Mark Twain Cave

Hannibal, Missouri

By Avery Gregurich

It was said that one might wander days and nights together through its intricate tangle of rifts and chasms, and never find the end of the cave; and that he might go down, and down, and still down, into the Earth, and it was just the same labyrinth underneath labyrinth, and no end to any of them. No man “knew” the cave. That was an impossible thing.

– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Dear Mark,

I haven’t written in a while. By now it’s August in Missouri, and I’m driving on the Avenue of the Saints, destination: Hannibal. I’m told this highway runs from St. Paul to St. Louis, eventually. You had to take the river between, but I’m able to take this avenue through the land of the Park-N-Ride. It’s mid-morning, and the first leg of the commutes are already done, measured in time out from the country roads into the cities which hold the jobs and back again into the country which hold a lot of anger, as they always have. Also, melons. The painted cardboard signs turned towards the highway announce that melon season is here. They’re all thump-ripe, I’m sure of it. At least that much is the same from both of our formative years spent here along the Mississippi.

Here are my credentials: I’m from Pike County, just south of here on the Illinois side of the river. Like you, I too had the sandbagging summers and the mayfly hatchings and the infinite boredom watching the river pass, knowing it was going somewhere and I wasn’t. In the introduction to Huck Finn, you warned that you had written the text employing a number of dialects, including “the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect, and four modified varieties of the last.” I suppose that I have used this dialect by default, confounding the rich suburban kids at college when my vowels all came out the same. I never could feign their language, so I sat real still, mostly with my mouth shut.

At the gas station, we fill up behind a hearse flanked by bare-faced men in suits that have become well-worn by this point in the pandemic. Back on the highway, we are passed by a car careful to merge, as its back window is covered with conspiracy theory paraphernalia. (There’s too much to tell, Mark. I’m sorry. Suffice to say people are now as they always have been: vain and afraid to apologize.) Just outside the highway hunting camp with tall fences penning in the game, a truck hauling a grain auger had an elk head propped up in its truck bed. It was just the head, and a blue tarp covered its face, but the antlers couldn’t be corralled. Past all this, the speed trap towns and firework stands and corn mazes and the round bales wrapped in red-white-and-blue plastic along the edges of the fields, we finally make it, announced by your face on the welcome sign. Hannibal: America’s Hometown™.

By now, all the remaining river towns look like one another. That is, if there’s any money left in them. If there is, then the train depots downtown are always turned into history museums, the former factories get big murals painted on their brick that make the locals cry foul, and the habitable real estate still left down by the water can be had at worrisome prices. In the time since I grew up, Hannibal opened up a brewery with your name on it, and they turned the Wonder Hostess Discount Bakery Outlet into a vape shop. That pretty much brings us up to speed.

At the entrance to the Mark Twain Cave Complex, which holds both “America’s oldest and newest show caves,” I spotted our teenage tour guide sitting behind the ticket counter, brushing up on her presentation with a copy of Tom Sawyer that they sold right there in the gift shop. (You won’t be surprised to learn that only the heartland hits have really survived. No copies of The Mysterious Stranger or The Private Life of Adam and Eve are available for purchase. I’m still not sure Hannibal is ready for either of them.) I was tempted to buy a bobblehead barely intimating your likeness. You could sit on the dashboard of my car, passing judgement on all passing things. I settled instead for a souvenir dime my father couldn’t believe cost 50 cents to smash.

My parents have joined Sara and I here at the cave. Due to ongoing circumstances, we had to skip last year’s Christmas and Thanksgiving, which our pre-tour conversation reflects. After a short video introduction, we are ushered into the mouth of the cave. The air in there is cool and surely the same as when you wandered through as a kid, only today it is mixed intermittently with my father’s picnic belches emanating from immediately over my shoulder. I recognize it even through the mask I wear, one of only two seen on the entire tour, the other covering my love’s face. We are clearly the real tourists here. I have to forgive my mother, who says she just forgot her mask in the car.

As you are aware, the cave is unique in its almost complete lack of speleothems, those stalagmites and stalactites that make caves desirable these days. Instead, hundreds of thousands of signatures cover the limestone walls around us, lots written in black paint or candle ash or berry juice, as our tour guide tells us. The signatures all around us confirm that for as long as we’ve been stumbling into caves, we’ve wanted to leave some kind of mark. Someone from St. Louis even drew a caricature of you about a century ago, a white outline cut into a patch of black paint.

Would you believe that they finally found your signature on the bicentennial of the “discovery” of the cave? They had it authenticated and everything, put up a wooden box with a screen on it to protect it from smudges. My father points to it, his indication that I should take a picture. Photographing in the cave is futile, but still I try to capture whatever he points at. I don’t think he’s ever read one of your sentences.

While we follow the path you made Tom and Becky traverse, we learn about the cave’s various lives as a one-time hideout for Jesse James, as a secret storeroom for Confederate weapons, and as a mausoleum for a doctor’s deceased teenage daughter. None of this is particularly surprising: most of what has been “discovered” over the last few centuries here in the river basin are grisly—bones left by things once chased or killed or both. No matter how we’ve tried to dress them up, we still played a role in the burial, if only by coming here now to attend the funeral.

At one point, our tour guide leads us in an exercise in which she turns out the accessory lights and we experience total darkness, something she says with teenage gravity is “really rare.” “So dark that you can’t see the hand in front of your nose,” tempting us to try. The punchline comes when she flips the lights, and we all stand there waving at one another. (Of course, we stop immediately when the lights come back on). The tour continues, more signatures are found, formations pointed out, and a prop treasure chest is revealed at the bottom of a crevice, but I keep thinking about that moment of total darkness.

Not only was there the absence of light, it was finally quiet for a moment, even the kids in the group awed by something outside of the algorithms’ reach. We shared there for a moment the realization of how much of our lives are consumed in light. This shared, quiet darkness felt elemental and deeply human, full of something communal, maybe grief, or fear. It might have been more commonplace in your time, but as our tour guide said, it’s rare these days.

I truly think the price of admission was for that one brief moment of total obscurity. I regret to admit that I really wanted to take that time to add my name to the thousands covering the cave walls. I wish I knew why. Instead, we walked out into August, said our goodbyes and drove back home beneath clouds of black gnats that seemed to follow the highway.

Let’s do it again next summer. I’ll bring a permanent marker. You bring a light.

Avery Gregurich is a writer living and working in Marengo, Iowa. He was raised next to the Mississippi River and has never strayed too far from it.

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All My Relations Art Gallery

Minneapolis, Minnesota

By Elizabeth Wilkinson

All My Relations Art Gallery is on Franklin Avenue, 1.1 miles from my house, in the Ventura Village neighborhood of Minneapolis. This section of Franklin Ave is called the American Indian Cultural Corridor. The corridor starts just as you cross over Cedar Avenue, is interrupted by Hiawatha Avenue, and extends west toward an end point near Maria’s Café on 11th Avenue. The art gallery shares space with the Pow Wow Grounds Coffee Shop. During the summer months, their joint parking lot becomes the Four Sisters Farmers Market, selling produce from Indigenous farm cooperatives. Much of what goes on, on the corridor is under the umbrella of the Native American Community Development Institute. Heid E. Erdrich, National Poetry Series Award recipient and poet from the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, until just recently served on their board and now works as curatorial mentor for All My Relations.

Heid’s work weaves through the Twin Cities and the cities weave through Heid. When I first came to Minneapolis and Saint Paul, a non-Native moving from North Carolina into Anishinaabe and Dakota territory, Heid Erdrich and her poetry welcomed me in. Only a few weeks into my life in the cities, fall of 2008, a colleague took me to hear Heid read poems from her collection National Monuments, which would come out in November. Now, I weave that book of poems over and over again into the classes I teach and smile at the sharp wit:

Guidelines for the treatment of sacred objects

that appear or disappear at will

or that appear larger in rear view mirrors,

include calling in spiritual leaders such as librarians,

well-ness circuit speakers and financial aide officers.

The Pow Wow Grounds is in the same building as All My Relations, and you have to go through the coffee shop to get to the art. Well, to get to the gallery. There is always some community art hanging on the coffee shop walls and some community artists hanging around drinking coffee. At Pow Wow Grounds, you can tuck into a warm corner with a cup of tea and a wild rice blueberry muffin, baked by Bob Rice, the owner. World-class poets write in Pow Wow Grounds. Heid’s newest collection, Little Big Bully, has poems that sprang up inside the bright yellow walls of the Grounds. Heid has been connected with the gallery for over a decade. It makes sense; her work — both poetry and prose — is often intertwined with performance and with visual art.

On her homepage, Heid includes links to her video poems. “Pre-Occupied” takes viewers from the comic cosmos into the churning Mississippi River, turned brown and frothy at the point of the St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam in central Minneapolis, just a scant two miles north of All My Relations. “River, river, river,” she says, “I never, never, never…” Her poem spills out over city scenes and archival photos and clips from a 1950s animated Superman comic, while the Crash Test Dummies’ “Superman’s Song” plays.

She wrote and recorded “Od’e Miikan / Heart Line” for an award-winning art project; her voice autotuned with wolf sounds and then with moose sounds echoed into the Minneapolis night sky while giant animated wolf and moose art installation sculptures, made from chicken wire and scrap plastics, howled and pawed the ground.

A few years ago, Heid taught ekphrastic poetry — poems that describe art, and its impact on the viewer, in vivid detail — to a small group of Indigenous women at All My Relations. Those writers traveled the gallery, pulling imaginative language-meaning out of the artistic visual-meaning pieces all around. Heid sat, as she often describes herself, bear-like, watching and listening with a fierce-gentle-art-love. Inside the warm yellow walls in Minneapolis, a name that combines mni, the Dakota word for water, with polis, the Greek word for city, Heid connected words and images and women across space and time in the heart of the American Indian Cultural Corridor.

Liz Wilkinson is an associate professor at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, MN. She researches, writes about, and teaches women’s literature — more specifically Native women’s literature and the literature of women and sports. She finds that these areas pleasantly collide more often than most people imagine.

Photo courtesy of All My Relations Arts.

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Miner’s Shack

Picher, Oklahoma

By Joe Schiller

The shacks huddled haphazard and crosswise, scattered between the chat piles. Leaky roofs, knotholes, and loose-swinging doors let the dust in on any decent breeze. In Picher, Oklahoma, nobody built for permanence. They leased their plots from the biggest mining companies or from the Bureau of Indian Affairs on behalf of Quapaw people (who were then mostly excluded from mine work). They moved on short notice as the “diggin’s” expanded, evicted by progress. In 1948 Meridel Le Sueur (1900-1996) traveled to the Tri-State mining district at its productive end. Where useful ore made up only two percent of the dirt, they were pulling mountains of rock to the surface to parse out any profit. The extra stuff was called “chat.” The shack she stayed in during her visit, like most in Picher, had come to town in pieces on family migrations from area farms and older district camps.

Le Sueur is identified mostly with the Upper Midwest, but this landscape of the Lower Midwest epitomizes her life’s work: proletarian literature and reportage about industrial capitalism’s paired assaults on women and land. Her mother’s home on Minneapolis’s tony Lowry Hill, where Le Sueur taught writing after World War II, will not do as a landscape for Le Sueur. The “wasteland of ruined earth and human refuse” she encountered in extreme northeast Oklahoma will.

“It’s the chat, overn everything,” explained Le Sueur’s interview subject, the titular “Eroded Woman” of this trip’s product, an article for the left-wing Masses and Mainstream. The woman wiped a chair for the writer. “Her eyes seemed dusted” with chat, wrote Le Sueur, “their blueness dimmed and yet wide open and upon me.” The Eroded Woman was the wife and mother of mine workers, and she nursed her husband through the district’s environmental scourge, silicosis — “You drown in your own blood, you do,” lamented their son.

The Eroded Woman and her family were partisans of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, which was affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). That made them outcasts in a district of proud, American-born laborers who had violently excluded Black Americans, immigrants, and labor organizers from their camps, certain that they were future bosses themselves and didn’t need a radical union. Just Le Sueur’s kind of person, the Eroded Woman repaired the son’s wounds from “the Klan, the bosses, pickhandlers,” who beat every man with a union button during mid-1930s labor strife. “I’m mighty proud of him not to lick the boots of the company,” she declared. She and her men resisted their town’s xenophobia. They exemplified the ideal of what the historian Julia Mickenberg has called Le Sueur’s “alternative Americanism.”

The shack is most certainly gone. Nothing in Picher met a dignified end when the mines closed across the 1950s and ’60s, except proud citizens, who willed theirs, usually by moving away. Even the landmark Connell Hotel was razed, its rubble filling an abandoned mine shaft in 1972.

In the 1980s, a new generation of feminists rediscovered Le Sueur. More recently have come the regionalists. Late in life she said she was “a passionate, partisan Midwest lover,” but that didn’t tell it all. More accurately, she loved the Midwest at its margins, and no place was more marginal than the Tri-State mines in the late 1940s.

“Eroded Woman” and its landscape embodied what Le Sueur’s editor Elaine Hedges called her “central formulation of female experience.” It focused on one woman haunted by the deaths of children and “the plunge into the darkness of the underground, the woman (or the earth) as wounded, invaded, and raped.” “Eroded Woman” was suffused with agrarian longing for what was lost on the land when capitalists extracted progress from beneath it. Amid shifting political winds in the late 1940s, perhaps Le Sueur felt her McCarthy-era persecution coming. She closed:

All over mid-America now lamplight reveals the old earth, reveals the story of water, and the sound of water in the darkness repeats the myth and legends of old struggles. The fields lie there, the plow handles wet, standing useless in the mud, the countless seeds, the little houses, the big houses, the vast spider network of us all in the womb of history, looking fearful, not knowing at this moment the strength, doubting the strength, often fearful of giant menace, fearful of peculiar strains and wild boar power and small eyes of the fox.

The lower continent underlying all, speaks below us, the gulf, the black old land.

Meridel Le Sueur’s life and work remind us of the hopeful and radical potential of regionalism and place — that tradition and history, rather than being reactionary, can gird people for progressive struggle. Picher, down from 10,000 people to about 2,000, unincorporated in 2009 after a contentious buyout process and the coup de grâce of a tornado that killed seven people and destroyed more than 100 homes. The Quapaws remain, remediating mine waste with the Environmental Protection Agency.

The chat piles, once the symbol of a proud community’s work, stand now like monuments to folly, leaching their payload of heavy metals into Tar Creek and rendering a large area uninhabitable. Without the shacks and the people who built them, the piles memorialize only the bankruptcy of past racial and ethnic exclusion. The “white man’s camp” of the early twentieth century proved to be no bulwark against economic and environmental collapse. As Meridel Le Sueur could surely have told us, it’s a good lesson for our time of climate crisis, economic precarity, hardening borders, and rising xenophobia.

Joe Schiller is an acquisitions editor at the University of Oklahoma Press. He is also a PhD candidate in history at the University of Oklahoma, writing an environmental history of deindustrialization in the rural Tri-State mining district. He lives in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, and tweets @Joe_Schiller.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress: “Zinc miner’s home. Picher, Oklahoma,” by Arthur Rothstein, May 1936. LC-DIG-fsa-8b38342.

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2907 Cleveland Street

Hammond, Indiana

By Samuel Love

“Ours was not a genteel neighborhood,” Jean Shepherd wrote of Hohman, his fictional Northwest Indiana hometown. The opening story from his 1971 book Wanda Hickey’s Night Of Golden Memories and Other Disasters describes a community “nestled picturesquely between the looming steel mills and the verminously aromatic oil refineries and encircled by a colorful conglomerate of city dumps and fetid rivers.” Whomever wrote the back cover copy for the 2000 Broadway Books trade paperback apparently didn’t read that part, describing the collection as a “beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana.”

The association of nostalgia with Shepherd’s work has long puzzled but not surprised me, especially in the light of the 1983 film A Christmas Story, which is based on parts of his 1966 novel In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. He is the author of arguably the quintessential modern American Christmas tale, but much of the bite of his work has been lost in the process of transcribing and adapting for viewing audiences the narratives that originated on late night radio in New York City in the 1950s. His stories first saw print in Playboy and The Village Voice in the 1960s, were adapted for public television in the 1970s, and finally in the 1980s, Hollywood.

Shepherd always insisted that his books were novels, not memoirs or collections of short stories. He also insisted that his literary works were fictional, that Hohman was a “mythical place,” a composite of all of the region’s industrial communities. Yet his description of fictional Hohman accurately describes the geography of his actual boyhood neighborhood in Hammond, Indiana. The Indiana Harbor steel mills and the Standard Oil refinery were just a few miles upwind. Even closer was the polluted Grand Calumet River. To the south were the brackish waters of the Little Calumet. And to the east, the Gary City Dump.

Jean Shepherd was born in Chicago in 1921 but grew up in Hammond, where the main street is Hohman Avenue. His family lived on Cleveland Street on the southeast side of town, in the Hessville neighborhood, near families named Schwartz, Flickinger, and even Bumpus. His books and films contain the typical disclaimers about “resemblance to individuals living or dead,” yet he often used the names of real people for his popular “kid-dom” stories.

Of the two houses on Cleveland Street that the Shepherd’s called home, the one at 2907 has the strongest claim as “The Jean Shepherd Boyhood Home” — on February 18, 1939, a seventeen-year-old Jean etched his name in the attic rafters. The current owners have lived there since the late 1970s, raising a family and growing to tolerate the curious people who wander by and photograph the exterior — provided the curious don’t linger around too long or violate the family’s privacy. When Shepherd’s younger brother Randy arrived in a limousine and asked to see the inside, they turned him away. They had no idea who he or Jean Shepherd were.

The nearest thing to a public Shepherd monument is the Christmas Story House Museum in Cleveland, opened in 2006 in the home used for the film’s exterior shots. It is a more appropriate celebration of the cultural phenomenon and ultimately the creativity of Jean Shepherd. Better to celebrate his talent as a fiction writer than perpetrate fictions about his life for tourists. Shepherd’s real-life father abandoned the family. And Shepherd himself eagerly left Indiana after his World War II service. “People ask me if I miss Hammond,” he told a crowd at the county library in 1984. “Do you miss the cold sores you had last week?”

Shepherd’s relationship with the region is often mischaracterized as “love-hate.” I don’t think there was hate from either side. Even before the film his hometown began embracing the man and his myths. Shepherd made regular public visits in the last three decades of his life. And we continue to remember him since his death in 1999. On the south end of Hessville is the Jean Shepherd Community Center, opened in 2003. Local theatre companies stage adaptations of A Christmas Story during the holiday season, and the nearby Indiana Welcome Center hosts an annual exhibit called A Christmas Story Comes Home.

Perhaps what some people mistake for nostalgia was Shepherd’s refusal to pander to his audience by mocking his hometown and the people there. “Never make fun of anything,” he frequently reminded his audience, “unless you love it.”

Samuel Love is the editor of The Gary Anthology (Belt, 2020) and lives in Gary, Indiana. Visit him at www.samuelalove.com.

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Gravesite

Sheridan County, Nebraska

By C.J. Janovy

It’s not easy to get to the final resting place of Nebraska writer Mari Sandoz, whose books, I’ll go ahead and argue, evoke one region of America as powerfully as William Faulkner’s portray another.

Paying respects to Sandoz in the traditional way of visiting her gravesite requires a pilgrimage far from the interstate, through Sandhills counties so thinly populated one can drive 20 minutes (it feels longer) without seeing another moving vehicle, on a two-lane highway dipping and rising through a forbidding grass-covered Sahara. Finally, about 27 miles north of unincorporated Ellsworth, a historical marker affirms that this is Sandoz country. A faded sign across from the Deer Meadows hunting outfitters confirms she is buried three miles farther back in the hills.

Getting to this point requires first knowing who Mari Sandoz was. I never encountered her name on any syllabus despite graduating from the Lincoln Public Schools and earning two fancy English degrees (I hope syllabi have changed). I made this pilgrimage only after reconciling a childhood mystery.

When I was a kid, Mari Sandoz’s name stared back at me from the bookshelves above the fireplace at my grandparents’ house in Oklahoma City. The book’s yellow spine sang out like a meadowlark, while tall red letters spelled two simple words: Old Jules. Below that was the author’s name in simple yet elegant black. The dramatic block letters told me the subject of this book was important. But what kind of name was “Jules”? It must be a man (tall red letters were for men). He was “old,” like the grandfather I loved, whose fireplace was where Santa delivered gifts, but this book was on high shelves where only the adults could reach it. The writer had a strange name, too. Was “Mari” a boy or a girl? How was I supposed to pronounce it in my mind? Decades later, after my folks cleaned out my grandparents’ midcentury modern house, this book was the only thing I wanted. And I finally read it.

The Swiss immigrant Jules Sandoz was an awful human, literally filthy and abusive but also educated enough to deliver breech babies on the frontier in the 1880s. Once the United States government had murdered or moved the region’s Indians, Old Jules helped colonize his part of the country through cussedness, luck, marksmanship and the help of obedient women, one of whom wound up in the insane asylum. I don’t know how often Mari uses the word “pounded” in this portrait of her father, but it’s a lot.

Generations of readers have put up with this man for 424 pages of what is now considered Mari Sandoz’s masterpiece. In this way, Mari’s accomplishment is far greater than her father’s legacy of towns and services in western Nebraska. Given the difficulties of making a life in this harsh place and time, one might wonder: Why bother? I think it was so his daughter could write such a beautiful book. “In Jules,” she observed, “as in every man, there lurks something ready to destroy the finest in him as the frosts of the earth destroy her flowers.”

Mari Sandoz Memorial Drive is a sand road that winds past a clanking windmill and ends in a patch of grass on a hill. Farther up is a plot surrounded by barbed wire, with a white gate. The plum-colored headstone reads simply “Mari Sandoz 1896-1966.” A metal glider allows visitors to sit and contemplate the view.

Near the gate is a mailbox; inside is a spiral bound notebook whose messages reveal it hasn’t been long since someone else was here.

“She was an admirable person & wonderful writer!” wrote one visitor from Windsor, Colorado. “I heard her speak at Kearney State College in 1965, approx. 1 yr. before she died. I can still hear her exclaim, ‘read my books.’”

Dan Kusek, vice president of the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society, had started a fresh notebook six weeks before my most recent visit.

“When they were bringing Mari’s casket here for burial, the hearse could climb no further,” Kusek wrote at the top of the first page. “Mari’s wish was to be buried at the TOP of the hill but they could get no further. A hawk came over us here while we were cutting grass & weeds. I have no doubt it was Mari’s spirit!!”

The only spirit I felt was the unnamed woman in Old Jules who tried to walk home to her one-year-old baby in a blizzard. “When the sun shone warm again over the glistening, drifted plains,” Sandoz wrote, “she was found curled up in a blanket in the slat-bottomed cart, a mile from home, frozen.”

Sitting in the sun on the metal glider, pondering the hills where Mari and Jules last lived, it was tempting to imagine her voice in the wind-stirring grasses. But even with a breeze, the place was so profoundly silent that all of my own thoughts were too loud.

Journalist C.J. Janovy grew up in Nebraska and lived on both coasts before settling in Kansas City. Her book No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas won the 2019 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize. Follow her on Twitter @cjjanovy.

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