Harmonia Cemetery

Battle Creek, Michigan

By Jeffrey Insko

In the heart of downtown Battle Creek, Michigan, near the bank of the Kalamazoo River, stands a memorial statue of the abolitionist activist and orator Sojourner Truth. Twelve feet tall, bespectacled and beshawled, Truth towers over an oversized lectern, presumably addressing an enrapt audience, her right hand resting on a Bible. Dedicated in 1999, the monument commemorates the 27 years — the last 27 years of her life — Truth spent in Battle Creek, much of it just across the river from the memorial site in the home on College Street she bought in 1867.

But if you were to travel six miles downriver to Bedford Township, you might find, not far from the river’s southern bank and perched upon a hill at the edge of what is now an industrial park, Harmonia Cemetery, the last remaining vestige of the short-lived utopian community Truth joined when she first moved to Michigan in 1857. A year earlier, Truth had visited Battle Creek from her home in Northampton, Massachusetts, for the annual meeting of the Progressive Friends in Michigan, a group of dissident Quakers devoted to abolition, women’s rights, and Spiritualism. Truth had been introduced to Spiritualism — the belief that the living could communicate with the dead — through her friends the radical reformers Isaac and Emily Post. During the first half of the 1850s, Truth attended other yearly meetings of Progressive Friends (sometimes called the Friends of Universal Human Progress) in New York and Pennsylvania, as well as seances and various antislavery gatherings with many of the period’s leading reformers and social and religious dissenters.

The precise circumstances that caused Truth to decide to join permanently the Progressive Friends in Michigan remain unknown. Well before the move, she had already earned renown and respect among abolitionists for her powerful speeches, sharp wit, and fierce activism, so it’s easy to see why her Western friends would have been eager to have her join them. What’s more, her time with the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a mixed-race communitarian experiment she had joined in 1843, had accustomed her to living among like-minded radicals and troublemakers. Whatever her reasons, she sold her Northampton property and paid $400 for a lot and house in the fledgling new village situated just south of the river, where the Hicksite Quaker Reynolds Cornell had purchased some 230 acres of land in 1850. Later, in 1855, he platted and parceled 140 of those acres into one acre lots and incorporated the Village of Harmonia. Its name derived from the 1850 Swedenborgian philosophical tract The Great Harmonia, dictated, or so the story goes, by the prominent Spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis while entranced.

By 1855, the Battle Creek area was already a progressive haven, a welcoming home for the religiously and politically unorthodox, and a central hub for Western abolitionism. Cornell was active in the state’s antislavery society. The city’s first antislavery newspaper The Signal of Liberty launched in 1841, followed by the even more boisterously abolitionist paper The Michigan Liberty Press, which ran from 1848-49 until it was destroyed by fire. Battle Creek was also a “station” on the Underground Railroad, where so-called stationmasters like Erastus and Sarah Hussey, and Truth herself, assisted freedom seekers on their journey from enslavement. It was home, too, to a small but thriving free Black community.

As for Harmonia, too little is recorded of its history, although we know the community was biracial, socially lively (it was rumored to be a bastion of free love!), and included, along with a store and a blacksmith shop, a seminary called the Bedford Institute, probably conducted according to Spiritualist tenets and run by Cornell’s son Hiram. Census records indicate that Truth’s grandson Samuel Banks attended the school for at least one year in 1859. Vibrant though it may have been, the community remained small; as late as 1873, it appears that relatively few of the original lots were occupied with houses. Even worse, a tornado swept through the village in 1862, destroying much of it and shearing the top two floors off of the four-story school. The next year, the Cornells moved away from Michigan and Truth appears to have moved from Harmonia about the same time, though she left the house to her daughter Sophia, where she and her family lived for another 30 years. In 1867, Truth purchased and moved into the house on College Street.

Other than a handful of headstones, almost all visible traces of Harmonia have long since been erased, overwhelmed by the twin forces of empire and industrialization. During the first world war, the land of utopian dreams was converted into a military training ground named, unfortunately, for the Michigan native and disgraced Army general George Armstrong Custer; the schoolhouse itself was converted, literally, into a gun school. Today, Fort Custer remains a National Guard Training Center. The rest of the area hosts an industrial park populated mainly by facilities that produce automotive parts. Earlier this year, when a local historian set out to pinpoint the precise location of Truth’s Harmonia residence, plat maps revealed that the site is now the recycling center at a thermal manufacturing plant.

As for the Kalamazoo River at the bottom of the hill, for centuries the life-giving artery of the region for indigenous peoples, settlers, and utopians alike, it has suffered from decades of industrial pollution, not least the million gallons of diluted bitumen that gushed into the river after an oil pipeline burst just upriver from Battle Creek in 2010. Four years and a billion dollars worth of cleanup after the spill improved the condition of the river considerably, but a significant amount of unrecoverable oil still remains. West of Battle Creek, areas of the river long ago contaminated with PCBs remain as well. Ongoing mitigation efforts at those sites have been severely hampered recently by a botched dam drawdown in 2021 that released hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sludge and sediment, smothering fish spawning habitats and creating massive mudflats. The river suffers still.

How many times, one wonders, must Truth and her comrades have crossed that river unspoiled, planning for justice? Even more terribly, perhaps, the route taken by that same pipeline as it traverses the state on its way to petrochemical refineries in Ontario uncannily follows the pathway to freedom taken by hundreds of the formerly enslaved, seeking refuge, not toxins, on the other side of the border. Underground transport today portends ecocide and planetary destruction rather than freedom. Which is to say that now, as much as then, we need Sojourner Truth’s expansive vision of justice. We also need more of the courage she displayed in pursuit of it.

Jeffrey Insko is Professor of English at Oakland University in Michigan, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century US literary history and culture and the Environmental Humanities. He is the author of History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (Oxford, 2018) and the editor of the Norton Library edition of Moby-Dick (2023). He is currently writing a book about the Kalamazoo River oil spill.

Photo by Tom Deater.

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Mixed Coniferous Forest
Osceola County, Michigan

By Camden Burd

“What we think of our hometown is our first substantial map of the world,” Jim Harrison wrote in his 2002 memoir, Off to the Side. A hometown takes the mishappen clay of a person and molds them, stands them up, and positions them in some vague direction. For Harrison (1937-2016), that was Reed City, Michigan — a rural town in Osceola County, situated in the northern portion of the State’s lower peninsula — where his family lived for much of his childhood. It was there, in a region defined by poor soil, long winters, and geographic isolation, where Harrison would cultivate the literary perspective that informed his essays, poetry, and novels.

There was nothing romantic about rural life in mid-twentieth-century Michigan. It was rural, not wild, definitely not idyllic. Hardship abounded. Harrison remembered ever-present poverty, in his family and others. “Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly,” he wrote. “Symmetry, balance, ultimate fairness seem to be abstractions remote to our occasionally naked sense of reality, as startling as walking out of a crisp and idealized civics class at a country school and into a lavish party of congressman and lobbyists.” He recalled eating at friends’ homes — minimal meals that included catsup sandwiches or a plate of beans. It is no wonder that his boyhood heroes included Eugene V. Debs and Walter Reuther.

But Harrison did not conflate sympathy with sentimentalism. He never waxed nostalgically about the inherent values of his neighbors. Poor residents of rural Michigan — like their wealthy counterparts — could steal, lust, and lie too. Reed City also exposed a young Harrison to the tragic throughline of humanity. After a childhood accident involving a feuding neighbor and a glass bottle, he lost vision in his left eye. The accident, and a subsequent failed surgery, left him in a severe state of depression which would come and go throughout his life. Years later, his father and sister were killed in a car accident while driving on a Michigan highway. For Harrison, the human experience was defined by hardship — which was not shared equally.

The environments of northern Michigan provided temporary respite from his own depression and the realities of rural life. Amid the scattered forests and fields surrounding Reed City, Harrison found a landscape that absorbed him.  “The natural world would always be there to save me from suffocating in my human problems.” He believed that wandering the woods, studying birds, fishing, and a general curiosity for the natural world could “lift you out of your self-sunken mudbath, the violent mixture of hormones, injuries, melancholy, and dreams of a future you not only couldn’t touch but could scarcely see.” It is important to note that Harrison rarely framed such excursions as an antidote to the modern world. His conception of nature did not fit the simplistic framework of “civilization vs. wilderness” — a dichotomy he believed mostly spoke to upper- and middle-class men who invented the concept to bolster their own ideas of masculinity. “There is nothing quite so fatuous as a man self-consciously trying to act manly,” he writes in Off to the Side. Harrison did these things for one simple reason: “Because that’s how I grew up.”

After several fits and starts Harrison received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Michigan State University. He worked in publishing for a short time in Boston and later received an offer to teach at SUNY Stony Brook. But he couldn’t shake the landscapes of his youth and, after two years of teaching, moved back to Michigan, first to Kingsley and then to a farm in Leelanau County. He took regular visits to a small, remote cabin near Grand Marais. In Off to the Side, he notes that these places “would appear nondescript and scrubby to those who favor the cordillera of the Rockies but to me it was homeground, similar to the terrain around Reed City where I had grown up.” Grand mountain ranges seemed almost vain to the writer, who preferred a bedraggled forest on sandy soil. The excursion into the natural world was not about summits or vistas. It was about losing oneself in the commonplace environments he knew near Reed City.

Settled in northern Michigan and connected to the landscapes of his youth, Harrison found literary momentum. He wrote his first novel, Wolf: A False Memoir, in 1971 and quickly followed with A Good Day to Die (1973), Farmer (1976), and Warlock (1981). The author preferred to focus on characters of unassuming backgrounds: bad farmers, lazy detectives, floundering professionals — nearly all of them who suffered from a life crisis or deep depression. All his characters were flawed. Most were unlikeable.

Harrison’s protagonists were poor, and those who weren’t carried traits that signaled to readers the politics he carried since childhood. The protagonist in True North (2004), David, spends his life rebuking his family’s legacy — lumber barons who clear-cut the forest of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during the region’s mining boom. He despises his inherited wealth, disowns his father (a sexual predator), and commits his entire life to researching his family’s environmental destruction. It is mostly a solo project, a type of penance for inheriting the family name. Over the course of several decades, David stews, guilty and ashamed. He only finds temporary relief by staying in an austere cabin in the dense northern woods where he can take regular walks and escape his own “self-sunken mudbath.” In True North, like many of his other works, these woods are the landscapes where Harrison’s characters find brief sanctum. 

The author’s own relationship to Michigan’s rural landscapes can be seen through his characters. In short, they wander in the woods to cope with their own traumas. The forests and fields, like those near Harrison’s boyhood home, helped to lift the cognitive baggage of life. As he noted in Off to the Side, the landscape could “draw away your poisons to the point that your curiosity takes over and ‘you,’ the accumulation of wounds and concomitant despair, no longer exist.”

The place consumes you so that your mind can’t. Exploring Harrison’s boyhood landscapes, I couldn’t help but feel the scenic humility. Osceola County’s forests and prairies never stuck me as particularly iconic or overwhelmingly picturesque. However, while meandering through the brush, tall grasses, and stilted pine I found that time had been distorted, my consciousness muted. And in my own navigation of these landscapes, I also came to understand how they had been foundational in shaping Harrison’s “map of the world.”

Camden Burd is an Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Illinois University, where he researches and writes on topics related to the environmental history of the Midwest. His work has appeared in The Michigan Historical Review, IA: The Journal for the Society of Industrial Archaeology, and several edited collections. He is also co-host of Heartland History, the podcast of the Midwestern History Association.

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H House

Comstock, Michigan

By Lisa DuRose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Smith Lake Camp
Herman, MI

By Ray E. Boomhower

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Belle Isle
Waawiiyaatanong

By Daniel A. Lockhart

I’ve come to the river, as one does frequently in Waawiiyaatanong, in the closing weeks of winter. The land has begun to wake up from the snow and the river itself contains patchworks of ice, a south sliding quilt of the lakes above us. The air is thick with fog, giving the world an evenness of white and grey. Punctuated by the restless patterns of geese and swans rejoicing over the return of open water. Across from where I stand, separated by the Fleming Channel of the Detroit River, is the jewel of an urban park, Belle Isle. I reminded of the island and the city across the water from us nearly hourly, as the clarion tower sings out its song across the water and the city streets between. What is before me in this moment is that spirit made real. A near translucent moment of a city in the clouds, an island at its heart.   

To think, this is the same restless river in which, in his poem “Belle Isle, 1949,” Levine and his Polish high school girl were baptized “in the brine / of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, / melted snow.” The river of industrial stove making, the river before the monumental decline of the great Horatio Algerian city, the river that is hardly visible past the row of phantom trees that make up the horizon that used to be, and still is, the island anchor of Levine’s poem.  Today, even the vision of the opposite bank is gone and the river is a nexus of dull light. Sharp edges of fluorescent modern Detroit, and Windsor for that matter, are absent. I have loved the constellation of skyscraper lights that dominate us here. Even in daylight they are gone. But here, alone, I am smudged by the warming mist of snow as the spring sun finds its way in.

Is this the perfect calm of the water between city and island? “Turning at last to see no island at all / but a perfect calm dark as far as there was sight.”  Before me, that darkness chased away and the river sheened as if it had never known of the Griffon, a burning Rouge River, the gore of Bloody Run. This river is a different river than Levine’s. More ancient, freed from ore haulers, the shadow of stoves, the traffic of Jefferson. At least, temporarily, between shipping seasons. Across the river there are certainly drums. A passing car on the island’s ring road, hidden in the dense fog bank hovering above shore. There is no possibility of touching the river beyond. Signs warn of its threat on the metal fence that separates us. Alone. There is no woman, there is no warmth of another in all of this.          The river is changed. And it is light now. And I find myself lost in thoughts of the warmth of a lover’s breath upon my skin. Taken by the heavy cold in the air around me, I understand that each time is of itself. The spirit lives on. But the impermanence of the world allows at best for anchors in our memories. We no longer build stoves. Few of us swim in the river. The water is undisturbed as it passes before me, its surface defiant and purposeful like sturgeon skin. And the world is the white of an elder’s hair; wèlathakèt returned. And the quiet, while the river slides by in her earliest stages of waking in this the earliest hours of spring. Moving us, in silence, “back where we came from.”

D.A. Lockhart is the author of Breaking Right (Porcupine’s Quill), Bearmen Descend Upon Gimli (Frontenac House), and Go Down Odawa Way (Kegedonce). His work has been shortlisted for Raymond Souster Award, and longlisted for ReLit Award for Short Fiction, and First Nations Community READS Award. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong and Pelee Island where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press and poetry editor at the Windsor Review.

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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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