Blackburn College
Carlinville, Illinois

By Karen Dillon and Naomi Crummey

As professors in the English department at Blackburn College, we have always been aware of the legacy of the college’s most famed writer, Mary Hunter Austin, who was born in Carlinville and graduated from Blackburn in 1888. Immediately after graduation she pioneered west with her family, and in the landscapes of California and the Southwest she became celebrated for her understanding of nature and unconventional feminism. In Austin’s canonical work of American nature writing from 1903, The Land of Little Rain, she recounts the story of a Paiute woman, Seyavi, who survived a massacre by hiding in caves with her young son. After describing the landscape in which Seyavi struggles to survive, Austin remarks, “That was the time Seyavi learned the sufficiency of mother wit, and how much more easily one can do without a man than might at first be supposed.” As Seyavi earned the respect of her people by raising her son without a husband, Austin, too, cast off convention to follow her own path. Though Blackburn played only a small and short-lived role in her life, we feel a kinship with Austin and the intellectual and artistic foundation the college laid for her.

Blackburn does not appeal to everyone. It is a tiny, student-managed work college in a small Midwestern town abutted on two sides by farmland; there is plenty of hard work but little glamour. Blackburn can sometimes feel isolating, but as a small, student-centered school, it also, in Austin’s own words from her 1932 autobiography Earth Horizon, provides space for professors and students alike “to walk about in it, making fruitful contacts with [each other], as [we] couldn’t have done in the larger universities.” Austin briefly left Blackburn for a nearby teaching college but despised the “rasping insistence on a regime that violated all the natural motions of her own mind.” Austin’s fiction also emphasizes the desire for natural motions over convention. In the short story “The Walking Woman,” the titular character “had walked off all sense of society-made values, and, knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it…. it was the naked thing the Walking Woman grasped, not dressed and tricked out, for instance, by prejudices in favor of certain occupations.”

Austin returned to Blackburn precisely because it welcomes and nurtures the individual mind; it gave her freedom and space to learn as she was inclined, leaving her, as she wrote in Earth Horizon, “so far as her professional proclivities go, without so much as a thumb-print of predilection; and that I count entirely to the good. I am quite sure she could never have escaped from one of the larger, better regimented institutions with so free an intelligence and so unhampered a use of herself.” The campus newspaper The Blackburnian, for which Austin was a writer and editor, may provide evidence of the intellectual freedom Austin was known for at Blackburn. In the March 1887 edition of the “Peculiar Characteristics” section, a 19th century version of a shout-out column to students’ and professors’ unique talents, quirks, and physical characteristics, Mary Hunter is recognized simply for her “ideas.”

As we pass the bust of Austin that presides over the halls of the science building, we continue to draw inspiration from her free-spirited feminism and artistry. In the college archives, there is a copy of the February 1888 edition of The Blackburnian, which notes, “Miss Mary Hunter has not been attending her classes for the past week. Too busy writing, we suppose.” We like to picture Austin, confident and even a bit arrogant (she switched her studies from English to science because for the former she believed she needed only herself and books, but the latter she felt required a proper teacher), walking through the green spaces of campus, writing and imagining alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Like the seemingly arid spaces Austin’s best-known works so meticulously open for readers, the Blackburn campus offers a path for those who seek a space in which to walk about unhampered and forge meaningful connections.

Karen Dillon has been a Professor of English at Blackburn College since 2011, where she teaches U.S. literature and first year writing. She has published two books since being at Blackburn: The Wire in the College Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches in the Humanities (co-edited with Naomi Crummey in 2015) and The Spectacle of Twins in American Literature and Popular Culture (2018). She is originally from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Naomi Crummey has been a Professor of English at Blackburn College since 2005, where she teaches writing and literature. Her personal essays have appeared in Prairie Fire, Kudzu House, and Grain, and she co-edited The Wire in the College Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches in the Humanities, in which she co-authored a chapter entitled “’They’re not learning for our world; they’re learning for theirs’: Changing the First Year Writing Experience” with Karen Dillon. A Canadian citizen, she lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

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North Meridian Street
Indianapolis, Indiana

By Wesley R. Bishop

Booth Tarkington would still recognize his hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, which he described in The Turmoil as “a midland city in the heart of fair open country, a dirty and wonderful city nestling dingily in the fog of its own smoke.” Although the city has undergone significant changes since he grew up there more than a century before, the spirit of the city, a spirit he often strove to capture in prose, is still very present. The Turmoil, first published in 1915, is not Tarkington’s most well-known work, but it makes a strong case to be the novel that best understands the sprawl of Indianapolis. Even in the twenty-first century, the city feels less like a compact entity and more a conglomeration of different parts haphazardly tied together by long avenues that serve as borders for racial, geographic, and socioeconomic divisions.

Often these expansive streets — 38th Street, Keystone Avenue, Massachusetts Avenue, Meridian Street — feel less like connections within the city and more like corridors racing somewhere else, kicking up smog from endless exhaust. Again, Tarkington’s words feel familiar:

The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more riches. He gets them and pants fiercer, smelling and swelling prodigiously. He has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained to one tune: ‘Wealth! I will get Wealth I will make Wealth! I will sell Wealth for more Wealth! My house shall be dirty, my garment shall be dirty, and I will foul my neighbor so that he cannot be clean — but I will get Wealth!’ . . . And yet it is not wealth that he is so greedy for: what the giant really wants is hasty riches. To get these he squanders wealth upon the four winds, for wealth is in the smoke.

I read The Turmoil this past year, a year of considerable unrest. COVID, the George Floyd protests, and the fallout from the final year of Trump’s presidency swirled together, clogging the air, suffocating all in its path. It felt like monumental, terrifying, history was being recorded on an hourly basis.

Yet the thing that most stood out to me as I read Tarkington from my apartment in Indianapolis was the almost audible cries of the American nation’s demands for continued growth. Not just businesspeople, but school administrators and customers and politicians, all demanding quick reopenings, defying mask mandates, and adding another level of grime to an already perilous situation. These calls for “wealth” — much like we see in The Turmoil — happened while we all could see the impacts of COVID. Air quality, smog or virus laced, be damned. Things needed to be open. To stop economic activity — shopping, working, selling — was to die even if going forward meant actual death.

Tarkington’s acknowledgement of social issues often earned him notice from contemporary readers and some critics. The Turmoil was followed by two other novels — The Magnificent Ambersons and The Midlander — that dealt with the issue of America’s transition into a new industrial age. These novels all take place in a fictionalized Indianapolis, and ultimately, The Turmoil’s major characters conclude that despite the hurried rush of growth and development, the United States could (and probably would) continue to move forward culturally. Today it reads as incredibly optimistic, but as I drive through the city over a hundred years later, I think Tarkington was essentially correct. It is not an admission I expected to make.

Indianapolis and the United States have been violently remade in the process of industrialization, and as Tarkington saw the rise of the industrial belt, residents of the Midwest’s rust belt are watching the tail end of that process. From rise to fall, to remaking again, again, again. Yet despite that, we still make art, we still think, we still strive for beauty and dignity.

As Tarkington notes, though, this is not a smooth process. The social classes that Tarkington discusses are still very much present in the city. The Indianapolis police department, a frequent subject of protests and calls for change, patrols the vast spread of the city. Even more sprawling than in Tarkington’s lifetime, Indianapolis often feels like a city held together by nothing more than geography.

At the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, marchers crossed 38th Street, a de facto border within the city that separates the city’s working class from its wealthiest residents. Marchers transgressed that border, going so far as to stand outside the governor’s mansion on North Meridian Street. I remember that night as my phone dinged with messages from friends and colleagues. Many in the city understood that a reckoning may be about to begin, where the wealthy and sheltered were being forced to see the cost of this inequality. Yet the protesters after chanting turned away from the mansion and began the long trek back to the center of Indianapolis.

What lies in store for us, the subjects of a tumultuous age? It’s impossible to say. Yet, like Tarkington’s novel, I remain largely optimistic that despite whatever dirt- or pandemic-congested state waits for us we will have (and must have) our ability to create meaningful representations of our lives — that, after all, is culture. We must do it, even as the giants pant violently for wealth.

Wesley R. Bishop is a historian, poet, and editor living in northern Indianapolis. He is an assistant professor of American history at Marian University Indianapolis and is the founding and managing editor of The North Meridian Review: A Journal of Culture and Scholarship.

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South Side Community Art Center
Chicago, Illinois

By Angie Chatman

4724 South Evans Avenue was located a block south of Cottage Grove, one of the main thoroughfares through the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. The three-flat building, now demolished, initially housed four generations of my family. The oldest generation — my great-grandfather Ernest Hezekiah Fambro, along with his two sons, Curtis and Timothy, his wife, Nellie, and her mother, Amelia Beasley Ball — had moved to Chicago from DeKalb County, Georgia, in 1916. This was early in the Great Migration of African Americans from the agrarian South to the industrial North of the United States, which continued through the 1960s.

My relatives weren’t the only Negroes to settle in Bronzeville. Gwendolyn Brooks and her family also migrated to Chicago, in response to lynchings and other forms of racial unrest in Topeka, Kansas, as well as for economic opportunities. Brooks lived in other places after her literary successes brought more lucrative teaching assignments, but those were temporary addresses. Chicago was home. This is obvious from the title of her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945, as well as Bronzeville Boys and Girls, published in 1956.

Due to national and local laws mandating segregated housing, at its peak 300,000 Negroes lived in Bronzeville, in the area between 39th and 51st from Cottage Grove to Halsted (until the Dan Ryan Expressway was built in 1961 and cut the western boundary line of the neighborhood to State Street). Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first open-heart surgery at Provident Hospital, the first African American owned and operated hospital in the country. Loraine Hansberry’s 1959 stage play, A Raisin in the Sun, was based on her family’s experience living in and attempting to move away from Bronzeville.

Once, on a Saturday morning my mother took us to the South Side Community Art Center, a three-story brick building on Michigan Avenue. We were going to hear Mrs. Brooks, who was then the first African American Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois, read her poems. My younger siblings and I sat on the linoleum floor on mats of woven fabric, fans moving the air like a barge on the Chicago River. Mrs. Brooks’ voice rose above the hum, like that of the soloist in the choir. I don’t remember what poems she read, only that I recognized the tenor of the words. Her poetry had the same rhythm and cadence of conversations among my relatives during a backyard cookout in the sunshine.

My mother had promised we’d stop for ice cream after the reading. She took a detour on the way and pulled over in front of 4724 South Evans. Stairs led up to the entrance. Every apartment had the same layout: an open living room, three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen. There was a small yard in the back. My siblings and I were dismayed that a family of six shared one bathroom.

I never lived in that building on 47th and Evans; it’s now an empty lot. For my mother, though, it was the telescope she used to focus on fond memories of carefree days with her three older sisters: days full of hopscotch, double-dutch jump rope, roller skating to the Hall Branch library — a mile and a half away — and movies at the Regal Theater. Ms. Brooks’ also uses her experiences in Bronzeville as a lens with which she can zoom in and out to comment not only on the quotidian activities of Black folk, but also display how dysfunctional racist practices are for both Black people and white people.

I have not lived in Chicago for over 25 years. Yet, as the Black Lives Matter movement grew from Minneapolis, to Chicago, to cover the globe, I turned my telescope towards home. It occurs to me — each time there’s another murder of a Black man/woman/child by police, and as people of color face a disproportionate impact from COVID-19 — that “We die soon.” Too soon.

I turn also to Brooks’ Annie Allen, published in 1949, especially a poem entitled “Beverly Hills, Chicago,” about a drive through Beverly, a then all-white neighborhood on the South Side:

Nobody is furious. Nobody hates these people.

At least nobody driving by in this car.

It is only natural, however, that it should occur to us

How much more fortunate they are than we are.

Angie Chatman is a native of Chicago. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Pangyrus, The Rumpus, Blood Orange Review, and Hippocampus Magazine. Her essay, “Ode to Poundcake,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She won a WEBBY award for her performance in the “Growing Up Black” episode of the World Channel’s Stories from the Stage. Angie can also be heard on The Moth Radio Hour’s podcast in the episode titled “Help Me.” Angie now lives in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood with her family and rescue dog, Lizzie.

Photo courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center.

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The Leopold Shack
Baraboo, Wisconsin

By Marc Seals

I am not a Midwestern native — I was raised in the woods and swamps of north Florida, far from the Driftless Region of Wisconsin (where I now live). As a result, I was not familiar with Aldo Leopold or his work when I moved to Baraboo sixteen years ago. Soon after arriving, I picked up a copy of Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, and I had not finished many pages before realizing that literature lost a fine nature poet when Leopold decided to dedicate his career to forestry. For example, Leopold writes, “One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.” Or “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” And don’t get me started about the chapter where Leopold remembers watching the green fire fade from the eyes of a dying old wolf.

Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, published the year after he died in 1948, has been recognized as a foundational text in the field of environmental ethics for over fifty years. It has been ten years since I finally made the pilgrimage to the Leopold shack, riding my 1973 Peugeot road bike to Leopold’s farm just outside of Baraboo. I dismounted and peered in the windows, where I could see bunkbeds, a stone fireplace, the rustic kitchen — calling it “simple” would be an extreme understatement. Regardless, I knew that I was standing on sacred ground. This might seem an odd pronouncement, given the fact that the shack is a converted chicken coop (since no other building on the property was worth salvaging), but hear me out….

Leopold purchased the ruined farm on the shore of the Wisconsin River in 1935 for a mere eight dollars an acre to use the land as a sort of laboratory — he wanted to restore the natural forest and prairies. The experience helped him finalize what he terms the “land ethic.” Leopold calls for a new relationship between humanity and nature, writing, “In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members.” He demonstrated this respect in his efforts to restore the property to its natural state. Leopold and his family planted over 40,000 trees on their frequent retreats from Madison, and the land is unrecognizable today. This “sand county” farm was not much good for farming, but it makes a great forest and prairie.

A Sand County Almanac is a memoir, a journal, a philosophical treatise, and more. Leopold honed his environmental philosophy on this property, and that’s why it’s sacred. There are not many chicken coops that helped give rise to a system of ethics. Beyond that, I struggle to convey what the shack means. I built a birdhouse replica of the shack last winter, and it turned out so nicely that the Aldo Leopold Foundation has supplied me with wood from trees planted by Aldo Leopold so that I can make birdhouses as a fundraiser for the Foundation. I’ve taken literature classes to the shack just after we finished reading A Sand County Almanac, where I was able to witness the wonder on the faces of students who drank water from original pump. I have driven out to the shack with Noah, my biology professor friend, on a ten-degree January day; we stood on the shore of the Wisconsin River and read our favorite passages to each other (for as long as we could take the cold). And I rarely cycle past without stopping in for a visit.

The Aldo Leopold Foundation, located in a wonderful visitor’s center just down the road, is continuing Leopold’s work, restoring the surrounding prairies to their original state. In short, every visit to the shack — and every rereading of A Sand County Almanac — feeds my soul.

Marc Seals is a professor of English at the Baraboo campus of the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, where he teaches courses in American literature, composition, and film. He has published articles and book chapters on authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dashiell Hammett, and Zona Gale. A native of the Deep South, he has grown to love the Midwest.

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JAMES EMANUEL

Alliance Public Library
Alliance, Nebraska

By Sean Stewart

Alliance, Nebraska, does not remember James Emanuel. There is no plaque, no statue. His poetry is not assigned to high school students. Despite the lofty architecture of the public library and museum, there is no display, no exhibit. Just two or three dusty books kept in the staff room of the library alongside genealogy tomes, protected behind glass cases. Protected from being discovered.

I grew up craving art in a town that didn’t have any. I read about other places—any other place I could—and the figures who put those places on the map. I decried the emptiness of the prairie I found myself in. I was scared the small world of my beginning had set the limits for all I could be.

Alliance had no bookstore, no venue for musical or theatrical performances to speak of, no university. In this town of 8,000, I gravitated to the place stories could be found. The public library was a lifeline. Everywhere else my world felt small, but when I stepped inside the library it became limitless. The old library building, built in 1912 with a Carnegie grant, boasts classical columns and resilient stone. The current library is equally grand: skylight windows fifty feet up seem to usher the world in. The place grabbed me. I got a job as a library page, and as I shelved books a new geography imprinted itself on my mind. Even if no section of the library was especially thorough, I could see the hints of everything not present. And I wanted to learn it all.

I’d been working there for years before I discovered James Emanuel. His faded books were kept with the archives in the staff room. When I was tasked with rearranging the archival shelves I was, as far as I could tell, the first to look at them in decades.

What I found left me breathless. James Emanuel was a poet pushing against the very bounds of what it’s possible for one life to contain.

He was born in Alliance in 1921 and grew up with the same quiet streets that I did, the same railroad engines droning in the distance, the same treeless sandhills stretching to every horizon. He read his first poem at Alliance Junior High. As a teenager, he worked on a cattle ranch before leaving the area and moving East.

Emanuel attended Howard, Northwestern, and Columbia universities. He was mentored by Langston Hughes, on whom Emanuel went on to write an influential book-length analysis. Emanuel then cemented his own scholarly reputation with Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, a groundbreaking anthology of African American literature.

From the relatively pastoral beginning of early poems, Emanuel’s later began to focalize in his writing around racial injustice. Their topical change is matched by their uptick in rhythm. Poems like “Panther Man,” his scorching condemnation of the murder of Fred Hampton, are marvels of energy and anger. Emanuel later disavowed America entirely. His son was brutalized by police and took his own life in the aftermath. James Emanuel renounced the United States and spent the rest of his life an expatriate in France, pioneering a new form he called the jazz haiku.

I have to think that Emanuel’s artistic and personal evolution in a direction his country was unwilling to follow is at least partly responsible for his anonymity in Alliance. When he died in 2013, the Alliance Times Herald ran one of his early poems called “Poet as Fisherman,” sidestepping his real legacy as a poet of startling rhythm, fierce critiques, and unfettered experimentation. I’m proud, now, to be from the home of the blistering jazz haiku king, James Emanuel—the town whose streets and surrounding oceans of dry tallgrass shaped his early world. When I began looking for traces of him in Alliance, I learned that Emanuel said of the public library—the 1912 iteration—“the Alliance town library was in biblical terms ‘my truth and my refuge.’” I wish I could tell him that it was for me, too. I wish I could tell him that his own books I discovered there are no small part of why.

Sean Theodore Stewart received his MFA from the University of Idaho, where he served as the fiction editor of Fugue. The Arkansas International selected one of his stories as a finalist for the 2019 Emerging Writer’s Prize and his work has appeared in Salt Hill, The New Territory, and Guesthouse. Originally from the Sandhills of Nebraska, he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Samantha, and their pups, Ramona and Molly.

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