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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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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World’s Largest Buffalo
Jamestown, North Dakota

By Sheila Liming

The most famous writer to ever come out of North Dakota never wrote anything that takes place there. Louis L’Amour often talked about revisiting his home state, which he left at the age of fifteen. But he didn’t succeed in doing that until he was well into his seventies, when his induction into the state’s hall of fame lured him back at last.

Jamestown, North Dakota, is a curious place, and one that delights in making much of its status as L’Amour’s hometown, despite his reluctance about ever seeing it again. Its skyline, so to speak, is dominated by a buffalo — the world’s largest buffalo, to be exact. The twenty-six foot-tall figure, which was commissioned in the 1950s as a ploy to ensnare motorists on I-94, presides over hills that rise so gently, they barely merit use of the word. Further off the highway, and just visible through the buffalo’s anatomically incorrect undercarriage, is the town itself (pop: 15,750). Its squat, brick buildings are intermixed with houses built in the American foursquare, or “cornbelt cube,” style, their hipped roofs designed to keep off the snow. Some of the brick buildings would have been there before L’Amour was, but the cornbelt cubes likely date from right around the time of his birth in 1902.

North Dakota is where the West meets the Midwest. The state is huge and thus big enough to contain the multitudes indicated by both geographical designations. L’Amour, though, was drawn to only one of them in particular — the rugged West of his fantasies, not the Midwest of his experiences. Jamestown sits about an hour west of Fargo, on the eastern side of the state and so has more in common with its neighbor Minnesota, topographically speaking, than with the scorched and mountainous Western landscape that plays such an important role in his fiction. In drawing inspiration for his books and stories, L’Amour set his gaze westward, summoning visions of bloody battles that took place against a backdrop of desert buttes and mesas, land which he termed “Indian country.” He was, as historical photos indicate, compulsively clad in a cowboy hat and oversized silver belt buckle, even after he moved to Los Angeles and settled into a career in Hollywood.

I first visited L’Amour’s hometown in 2014, though not exactly by choice. Rather, I was traveling the state as part of a bus tour for new University of North Dakota faculty. The bus dropped us off at the buffalo; we were given bottles of sarsaparilla and a few hours to poke around the attached tourist facility known as Frontier Village.

Much like Louis L’Amour once did, Frontier Village combines Western identity with Midwestern geography. You can ride a horse-drawn stagecoach there; you can gaze upon a disturbing collection of hollow-eyed stares in its doll museum; and you can wander amongst buildings that have been plucked from their original prairie environs and deposited there for the sake of posterity. Among them is Louis L’Amour’s so-called “Writer’s Shack,” though he never wrote or published anything while living in North Dakota. It’s a one-room, wooden house — structure? cabin? nay, shack is the only word that works here — containing paperback copies of all of his “117 published novels” (the real number is, apparently, 86 though after his death, L’Amour’s son Beau continued to write and publish books under his father’s name, extending his oeuvre considerably). They’re arranged in a plexiglass display case on the far wall, alongside a few of his typewriters and a placard offering a dubiously fact-checked version of his biography.  

I had heard of L’Amour before I visited his Frontier Village “Writer’s Shack,” of course; my grandparents’ spare bedroom, located in the basement of their ranch-style home in Snohomish, Washington, was lined with his books. But I can’t say that I was much of a fan, or that visiting his Writer’s Shack in Jamestown succeeded in turning me into one. There is an intriguing bleakness to be found at the site of this makeshift memorial to him in Jamestown, though. Much like the rest of its Frontier Village surroundings, the Writer’s Shack strives to commemorate an authentic vision of Western history via a familiar if rather problematic species of Midwestern fantasy. The Midwest, after all, is not the West; if you take I-94 out of Fargo, away from Minnesota and towards the Montana border, you’ll see what I mean. The flat, level plains of the cornbelt give way to arid grasslands that are only good for grazing, just as the trucker caps of beet truck drivers on the eastern side of the state give way to Stetsons in the west.

L’Amour’s career, it could be argued, was a direct product of the confrontation between the romanticized West he barely knew and the Midwestern prairies he knew all too well. In the same way that the world’s largest buffalo was born as a means of coaxing tourists out of their cars, so might his literary legacy be seen as an attempt to coax the “west” out of the “Midwest” and thus renovate the conditions of culture and geography that he was born into.

Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College and the author of three books: What a Library Means to a Woman (2020), Office (2020), and most recently, Hanging Out (2023). Her writing has appeared in venues like The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Globe and Mail. She lives, works, and plays the accordion (and bagpipes) in Burlington, Vermont.

World’s Largest Buffalo sculpture by Elmer Petersen (1959). Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Ichabod.

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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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Cow Creek Crossing
Pittsburg, Kansas

By Leslie VonHolten

Each James Tate poem presents itself like a welcoming trailhead — happy, sunshiney even. It is not until you are deep in the woods of it all before you sense the lurking weirdness. For example, in “The Government Lake,” a trip to the toy store ends with a discomfiting acceptance of violence. Or the reader of “Awkward Silence,” on her porch, annoyed by helicopters mating overhead. Or how about those late-in-life lovers, mugged by musicians in “The Hostile Philharmonic Orchestra”?

If you think these are strange set-ups, how about this: Tate, a surrealist, absurdist Midwestern poet won the Pulitzer Prize (1992) and the National Book Award (1994) for his odd dreamscapes. What a world.

Tate lived many places that rightfully claim him, but it was as a student in Pittsburg, Kansas, where he learned that he was a poet. This landscape of disturbed prairie, coyote howls, and broad days opened the deep attention he needed to see the absurd in everyday life.

I’m all for the magic carpet ride Tate gives us, but it is “Manna” from his first collection that grounds me. A little sentimental, yes, but its alignment of solitude and connection under the night sky hits me square in the sternum. It is my all-time favorite poem set in Kansas.

Train tracks in Pittsburg have changed since Tate wrote those lines in 1967. Many spurs have been pulled out or paved over, and the depot is now an event center. But you can still find slow, flat and open crossings on the quieter edges of town. Tate’s miraculous provision of the poem likely happened as he walked home along West Hudson Street. Poets and other bohemians were known to drink on the trestle bridge spanning nearby Cow Creek, the setting of another poem in the collection.

Rural Kansas is rarely seen as a gateway to surrealist thought, but look closer and consider. Pittsburg is surrounded by the land-scars of mining, small pits and hills that undulate throughout the county. In the early 20th century, immigrants from all over the world came to southeast Kansas to work in the “gopher hole,” strip, and shaft mines. Many were from Eastern Europe, and the area became known as the Little Balkans. It’s a heritage that echoes still: until the pandemic, you could polka dance at Barto’s Idle Hour in neighboring Frontenac on Saturday nights. Artist-painted fiberglass replicas of coal buckets honor the town’s mining past.

This is also a land of gorillas. They are everywhere. The Pittsburg State University mascot is the proud town identifier — even the trash bins in front of each house are gold and red, and cement silverbacks decorate yards in every neighborhood.

The historical juxtaposition exposes the absurdity: Pitt State students selected the gorilla in 1925, while just three years earlier, the town made international news when 6,000 women and children marched for three days to protest poor labor conditions in the mines. The Kansas National Guard was deployed to establish order; a New York Times reporter dubbed the women the “Amazon Army.” They were lauded as heroes in the mine camps.

It’s a surreal mix, these legacies of college rah-rah comingling with a socialist labor movement. “I sure miss that country; I am really beginning to feel or see the roots I have there,” Tate wrote to his instructor Eugene DeGrusen in 1966. “It takes time and distance I guess to see that kind of thing, but I see it now and I’m proud of it. Not that I write bucolic verse or even use much naturalistic imagery, but I am primitive in a contemporary way, if such a phrase can be allowed.”

… but I am primitive in a contemporary way … Fiberglass coal buckets, Saturday night polka music, and gorillas on the prairie. Seeing a place better after you have left. Hello absurdist poet — we know you well.

Leslie VonHolten writes about the connections between land and culture. A 2022 Tallgrass Artist Residency fellow, her art writing has been published in Pitch, Lawrence.com, and Ceramics Art + Perception. Sometimes she also curates a show or makes a zine. She lives in Kansas, where she mostly grew up. Leslie thanks poet Al Ortolani for the Pittsburg map and memory conversations.

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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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Woodland Park
Lawrence, Kansas

By John Edgar Tidwell

In the weeks leading up to August 19, 1910, all the children in Lawrence, Kansas, were aglow with excitement and energy. To honor the birthday of Editor J. Leeford Brady, the Lawrence Daily Journal set about hosting a Children’s Day party at Woodland Park in East Lawrence. For young Langston Hughes and the other children of color, anticipation turned into anxiety and disappointment when the Daily Journal clarified the meaning of “invitees.” In response to the question about Black children attending, a front-page article confidently asserted: “The Journal knows the colored children have no desire to attend a social event of this kind and that they will not want to go. This is purely a social affair and of course everyone in town knows what that means.”

How could the Black children not want to go?! The Amusement Park would have special vaudeville and picture shows, bands would entertain, a Ferris wheel and a merry-go-round would provide free rides, and such favorites as lemonade and popcorn would be available too. Without knowing it, the Black children had run up against the prohibition made legal by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The law of the land now defined “social” to mean “forced or unwanted relations.”  As protection against undesired interracial interaction, the court endorsed the concept of “separate but equal.”  Unfortunately, as Black children in Lawrence and everywhere learned, this legal interpretation granted society permission to practice racial separation without racial equality.

Hughes recreates this incident in Not without Laughter. He deftly enters into the Black children’s high expectations, which rise to a crescendo of excitement, only to be crushed when the admissions attendant refuses to accept the coupons that would admit them to the Ferris wheel, the shoot-the-shoots, and the merry-go-round as well as the entertainment and food. Later, he would capture this feeling of emotional confusion in his poem “Merry-Go-Round.” The speaker in the poem, a little Black girl who had moved from the South to the North, sought to ride the merry-go-round at a carnival. Not knowing if she would be allowed to mount a horse at all, she attempts to find the back of the ride. She laments: “Where is the Jim Crow section / On this merry-go-round / . . .Where is the horse / For a kid that’s black?”

Pernicious racism dogged young Langston Hughes throughout his formative years in Lawrence. To his credit, he never allowed bitterness and hatred to jade his vision of humankind. Instead of blaming all whites for preserving the racial status quo, he learned that “most people are generally good.” This quality, no doubt, inspired the city of Lawrence to begin embracing him as one of its own shining lights.

John Edgar Tidwell is professor emeritus of English at the University of Kansas. He has published six books, including Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes, which he co-edited with Cheryl Ragar. Tidwell is currently working with the Dream Documentary Collective and the Lawrence Arts Center to secure funding to make “I, Too, Sing America: Langston Hughes Unfurled,” a documentary film on Hughes’s life and art.

Danielle C. Head, Associate Professor of Photography at Washburn University in Topeka, KS. Head’s photographic work examines the physical remnants of history. Her series “Within and Without” traced the pathways of Lee Harvey Oswald and was selected for inclusion in the Midwest Photographer’s Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, IL. Her current work, “The Way Out of Heaven is Of Like Length and Distance” explores the mystique of “The Magic Circle,” a midwestern utopia conceived by economist Roger Babson in the 1940s. Her work can be found at www.daniellechead.com.

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599 Summit Avenue
St. Paul, Minnesota

By Ross K. Tangedal

In fall 2016, my wife, CJ, was four months pregnant, and we decided to visit the Minnesota State Fair at the insistence of my cousin Michael, a Minneapolis resident and state fair aficionado. After meandering through the massive beehive exhibit, CJ and I peeled away to take a quick walking tour of old St. Paul. I was excited to explore Summit Avenue, which is known for its Victorian rowhouses, including the birthplace of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose work I’d been studying for the past five years.

599 Summit Avenue is not all that different from the houses around it, fitting into the line of its Victorian neighbors: two stories, with an arched entryway, a rounded bay window, and a stately turret topping the unit. One expects to be wowed when witnessing the domicile of genius, but this unimpressive house did little for my enthusiasm. We could not go inside, nor were there any definable features of the home to suggest anything but mundanity. The plaque out front says nothing about the home either, other than “F. Scott Fitzgerald House.” On Summit Avenue in the early twentieth century, people dreamt of their money aging. But now, more in line with Fitzgerald’s fears than his parents’ dreams, this home is a broken-down shell of Romanesque revival and mediocrity.

Rarely has there been a more complicated “favorite son” than Scott. He spent his childhood in Buffalo, Hackensack, and St. Paul, wanting so much to be more than he was, more than his disappointing father had become, more than a Midwestern nobody with glittering things in his heart. After completing his military service he drank himself into such depression that in 1919 he moved home to the last place he wanted to be, St. Paul, and lived in the house he least wanted to live in, 599 Summit Avenue, with the people he least wanted to live with, his parents. If he got his first book published, Zelda Sayre, a judge’s daughter, the rich girl that poor boys like him never marry, would marry him.

I know now why I felt that way about 599 Summit Avenue during fall 2016: we don’t appreciate transitions, not like we do beginnings or endings. The F. Scott Fitzgerald House in St. Paul is a transition cloaked in a beginning, a place he never cared to live in, and a place to which he never returned once he published This Side of Paradise. There was more for him, he thought, than a rowhouse rented with his mother’s money and populated by his father’s letdowns. He was always moving away from St. Paul and the Midwest, even when he wrote about them. Fitzgerald’s Midwest was behind him. His future was glittering things and people. Like his character Dexter Green in the short story “Winter Dreams,” Fitzgerald was all potential.

As for CJ and I, our trip to St. Paul that summer was a beginning too, with a pregnancy and a new job leading toward our unknowable future. Like Fitzgerald, I had a hard time appreciating the transition. Then my daughter Adeline Rose arrived just five months later, glittering with the newness of life.

Ross K. Tangedal is assistant professor of English and director of the Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He specializes in American print culture and publishing studies, textual editing, and book history, with emphasis in Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Midwestern literature. His first book, The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century, will be released in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan.

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Boyhood Home
Central City, Nebraska

By Nathan Tye

For Wright Morris, home was both a physical place and emotional ache. Born in Central City, Nebraska, in 1910, Morris made his life elsewhere, but returned to the Platte Valley in his writing and photography. His childhood home remains, now a museum maintained by the Lone Tree Literary Society and in it I find a shared weight of homecoming. Like him, I was born in the Platte Valley, built a life elsewhere, and returned. Morris’ labor to excavate the home’s memories resonate as I uncover connections fallen into disrepair and begin to build a new life on the old.

Carefully restored, this single-story white frame house, built amidst the Panic of 1893 by a real estate agent, carries the faded wealth of a small-town businessman. Certainly, it must have felt like that when a widower, his son, and housekeeper moved in two decades later. Morris’ earliest memory of “lampglow and shadows on a low ceiling” is likely tied to this home. A window topped with a row of colored glass faces northeast. Bedbound with pneumonia, Morris traced the colored beams as they moved across his sheets in that room. In his first memoir, he admits that such memories left him with “the ache of a nameless longing,” which he threaded through his work until he died.

In The Home Place (1948), Clyde Muncy returns to Lone Tree, a stand-in for Central City. Nearly 30-years gone, Clyde has a new family, a new place, and memories ill-fit to Lone Tree’s present. Clyde’s futile attempt at placemaking is framed by images of debris and empty farmsteads, a subject Morris’ first explored in The Inhabitants (1946). In both books he captures a world worn over — abandoned homes, barren storefronts, football-worn carpets, frayed familial ties — and finds those spaces inhabited by absence. These homebound texts are all the sharper in our homebound epoch, for our own places are now populated with days upon days of unbroken living.

Morris relished patina, the worn, and the lived-in. For him, abandonment closes distances in time. Or, as the art critic and novelist John Berger found, “Home is the return to where distance did not yet count.” What though, does home mean, in Central City and the elsewheres we find ourselves ordered in? Where do our ties to the past take us when the future is so uncertain? Morris returned to escape, and by documenting these visits laid the foundation for the preservation of his home. The connection to the past, “was the important thing. It had to be established,” Wright wrote in The Home Place, “I had to be born again.” Morris’ texts and images commingled the present and past to forward a vision of living nostalgia.

The Lone Tree Literary Society has reversed the decay Morris documented and made his childhood home available to curious publics. And while what Morris called “the inhabitants” of these structures may now be obscured by respectful restorations, in Morris’ work, their absence persists. Later in his career, Morris commented that photographs came from “the most durable of ghosts, nostalgia.” In his early images of Central City, he reached back to the remnants he left in order to move forward. Nostalgia is a welcome escape given the uncertainty of our present, but as Morris’ struggle with his homebound ghosts underscores, our worn-over homes are points of departure, not occupation.

At home with ourselves, we’re learning to live with our inhabitants. Like Morris’ photographs, Covid-19 emptied the streets, turned homes into lived-in voids, and blurred delineations between past, present, and future. Yet, by documenting deterioration and distance, Wright pointed toward a restorative future. Now, in the stillness of an uncertain time, the inhabitants of Morris’ home and those of our own become clearer, and the possibilities they hold emerge.

Nathan Tye was born and raised in the Platte Valley. A historian by trade, Tye is assistant professor of Nebraska and American West history at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is currently working on his first book, a history of hobo workers in North America.

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Ann Rutledge’s Grave
Petersburg, Illinois

By Jason Stacy

As a boy, I found it unsettling that Edgar Lee Masters anthologized the dead in an Illinois cemetery that never existed. Spoon River Anthology’s ghosts haunted the same rich Illinois soil I walked upon, stared out at fields like the ones that rolled by the window of my school bus, and spoke in accents that echoed mine, but these people were nowhere to be found. Doubly spectral, they were the dead neighbors that never were. Reading a frayed copy of Masters’s book brought home by my mother, an English teacher, I felt as if I were peering into a legendary Illinois that dissipated the closer I got to it.

But now that I’m older, I am at peace with the legends. The trick is not to get too close.

Masters himself is buried in a very real place: Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois, just about at the center of the state, a short drive from Springfield and down the road from New Salem, the pioneer community where Abraham Lincoln lived for a time. Petersburg is in the Illinois part of Illinois.

Masters rests only a few feet from a legend he helped make: Ann Rutledge, thought to be the one love of Abraham Lincoln’s life. About twenty yards away, down one of the main paths of the cemetery, a low iron fence surrounds a solid block of granite, on which is engraved a poem by Masters:

Out of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Ann Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!

Rutledge died of typhoid fever in 1835 and was originally buried in the Old Concord graveyard about five miles from Petersburg. After Lincoln’s death, his former law partner, William Herndon, claimed in his biography of the president that Rutledge was the one true love of Lincoln’s life. Her death at twenty-two threw the future president into an emotional crisis and, according to Herndon, Lincoln never loved any woman as much again. As the living Lincoln faded from popular memory after the Civil War, Rutledge’s ghost began to haunt the legends of the fallen president. These legends turned central Illinois into a destination for secular pilgrims, and she became the key to understanding Lincoln’s combination of melancholy and stoic fortitude.

To capitalize on the legend, local undertaker and furniture dealer Samuel Montgomery exhumed Rutledge in 1890 from the Old Concord graveyard and reburied what was left of her — two bones, a little hair, some bits of cloth — in Oakland Cemetery, where he was part owner. Montgomery hoped this location would prove convenient for visitors and fortuitous for the town. Twenty-five years later, in 1915, Rutledge was reburied again, this time symbolically, when Edgar Lee Masters planted her in Spoon River’s fictional cemetery. In 1921, at the height of Masters’s popularity, her epitaph from Spoon River Anthology was engraved on a new monument in Oakland Cemetery. These days, tourists commune with the legend of Rutledge that William Herndon perpetuated, by the grave that Samuel Montgomery filled with a few remains, under a fictional epitaph written by Edgar Lee Masters.

Outside of town, in the Old Concord graveyard, a small headstone marks Ann’s first resting place. It appeals to visitors’ desire for authenticity by telling them that this lonely spot in an out-of-the-way field is, in fact, “where Lincoln wept.” But when I drive through Petersburg, I visit Ann at Oakland Cemetery. The legend is better there.

Jason Stacy grew up in Monee, Illinois. Since 2006, he has served as a professor of history and social science pedagogy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His latest book project, Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town, is under contract with University of Illinois Press.

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