The Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library
Indianapolis, IN

By Laura Beadling

Like many, I found and loved Kurt Vonnegut somewhere in my miserable teenage years. Slaughterhouse-Five is now one of my favorite novels to teach, whether in Great American Books or Science Fiction Literature, and at least some of my students have had similar reactions. When the Kurt Vonnegut Library and Museum moved to its new location in downtown Indy, I knew I had to go, and, late in December 2019, my husband and I packed up the dogs and headed west from Youngstown.

Slaughterhouse-Five showcases Vonnegut’s finely tuned eye for evocative juxtapositions. Structurally, the book strings together short vignettes from across protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s life, which is fitting given his assertion that he’s “come unstuck in time,” as the first page tells us. The narrative ping pongs between Billy’s sad youth, his hellish experiences in World War II, his humdrum breakdowns in Illium, NY, and his domestic contentment as an exhibit in a Tralfamadorian zoo with porn star and fellow captive Montana Wildhack.

The trip from Youngstown to downtown Indy is also filled with jarring incongruities. After several hours of flat sameness on I-70 West, suddenly you’re in the city. As we drove through downtown, we passed the gigantic blue curved-glass Marriott Hotel and a minute later a small homeless encampment under an overpass. Less than five minutes later, we pulled into a spot just off Indiana Avenue, right outside the museum.

The most striking artifact inside the museum was the icebox from Vonnegut’s childhood home. Such an incongruous object to include in a museum dedicated to a writer, especially a writer of science fiction and satire. It can’t have been easy to install either. The giant thing, made of painted wood and a number of serious-looking metal fasteners, looked murderously heavy and was, also incongruously, topped by a jaunty toy Tralfamadorian. My eyes went back to it again and again.

The museum building itself is lovely, brick with a second floor patio and plenty of windows situated in a lively neighborhood. I noticed that the Madame C.J. Walker Building was across the street, so we took a walk around the area, one of Indy’s six Cultural Districts. Although the Walker Building is closed on the weekends, we appreciated the beautiful detail on the flatiron-shaped brick structure. On it, a number of intricate, Art Deco-esque terra cotta ornaments depict African art motifs. Both buildings sit quite near to Indy’s Canal Walk, which is a pretty promenade alongside an old industrial canal that cuts through downtown.

The visit made me think about structures and organization. Given the lack of a chronologically coherent narrative, Slaughterhouse-Five relies on purposeful juxtapositions between the vignettes to create meaning. Museums are similar, deliberately placing objects to illuminate connections and disjunctions. City blocks can sometimes do the same, although not always intentionally. The placement of the museum on Indiana Avenue, once a thriving residential and commercial African American neighborhood, is an example. Although few of Vonnegut’s characters were African American, he was an outspoken lover of jazz, and Indiana Avenue boasted over 33 jazz clubs at its height. Furthermore, each building offers different but important programming throughout the year. The Walker Legacy Center offers a wide variety of African American art, history, and cultural programs. Alongside its usual focus on banned books and freedom of speech, the Vonnegut Museum’s particular focus this year is on civic engagement.

Whether inside the museum or throughout the city, these juxtapositions can, like jazz, be improvisational and surprising and beautiful. I’m sure Vonnegut would approve.

Laura Beadling was born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio where she now teaches literature, film, and screenwriting at Youngstown State University. She realizes now that she should have bought the plush toy Trafalmadorian on offer at the Vonnegut Museum’s gift shop as it would be a good addition to her office collection of tchotchkes.

Photo by Neil Teixeira, courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library.

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Gravel Roads
Seward County, Nebraska

By Matt Miller

For all his stature as former U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser remains a poet of Nebraska, and so he is a poet of gravel roads. Consider “So This Is Nebraska,” his best-known poem about his home state:

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.
. . .

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

I grew up in Seward County, just outside of Milford, about 16 miles from Kooser’s home in the village of Garland. Our cars never lacked a thin coat of dust that I found embarrassing any time we went “to town” in Lincoln; the city seemed so clean, with all its white concrete. Still, the gravel roads were our life in Seward County. We met our neighbors there, stopping our cars right in the middle of the lane to chat through open windows. We explored nature and culture on the roads, tossing rocks in Coon Creek or gawking at somebody’s private landfill, posted NO DUPING (exact spelling). Sometimes the roads became our grocery store — we knew where elderberries or wild plums grew in the ditches. Once, we found a stand of edible crabapples and picked gallons of them. As we drove home, we trailed one out the back window of our Chevy Astro with a reel of dental floss, a spot of red leaping on the tan of the washboards. 

It is from time spent on those gravel roads that Nebraskans can tell you the shape of our country, that we know where to find the old German church or the local fishing hole. It is because of gravel roads that we know, as Kooser puts it in the voice of a radiator in a broken-down Chevy, “the names of all these / tattered moths and broken grasshoppers / the rest of you’ve forgotten.”

The gravel roads have their limitations as a public square, however. If somebody turns onto your lane, you had better stop gossiping with the neighbor and get out of the way. And Kooser, in his 2002 memoir Local Wonders, highlights another limitation in a rare moment of political commentary. At the start of the book’s consideration of summer in Seward County, Kooser observes “the Fourth of July parade float for this year’s Poison Queen” — two contractors spraying herbicide on the roadside. “While these two hapless men are killing the things they’re paid to be killing,” Kooser laments, “they’re spraying nearly everything else as well: the sunflowers, the pink wild roses, the wild grapevines, the chokecherries.” The public benefit of the gravel roads extends only so far as public willingness to preserve them.

Some of that willingness has grown since Kooser wrote Local Wonders. Now, when I go home, milkweed and yellow signs marking organic crops are commonplace in the ditches. The spraying regimen may have loosened a bit, to judge by the milkweed. And the new prevalence of organic growers testifies to some rising ecological concern, however market-driven. At least some of Kooser’s neighbors in Seward County have understood how these roads and the creatures about them still contour our lives as they do the landscape.

And those contours have lasting meaning. Near the end of Local Wonders, Kooser recounts how the roads helped him endure cancer: “Each day when I came home, I stopped at the head of our lane and picked up a pebble from the road. I lined these up along the kitchen windowsill to count off the treatments” (150).

Mercifully Kooser survived, and so we might imagine that line of pebbles continuing on, day by day, joining up into a road. Beside them on the sill, a wild rose.

Matt Miller now lives outside Reeds Spring, Missouri, where he works with his family to reforest their quasi-suburban lawn with fruit trees. He serves as Assistant Professor of English at College of the Ozarks and writes essays and reviews on ecology, spirituality, and the Midwest. Find him online at matt-miller.org.

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Tallgrass Prairie Preserve
Osage County, Oklahoma 

By Mason Whitehorn Powell

“Three ridges roughly boat-shaped push their prows south into the sea of prairie.” The opening lines of Talking to the Moon by Osage author John Joseph Mathews describe the land where he would build a sandstone cabin in 1932 to live out the remainder of his life. Published in 1945, Talking to the Moon is an intimate reflection on the landscape, wildlife, occasional tribal affairs, and seasonal changes that he experienced across this decade.

Mathews named his one-room cabin The Blackjacks, moored by those eponymous native oak trees and harbored by a sea of prairie. The cabin was abandoned after his death in 1979, and his grave remains on the property, which is now surrounded by a fence to keep roaming buffalo off the grounds. The Blackjacks and the land surrounding it were purchased from Mathews’ descendants by The Nature Conservancy in 2014 and, during summer 2020, I toured the cabin digitally, in a virtual event hosted by TNC and the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve.

I may have never seen the Blackjacks with my own eyes, but I know the world he describes because I was cut from the same cloth. After serving as a pilot during in World War I, studying at the University of Oklahoma, obtaining a degree in Natural Sciences from Oxford, and roaming around Europe, Mathews grew travel weary and was drawn back to the lands he knew intimately and loved. He returned home to allotted land on the Tallgrass prairie north of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, his birth town.

His words are familiar to me, as an Osage having the same blood quantum as Mathews, raised in Osage County, pulled between tribal traditions and the white influence upon my own life. I also studied in Europe; I met my wife there and lived in Italy for a time before returning to reside in an even older native sandstone building in Hominy, Oklahoma with family allotments not too far from Mathews’ cabin. 

Mathews writes, “My coming back was dramatic in a way; a weight on the sensitive scales of nature, which I knew would eventually be adjusted if I live as I had planned to live; to become a part of the balance.” Structured by and depicting the four seasons, Talking to the Moon is subdivided according to the traditional Osage calendar: moon phases. Everything is structured as so — one only has to look. I write this as the Yellow-Flower Moon fades into Deer-Hiding Moon. Heat enters through my window and I notice that the yellow flowers growing in my yard have closed up. Behind my grandfather’s house, a doe and fawn are beginning to stir on cooler evenings, but the bucks have already vanished as hunters ready themselves.

Under this same moon, Mathews writes of driving to Hominy to meet with the old Osage men, Claremore, Abbot, and Pitts, to have their portraits painted by an artist with the Public Works of Art Project. These portraits are still on display in the Osage Tribal Museum in Pawhuska, which Mathews established in 1938. From 1934 to 1942, he sat on the Tribal Council on that same hill rising above downtown Pawhuska, where my mother also served for two terms as an Osage Congresswoman.

My grandfather never met Mathews but tells me about my family’s encounter with him:

“About half those books were given to him by your [great-great-] aunt Magella. When he’d run out of things that weren’t in a book somewhere he could study, or come out of the Catholic Diocese or wherever, then he’d have Magella tell him what had really happened. Where they came from. What families you were talking about.”

He summed up the conversation: “My dad told my aunt, ‘Don’t you be giving him any more information.’”

Mathews and my blind aunt Magella Whitehorn were speaking after the “old ways” were laid to rest during her father’s generation. Mathews and Magella were both born in 1894 in Osage Indian Territory, twenty-two years after our final relocation. She was a full-blood and among the last of those born onto the ground and raised with a bundle, observing the ancient Osage religion.

In the posthumously published autobiography Twenty Thousand Mornings, Mathews writes of his childhood bedroom, from which he “could look down into the valley.” From this vantage point, he could hear Magella’s father and other elders rise before dawn to greet the sun with prayers, which sounds he recounts as “the scar” of “a precocious memory.” Mathews writes, “The prayer-chant that disturbed my little boy’s soul to the depths was Neolithic man talking to god.”

In her youth, Magella was sent to boarding school and pressured to relinquish her traditional Osage identity and status grounded in our ceremonial rites. She did so because her elders said to, and it must have felt like entering an oblivion. Even though Mathews spent a career wrestling with his precocious memory of Osage mysteries — a lifelong attempt to capture and confront the past with words — there remained a painful tension between those who had to leave the old ways behind and those raised to inherit the new world. For Magella, this was a tragic episode. And her brother Sam Whitehorn, my great-grandfather, told her not to speak with Mathews because he viewed her knowledge of the past as family business.

The land speaks in indescribable ways, and our history is mysterious in its abandonment as we are adopted into a new world. It is evident in his writings that Mathews experienced a different Osage County than I know, but my generation still faces many of the same concerns, will pass down similar traditions, and can still fully experience that immutable landscape. A cabin is just a building. That was never the point—rather that it is centered, grounded, embraced by land that knows and accepts us, that is our inheritance despite ongoing changes. Lost traditions survive in both Mathews’ books and family stories such as my own. Mathews knew that Osage history must be preserved, just as land must be conserved, because the two are inseparable.

The more I learn from the rolling hills around me, the more I know about myself. Any time I drive north from Hominy towards Pawhuska, crossing a sea of prairie and islands of blackjacks, I feel at home and overwhelmed by acceptance. I haven’t needed to visit his cabin to know these things, only to truly see nature here, and to listen. When the world allows and in-person tours resume, I hope to step inside Mathews’ cabin. Until then, I have the Osage landscape and my connection to Mathews in our shared culture and his books: “with word symbols as my poor tools, to sweat at the feet of a beauty, an order, a perfection, a mystery far above my comprehension.”

Mason Whitehorn Powell is a freelance journalist based in Oklahoma and Rome, Italy. An enrolled member of the Osage Nation, his work often explores Indigenous arts and representation. 

Photo courtesy of Tallgrass Nature Conservancy.

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Paradise Valley
Detroit, Michigan

By Ayesha K. Hardison

Robert Hayden’s poems are artifacts from a long-gone yet storied neighborhood in Detroit. He grew up in Paradise Valley, the near east side commercial district adjacent to the more residential community called Black Bottom (named originally for its rich soil). Similarly, Hayden’s biography is a palimpsest for the lost and resistive. Born Asa Bundy Sheffey in 1913, he discovered, at 40 years old, his parents William and Sue Ellen Hayden neither adopted him nor legally changed his name when they committed to foster him. In the poem “Names,” he writes, “You don’t exist—” a problem his narrator struggles to resolve: “As ghost, double, alter ego then?” Hayden’s old neighborhood, like his representation of it, has an analogous complicated history.

Once a mixed-race community with Jewish, German, and Italian households alongside African American families, Paradise Valley was one of few areas where southern migrants could move to in Detroit, and in the 1920s it became a Black enclave. With over 300 Black-owned businesses, including medical offices, retail shops, hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs, the district was the center of Black economic fortitude in the ensuing decades. Throughout the 1930s, the Haydens lived on St. Antoine, Beacon, and Napoleon Streets as well as East Vernor Highway. While these streets still exist, waves of urban development have altered their geography.

By the late 1940s, Detroit initiated its urban renewal by demolishing old, dilapidated housing and, later, constructing the Chrysler Freeway, the northbound section of I-75 and I-375, to accommodate autoworkers who followed manufacturing to the suburbs. The interstate was completed in 1964, destroying Hastings Street, a major Black Bottom and Paradise Valley thoroughfare, and sounding the neighborhoods’ death knell. Since the early 2000s, Ford Field and its parking lots have supplanted some of this landscape, including the corner of Beacon and St. Antoine where the Haydens once lived.

Other landmarks mapping Hayden’s career are distinguished by historic property, new construction, and the space in-between. Falcon Press, which published his inaugural collection Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), was located at 268 Eliot Street, the home of Louis E. Martin. Editor of the Michigan Chronicle, Martin founded the Black weekly newspaper in a one-room office on St. Antoine in 1936 and hired Hayden to join the newsroom stationed in his dining room. Presently, a 5,663 square foot vacant lot sits there, flanked by a Georgian Colonial built in 1900 and contemporary brick condos. The empty space marks the publisher’s absence in the neighborhood now called Brush Park.

Hayden’s poems about the city, then, are artistic signs outlining historic negative space. Paradise Valley is source material for his Depression-era poems, such as “Sunflowers: Beaubien Street” and “Bacchanal.” In the latter, published in Negro Caravan (1941), Hayden’s blues-infused narrator laments his lost factory job and bemoans his lover seduced by “one of these Hasting studs.” Finally, in the fifth poem from “Elegies for Paradise Valley,” published in his last collection American Journal (1978), Hayden invokes the neighborhood’s disappeared:

      Where’s Nora, with her laugh, her comic flair,

      stagestruck Nora waiting for her chance?

Where’s fast Iola, who so loved to dance

she left her sickbed one last time to whirl

in silver at The Palace till she fell?

Hayden also inquires about the “mad,” “snuffdipping,” “defeated,” “shell-shocked,” “taunted,” and those who passed for white, “who cursing crossed the color line.” He concludes with the repeated line, “Let vanished rooms, let dead streets tell.”

Old street names memorialize such corporeal absence but obscure it with their new orientations. As Hayden elucidates in a 1978 documentary, “I had Beacon Street in mind when I wrote the poem, ‘Dead Streets’ because there are no people there now.” Hayden’s Heart-Shape in the Dust is an elegy for the neighborhood, too, as it eponymously documents Falcon Press’s ephemerality. Paradise Valley is a metonym for the people celebrated in Hayden’s poems, like Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Bessie Smith, and Malik El-Shabazz. In turn, Detroit’s ongoing transition — from suburban expansion and deindustrialization to corporate returns and economic recovery — give added meaning to his compositions. “How clearly you / materialize,” he promises in the fourth elegy to Paradise Valley, “before the eye / of memory—”

* Except where noted, all poems cited from Robert Hayden: Collected Poems (1996), edited by Frederick Glaysher. This essay’s literary and cultural history draws on the work of Melba Joyce Boyd, Frank Rashid, Ronald Walcott, and the Detroit Historical Society.

Ayesha K. Hardison is a literary and cultural critic of African American writing and representation. An Associate Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas, she explores questions of race, gender, genre, social politics, and historical memory in her research and teaching. She is the author of Writing through Jane Crow and editor of the journal Women, Gender, and Families of Color. In 2021, she will co-direct a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Zora Neale Hurston. Find her on Twitter at @aykiha.

* Except where noted, all poems cited from Robert Hayden: Collected Poems (1996), edited by Frederick Glaysher. This essay’s literary and cultural history draws on the work of Melba Joyce Boyd, Frank Rashid, Ronald Walcott, and the Detroit Historical Society.

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Brick District Playhouse
Fulton, Missouri

By Alex Dzurick

The 1940 novel Kings Row once so offended residents of Fulton, Missouri, that you couldn’t find a copy on the shelves of the local library. You could, however, in the very same town, find a copy on my mother’s bookshelf. She was a history teacher who taught classes on Missouri history, so even as a child, I had heard the rumors: Kings Row was based on Henry Bellamann’s life growing up in Fulton, and his frank portrayal of the darker side of life in my hometown did not earn him admiration by its social elites.

With all my mother’s connections to the book, I’m not surprised her copy occupied such a prominent place in our home, next to heirlooms and family photographs. In middle school, I asked if I could read it to complete a book challenge. She said that I could as long as I was careful with her copy, and I remember stretching out on the living room sofa, devouring the novel over just a few days. It’s a shocking story, exploring topics like euthanasia and incest, so looking back I’m surprised that I was trusted enough as a young teenager to handle the material.

Take a drive down Fulton’s Court Street today, and you’ll still see the Victorian-style homes that those elites once lived in. It’s easy to imagine how young Mr. Bellamann must have felt seeing those homes and knowing it was their occupants who bullied him, ostensibly for his German heritage and friendships with kids from the poorer, industrial neighborhoods. In Kings Row, on the other hand, Bellamann’s alter ego Parris Mitchell is quite well liked by everyone. Still, he discovers the sinister side of those wealthy residents while apprenticing under the secretive Dr. Tower, who is likely based on a real local doctor.

A bit further down Court Street, you’ll find the Brick District Playhouse, which served as the town’s only movie theater from 1928 to 2006. My mother worked there part-time for decades, and I followed in her footsteps when I turned 16. The small cinema had just two screens, with one built into a former balcony, and the lobby doors opened directly onto the brick streets of downtown Fulton. The brick building’s marquee was changed by hand even in its last years, and it wasn’t unheard of for birds and bats to swoop down from the ceiling during a film. Today, the building has been converted into a live performance venue, hosting plays, concerts, and lectures.

The theater itself is part of Kings Row lore, thanks to a 1942 film adaptation starring Robert Cummings as Parris Mitchell and future president Ronald Reagan as Drake, one of Parris’s wealthy friends. The movie did little to appease Fulton’s residents, exposing their town’s secrets to an even wider audience. Tensions had eased by the later part of the century, however, and several cast members came to Fulton in June 1988 to celebrate their source material (Reagan did not attend, as he was busy politicking). My mom had the opportunity to meet them at the theater. Her copy of Kings Row has a red autograph inside the front cover — “To Beautiful Lola. Love, Bob Cummings.”

Later, I had the chance to watch the film, which brought characters like Parris, Drake, and Dr. Tower to life in new ways for me. The novel’s darkest themes were removed to satisfy film codes, but it remained a tale of small town hypocrisy. And the film’s visuals are eerily reminiscent of the older parts of Fulton, as evidenced by the historic photos and sketches that hung in our home. Despite the passage of some 50 years between the film’s release and my own youth, it became apparent to me how easily Fulton’s residents would have seen themselves in Bellamann’s work.

I now live just outside of Philadelphia, where Bellamann was a dean at a prestigious music school before writing Kings Row. When I return to Fulton these days, and I pass those grand old Court Street homes just a few blocks north of the movie theater, I can’t help but look at them through Bellamann’s eyes, seeing the town in its honesty, with all its grandeur and all its faults.

Alex Dzurick is an educator and writer originally from Fulton, Missouri. He has published in The New Territory, NSTA’s The Science Teacher, and NAAEE’s Urban Environmental Education. Currently living in the Philadelphia region, Alex spends most of his time (when he’s not teaching) writing quizbowl questions, building crossword puzzles, or reading random Wikipedia articles.

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