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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Buy tickets here to participate in the live and silent auctions.

Featured artwork in our live art auction:

“Laying Old Ghosts to Rest”

30″ x 22″, gouache on black Arches, and from the first 12 paintings in DARK MATTER.

Both are in museum quality frames. Framed size is 33 1/2″ x 25 1/2″.

This painting comes with a poem, hand written in silver ink on black card stock, inspired by and written after them by physicist and poet and physicist Agnes Vojta.

Starting bid at The Pageturner Fundraiser: $2,400

Early Dark Matter pieces

Two of his Greg’s early DARK MATTER pieces, minimum bid $500 each.

To bid at The Pageturner Fundraiser: Starting bid on two, for $1,000.

• “Bending the Truth,” 11″x8.5″, gouache on graph paper, 2020
• “Y Knot,” 11″x8.5″, gouache on graph paper, 2020
• “The Whirlpool Charybdis,” 11″x8.5″, gouache on graph paper, 2020
• “The Sea Monster Scylla,” 11″x8.5″, gouache on graph paper, 2020

About Greg Edmondson

“…It was the four years spent at a remote artists residency on the banks of the Gasconade River that offered me an authentic connection to Missouri as my ‘Place.'”

I was raised in Oak Ridge Tennessee, the “Secret City” of the Manhattan Project built in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The Midwest was a foreign land when I first moved to St. Louis in 1983 to begin Grad School at Washington University. After graduation I received two fellowships to Europe and spent the next five years in Germany. In 1993, I returned to St. Louis, this time for good. Although my practice has now been based here for over a quarter century, it was the four years spent at a remote artists residency on the banks of the Gasconade River that offered me an authentic connection to Missouri as my “Place.” My childhood had been spent playing in woods, in creeks and on rivers. Missouri is a topography of wilderness and water, and the rhythms of its rivers are the heartbeat of its landscape. While my heart is in Missouri, my art is on the walls of Elton John, Halle Berry, and the Berkshire Museum.

See Greg’s work in print throughout the literature section in The New Territory Issue 14.

Personal hopes for art in the Midwest:

My primary hope for the Arts in our region requires a shift in perception. I hope we can drop the perception that Art and Culture must be imported to the Midwest from New York or LA, and begin to legitimize the Art and Artists being generated and incubated here. One reason we are so often thought of as cultural followers is that we indeed are often more willing to follow than lead… There is great work being made here. Unfeigned ideas are being explored all over the region, too often with insignificant opportunities to be presented, viewed, seen or heard.

“My primary hope for the Arts in our region requires a shift in perception.”

Greg Edmondson’s artwork:

My work is still informed by a lifelong interest in the natural world… its patterns of organic growth and decay, its systems of intricate interdependence… As an undergrad I studied painting, in grad school I studied sculpture and printmaking. Over my four decades plus as a working artist, my practice has ranged widely in scope, scale, material and subject matter. But I seem to always circle back to formal abstraction. When confronting the purely abstract, you are never dealing with a singular “What”, but always and only with an endless “What if.”

See Greg’s art in print in the literature section of The New Territory Issue 14.

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4633 Westminster Place

St. Louis, Missouri

By Devin Thomas O’Shea

Tennessee Williams called St. Louis “cold, smug, complacent, intolerant, stupid and provincial,” in a 1947 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, playing the heel to his childhood home as he was on his way to becoming one of the most influential and celebrated American playwrights of the twentieth century.

Williams’ relationship to the Midwest is the antithesis of The New Territory’s ethos, “Here is Good.” For Tom, as he was known as a young man, here was very bad. But the repression St. Louis represented was a creative pressure cooker, according to Henry Schvey in Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams. Wild birds would become a ubiquitous symbol throughout Williams’ work: “I feel uncomfortable in the house with Dad when I know he thinks I’m a hopeless loafer,” Tom journaled. “Soon as I gather my forces (and I shall!) I must make a definite break… I have pinned pictures of wild birds on my lavatory screen — significant — I’m anxious to escape — But where & how? — . . . What a terrible trap to be caught in!”

Williams nicknamed his river city home “Saint Pollution” and indeed, the city had a few characteristics of a sulfuric runoff swamp. In the 1920s, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America, following New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and it was one of the most polluted urban spaces on the planet, culminating in “the day the sun didn’t shine,” in November 1939.

On “Black Tuesday,” as it came to be known, a weather pattern trapped coal emissions close to the ground, blanketing the entire city in a thick smog that smelled of ash. The streetlamps were lit all day, and in his poem “Demon Smoke,” written in 1925, Williams captured the noisy, smelly, industrialized hellscape:

crash and clap of Olive Street

Where nature and man’s work compete

For mastery in the dingy sky;

Where clouds of smoke

And jets of steam

Defy pure air and sunlight’s gleam.

Saint Pollution was no place for wild birds, though as Schvey points out, Tom’s true antagonist lay “not in the physical city, but within his own family.” His father, Cornelius C. Williams, was either absent, drunk, abusive or some combination of all three. Tom’s mother, Edwina Williams, was a repressed socialite never contented with her station in St. Louis society. Tom’s older sister, Rose, was schizophrenic — diagnosed with “dementia praecox” and confined to a mental institution in Farmington Missouri. “She is like a person half-asleep now,” Tom wrote of his sister. “Quiet, gentle and thank God — not in any way revolting like so many of the others.”

All three members of the Williams family were inspiration for various characters throughout Williams’ writing career. “So much of this writer’s work was forged in a crucible of anger and self-conscious rebellion against both family and home,” Schvey writes.

The smokestacks poisoning downtown with demonic coal ash caused all kinds of people to flee west, touching off St. Louis’ westward suburbia as early as the 1880s. The rich built mansion neighborhoods in the clean air, at the periphery of the city, like the Central West End where the Williams family lived for a time, which is now the site of the Tennessee Williams Festival.

In 2021, confronted with COVID-19 restrictions, the festival staged a production of The Glass Menagerie outside of Williams’ childhood home on Westminster Avenue. The production made use of the fire escapes that Williams once walked on, which inspired scenes in the play, as part of the outdoor theater set.

When the Williams family moved out of Westminster Place to their residence on South Taylor, Tom noted the “radical step down in the social scale, a thing we’d never had to consider in Mississippi; and all our former friends dropped us completely — St. Louis being a place where location of residence was of prime importance.” A sensitive, shy Tom Williams seemed to adopt many of his mother’s opinions of the city. “Social status in St. Louis depended on how much money you possessed,” Edwina Williams complained in her memoir Remember Me to Tom. His mother’s inveterate disdain for the city was based largely on her failure to find a social position equivalent to what she possessed as the rector’s beautiful daughter in her previous homes, Columbus and Clarksdale.

Meanwhile, Tom’s father Cornelius was often drunk and fighting with Edwina — complaining loudly about his wife’s disdain for sexual intercourse, warring over the bottle hidden behind the bathtub. Williams describes a Cornelius-like figure in his short story, “Hot Milk at Three in the Morning,” noting that his father often entered the house with “the intention of tearing it down from the inside.”

With this kind of family life, surely a bookish young man could find sanctuary in school, right? As the historian David Loth points out, St. Louis was a booming metropolis known for the “best city school system in the Midwest, and by several years of national ratings, it was considered one of the best school systems in America.” In University City High, Tom learned Latin and received a classical education in art, reading, and writing, but he was teased for his southern accent and “effeminate” manner.

College was not much better. Williams was so ashamed of failing to graduate from Washington University that he omitted mention of his enrollment from his memoir. “I was a very slight youth,” Williams describes himself. A young man beginning to come into his queer sexuality, he writes, “somewhere deep in my nerves there was imprisoned a young girl, a sort of blushing school maiden.”

“Williams was addicted to escaping St. Louis from first to last,” Schvey writes in Blue Song. “It was the great triumph of his life that, unlike his sister, he did manage to literally leave it behind.” After a lifetime of flight, it seems ironic that Williams would be returned to Missouri and buried in Calvary Cemetery alongside his family, but as Schvey notes, “Williams remained tethered to the city for the rest of his life… It was his tragedy that for all his desperate attempts, Tom Williams never really left home. The imagination and willpower that allowed him to devote his life to writing also kept forcing him to return home again in his imagination.”

The restrictive turmoil of the city is a symbolic throughline in William’s work — a wound he returned to over and over.

The Tennessee Williams Festival now carries on his legacy in the Central West End, projecting the author’s words from the cast iron balconies of his former home. A sculpture of the writer decorates the corner of McPherson and Euclid Avenue, across the street from the historic Left Bank Books, capturing a moment in bronze of Williams emphasizing something profound with a cigarette. But St. Louis still owes a debt to Tom Williams — an obligation to prevent yesterday’s traumas and protect the city’s LGBTQ+ community, its wild birds, and its artists.

Devin’s writing is published in Slate, The Nation, The Emerson Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. @devintoshea on twitter, @devintoshea on instagram.

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Fort Crawford
Prairie du Chien, WI

By Christy Clark-Pujara

On November 4, 1834, a twenty-year-old “mulatto” woman named Rachel filed a freedom suit in St. Louis, Missouri. She claimed that a military officer named Thomas Stockton held her in slavery at Fort Snelling for two years and then moved her to Fort Crawford in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. According to Rachel’s suit, Thomas “took your petitioner to … Prairie du Chien for about two years, holding your petitioner as a slave … causing her to work for & serve him & family at that place during that time as a slave at which place her child James Henry was born.” Rachel argued that her residence and her son’s birth in the free territories made them free people. Slavery was prohibited by federal law in the Northwest Territories. But, despite the ban on slaveholding, Black Americans were held in bondage; in fact, federal military officers were given an allowance to cover the cost of hiring a servant or keeping a slave.

Rachel had been extremely vulnerable at Fort Crawford. She lived in a space dominated by armed white men, and she was regarded as property. Moreover, because Fort Crawford was under construction, Rachel was burdened with serving Thomas’s family, which included two infants (born in 1831 and 1832), in extremely crude conditions. Life on the Midwestern frontier became even more taxing when Rachel became pregnant and gave birth to a boy named James Henry, whose father is not revealed in the historical record. Rachel was not protected by status or race or law or family. She had no legal or social recourse against the sexual advances of the multitude of men who had access to her, especially Thomas. And, in 1834, just months after she gave birth, Thomas took them to St. Louis and sold them to Joseph Klunk, who sold them to William Walker — a local slave trader.

Somehow, Rachel and Henry escaped and made their way to the courthouse. Rachel petitioned for legal representation: “your petitioner prays that your petitioner and said child may be allowed to sue as a poor person in St. Louis Circuit Court for freedom & that the said Walker may be restrained from carrying her or said child out of the Jurisdiction of the St. Louis Circuit Court till the termination of said suit.” Her petition was granted, but Rachel lost the case. The circuit court ruled that slavery was not prohibited in the Territories when enslaved people were put to work serving military officers. Rachel appealed, and in June of 1836, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision. They asserted that Thomas had violated the ban on slaveholding in the Northwest Territories when he purchased Rachel from the slaveholding state of Missouri after he was stationed at Fort Snelling. Rachel’s courage and audacity are palpable, seen especially in her use of a legal system created to disempower her.

I first visited Fort Crawford two years after I accepted a faculty position as a historian in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I knew enslaved people were held at forts throughout the Midwest, but I did not associate Midwestern frontier forts with the larger institution of race-based slavery in the United States.  Mainly, I understood these frontier forts as part of American westward expansion and empire building that violently and viciously displaced Indigenous peoples. The area around Prairie du Chien, where the Mississippi River meets the Wisconsin River, has been home to Indigenous peoples for over 12,000 years, most recently the Meskwaki, Sauk, Ho-Chunk, and Dakota peoples who had been repeatedly forced off their ancestral lands. Prairie du Chien had been a center of French fur trading since the 1680s, the oldest European settlement on the Upper Mississippi River. Both the French and British claimed territory in the region. Fort Crawford, founded in 1816, would come to represent American hegemony in the region. Built from local oak timber, it formed a square of 340 feet on each side. In 1826, the fort was severely damaged by a flood. In 1829, construction began on a new elevated fort made of limestone, which was completed in 1834.

Rachel was brought to this contested space. She was enslaved in the hinterlands of the American empire, and she bore witness to the daily realities of the displacement and violence of “manifest destiny.” She literally witnessed the physical building of the American empire in the “West,” and she was forced to contribute to that process in service of Thomas, his wife, and his children. At least seventeen African Americans were held in race-based bondage in and around Fort Crawford between 1820 and 1845. Slaveholding at Fort Crawford, like forts throughout the Midwestern frontier, was a part of the expansion of race-based slavery in America. And slaveholding officers served to undermine the ban on slaveholding and permit its practice in the region. Race-based slaveholding was so embedded in white American culture that its practice persisted even when it was explicitly and legally banned. As a life-long Black Midwesterner whose maternal family settled in Nebraska before it was a state and a historian of American slavery, I was astounded about how little I knew or had even considered knowing about race-based slavery in the Midwest.

Midwestern frontier forts, like Fort Crawford, are places that illuminate and expand understandings of American slavery and Black people’s tenacious pursuits of freedom. People like Rachel are part of a larger history of slaveholding in the United States. Stories like hers transform how we experienced these places. For me, these forts have become archives, places to contemplate Black history and experience. And while I am frustrated that stories of people like Rachel have only recently — and often marginally — been included in the historic presentation at these sites, I am inspired when I imagine that maybe I have walked where Rachel walked, maybe touched a wall she watched being built. My current book project Black on the Midwestern Frontier: Contested Bondage and Black Freedom in Wisconsin, 1725–1868 seeks to tell the stories of people like Rachel and expand how we understand American slavery, the social-cultural formation of the Midwest, and Black people’s pursuits of freedom and liberty.

Christy Clark-Pujara is a Professor of History in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press), and her research focuses on the experiences of Black people in small towns and cities in northern and Midwestern colonies and states in British and French North America before the Civil War. Her current book project, Black on the Midwestern Frontier: Contested Freedoms, 1725–1868, examines how the practice of race-based slavery, Black settlement, and debates over abolition and Black rights shaped race relations in the Midwest.

Rachel’s petition and other documents related to Rachel v. William Walker (1834) can be found on the Digital Gateway of the Washington University in St. Louis.

The image is a detail from a painting by A. Brower, circa 1840, that was reproduced on a 1908 postcard published by A.C. Bosselman & Co.

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4232 McPherson Avenue
St. Louis, Missouri

By Michaella A. Thornton

The Central West End neighborhood where Kate Chopin spent her final year boasts some of the loveliest homes in St. Louis, Missouri. Dormers and cornices and stained glass, lush gardens bedecked in hydrangeas and peonies, birdsong and wrought-iron fences.

4232 McPherson Avenue isn’t far from the domed, devout beauty of the Cathedral Basilica or the local coffee roaster who prides himself on not using computers to roast the beans.

I haunt Kate Chopin’s last earthly home on the weekends I don’t have my child, death all around us. I want to know how to continue writing through a pandemic. Here’s what I would love to ask Chopin as I sit on the front steps of this historic home: How did you do it?

How did you write two novels and numerous short stories and poems and support six children as a single, widowed mother? How did you remember your worth as a writer and human being when polite society shunned you after The Awakening was published in 1899?

Before your death at age 54, you suffered many fools. How did you put up with T.S. Eliot’s bore of a mother for two years in the Wednesday Club? You were right to roast the hell out of “club women” in your writing.

We didn’t deserve you, Kate.

But I’ve loved you since I taught “The Story of an Hour” to my community college students. Intuitively, readers understand the feeling of being trapped, the lure of freedom. We recognize “the joy that kills,” which is why I’m taking notes at this underwhelming two-story brick house.

Did you need smelling salts or brandy, as your friend Lewis B. Ely joked you might, when the local newspaper printed a bad review of The Awakening? How about when Willa Cather wondered out loud in a Pittsburgh newspaper how you could waste “so exquisite and sensitive … a style on so trite and sordid a theme”?

I mean, how dare she? Trite?

You studied Guy de Maupassant. You revolutionized flash fiction. Plot twists? Hello, “The Storm” and “Désirée’s Baby.” Realistic fiction? You debunked the saccharine stench of motherhood as martyrdom, and you wrote women’s sexuality as ripe, rich, and complicated as any man’s.

Only after your death would the literary world realize your brilliance. What a fucking shame and also so typical. Even now, there’s no plaque marking this house.

Did the critics make you doubt what you had to say? That kills me. Some say you wrote less because of the criticism. The Awakening was out of print two years after your death. It took more than 60 years for scholars and readers to rediscover your prose.

Many days, for me at least, it feels impossible to write in the margins of one’s life, especially as a single mother. To care for my child, myself, and my home, let alone my art, is hard. There are Zoom meetings and work in 10-minute bursts and snacks and walks and groceries to buy and a face mask to secure to my 3-year-old daughter’s nose and mouth.

And I am one of the lucky ones.

But also like Edna Pontellier, many days I’m drowning.

I cannot imagine doing what you did, Kate. You began a writing career at age 40. You navigated the straightjacket of women’s social conventions at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. You were the first to write unflinchingly about sexuality, divorce, and a woman’s desire to govern herself. As literary scholar Per Seyersted wrote in your biography in 1969: “She was the first woman writer in her country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken fiction.”

As a former farmgirl who once dreamt of secret gardens and women who refused to remain silent, I sit on these cracked, crooked steps, and breathe. If homes hold onto a small piece of their former inhabitants, I feel respite here. I can finally catch my breath.

Kella’s prose can be read in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Complete Sentence, Creative Nonfiction, Midwestern Gothic, New South, The Southeast Review, and a few other places. When she’s not chasing her toddler daughter, she savors digging in the dirt, kayaking, and second acts. You can find her on Twitter at @kellathornton.

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Parkview
St. Louis, Missouri

By Devin Thomas O’Shea

The epigraph of The Tunnel reads, “The descent to hell is the same from every place,” but William Gass chose to set his magnum opus in a leafy suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, called Parkview.

Parkview is one of the first White Flight subdivisions ever constructed. It was a planned neighborhood, a prototype that would use winding lanes and a single outlet to discourage “traffic.” In the basement of one of these darling mansions, based on William Gass’ real house, Gass imagined a history professor at an upscale *cough* Wash U *cough* Midwestern university. Professor Koehler sits to write the introduction to his career-defining work, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. But he faces a block and pens The Tunnel instead — a messy, dark, lyrical portrayal of Koehler himself.

Instead of the neat, well-researched book dissecting the Nazis, Koehler describes the fascism in his own heart. In his basement, digging down in the soil of his soul, he also literally tunnels in the dirt floor of his Parkview cellar.

According to Gass, “[t]he reader is to feel, as he or she doubtless will, as if they are crawling through an unpleasant and narrow darkness.” We learn Koehler threw a brick on Kristallnacht. He kills his wife’s cat when it gets in the way of his digging. He runs out of space for all his soil, but luckily the history professor’s wife is an antiques shop owner. Their second floor is lined with Martha’s restored bureaus, and though Koehler fears Martha’s gaze — and wants to hide the tunnel (and The Tunnel) from her — he loads soil from his basement dig into her furniture, where she’ll surely find it one day. At the end, Martha finds Koehler’s filt­h and confronts him in the basement. She tips a drawer onto his manuscript, and the dirt goes everywhere: in his lap and all over his pages. Martha orders him to clean her cabinets, and Koehler wonders if she understood his pun about soiling her drawers.

Gass and Koehler both lived in secluded Parkview, a neighborhood built upon the philosophy that rich people shouldn’t have to share the sidewalks with poor people. In the 1900s, downtown St. Louis was busy and dirty. The rich built Parkview far away, just across the city limit, literally on the edge of the county. The Tunnel — written and set in the center of this planned community — is a deeply moral book about filth hiding below the surface of respectability. Like Gass, Koehler is an esteemed American intellectual with a wife, a house, and tenure. His research aims to find what was so unusually nasty about the villains of history, but long before he starts digging in the St. Louis mud, Koehler concludes that the Germans were just like you and me. Fascism is not aberrant. It has always been down in our subconscious basement; it lives in everyday hatreds.

Parkview’s wealth has been resilient in the face of St. Louis’s century-long economic decline, but just down the street, the city’s racial segregation has made poverty in the Black community worse every day. The so-called “Delmar Divide” represents one of the largest economic cliffs in the country. On the south side, White professors raise families in leafy, historic neighborhoods with old-timey gas lamps. Just up the street from Koehler’s basement, the redlining starts. Black suburbs like Mill Creek were destroyed to ghettoize Black St. Louisans in the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects. The city defunded Pruitt-Igoe soon after it was completed in 1956, then condemned and demolished it in the 1970s. Now, even the North County homes are falling down or being deconstructed because the bricks are worth more than the walls. Beauty is everywhere in North St. Louis — but people go hungry, police violence runs rampant, schools are pipelines to the prisons, and poverty abounds. And you don’t have to dig to find it.

Devin Thomas O’Shea’s writing is in Boulevard, Paterson Literary Review, Midwestern Gothic, The St. Louis Anthology, and elsewhere. Chapter one of his manuscript, Veiled Prophet, is published in Embark Literary Journal. He graduated Northwestern’s MFA program in 2018. Find him on Twitter.

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