27240 N. Longwood Dr.

Forest Haven, Illinois

By Jenny Mueller

“Our trees are aspens, but people / mistake them for birches” — so begins Lisel Mueller’s “Another Version,” set in 1970s Midwestern suburbia. This proves to be a territory of error. After mistaking the aspens, which spread along the southern edge of the property where Lisel and Paul Mueller had lived nearly 20 years, their visitors romanticize the couple “as characters / in a Russian novel, Kitty and Levin / living contentedly in the country.” My parents surely matched Tolstoy’s Kitty and Levin in the strength and longevity of their marriage.

But not all happy families feel happy. Nor, by the end of the 70s, did we live in “country” anymore, even though the guests still think so, gazing out with pleasure on the scene.

Our friends from the city watch the birds

and rabbits feeding together

on top of the deep, white snow.

(We have Russian winters in Illinois,

but no sleigh bells, possums instead of wolves . . .

The city friends came from Chicago and its neighbor-city, Evanston. My parents had moved from Evanston in the late 1950s, buying one acre in Lake County, to Chicago’s north. There they built one of the first houses in “Forest Haven,” a tiny subdivision near the interstate. The house stood at the dead end of one of the subdivision’s five streets, in a northwest corner lot separated by barbed wire from a farm that bordered all of Forest Haven’s north end, as well as our portion of its west. In my childhood, in the 1960s, I gazed west through the wire at the edge of the backyard, looking past the small cattle herd that grazed in the sunset, toward the dark line of woods where the pasture ended and my sight ran out. Past that lay the railroad, another small new subdivision, and the Des Plaines River. Contrails burned their courses over me, arrowing back and forth from O’Hare — newly opened to passenger traffic, half an hour down the interstate.

In those early days, it was almost country around the house where Lisel Mueller’s poems were born. She came to this writing late in life — already 41 when her first book was published in 1965. By 1997, when her selected poems won the Pulitzer, she had nearly stopped writing. Glaucoma diminished her ability to read, and she could no longer drive. One day she found my father at the kitchen table, trying and failing to write his own name. He was losing his language to Lewy-Body Disease. She sold the house and moved them to a complex in Chicago, five minutes’ walk from both groceries and my father’s nursing unit. She never wrote another book of poetry.

In “Another Version,” we seem to be at the comfortable end of the 70s American lyric, with its quiet voice, personal sorrows, nature ready-to-hand for muted unities. While the city-slickers admire the peaceable kingdom outside a contented country home, an old man is dying inside. “He is my father,” Mueller writes,

he lets go of life in such slow motion,

year after year, that the grief

is stuck inside me, a poisoned apple

that won’t go up or down.

But “like the three sisters” in Chekhov’s play, “we rarely speak / of what keeps us awake at night.”

like them, we complain about things

that don’t really matter and talk

of our pleasures and of the future:

we tell each other the willows

are early this year, hazy with green.

“Another Version” begins with the visitors’ error and ends with their hosts’ secrecy. The misunderstandings pile up like northern Illinois snow. Russian allusions mask a German story. The old man was Fritz Neumann, who first arrived in Illinois as a political refugee. As a child in Nazi Germany, Lisel was forced to keep quiet about her father, whose known leftism had marked him as an enemy, someone against whom her schoolmates and neighbors should inform. Neumann, too, kept quiet when at home, but often he was far away. For much of the 1930s he took ill-paying temporary teaching work in France and Italy, while his wife raised two daughters alone in Hamburg. In 1937, luck landed him a scholarship to study at a teacher’s college near Evanston. His wife and children joined him in the US in 1939, ending the years in which Lisel clamped her lips tight to suppress her fears — the child’s terror that her parents might disappear, made very real by her father’s two arrests. Now Lisel became a Midwesterner. She lived all her adult life in Indiana and Illinois. She wrote often of her own luck. But she never lost her night fears, and when an interviewer asked if she considered the Midwest home, she dodged the question, answering, “Let me say what countless other displaced persons must have said: I am more at home here than anywhere.”

Her father remained on the move: from teaching job to teaching job in America, then returning to his native Hamburg after the death of his wife in the 1950s. Remarried unhappily, he kept traveling, steamshipping across the Atlantic for long US visits. One night in the 1970s, he touched down at O’Hare and never left. A stroke had stricken him with aphasia. He retained, however, a teacher’s memory for history: treaties, battles, empires, republics.

But how many people understood that there were non-Jewish German political refugees? In my experience, the old man who came to die with us represented little-known history that always puzzles Americans, even now. My mother sometimes invoked a more famous poet, Brecht, as a short-hand. In poems about her parents, she borrowed Brecht’s description of European exiles “changing countries more often than shoes,” and she quoted Brecht’s sorrow at talk of small pleasures in terrible times, his despair that a casual “talk about trees is almost a crime / since it means being silent about so much evil.”

Undoubtedly, Lisel Mueller talked about trees: aspens and willows, the great maple that still stands at an edge of the front yard — if I can trust the internet. But I can’t, of course, since the house is currently listed on Zillow as “uninhabitable.” On my laptop, I can see that the windows are boarded in the upstairs room that became my mother’s study, from which we saw the long views north and west. In that study, she wrote the books for which she won awards, poems that were popularized on the radio by the era’s voice of the Midwest, Garrison Keillor. The Poetry Foundation praises her work “for its attentiveness to quiet moments of domestic drama, and its ability to speak to the experiences of family and semi-rural life.” Happy families in suburban nature, quietly sad, the great luck of a long, loving marriage. But she also wrote, almost always, of displaced persons, and in a journal she commented, “My preoccupation with history marks me as outside the mainstream of American poetry. No matter how long I’ve lived and written here, that has not changed and will not change.”

In “Another Version,” when the daughter can’t speak of her father, whose life was determined by history, she talks about trees instead. Her poem makes the pain of such evasion its point.

Suburbia is full of oscillations, migrations. My father, who worked in the city, drove back and forth for years on ever more crowded roads. As the subdivisions multiplied along them, our yard filled up with deer, displaced from the cleared woods. My mother likened them to “refugees,” “risking death on the road / to reach us, their dispossessors.” My sister and I moved to Chicago — which made us the city visitors gazing out on the aspens, itching to return to urban streets. There, we were sure, our authentic lives waited.

But some things never change. In 2020, reviewing an anthology of poems responding to the pandemic, the New York Times took furious aim against its “tepid” contents’ resort to natural imagery. There were too many poems “about flowers. Or birds. Or trees.” The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, had been “wise to rage against tree poems,” the critic complained. And perhaps the book really was tepid. But what an astonishing charge! As if we could still see no urgency in trees. As if we still believed that trees crowded out our witness of history, not the other way around. As if we hadn’t all learned to pronounce a new urbane word, Anthropocene, to slip inside our poems. As if grief, the poisoned apple in my throat, were only for childhood and not for aspens, “country,” snow.

Jenny Mueller lives in St. Louis. She is the author of two books of poetry, State Park and Bonneville, both published by Denver’s Elixir Press. She is also the editor of Moonie, a posthumous e-book of poetry by Brian Young, published by Fence Digital. She is the younger daughter and literary executor of Lisel Mueller. Unlike her mother, Jenny has been able to do years of coursework in creative writing, a privilege she tries to pass on to her students at McKendree University in Lebanon, Illinois.

Photo by Marianne Connell.

To read “Another Version” in its entirety, please visit the website of the Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois, where Lisel Mueller is a featured poet.

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Crutchfield
Tulsa, Oklahoma

By Caleb Freeman

One day in the winter of 1981, when the film adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders was still in pre-production, Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola, the film’s director, rode double on a bicycle down North Tulsa’s side streets. More than 60 pounds of film equipment sat in their handlebar basket, so they had to stop periodically to keep from falling onto the pavement. Their route took them into one of the city’s oldest mixed-use neighborhoods. They rode past houses in various states of disrepair, many of them built shortly after the city was incorporated in 1898, as well as industrial sites and manufacturing plants, some empty and derelict, abandoned in the years of suburban sprawl.

Their destination was a house that Coppola had stumbled upon, a dilapidated Craftsman bungalow located at 731 North St. Louis Ave. in the Crutchfield neighborhood. With its rusted chain-link fence and overgrown lawn, it was a promising candidate for the Curtis house, where Darry, Sodapop, and Ponyboy, the orphaned protagonists of The Outsiders, would live. Hinton agreed, and when production began the next year, that house was at the heart of it.

Hinton’s novel of warring teenage gangs, written fifteen years earlier when she was a student at Will Rogers High School, has a complicated relationship with Tulsa. Hinton is from Tulsa, and by all accounts set the story here too, but chose not to include any real names or landmarks in order to, as she told the local newspaper, “protect the guilty.” When she wrote The Outsiders, Hinton was bearing witness to teenage alienation and violent socioeconomic segregation, and these weren’t Tulsa problems; they were everywhere.

The film took a different approach, fully embedding itself in Tulsa. In March 1982, Zoetrope Studios moved into Crutchfield, setting up their production team in the former Lowell Elementary School building, which had been closed four years prior. In a type of method acting, the young cast members haunted the city as greasers, stealing from local drug stores, staying out all night, and sometimes sleeping in the Curtis house, which didn’t have any heat. Local markers — the Oklahoma Steel Castings Company, the Admiral Twin Drive-In, the Art Deco architecture of Will Rogers High School and Boston Avenue Methodist Church — appear in the film. Hinton and Coppola even revised the story so that the Greasers would live on the north side instead of the east, a more accurate geographic representation of Tulsa’s class and racial divide. When the filming was done, Coppola threw a party in Crutchfield Park, complete with carnival rides, an abundance of food and beer, and an ice sculpture. He received a key to the city from the mayor and an appreciation plaque from the Crutchfield Neighborhood Association.

Then he left. The film came out in 1983, and members of the Oklahoma Film Industry Task Force, which had lobbied hard for Coppola to film in Tulsa, relished their success. Much of the young cast went on to become celebrities. Crutchfield, on the other hand, faded into memory.

The neighborhood is still here, though, just north of the historic “Frisco” Railway, which once brought hopeful settlers and cutthroat opportunists to Tulsa back when the area was still known as Indian Territory. Now you drive through Crutchfield and see the husks of uninhabited buildings. The neighborhood kindergarten was shut down in 1986. The Oklahoma Steel Castings Company closed a year later, leaving behind a polluted 10-acre lot. The oil bust of the 1980s drove out many of the neighborhood’s remaining manufacturers, and many residents who could afford to leave did. By 2007, approximately one-third of the houses in the neighborhood were abandoned. Rates of violent crime rose to become the highest in Tulsa.

The neighborhood association, led by longtime residents — truck drivers, store owners, church leaders — advocated tirelessly for Crutchfield. They organized neighborhood cleanups, met with city officials, and developed a revitalization plan which called in part for better infrastructure and more public facilities, including a new school. Although the City of Tulsa approved the plan in 2004, little has changed. In 2006, Tulsa Public Schools spent $3.3 million converting the old Lowell Elementary building, the former production site for The Outsiders, into a four-and-a-half acre “state-of-the-art” ropes course. Although it was touted as a boon to the community, the course was fenced off and inaccessible to the neighborhood’s residents. The course was later closed in 2017 due to budget cuts, and the site once again sits abandoned.

Today, Crutchfield is still without a school or a grocery store. Its predominately Hispanic population experiences some of the worst health outcomes and rates of poverty in the city. Although the neighborhood is one of Tulsa’s oldest, the City has never treated it with the same significance as its other historic neighborhoods.

As my girlfriend and I drive through Crutchfield in the winter of 2021, I wonder about the decision to bring The Outsiders film to Tulsa. When the novel was released, local media was quick to absolve the city. The Tulsa World suggested that, although the setting was Tulsa, “it could be any city.” After watching the film, though, I wonder if Hinton might say otherwise.

The Outsiders is a story about boundary lines, divisions that we create and perpetuate. It’s a fitting story for Tulsa, a city whose inclination towards boosterism — as the self-proclaimed “Magic City” and “Oil Capital of the World” — frequently has sanitized and distorted its history, almost always at the expense of its marginalized communities.

Crutchfield sits just north of the line that divided Cherokee Nation and Muscogee (Creek) Nation land, one of the lines established by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The neighborhood was named after Vinita Crutchfield, who was allotted the land after the General Allotment Act. She appears on the Dawes Roll as a nine-year-old Cherokee girl living with her mother. Growing up, Crutchfield would have lived on the dividing line much like the characters in Hinton’s novel.

One mile to the east of Crutchfield is Tulsa’s Greenwood district, which was once 40 square blocks of Black-owned land known as “Black Wall Street.” Born of entrepreneurship, Greenwood was a precarious haven for Black Oklahomans during a time when the state adopted strict Jim Crow laws. Local newspapermen disparaged Greenwood as “Little Africa,” and the growth of the KKK in Tulsa posed an increasing threat. In May 1921, a white mob invaded, razed, and, in the end, partially annexed Greenwood, killing its residents in a state-sanctioned slaughter. For decades, the Tulsa Race Massacre, as it would come to be known, remained a secret, a part of Tulsa’s history hidden from people like me who never learned about it in school. From Crutchfield, just beyond the borderlines of Lansing Ave. and the Midland Valley railway tracks, you would have been able to see the smoke of Greenwood’s burning buildings.

When we arrive at the Curtis home, which was purchased in 2016 and converted into a small museum dedicated to The Outsiders, I think about the people of Crutchfield. Surrounding the home are boarded-up houses flying tattered American flags. Stray dogs roam the area. Less than a block away from the house is an auto shop, the same type of place where Ponyboy might have worked. We stay for a little while, driving around the neighborhood. When we leave, I think about the tyranny of boundaries and the exorbitant privilege of being able to cross them.

Caleb Freeman was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he is a freelance writer, an adjunct English instructor, and a part-time librarian. When he is not working with words, he is more than likely annoying his cats. Follow him on Twitter @calebdfreeman. 

 

Photograph by Megan Hosmer, an artist, teacher, and Tulsa transplant. Her work primarily centers around feminist questions of identity and community through photographic portraiture. Check out her artwork at https://www.meganhosmer.com/.

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Greene County Courthouse
Xenia, Ohio

By Jacob A. Bruggeman

I first visited Xenia, Ohio, a small city in the state’s southwestern corner, on a hot May afternoon in 2018. Headed north from Cincinnati on Interstate 71, smoke started rising out from under the hood of my 1999 Toyota Corolla. I pulled onto the highway’s shoulder, popped the hood, and prepared to do battle with the Toyota’s notoriously oil-burning engine. Equipped only with a container of 5W-30 motor oil, I realized that my modest mechanical know-how was insufficient, and I called good ol’ AAA.

While waiting for the Triple-A guy, I saw a roadside sign pointing Xenia’s way. Soon enough, I was riding shotgun in the tow truck as we rolled through the city and passed the Greene County Courthouse at 45 North Detroit Street. Built of Bedford stone in 1901–1902, the Romanesque courthouse’s soaring square clock tower has been a community touchstone in Xenia for more than half of its history.

Born in Cincinnati and raised in Xenia, novelist Helen Hooven Santmyer (1895–1986) captures the courthouse’s centrality in the opening passage of her memoir, Ohio Town: A Portrait of Xenia (1962). Santmyer acknowledges that, because so many similar structures are scattered “all along middle western roads,” Xenia’s visitors “must hardly give the courthouse a conscious thought.” For the resident, however, the courthouse is distinct, familiar, and necessary:

Along with the state of the weather and the time of day, there has always been in his mind a background consciousness of the tower with its four-faced clock, the goose-girl drinking fountain on the Main Street curb, the spread of lawn, and the trees in the square whose crests are stirred by winds higher than the roof.

Ohio Town proceeds with similarly rich descriptions of community life in chapters titled “Streets and Houses,” “Church,” “School,” “The Railroad,” and “There Were Fences,” all focused on the rhythms of life in Xenia.

Founded in 1803, the same year Ohio was admitted to the Union, Xenia was an early testing ground for tribal relations and removal. In fact, in the early 1800s, the Shawnee Indians called Old Chillicothe, a small village just north of Xenia, their home; Tecumseh, the famous and then-feared chief who organized a confederacy to stop settler colonialism, was born there. As time passed, the character of his ancestral lands changed as ploughs broke, railroads cut, and Main Streets sprung up upon them.

Ohio communities like Xenia flourished as natives like Tecumseh were slain or forced further inland, and settlers began the long, frequently violent transformation of the region into what Xenia-born historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. described as the Midwest’s “valley of democracy.”

From a young age, Santmyer cherished the products of that transformation: southwestern Ohio’s communities and traditions. Enthused by Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, she dedicated herself to recording them in writing. After retiring as a librarian in Dayton in 1959, Santmyer published her two major critical and popular successes: Ohio Town and …And the Ladies of the Club (1982), a nearly 1200-page epic telling the story of generations of communal life in rural Ohio. Indeed, Santmyer’s writing is a testament to the social dynamism of what might outwardly be described as a dull Midwestern town.

For Santmyer, the courthouse is a literary conduit for those intricacies: its enduring image “recall[s] the Saturday-night excitement of the past,” when its “curb […] was the center of noise and light and crowded movement.” For Xenia’s former residents, the courthouse remains the “the first vision to flash upon the inward eye,” expanding into memories of “the courthouse as it was on quiet afternoons, when nothing moved in the length and breadth of the sun-blazing streets, and only a few persons were to be seen in open shop doors or on the benches under the elms.”

To read Santmyer today is to revel in her satisfyingly efficient and life-affirming descriptions of midcentury Ohio life, whereby readers may access something of the joy and reverie once held common in its streets. At the same time, those celebrations also obscure the decidedly undemocratic origins of Ohio’s settler communities: despite their virtues as sung by Santmyer and Schlesinger, towns like Xenia were built on stolen land. The extent to which Xenians — and, indeed, Ohioans — comprehend this erasure is unclear, but ignorance then is no justification for indifference now. To read Santmyer today, then, is to dwell in the tension between her wonderful rendering of Xenia’s social and civic life with the true weight of its cost.

Jacob Bruggeman is a PhD student in American History at Johns Hopkins University and an editor of the Cleveland Review of Books. You can follow him on Twitter @jacob_bruggeman.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Dph414.

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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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