Euclid Ave. Mural

Cleveland, Ohio

By Monique Wingard

In the tapestry of life, sometimes the threads that pull us away are the same ones that guide us back home. In 2013, the job market in Cleveland had left me feeling shut out, unwanted, unworthy. I hit the road for a job in Chicago, in pursuit of a better life. After ten years away, I came back to be closer to home. When I returned, while walking through downtown Cleveland, a striking mural caught my eye. There, prominently displayed on the side of a building at 334 Euclid Ave., alongside LeBron James and Tracy Chapman, was the face of Toni Morrison — Nobel laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and Ohio’s own literary giant.

As I stood before Morrison’s portrait on that Euclid Avenue wall, it was her smile that ignited my renewed sense of purpose and belonging. The mural, commissioned by Browns player Myles Garrett and created by Glen Infante, welcomes visitors near Destination Cleveland, and it now served as a powerful reminder of Morrison’s legacy and the potential within every Black woman from Ohio to persevere in the face of adversity.

After nearly a decade away, I felt a surge of emotions as I stood before Morrison’s mural. The vibrant colors and bold lines captured not just her likeness, but her spirit — unapologetic, fierce, and inspiring. As I gazed at the mural with my mother by my side, I was struck by a sense of homecoming and responsibility. Morrison’s watchful eyes seemed to ask, “What will you contribute to our shared legacy?”

This mural takes on even greater significance in light of recent statistics. In 2020, Bloomberg CityLab published a report analyzing the livability for Black women in 42 U.S. cities, based on health, education, and economic factors. Shockingly, Cleveland — with its nearly 50% Black population — ranked dead last. This statistic is sobering, but it’s crucial to understand its context. While the label of “worst city for Black women” holds some truth, it also leaves room for change and renaissance. It should prompt us to demand that Black women and organizations in Cleveland remember their power and responsibility to advocate relentlessly for each other and for a better life in the city.

Morrison once told an audience of college students, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” Her words resonate powerfully, encapsulating the responsibility we have as Black women in Ohio — to lift as we climb, to create opportunities for those who come after us, and to transform our communities. The mural reminds us of this responsibility. It challenges us to stand up, be counted, and hold ourselves and our community accountable. It urges us to be persistent in our pursuit to change Cleveland and uplift the entire state of Ohio.

As we look upon Morrison’s face on that Euclid Avenue wall, we must ask ourselves: How can we embody her spirit of unapologetic Blackness and unwavering determination? How can we weave our own threads into Morrison’s tapestry of Black womanhood?

We can start by:

1. Supporting and uplifting other Black women in our communities
2. Advocating for policies that address the disparities highlighted in the CityLab report
3. Creating and supporting spaces for Black women to thrive in business, arts, and education
4. Mentoring young Black girls, ensuring they see the potential within themselves

The Toni Morrison mural in downtown Cleveland is more than just a beautiful piece of art. It’s a beacon of hope and a call to action. The mural entitled, “Cleveland is the Reason,” was created by artist Glen Infante in April 2021 to remind the world that he and others are proud of the people who have shaped the city. The mural reminds us of the power of imagery, our words, our actions, and our unity. As Black women in Ohio, we have a responsibility to change the narrative, to rewrite Cleveland’s story, and to continue the work that Morrison began. Let us stand tall, speak boldly, and act with purpose, knowing that we carry within us the same strength and resilience that Morrison embodied. By doing so, we honor her legacy and create a better future for all Black women in Cleveland and beyond. As Morrison would have done if she were still with us, let us be relentless in our pursuit of justice, equality, and empowerment for Black women in our city and our state.

My exodus in 2013 was born of necessity and hope — a pursuit of better opportunities in a job market that seemed to have no place for me. At the time, I couldn’t have known about the harsh realities that would later be quantified when CityLab named Cleveland the worst city for Black women. Yet, as I stood before Toni Morrison’s vibrant visage on that Euclid Avenue wall, I felt a renewed sense of purpose and belonging, despite the sobering statistics that had emerged during my absence. Chicago had been great, and D.C. okay, but neither quite felt like home. There’s a unique rhythm in Ohio that resonates in the souls of those born here, whether in my birth city of Dayton or my adopted home of Cleveland. It’s a cadence of perseverance, a melody of pride, and a harmony of shared identity that calls us back, no matter how far we roam.

Now, as I gaze up at Morrison’s unwavering eyes and electric smile, I feel a surge of determination. This has been more than a homecoming; it is a reclamation. A reclamation of my place in this city, of my identity as an Ohioan, and of my responsibility to weave new threads of hope and opportunity for others into the tapestry of Cleveland’s future and beyond.

The city has changed since 2013, and so have I, but one thing is certain — I am home, ready to stand firm and forge a new path in the state that shaped me and Toni Morrison. Armed with the knowledge and experiences gained during my time away, and inspired by Morrison’s unapologetic celebration of Black womanhood, I’m determined to be a beacon for young women — our future leaders. My mission is clear: to ignite a fierce pride in their Ohio roots, a pride so deep that it becomes an unshakeable foundation built by trailblazing Black women like Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, activist Mary B. Talbert, philanthropist Dr. Zelma Watson George, and educator Louise Troy.

Together, we’ll rewrite Cleveland’s story, just as Morrison rewrote the narrative of Black women in literature. We’ll transform this city into a place where Black women not only survive but thrive, where every young girl can see herself reflected in the success stories around her. This is our home, our legacy, and our future — and we will make it shine with the brilliance of every young woman who dares to dream here, carrying forward the torch that Morrison and countless other Ohio daughters lit for us all.

A proud Buckeye and doctoral student at Kent State University’s College of Communication and Information, Monique Wingard is a digital transformation consultant who amplifies the digital footprint of women-led organizations by shaping effective communication strategies. Her research focuses on news and media literacy among adolescent girls, with the goal of developing curriculum that enhances their critical thinking skills. She is a member of the Coalition for Independent Tech Research and the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE). Visit moniquewingard.com for updates on her research, speaking engagements, conference presentations, and published works.

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Vegetarian Settlement Company

Allen County, Kansas

By Pete Dulin

Concern loomed like a thunderhead in this untamed place. Miriam Davis Colt, her family, and other settlers intended to make their home in the Vegetarian Settlement Company, a planned community within Octagon City envisioned to become a city “of considerable wealth and importance.” Colt’s family arrived on May 12, 1856, at the proposed site in the Territory of Kansas, south of present-day Humboldt.

With the Missouri border in her wake, Colt beholds the vast Kansas Territory and its potential: “A broad green sea of prairie is spread out before us, and in the distance large mounds stretch themselves along the horizon.”

Soon, however, Colt realized the settlement was not developing according to plan. Six years later, she published a detailed memoir titled Went to Kansas: Being a Thrilling Account of an Ill-Fated Expedition to that Fairy Land, and Its Sad Results.

I drove two hours southwest from Kansas City, Missouri, to see this Fairy Land. A roadside historical marker divulged no secrets. Vegetarian Creek, woodlands, and grassy fields refused to gossip. Time, heartbreak, and death have eroded the imagined potential of this land.

Promissory plans for the Vegetarian Settlement Company originated in 1855 in New York City. A circular proclaimed that morally pure families could raise and educate children at the settlement away from “vice, vicious company, vicious habits of eating and drinking, and other contaminations of old cities.” Colt’s family and other investors sent significant funds, life’s savings for some, to underwrite the development, based on the circular and correspondence with company directors.

Unspoiled prairie and woodland suitable for settlement, farming, and investment near the Neosho River was only part of the allure. Colt believed her family would find community “with people whose tastes and habits will coincide with our own.”

Colt, her husband John, their young son and daughter, her sister, and her husband’s parents departed in mid-April. Traveling weeks from upstate New York led them to Kansas City. Oxen pulled supply wagons ten days toward the promised land. Arriving at nightfall, Colt’s rain- soaked party encountered men and women at the site cooking supper over a campfire and living in tents and wagons.

“The ladies tell us they are sorry to see us come to this place; which plainly shows that all is not right,” wrote Colt. Their lament was a harbinger of struggles ahead.

Settlers found no purported development or shelter from “furious prairie winds” and “terrific storms.” They ground corn with hand mills. Without a sawmill, they cut timber to fashion crude log cabins.

Summer’s blistering heat and plentiful mosquitos battered the spirits of these starving settlers. The river and creek yielded scarce, undrinkable water. Fever caused by malaria led to illness and death. Foraging, subsistence farming, and the generosity of distant neighbors provided meager sustenance. Colt wrote that Osage tribe members took tools and housewares and raided field crops. News of Kansas-Missouri border ruffians to the north spurred concerns.

Colt and her family abandoned the stillborn community four months later. Her sister and in-laws remained behind and died within months. Colt wrote on September 2, 1856, “We start out upon the world again. Many a dark shade has passed over us since last Spring.”

When I visited the settlement site, spring was still a month away. Bluebell, bloodroot, and prairie larkspur have yet to bloom. This soil was once fertile enough to plant dreams. What happens when fragile hope withers and roots immersed in the prairie do not take?

Colt’s experience prompts wonderment at my own mother’s uprooting and journey.

She met and married my father, a U.S. soldier stationed at a base near her home in central Thailand. Mom left her family, friends, and rural village in the early Sixties and emigrated to Kansas City, Kansas.

Love, hope, and opportunity do not fill an immigrant’s pockets. Wayfinding in life involves unexpected outcomes and consequences. Bearings may be lost along the path chosen.

Mom arrived at an unfamiliar place. Routines formed with each word spoken and decision made, and the fog of how little she knew slowly lifted. Understanding bloomed, its tender roots sunk into non-native soil.

She gradually learned English, earned citizenship, and acclimated to American customs. My parents eventually moved out of my grandparents’ home, bought a house in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised four children.

What happens when dreams exact unthinkable personal cost?

Colt and her beleaguered family stopped in Boonville, Missouri, en route to the “known world.” Her husband John, 40, and son Willie, 10, suffered from fever, malnourishment, and likely malaria. Willie died on September 24, three weeks after leaving the settlement. John perished on October 4, cradled in the “cold embrace of death.” Colt buried them, returned to New York, and bought a five-acre lot.

My mother remained entrenched despite life’s unpredictable storms – divorce, the death of a son, tangled family ties near and far, and health issues prompting thoughts of her mortality and legacy.

What happens when choices and consequences become uneasy cousins?

Colt and fellow settlers faced stark choices. Shed the weight of sunk costs, sever the cumbersome tether of hope? Colt sharpened her survival skills against the grindstone of trial and trauma.

She chose how to lead the remainder of her life, persevering to raise her daughter Mema, publish her tale for income, and establish a home and farm. Her memoir closed with a prayer to “have grace to bear all the remaining reverses that may come in my pathway.”

Footsteps from the past can no longer be heard. The settlement represents more than the sum of broken dreams. Their unrealized vision still exudes the faint residue of reality, a premise to ponder on our journey.

The territory is not new, only our presence on it. Leaving this land and thirsty creek bed, I deposit questions like seeds in soil foreign to me.

What remains when we depart a place? The lips of John and Willie offer no answers. Perhaps my mother knows.

Colt’s story implies that we eventually abandon the place we sought to settle. We will exit the land and return to earth. Death awaits, an assured outcome.

Until then, I am a vessel of my own making. I choose what to carry, what to leave behind. No oxen in sight. My wagon bears hope and conviction, fear and wonder, loss and what remains, grief, sorrow, some fortitude.

Our words and our will, they form within us, born of the same substance, depositing, eroding, ever shifting.

February wind blows against me. I head in that direction and return home, unsettled.

Pete Dulin is the author of Expedition of Thirst: Exploring Breweries, Wineries, and Distilleries Across the Heart of Kansas and Missouri, Kansas City Beer: A History of Brewing in the Heartland, KC Ale Trail, and Last Bite, and is currently working on his next book. A professional writer for more than 20 years, Pete’s work has appeared in many print and online publications. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

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Harmonia Cemetery

Battle Creek, Michigan

By Jeffrey Insko

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Tom Deater.

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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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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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Earlham Hall
Richmond, Indiana

By Leah Milne

I was a Midwest transplant, born and raised on the East Coast. Before I left home, friends joked about flatland and cornfields and voiced concerns about my entering what they perceived to be a region of overwhelming whiteness. Culture shock, however, was nothing new to me. As the first in my immigrant family to attend college, I knew what it meant to feel unmoored, to walk into a room where no one resembled you.

My conference visit to Earlham College was an attempt to soften that dislocation. Books have always been my second home, so sitting in the Runyan Center listening to literary presentations, I was already more comfortable. A bonus? Zitkála-Šá went here in the 1890s. Having read her stories about being the only American Indian among over 400 college students, I felt a kinship.

Earlham Residence Hall — where she stayed — was right next door. Bright leaves floated onto the campus quad where I stood before a sweeping red-brick building. Its entrance was framed by white columns, wooden benches, and painted Adirondacks. This was what the child in me imagined all college campuses looked like. Later, I would learn that this tree-lined enclosure was called The Heart.

In “School Days of an Indian Girl,” Zitkála-Šá — known to Earlhamites as Gertrude Simmons — writes about leaving her happy childhood on South Dakota’s Yankton Reservation for White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana. Her introduction to education left her homesick; she was forced to cut her hair, adopt a new language and religion, and endure numerous abuses. One wouldn’t blame her for leaving school entirely. And yet she went to college, much to the chagrin of her mother, who feared losing her daughter to “the white man’s ways.” If my visit was a modest attempt at self-encouragement, Zitkála-Šá’s more permanent move to Earlham represented a willful assertion of a new life.

Gertrude’s time at Earlham was lonely. She often isolated herself in her dorm room, and a classmate described her as “pleasant but somewhat distant.” Nevertheless, she flourished, publishing poetry in the school newspaper and performing in recitals. Her speeches, however, were where she found her voice as an activist.

After winning Earlham’s oratory contest, Gertrude was surprised when fellow freshmen celebrated by decorating the student parlor. Maybe, she thought, my classmates aren’t so bad. But then, weeks later in the subsequent state-level competition, students from one university mocked her with racist epithets. Gertrude rallied. In her soft but determined voice, she lambasted America’s prejudices, winning over all the judges save a Southerner offended by her position on slavery. She won second place.

I picture her afterwards in The Heart, staring at Earlham Hall, those columns festooned in cream and yellow drapery in her honor. Like many of Gertrude’s triumphs, this one was bittersweet. The humiliation of the night’s racism lingered, and she rushed to her dorm room, questioning her decision to leave home.

Even as she became a student at the New England Conservatory of Music and a teacher at the infamous Carlisle Indian School, she would remember this night. Maybe she stared at the stars and stripes flying above the Hall’s entrance and thought about how her speech referenced “our nation’s flag” and “our common country,” stubbornly and even hopefully insisting on a shared humanity that she knew was often denied. The image of her standing before Earlham Hall inspires me to contemplate my experiences in education, both alienating and invigorating, and the way that institutions can both fail us and uplift us. If Zitkála-Šá could make such resolute demands for equality after all she had experienced, I figure there’s still hope for me.

Leah Milne writes about and teaches multicultural American literature at the University of Indianapolis. It took her a full year living in the Midwest to learn how to properly pronounce “Louisville.” You can find out more about her publications and courses at LeahMilne.com.

Photo by Rebekah Trollinger, the Plowshares Assistant Professor of Religion at Earlham College.

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Central Elementary School
Ferguson, Missouri

By Taylor Fox

There’s a haunted feeling that comes with walking around an empty schoolyard. Barren playgrounds and darkened windows convey emptiness, dejection. It’s unnatural for playgrounds to go quiet. Yet, outside the historic Central Elementary School in Ferguson, Missouri, that eerie feeling is missing, replaced by a comforting glow provided by the towering trees, climbing vines, and community garden of fragrant herbs.

Did you know there was a time Ferguson was all a farm?

Central alumna Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry is filled with imagery that conjures up the aura of her former school. She specifically reflects on the Ferguson of her youth in a poem honoring Jamyla Bolden, a 9-year-old black girl shot and killed in her Ferguson home in 2015 when a man shot into the house, targeting someone he believed stole from him.

The poem illustrates the commonalities between the author and Jamyla, who attended Koch Elementary School, just over three miles east of Central. In the poem, Nye wishes she could pass her own lived years on to the girl who was taken too soon.

Drive down Florissant Road today, and it is hard to imagine as farmland. The asphalt street is lined with barbecue restaurants and dozens of murals honoring the Black Lives Matter movement. Outside the Ferguson Police Department stands a row of signs and artwork remembering those killed by police violence in the United States.

Leaving Florissant Road and all of its restaurants, you immediately enter the quiet, calm neighborhood surrounding Central Elementary. Nye has described the area as a “leafy green historic suburb” and fondly remembers her old brick school. Built in 1880, the school flaunts a plaque acknowledging its listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The original bell tower — visible from both the playground and the community garden — still crowns the old building.

Considering Nye drafted her first poem when she was six years old, it’s easy to imagine the young artist gazing out the school’s wrought iron windows onto the large garden below and piecing together her earliest works.

Nye attended Central from kindergarten until sixth grade, and in 1966 her family moved to Palestine, her father’s country of origin. She has often spoken on her experiences as a Palestinian-American going to a then all-white school and in a 2014 essay wrote, “In Ferguson, an invisible line separated white and black communities. In Jerusalem, a no-man’s land separated people, designated by barbed wire.”

Nye’s poetry often reflects the parallels between her two childhood homes. Her first published collection, Different Ways to Pray, is entirely on the topic of cultural similarities and differences, using her own Palestinian-American identity as a model.

As a first generation Cuban-American with an ethnically Jewish heritage, my own parallels to Nye are too striking to ignore. I can imagine the feeling of other she must have endured in Ferguson, accepted in neither the white nor black communities. After moving to Palestine, where she may have felt even more of an outsider, she began to study culture and identity, perhaps to find her own sense of belonging. I too have felt the drive to study my heritage in order to feel enough, to feel like you deserve to claim your roots.

Despite our commonalities, it is also not lost on me that, while I cannot trace my ancestry back to Israel, we are from opposite sides of that barbed wire fence, belonging to two cultures with more in common than they are willing to admit. We are from two cultures that historically villainize the other without the effort of understanding and respect.

We share this severing too with Ferguson itself, represented by the seeming innocence of the empty Central Elementary School across town from the home where Jamyla was killed and next to a street so often shown as a scene of violence against black people — violence portrayed to make a point, without respect for the motivation behind the movement or any attempt to amend the systemic issues that have led to this point.

Taylor Fox recently graduated from the University of Missouri with a Master of Arts in Geography. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, she has spent her career learning and writing about cultures and hopes to continue sharing this passion with others. Fox has also been published in Missouri Life Magazine and the Columbia Daily Tribune.

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