may now be obscured by respectful restorations, in Morris’ work, their absence persists. Later in his career, Morris commented that photographs came from “the most durable of ghosts, nostalgia.” In his early images of Central City, he reached back to the remnants he left in order to move forward. Nostalgia is a welcome escape given the uncertainty of our present, but as Morris’ struggle with his homebound ghosts underscores, our worn-over homes are points of departure, not occupation.

At home with ourselves, we’re learning to live with our inhabitants. Like Morris’ photographs, Covid-19 emptied the streets, turned homes into lived-in voids, and blurred delineations between past, present, and future. Yet, by documenting deterioration and distance, Wright pointed toward a restorative future. Now, in the stillness of an uncertain time, the inhabitants of Morris’ home and those of our own become clearer, and the possibilities they hold emerge.

Nathan Tye was born and raised in the Platte Valley. A historian by trade, Tye is assistant professor of Nebraska and American West history at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is currently working on his first book, a history of hobo workers in North America.

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Ann Rutledge’s Grave
Petersburg, Illinois

By Jason Stacy

As a boy, I found it unsettling that Edgar Lee Masters anthologized the dead in an Illinois cemetery that never existed. Spoon River Anthology’s ghosts haunted the same rich Illinois soil I walked upon, stared out at fields like the ones that rolled by the window of my school bus, and spoke in accents that echoed mine, but these people were nowhere to be found. Doubly spectral, they were the dead neighbors that never were. Reading a frayed copy of Masters’s book brought home by my mother, an English teacher, I felt as if I were peering into a legendary Illinois that dissipated the closer I got to it.

But now that I’m older, I am at peace with the legends. The trick is not to get too close.

Masters himself is buried in a very real place: Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois, just about at the center of the state, a short drive from Springfield and down the road from New Salem, the pioneer community where Abraham Lincoln lived for a time. Petersburg is in the Illinois part of Illinois.

Masters rests only a few feet from a legend he helped make: Ann Rutledge, thought to be the one love of Abraham Lincoln’s life. About twenty yards away, down one of the main paths of the cemetery, a low iron fence surrounds a solid block of granite, on which is engraved a poem by Masters:

Out of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Ann Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!

Rutledge died of typhoid fever in 1835 and was originally buried in the Old Concord graveyard about five miles from Petersburg. After Lincoln’s death, his former law partner, William Herndon, claimed in his biography of the president that Rutledge was the one true love of Lincoln’s life. Her death at twenty-two threw the future president into an emotional crisis and, according to Herndon, Lincoln never loved any woman as much again. As the living Lincoln faded from popular memory after the Civil War, Rutledge’s ghost began to haunt the legends of the fallen president. These legends turned central Illinois into a destination for secular pilgrims, and she became the key to understanding Lincoln’s combination of melancholy and stoic fortitude.

To capitalize on the legend, local undertaker and furniture dealer Samuel Montgomery exhumed Rutledge in 1890 from the Old Concord graveyard and reburied what was left of her — two bones, a little hair, some bits of cloth — in Oakland Cemetery, where he was part owner. Montgomery hoped this location would prove convenient for visitors and fortuitous for the town. Twenty-five years later, in 1915, Rutledge was reburied again, this time symbolically, when Edgar Lee Masters planted her in Spoon River’s fictional cemetery. In 1921, at the height of Masters’s popularity, her epitaph from Spoon River Anthology was engraved on a new monument in Oakland Cemetery. These days, tourists commune with the legend of Rutledge that William Herndon perpetuated, by the grave that Samuel Montgomery filled with a few remains, under a fictional epitaph written by Edgar Lee Masters.

Outside of town, in the Old Concord graveyard, a small headstone marks Ann’s first resting place. It appeals to visitors’ desire for authenticity by telling them that this lonely spot in an out-of-the-way field is, in fact, “where Lincoln wept.” But when I drive through Petersburg, I visit Ann at Oakland Cemetery. The legend is better there.

Jason Stacy grew up in Monee, Illinois. Since 2006, he has served as a professor of history and social science pedagogy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His latest book project, Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town, is under contract with University of Illinois Press.

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Earlham Hall
Richmond, Indiana

By Leah Milne

I was a Midwest transplant, born and raised on the East Coast. Before I left home, friends joked about flatland and cornfields and voiced concerns about my entering what they perceived to be a region of overwhelming whiteness. Culture shock, however, was nothing new to me. As the first in my immigrant family to attend college, I knew what it meant to feel unmoored, to walk into a room where no one resembled you.

My conference visit to Earlham College was an attempt to soften that dislocation. Books have always been my second home, so sitting in the Runyan Center listening to literary presentations, I was already more comfortable. A bonus? Zitkála-Šá went here in the 1890s. Having read her stories about being the only American Indian among over 400 college students, I felt a kinship.

Earlham Residence Hall — where she stayed — was right next door. Bright leaves floated onto the campus quad where I stood before a sweeping red-brick building. Its entrance was framed by white columns, wooden benches, and painted Adirondacks. This was what the child in me imagined all college campuses looked like. Later, I would learn that this tree-lined enclosure was called The Heart.

In “School Days of an Indian Girl,” Zitkála-Šá — known to Earlhamites as Gertrude Simmons — writes about leaving her happy childhood on South Dakota’s Yankton Reservation for White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana. Her introduction to education left her homesick; she was forced to cut her hair, adopt a new language and religion, and endure numerous abuses. One wouldn’t blame her for leaving school entirely. And yet she went to college, much to the chagrin of her mother, who feared losing her daughter to “the white man’s ways.” If my visit was a modest attempt at self-encouragement, Zitkála-Šá’s more permanent move to Earlham represented a willful assertion of a new life.

Gertrude’s time at Earlham was lonely. She often isolated herself in her dorm room, and a classmate described her as “pleasant but somewhat distant.” Nevertheless, she flourished, publishing poetry in the school newspaper and performing in recitals. Her speeches, however, were where she found her voice as an activist.

After winning Earlham’s oratory contest, Gertrude was surprised when fellow freshmen celebrated by decorating the student parlor. Maybe, she thought, my classmates aren’t so bad. But then, weeks later in the subsequent state-level competition, students from one university mocked her with racist epithets. Gertrude rallied. In her soft but determined voice, she lambasted America’s prejudices, winning over all the judges save a Southerner offended by her position on slavery. She won second place.

I picture her afterwards in The Heart, staring at Earlham Hall, those columns festooned in cream and yellow drapery in her honor. Like many of Gertrude’s triumphs, this one was bittersweet. The humiliation of the night’s racism lingered, and she rushed to her dorm room, questioning her decision to leave home.

Even as she became a student at the New England Conservatory of Music and a teacher at the infamous Carlisle Indian School, she would remember this night. Maybe she stared at the stars and stripes flying above the Hall’s entrance and thought about how her speech referenced “our nation’s flag” and “our common country,” stubbornly and even hopefully insisting on a shared humanity that she knew was often denied. The image of her standing before Earlham Hall inspires me to contemplate my experiences in education, both alienating and invigorating, and the way that institutions can both fail us and uplift us. If Zitkála-Šá could make such resolute demands for equality after all she had experienced, I figure there’s still hope for me.

Leah Milne writes about and teaches multicultural American literature at the University of Indianapolis. It took her a full year living in the Midwest to learn how to properly pronounce “Louisville.” You can find out more about her publications and courses at LeahMilne.com.

Photo by Rebekah Trollinger, the Plowshares Assistant Professor of Religion at Earlham College.

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Parkview
St. Louis, Missouri

By Devin Thomas O’Shea

The epigraph of The Tunnel reads, “The descent to hell is the same from every place,” but William Gass chose to set his magnum opus in a leafy suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, called Parkview.

Parkview is one of the first White Flight subdivisions ever constructed. It was a planned neighborhood, a prototype that would use winding lanes and a single outlet to discourage “traffic.” In the basement of one of these darling mansions, based on William Gass’ real house, Gass imagined a history professor at an upscale *cough* Wash U *cough* Midwestern university. Professor Koehler sits to write the introduction to his career-defining work, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. But he faces a block and pens The Tunnel instead — a messy, dark, lyrical portrayal of Koehler himself.

Instead of the neat, well-researched book dissecting the Nazis, Koehler describes the fascism in his own heart. In his basement, digging down in the soil of his soul, he also literally tunnels in the dirt floor of his Parkview cellar.

According to Gass, “[t]he reader is to feel, as he or she doubtless will, as if they are crawling through an unpleasant and narrow darkness.” We learn Koehler threw a brick on Kristallnacht. He kills his wife’s cat when it gets in the way of his digging. He runs out of space for all his soil, but luckily the history professor’s wife is an antiques shop owner. Their second floor is lined with Martha’s restored bureaus, and though Koehler fears Martha’s gaze — and wants to hide the tunnel (and The Tunnel) from her — he loads soil from his basement dig into her furniture, where she’ll surely find it one day. At the end, Martha finds Koehler’s filt­h and confronts him in the basement. She tips a drawer onto his manuscript, and the dirt goes everywhere: in his lap and all over his pages. Martha orders him to clean her cabinets, and Koehler wonders if she understood his pun about soiling her drawers.

Gass and Koehler both lived in secluded Parkview, a neighborhood built upon the philosophy that rich people shouldn’t have to share the sidewalks with poor people. In the 1900s, downtown St. Louis was busy and dirty. The rich built Parkview far away, just across the city limit, literally on the edge of the county. The Tunnel — written and set in the center of this planned community — is a deeply moral book about filth hiding below the surface of respectability. Like Gass, Koehler is an esteemed American intellectual with a wife, a house, and tenure. His research aims to find what was so unusually nasty about the villains of history, but long before he starts digging in the St. Louis mud, Koehler concludes that the Germans were just like you and me. Fascism is not aberrant. It has always been down in our subconscious basement; it lives in everyday hatreds.

Parkview’s wealth has been resilient in the face of St. Louis’s century-long economic decline, but just down the street, the city’s racial segregation has made poverty in the Black community worse every day. The so-called “Delmar Divide” represents one of the largest economic cliffs in the country. On the south side, White professors raise families in leafy, historic neighborhoods with old-timey gas lamps. Just up the street from Koehler’s basement, the redlining starts. Black suburbs like Mill Creek were destroyed to ghettoize Black St. Louisans in the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects. The city defunded Pruitt-Igoe soon after it was completed in 1956, then condemned and demolished it in the 1970s. Now, even the North County homes are falling down or being deconstructed because the bricks are worth more than the walls. Beauty is everywhere in North St. Louis — but people go hungry, police violence runs rampant, schools are pipelines to the prisons, and poverty abounds. And you don’t have to dig to find it.

Devin Thomas O’Shea’s writing is in Boulevard, Paterson Literary Review, Midwestern Gothic, The St. Louis Anthology, and elsewhere. Chapter one of his manuscript, Veiled Prophet, is published in Embark Literary Journal. He graduated Northwestern’s MFA program in 2018. Find him on Twitter.

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Central Elementary School
Ferguson, Missouri

By Taylor Fox

There’s a haunted feeling that comes with walking around an empty schoolyard. Barren playgrounds and darkened windows convey emptiness, dejection. It’s unnatural for playgrounds to go quiet. Yet, outside the historic Central Elementary School in Ferguson, Missouri, that eerie feeling is missing, replaced by a comforting glow provided by the towering trees, climbing vines, and community garden of fragrant herbs.

Did you know there was a time Ferguson was all a farm?

Central alumna Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry is filled with imagery that conjures up the aura of her former school. She specifically reflects on the Ferguson of her youth in a poem honoring Jamyla Bolden, a 9-year-old black girl shot and killed in her Ferguson home in 2015 when a man shot into the house, targeting someone he believed stole from him.

The poem illustrates the commonalities between the author and Jamyla, who attended Koch Elementary School, just over three miles east of Central. In the poem, Nye wishes she could pass her own lived years on to the girl who was taken too soon.

Drive down Florissant Road today, and it is hard to imagine as farmland. The asphalt street is lined with barbecue restaurants and dozens of murals honoring the Black Lives Matter movement. Outside the Ferguson Police Department stands a row of signs and artwork remembering those killed by police violence in the United States.

Leaving Florissant Road and all of its restaurants, you immediately enter the quiet, calm neighborhood surrounding Central Elementary. Nye has described the area as a “leafy green historic suburb” and fondly remembers her old brick school. Built in 1880, the school flaunts a plaque acknowledging its listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The original bell tower — visible from both the playground and the community garden — still crowns the old building.

Considering Nye drafted her first poem when she was six years old, it’s easy to imagine the young artist gazing out the school’s wrought iron windows onto the large garden below and piecing together her earliest works.

Nye attended Central from kindergarten until sixth grade, and in 1966 her family moved to Palestine, her father’s country of origin. She has often spoken on her experiences as a Palestinian-American going to a then all-white school and in a 2014 essay wrote, “In Ferguson, an invisible line separated white and black communities. In Jerusalem, a no-man’s land separated people, designated by barbed wire.”

Nye’s poetry often reflects the parallels between her two childhood homes. Her first published collection, Different Ways to Pray, is entirely on the topic of cultural similarities and differences, using her own Palestinian-American identity as a model.

As a first generation Cuban-American with an ethnically Jewish heritage, my own parallels to Nye are too striking to ignore. I can imagine the feeling of other she must have endured in Ferguson, accepted in neither the white nor black communities. After moving to Palestine, where she may have felt even more of an outsider, she began to study culture and identity, perhaps to find her own sense of belonging. I too have felt the drive to study my heritage in order to feel enough, to feel like you deserve to claim your roots.

Despite our commonalities, it is also not lost on me that, while I cannot trace my ancestry back to Israel, we are from opposite sides of that barbed wire fence, belonging to two cultures with more in common than they are willing to admit. We are from two cultures that historically villainize the other without the effort of understanding and respect.

We share this severing too with Ferguson itself, represented by the seeming innocence of the empty Central Elementary School across town from the home where Jamyla was killed and next to a street so often shown as a scene of violence against black people — violence portrayed to make a point, without respect for the motivation behind the movement or any attempt to amend the systemic issues that have led to this point.

Taylor Fox recently graduated from the University of Missouri with a Master of Arts in Geography. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, she has spent her career learning and writing about cultures and hopes to continue sharing this passion with others. Fox has also been published in Missouri Life Magazine and the Columbia Daily Tribune.

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