Lakeview Park

Lorain, Ohio

By Ashley Burge

As a teenager, I entered what Toni Morrison calls her narrative “village” through her first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), and I was pleased to see three young Black girls traverse the familiar experiences of home life while prodding the unfamiliar territory of adolescence. I found much comfort in these girls’ fantasies and fears, and I wept, as I still do, over their tragedies. I was also entranced by the way Morrison framed her beautifully tragic characters in picturesque settings of nature and growth and beauty. Any serious Morrison reader is well attuned to her complex and intriguing characters, sparse but rich prose, and “unspeakable” thematic materials. I remember sprawling on my bed admiring these Black girls amidst golden-brown autumn leaves or tight red rosebuds. To me, these snapshots of nature were a buffer to the hopelessly tragic story that would soon unfold.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses the backdrop of Lorain, Ohio, her midwestern hometown, to illuminate the traumas inflicted on young Black girls and women in the 1940s. Specifically, she represents the Edenic Lakeview Park, with its beautiful rose gardens, situated among the pristine beachfronts on West Erie Avenue, as a pathway to cathartic revelation and renewal. For Morrison, nature and the natural world are a catalyst for survival, so the book’s version of Lakeview, called Lake Shore Park, is an ideal space to anchor her vision.

Lakeview Park has become a landmark in Lorain County with its approximately 2,500 roses planted in a rotary wheel. The park sits on Lake Erie, its circular design symbolizing wholeness and rebirth. In a more just world, it would be the ideal space for Morrison’s tragic protagonists to transcend the confines of intersectional oppression. But in 1940s Lorain, Ohio, spaces such as these were inaccessible to the three Black girls who epitomize themes of victimhood and survival in Middle America. In The Bluest Eye, these girls, Claudia, Fredia, and Pecola, are accosted by the traumas of racism, sexism, and classism well before they have escaped the naïve joy and confusion of adolescence. The tragic character Pecola does not understand or question her obsessive desire for blue eyes, but she is awestruck when the green-eyed “high-yellow dream child” Maureen Peal enchants teachers, parents, and students. Portrayed as a type of Persephone embodied in Morrison’s season themed narrative, Maureen disrupts the equilibrium of the girls’ identities and symbolizes the overwhelming otherness of Black girlhood in America. In these young girls’ experiences with racism and sexism, Morrison interrogates the worst possible scenarios for those who are othered, marginalized, and dismissed, and she indicts the communities that are complicit in their annihilation.

In many ways, The Bluest Eye is an autobiographical rendering of Morrison’s own othered identity in the small Midwestern industrial town of Lorain, Ohio. Morrison adamantly affirmed her Midwestern roots throughout her career. In conversation with Collette Dowling, she said, “Everything I write starts there…. Whether I end up there is another question, but that’s the place where I start…. It’s my beginning, my ‘thing,’ and I have distorted it, piled things on, I have done whatever it is that writers do to places, and made it my own. So it is mine now.”  Even while claiming the Midwest as her own, she confessed to Robert Stepto, “I know that I never felt like an American or an Ohian or even a Lorainite.”

Morrison’s allegiance to the Midwest shows in her ability to carve out the validity of Black identity in a region that often silences diverse voices. Morrison’s family faced such disenfranchisement. Before relocating to the Midwest for better opportunities, they had deep roots in the South, with her mother being from Alabama and her father from Georgia. She often recounts the story of 88 acres of land that were legally taken from her Native American maternal great-grandmother to show how white supremacy and systematic oppression renders land inaccessible to Black and brown people.

Morrison emphasizes this extension of day-to-day oppression in The Bluest Eye as she traces the growth and then disintegration of Pecola’s character. Before a pivotal scene in which Pecola is rejected by her mother and humiliated in front of the little white girl who her mother cares for, Morrison details the natural beauty of the white neighborhood that these young girls cannot access:

“We reached Lake Shore Park, a city park laid out with rosebuds, fountains, bowling greens, picnic tables. It was empty now, but sweetly expectant of clean, white, well-behaved children and parents who would play there above the lake in summer before half-running, half stumbling down the slope to the welcoming water. Black people were not allowed in the park, and so it filled our dreams.”

Here, Morrison embosses the fictionalized Lake Shore Park onto Lorain’s own Lakeview Park, with its lush rose gardens, manicured lawns, and picturesque lakeside. The tragedy of its beauty is that these young Black girls in 1940s Lorain are denied access to the dream of smelling those rosebuds, playing on those lawns, or frolicking on that lakeside. They are shut out from its beauty in nature and, therefore, alienated from their community, which adds to the despair that leads to Pecola’s demise.

When I reflect on my first immersion into The Bluest Eye as a teenager, I realize that my delight in Morrison’s poetic rendering of nature points to the reclamation of spaces that have been historically inaccessible to the Black community. Within that legalized denial enacted prior to the 1960s there was not only the unspoken denial of the ecstasy of nature but also the disenfranchisement of property, wealth, and mobility that still plagues Black Americans today. I was not personally denied access to Lorain’s natural enclaves, but the tragic narrative of denial was a tangible specter that haunted my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama even in my adolescence.  

These are, perhaps, the sentiments that impressed upon me as I empathized with Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola. And these are, perhaps, the sentiments that many Black Americans must navigate as they encounter the traumas connected to public parks and natural resources in America. It would not be difficult to surmise that Morrison incorporates the tragic denial of Lake Shore Park in her narrative because her desire to access its beauty and nature also dominated her own dreams as a child. However, Morrison’s novels never persist in the tragic nor linger too long into despair. At their core, they are about healing that can lead to survival and subjectivity. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison took the pang of rejection and adorned the park with flourish and meaning and gravitas and three little Black girls whose voices would have otherwise been silenced. Now, Lakeview Park is forever hers, and through her reclamation, it becomes ours.

Dr. Ashley Burge is an Assistant Professor of African American literature at Augustana College–Illinois specializing in 19th and 20th century African American literature. Her research and teaching emphasize the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class. She also explores Black feminism and ecocriticism in her writings. Her essays have appeared in the North Carolina Literary Review, the Pennsylvania Communication Annual, the African American Encyclopedia of Culture, and the critical anthology Through Mama’s Eyes. Her current book project establishes a theoretical paradigm that transmutes trauma and fragmentation to wholeness and subjectivity in African American literature. 

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1909 Annie Malone Dr.
St. Louis, Missouri

By Marc Blanc

Peter H. Clark lived in St. Louis when it felt like its brightest days were still ahead. Relocating from Cincinnati to the north St. Louis neighborhood called the Ville in 1888, the teacher and political orator found a river town on the brink of becoming a national metropolis. Starting in the 1880s, St. Louis would add 100,000 residents to its population every ten years for the next half-century, arguably reaching the peak of its cultural power in 1904 when it hosted both the World’s Fair and the Summer Olympics. Part of this growth was driven by Black migrants from the unreconstructed South, many of whom began to settle in the Ville shortly before Clark’s arrival.

Clark’s neighborhood was also home to St. Louis’s significant German and Irish populations, and the social mixing between the European emigres and Black migrants was often tense; by the 1920s, most whites had left the Ville. However, some residents labored to build relationships across the color line. Clark, a Black socialist who had been collaborating with German radicals in Cincinnati since the days of abolitionism, was well prepared for the task.

Known just as much for his work on behalf of racial equality as he was for his activism in the German-dominated socialist movement, Clark was in the rare position of having the ear of both Black and white Midwesterners. He used his platform to mend ethnic divisions sewn by racial capitalism, reminding workers that the boss was not their friend even if they shared the same skin tone. “Go into the South and see the capitalists banded together over the poor whites,” he implored an overflow crowd at Cincinnati’s Robinson Opera House in March 1877. Invited to the opera house to give a stump speech for the Workingmen’s Party ticket ahead of local midterm elections, Clark seized the opportunity to address what he saw as intersecting national crises: monopoly capitalism in the North and the re-entrenchment of a racist caste system in the South.

In the same speech, Clark showed how the postbellum marriage of southern plantation power to northern financial capital weighed particularly heavily on Black sharecroppers, who in 1877 were more vulnerable to virtual re-enslavement than at any point since the Civil War. For Clark, the same wealthy landowners and financiers who lorded over poor whites “carefully calculate[d] how much, and no more, it will require to feed and clothe the black laborer to keep him alive from one year to another. That much they will give him for his hard labor, on which the aristocracy live, and not a cent more . . . Not a foot of land will they sell to the oppressed race who are trying to crowd out the degradation into which capital has plunged them.”

Clark’s orations reveal a man who was aware that people experience economic exploitation and political domination differently depending on their race and region. At the same time, his speeches attempt to make these different experiences of oppression legible across the diverse groups that he addressed. We know that Clark was thinking about Cincinnati’s and St. Louis’s sizable communities of German revolutionaries in his March 1877 speech because he pointed out that “capital,” the same force that German socialists knew to be dominating industrial laborers in the North, was also weighing heavily on Black farmers in the South.

Clark thereby legitimized Black agricultural labor in the context of the early Marxist movement, which too often considered the factory and its generally white proletariat as the sole sources of revolution. Similarly, his description of Southern planters as an “aristocracy” appealed to the Midwest’s Irish immigrants, starved and subjugated by the English monarchy. While Clark seems to have been the only Black member of the Workingmen’s Party, he never separated anticapitalism from antiracism. With varying degrees of subtlety, all of the speeches that he delivered on behalf of the Party encouraged Europeans and white Americans to understand and ally with his race in the struggle for freedom.

Clark exhibited a striking hope that his efforts to build an interracial coalition of political radicals would pay off sooner rather than later. On July 21, 1877, when the United States was in the throes of a national railway labor strike, Clark delivered his most famous oration, “Socialism: The Remedy for the Evils of Society.” He predicted that “twenty years from today there will not be a railroad belonging to a private corporation; all will be owned by the government and worked in the interests of the people.”

This, of course, did not happen. The railroad monopolies coordinated with the federal government to violently crush the strikes, and today a handful of behemoth corporations continue to dominate the country’s major freightways. Knowing that Clark believed the U.S. would nationalize its railroads by 1900, it is difficult to stomach our twenty-first-century economy’s acceleration of privatization and deindustrialization.

Today, as I drive north from my inner ring suburb to the Ville, I survey a city that has been hollowed out. Clark’s house, like many structures from St. Louis’s boom years, has crumbled and disintegrated. However, traces of it remain. The foundations of a brick facade guard the edge of what was once Clark’s property, with two concrete steps ascending into a now clover-covered lot. If his house resembled the few that still flank the empty lot, then it would have been a modest shotgun-style abode, perhaps with a small front porch for Clark and his wife, Frances, to talk and watch their neighbors stroll by on languid summer evenings. The home kept Clark within walking distance of the school where he taught, the stately Charles Sumner High, which looks as magnificent today as it did during Clark’s tenure.

Shortly after Clark’s death in 1925, his neighborhood began to prosper. In the mid-twentieth century, the Ville was a crucible of Black wealth and talent. For such a small square of urban land, the number of famous figures whom the neighborhood raised is astounding. Josephine Baker (b. 1906), Chuck Berry (b. 1926), and Rep. Maxine Waters (b. 1938) are just the beginning of a roster stacked with cultural, political, and athletic luminaries; I could pull three different names as recognizable as these from the neighborhood’s historical census. Partially in recognition of the Ville’s sterling legacy, Clark’s street, Goode Ave., was renamed in 1986 after Annie Turnbo Malone, a twentieth-century entrepreneur and philanthropist who was one of the first Black women millionaires in American history. With names as prominent as these, it’s not surprising that Clark does not often turn up in lists of the Ville’s famous residents.

However, with national trends of economic precarity amplified in Black Midwestern neighborhoods like the Ville, the words of America’s first Black socialist may once again command people’s attention. To read Clark in present-day St. Louis is to experience temporal vertigo. Although the speeches that he delivered a century and a half ago anticipate an egalitarian future, his critiques of inequality remain as applicable to the 2020s as they did to the Gilded Age. But what if the 1877 labor strikes had resulted in a victory for the workers? Would Clark’s speeches from that fiery July have been recorded in history books? Would Clark’s house have remained standing, preserved to honor its visionary resident?

That is not the present we’re living in — Clark’s political and oratorical contributions belong to the American people’s dissident counterhistory, not the dominant, institutionalized historical narrative. This is not necessarily a reason to despair. The inequality and unrest of Clark’s time did not prevent him from believing that he would live to see peace and prosperity prevail in every region of the United States. In his nearly 100 years of life, Clark witnessed slavery and its abolition, Reconstruction and its betrayal, racist massacres and cross-racial labor solidarity. Through it all, he maintained faith in the possibility for a social order that was not simply better than what presently existed, but even ideal. What reasons for political hope might I glimpse in a sleepy postindustrial city, or an empty lot? It will take some searching, but I am confident that signs of the cooperative spirit and human perseverance that led Clark to believe in a better world are still visible in St. Louis, like the brick foundations of a house waiting to be rebuilt. 

Marc Blanc is a Ph.D. candidate in American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Growing up in the shadow of factory smokestacks in northeast Ohio fostered his passion for working-class literature of the industrial Midwest, which is the subject of his dissertation. His other writings on the region’s radical literary history have appeared or are forthcoming in Belt Magazine, African American Policy Forum, and College Literature. You can connect with him on Twitter, @marcablanc.

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3448 Pinkney Street
Omaha, Nebraska

By Ashley M. Howard

My 1980s childhood included reading to my Cabbage Patch Kid in a neon bean bag and practicing my moves so that I could dance with MC Scat Cat. I was (am) a nerd. I loved school. And with exception to the week set aside for standardized testing (shout out to Iowa Test of Basic Skills), field trips reigned as the most exciting occasions.

In Omaha, where I grew up, trips to the railroad museum and zoo were standard. Once when we visited the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery, I tripped and fell face first into a spiked wrought-iron fence. Relatively unscathed, I returned to the school cafeteria where my third-grade classmates and I shook a mason jar filled with cold cream until our little arms turned to mush.

It was a good day. We ate fresh baked bread and homemade butter. I didn’t lose an eye.

Another time our plaid-clad mob loaded onto a yellow bus bound for Hastings. At the end of the two-hour drive, we met global legend, well at least People magazine feature fowl and Tonight Show guest, Andy the Footless Goose.

These trips reinforced the mythologized stories taught to me about Nebraska history. Wide-open prairies, bustling stockyards, brave pioneers, and wholesome Heartland values. Absent were the stories of the displaced Pawnee, Ponca, Omaha, and Oto-Missouria Peoples. Erased were the Black, Asian, and Latinx workers who butchered livestock and built railroads. The state’s ugliest moments, those that challenged claims of Midwestern meritocracy, were swept under the rug.

Both within the popular imagination and much of the scholarly discourse, the Midwest is normalized as an exclusively white place—frozen in the past, albeit one dissociated from actual historical reality. Politicians, journalists, and everyday citizens regard the region with deep nostalgia; a “museum-piece” of a bygone era in times of great uncertainty.

I was in my thirties and a professor of African American history when I finally took my own field trip to the birth site of Malcolm X, Omaha’s oft-forgotten native son.

The opening pages of Malcolm X’s autobiography, and arguably his political radicalization, begin in Omaha. In the chapter “Nightmare,” Malcolm shares a vivid description, recounted to him by his mother, Louise Little. One evening the Ku Klux Klan rode on their home to intimidate the family into fleeing. Heavily pregnant with her fourth child, while her husband was travelling, Mrs. Little stood her ground as the terrorists “galloped around the house, shattering every windowpane with their gun butts. Then they rode off into the night, their torches flaring, as suddenly as they had come.” The Littles welcomed their son, Malcolm a few months later and remained for two more years. Although Omaha is not mentioned again in the five-hundred-page book, the violence his family experienced throughout the region looms large.

In death, as in life, Malcolm X is a divisive figure. An admitted hustler, convicted felon, racial separatist, Muslim, and provocative orator, his brilliance resonated deeply with millions across the African diaspora. Yet the memorialization of his first home at 3448 Pinkney proceeded at a near glacial pace, due in part to his political views and skepticism that one of the nation’s most prominent Black leaders hailed from Nebraska. This delay is especially stark when compared to Atlanta’s 38-acre Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park, consisting of dozens of buildings managed by the National Parks Service.

If we consider that physical sites promote our most sacred historical myths, this really should come as no surprise. America now embraces King and the sanitized narrative of his activism as proof of this nation’s redemptive, triumphalist narrative arc. Narrators distill racism as contained to the south and eradicated through the efforts of activists and federal legislation. The blocks-long King site affirms this illusion.

The Littles’ Omaha experience and the on-going struggle to create an adequate memorial of their son challenges this framework and breaks open the comfortable history of the Midwest. The Klan threatened the young family on account of Earl and Louise Little successfully organizing with the Omaha branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914, the pan-Africanist organization promoted Black economic independence and racial pride, representing a freedom agenda distinct from the integrationist model.

The struggle for recognition of Malcolm X’s home is a continuation of this tension. The city razed the modest house on Pinkney in 1965, the year Malcom was assassinated. That building’s destruction was the result of ignorance, not malice. But the wholesale demolition of homes on the surrounding blocks is indicative of the inherent racism of urban renewal.

In 1970, activist and former resident of the home Rowena Moore began the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation. While the Nebraska Historical Marker Program quickly approved the sign, another two decades passed until it was placed. On May 19, 1987, on what should have been Malcolm X’s sixty-second birthday, the official state marker was dedicated. When I visited over a decade ago the marker stood, a lone sentinel in an overgrown lot, isolated from Malcolm X’s activism and the vibrant community.

Today, that spirit is renewed. In 2018, artist and land activist Jordan Weber constructed the 4MX greenhouse, conceived as a place to nurture seedlings and people. When standing in the greenhouse with its double doors open wide, the marker is perfectly framed between them. Its final four words read “His teaching lives on.”

What might schoolchildren learn from a visit to this site? By reinscribing Malcolm X on to the landscape, his legacy comes to the fore. Put simply, this means a radical retelling of Omaha’s history. That retelling includes stories about Moore’s work organizing women meatpackers as well as Black high school students staging a walkout on May 19, 1969, demanding racially affirming educational experiences.

These histories also generate new questions: What were the work and educational experiences of Black Omahans? Why are there no local streets, government buildings, or schools bearing Malcolm’s name? Why were 311 historical markers erected around the state before one honored the contributions of a Black Nebraskan?

Neighborhood divestment and stigmatization ensures that no one will happen upon Malcolm X’s birthplace. One must intentionally seek it out. And like the physical marker, Omahans must also journey to seek answers to the above questions.

Through a deep engagement with Malcolm X’s Omaha experience, students will locate the rich social, intellectual, cultural, and political life of the city’s Black residents. In (re)visiting these sites, a more complex portrait of the construction and maintenance of Midwestern mythologies emerges. Such field trips to the past provide a roadmap to a more inclusive history and future. To supplement the white bread snack (and history) of my youth with colorful, community grown veggies is delicious indeed.

Ashley Howard is an assistant professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. A proud Omahan, her research interests include violence, social movements, and the Black Midwest.

Photo by Chris Machian.

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4831 S. Vincennes Ave.
Chicago, Illinois

By Joseph S. Pete

Powell’s Books used to have a few locations in Chicago, none anywhere near as large as the fabled city block full of books in Portland. Now only its venerable Hyde Park bookstore remains, but I fondly remember the Lincoln Park Powell’s with its distinguished rows of dark-wood bookshelves soaring up to the ceiling, the rarefied upper shelves reachable only by sliding ladder. It had the hallowed airs of some centuries-old university library. It’s where, as a pock-faced and perpetually despondent teenager, I first obtained a copy of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which swiftly became one of my favorite and most re-read books.

Fran Lebowitz said at a recent talk at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago that literature should be a window and not a mirror. I found Wright’s Native Son to be both. It was a mirror in that I hailed from the heavily industrialized and culturally similar Northwest Indiana just outside the familiar South Side landscapes he described. As a troubled youth, I could also relate strongly to Bigger Thomas’s alienation and desperate sense of doomed hopelessness. And Mary Dalton’s rebellious dalliance with communism spoke to my burgeoning political consciousness. I was delving deeper and deeper into reading serious literature and Native Son had more recognizable touchstones than the 19th-century British and Russian classics I was devouring around that time. It just clicked for me.

But it was also a window into the African American experience I could never fully know, and that intrigued me. I had started to see the white flight, abandonment, and segregation that split greater Chicagoland asunder as the great defining original sin that corrupted the area. Highways came to divide white and minority neighborhoods in both Chicago and the Calumet Region. I went to high school about a block south of Gary when it was still the murder capital of the United States, where as many as 13,000 vacant buildings have rotted in shameful testament to people’s unwillingness to live next door to people who look differently. The sins of our forefathers scarred the landscape with blight, boarded-up storefronts, and rubble-strewn buildings with collapsed roofs. Native Son explores racial discrimination that sadly remains just as relevant as ever. A recent HBO adaptation, instead of putting Bigger through a show trial, modernized his plight by having Bigger gunned down extrajudicially by trigger-happy police.

Wright grew up in Jim Crow Mississippi and moved as a young adult to Chicago’s South Side, his family following the Great Migration from the South to the more prosperous industrialized cities of the North. He spent the most time in one place on the second story of a row house in Bronzeville, a largely residential neighborhood flanking Grand Boulevard (now called Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive). He lived with family in a two-story building with a cream-colored brick façade, bay windows, a tiny patch of lawn, and an entrance with stone stairs and relatively unembellished Greek pillars, the most modest home in a strip of taller and more architecturally extravagant houses. Today, the home is privately owned, and no tours are offered, but you can admire the solid masonry of the stone-and-brick exterior and enduring handiwork of craftsmen from 1893, when it was built.

Wright lived on that densely populated stretch of S. Vincennes Ave. in his early 20s, working as a postal clerk until the Great Depression cost him that position. He went on to bounce around the city, working a series of unskilled jobs, but spent that formative period in the Black Metropolis that produced many intellectuals, artists, and musicians, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Louis Armstrong, Ida B. Wells and Sam Cooke.

During his downtime, Wright studied great authors and started to pursue his literary ambitions. He contributed to the area’s vibrant culture, founding the South Side Writers Group and the literary journal Left Front as he started to publish his own poetry. He also began his first novel, Lawd Today!, which he finished in 1935 but wasn’t published until after his death decades later.

There’s not much to see now on the quiet residential street other than a plaque designating the house as a Chicago Landmark, but the modestness of the abode that helped nurture Wright to greatness is the point. Ninety years after he lived and started writing there, the neighborhood continues to hum with culture. There’s the Harold Washington Cultural Center, the Southside Community Art Center, Room 43, the Bronzeville Art District Trolley Tour, and the Bronzeville Walk of Fame, among many other points of interest.

Though just south of the glittering skyscrapers of the Loop, the majority-black Bronzeville often gets as overlooked as it was when Wright lived there from 1929 to 1932. In Native Son, Mary Dalton tells Bigger, “I’ve been to England, France and Mexico, but I don’t know how people live ten blocks from me. We know so little about each other.” Even today, many suburbanites and recent Big Ten grads transplanted to the North Side have never set foot in the rather genteel neighborhood. I frequently attend White Sox games just across the highway, but it feels a world away. The divisions that doom young men like Bigger Thomas still stand today in great sweeping corridors of concrete and ingrained prejudice.

The descendent of steelworkers, author and award-winning journalist Joseph S. Pete hails from the Calumet Region just outside Chicago, where the oil refinery flare stacks burn round the clock and the mills make clouds. His literary work and photography have appeared in more than 100 journals, including Proximity Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, O-Dark-Thirty, Line of Advance, As You Were, Chicago Literati, Dogzplot, Proximity Magazine, Stoneboat, The High Window, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, The First Line, New Pop Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, Junto, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch Magazine, Bull Men’s Fiction, Rising Phoenix Review, Thoughtful Dog, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, The Rat’s Ass Review, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, and Vending Machine Press.

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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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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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Angelou Memorial
Stamps, Arkansas

By Greer Veon

Despite living in southwest Arkansas most of my life, my first visit to Stamps was with my parents in August 2018. We made the trip on a Sunday afternoon before my flight back north the following morning, my parents joking that Stamps was the kind of place that kept to itself. I sat in the backseat picturing the red clay that Maya Angelou once walked across and imagined feeling the breeze she once breathed.

In September 2017, a local newspaper reported that a memorial sign dedicated to Angelou disappeared from the grounds of Lake June days after Stamps elected Brenda Davis, their first Black mayor. “It makes you wonder,” Mayor Davis told reporters. “But I wouldn’t speculate.” All the same, the mayor’s suspicions resonated, coming as they did in the Southern town that served as the backdrop for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou’s painful 1969 memoir about coming of age during the Jim Crow era. Over time I searched for updates, but the suspects’ names were never printed, and the story went cold.

In a way, Angelou’s memoir prefigures Mayor Davis’s wariness:

What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high rise? The answer must be in the experiences shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment.

In the early 20th century, Stamps served as a flag stop for the railroads that stretched across Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. I grew up forty-five minutes away on the state line between the twin cities of Texarkana, one of the bigger stops on that same line, the Cotton Belt Route. Many of my childhood memories are set in the backseat of our family car as we took weekend drives on local roads through one-stoplight towns filled with forgotten gas stations and churches. Most of the newer highways bypassed Stamps. So did most people. When my ninth-grade English class read Angelou’s memoir, our teacher spoke less about how close we lived to the town and more about parents’ letters asking that my classmates be excused from the reading.

I didn’t revisit that memory until shortly after I moved away and read a piece on the Celebrate Maya Project, which was holding a 2018 celebration for the author’s 90th birthday. Angelou’s admirers gathered in Stamps to honor her and witness her childhood landscape. Still, I couldn’t shake the missing sign. I wondered what remained, and I longed to visit Maya’s hometown the next time I returned home.

On the way to Stamps that afternoon, we stopped at Burge’s, a retro dairy barn in nearby Lewisville, where we ordered from the front window. Minutes after stuffing ourselves with brisket and chocolate pies, we entered Stamps’ historic downtown, marked by a post office and outdoor storefronts. Paint cans and a ladder leaned against a half-completed mural. As we crossed over the train tracks, I looked for Annie Henderson’s merchandise store, the center of Angelou’s life in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but it’s gone.

We found Lake June on the edge of town, the water drained enough to expose its bottom brush. Despite reports that the state would replace the missing sign, there, almost a year after it was stolen, stood a wooden skeleton of the memorial. There’s something sobering to see that as the same place where a young Angelou spent her alone time. Even Maya Angelou, a voice of her generation, still faces these attempts at erasure, even in the town that played such a vital role in her legacy. Angelou’s memoir addresses a childhood filled with love and pain that stayed with her no matter where she moved. What “heroes and bogeymen” have other children first encountered here and other towns alike?  I feared who decides what parts of our homes will be made forgotten. Will they make space or blot out the experiences, the identities of their neighbors? I inhaled the damp air and left without answers.

Greer Veon is a writer who works for the Office of Residence Life at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. In 2019, she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her most recent work has been featured in ELLE. Find her at greerveon.com.

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