I spent five years in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—a place I didn’t even know existed until I moved there to attend graduate school. I lived in a town of four thousand people. The next town over, over the portage bridge, had seven thousand people. In my town, the street signs were in both English and Finnish because the town had the highest concentration of Finns outside of Finland. We were so far north that my blackness was more curiosity than threat. I was a woman out of place but I did not always feel unsafe. There were the abandoned copper mines and the vast majesty of Lake Superior and so much forest cloaking everything. During fall, deer hunting, so much venison. The winters were endless, snow in unfathomable quantities, the aching whine of snowmobiles. There was loneliness. There were my friends, who made the isolation bearable. There was a man who made everything beautiful. What I cannot forget is my landlady, who rented my apartment to me over the phone and who, when she first met me, told me I didn’t sound like a colored girl.
In rural Illinois, I lived in a town surrounded by cornfields, in an apartment complex next to an open meadow, the site of ambition thwarted when the developer who built the complex ran out of money. The meadow was wide and green, bordered by trees. In the fall, I often saw a family of deer galloping across the field. They reminded me of Michigan. Especially early on, they made me think, I want to go home, and I would startle, that my heart, my body, considered such an unexpected place home. The man didn’t follow. The man didn’t understand why I would not, could not raise brown children in the only place he had ever called home. There was more to it, but there was also that. At the end of every summer, a farmer threshed the meadow and hauled the hay away. I stood on my balcony and watched as he worked, methodically, making the land useful. I had a job, I kept telling myself. At least I had a job. This town was bigger. I nurtured a very small dream—to live in a place where I could get my hair done—without knowing if that dream would ever come true. There was a Starbucks, though not much else. There was loneliness. There were a few very, very unsuitable men who made everything ugly. We were three hours from Chicago so my blackness was less of a curiosity, more of a threat. And there were the black students on campus, the nerve of them, daring to pursue higher education. In the local newspaper, residents wrote angry letters about a new criminal element—the scourge of youthful black ambition, black joy. In my more generous moments, I tried to believe the locals were using anger to mask their fear of living in a dying town in a changing world.
Four years later, I moved to Central Indiana, a much bigger town, a small city really. In the first weeks, I was racially profiled in an electronics store. Living here never got better though local acquaintances often tried to tell me, in different ways, “Not all Hoosiers,” when I lamented how uncomfortable and unhappy I was, I am. There is loneliness. The confederacy is, inexplicably, alive and well here. There is a man who drives around in an imposing black pickup truck with white supremacist flags flying from the rear. My dental hygienist thinks I live in a bad part of town. There are no bad parts of town here, not really. In the local newspaper, residents write angry letters about a new criminal element in town. “People from Chicago,” they say, which is code for black people. On campus, pro-life students chalk messages on sidewalks like, “Planned Parenthood #1 Killer of Black Lives,” and “Hands up, don’t abort.” My blackness is again, a threat. I don’t feel safe but I know how lucky I am, which leaves me wondering how unsafe black people leading more precarious lives must feel.
Friends in cities have long asked me how I do it—spending year after years in these small towns that are so inhospitable to blackness. I say I’m from the Midwest, which I am, and that I have never lived in a big city, which is also true. I say that the Midwest is home even if this home does not always embrace me, and that the Midwest is a vibrant, necessary place. I say I can be a writer anywhere and as an academic, I go where the work takes me. Or, I said these things. Now, I am simply weary. I say, “I hate it here,” and a rush of pleasure fills me. I worry that I can’t be happy or feel safe anywhere. But then I travel to places where my blackness is unremarkable, where I don’t feel like I have to constantly defend my right to breathe, to be. I am nurturing a new dream, of a place I already think of as home—bright sky, big ocean. I know the where and the why and even the who might be waiting there. I just need to say when.
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Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. She is also the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, and Hunger, forthcoming from Harper.
Artwork by Damon Locks
That was utterly beautiful. I never thought of the Midwest as a place inhospitable to the minds and hearts of Black people. In my mind’s eye, I saw the deepest green met by oceans of blue sky, with wildlife migrating every, which way; but I never considered the icy reception of the people who lived there or that their minds were just as narrow as the road verges often encountered. Thank you for sharing and writing this gorgeous essay.
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Agreed. There is something about the land and space that makes the midwest a glorious place, and less so when you add the layers of people. Beautiful writing– and when. I love the power of when.
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Thank you for sharing this. I live in the sometimes snowy Sweden, and I feel lonely.
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Beautiful said and it reflection of how i felt for a long time.
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I would also feel isolated and very lonely in the towns you describe. Yet I am white and was born and raised in New York. Loneliness is sometimes a state of mind, colored by our insecurities.
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omg, shut up Terry.
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So honest. Thank you for this piece.
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Thank you for your truth. I know many people needed to hear this, to know they aren’t alone, or because they need to put how they feel about racism today into words. Thank you.
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Ugh. Made my heart hurt. Thanks for capturing the feeling of calling a place home when that place also makes you feel like an outsider.
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What Lindsay said– yes, “the feeling of calling a place home when that place also makes you feel like an outsider. Thank you for this essay. Also love an earlier one in Brevity–“There Are Distances Between Us.” https://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/there-are-distances-between-us/
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I am the white mother of a black son.
Where to live, which neighborhood, was always a dilemma, even in a small city where a university dominated the economy. Where would be both be reasonably welcome? Where would he have reasonable adult role models, not be the only child of color? Where would I be able to find and keep jobs, even if I put his picture on my desk? (I finally stopped doing that after several long stretches of unemployment.)
How the schools treated my very bright, very well behaved, dyslexic brown-skinned child seemed steeped in racism, any place we lived. Rural, urban didn’t seem to matter, he was treated as though he was potentially dangerous. The high IQ was ignored as was the string of As in citizenship. By age ten he was talking about having “nothing to live for”.
By then private school had become a necessity, and he thrived.
For a long stretch I lived in the very rural Catskills, and the Quaker boarding school was more comfortable for him than the village where I lived. I didn’t see much of him while he was in college in a relatively friendly town in eastern Indiana, and then later for the 11 years he lived in Japan.
Eventually I moved to that college town, in hopes that he would visit more. He did, and even lived here for 5 years in his middle 30’s. He has told me that he has encountered less racism here than anywhere.
Of course, we know there is plenty to be had just a few miles away.
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Perfectly written essay. I love it.
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A lovely moving piece. Thank you for sharing it.
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Thanks for sharing your experience.
Have not experienced the racism but rater the cultural differences living 3,000 miles from home (moved from the West coast to the South).
Unfortunately some are not ready to face the reality that US is a melting pot with brilliant people of all races.
Continued success!
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Thank you for expressing the feelings of many Black Americans, whose home is a country where we are not often made welcome. Racism is apparent in America, and brown skin provides an easy target for those who are looking to lash out with hatred for any reason. However, there are communities that are as color-blind as Americans can be, and I’m blessed to belong to a multi-cultural church that welcomes all. I can’t give up hope since I am citizen of one country only.
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this was good
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Thank you for this well written reflection and insight. I’ve been searching my white privileged soul for where it all comes from. Your written experiential gift helps me to see through another lens. I’m from the Midwest – Northern Illinois – and loved the sight, smell and textures of the cornfields and farms near my parents’ home. By high school, it was all developed. Didn’t learn about red lining until my 20’s. Didn’t learn about Sundown Towns until I read Loewen’s book in my 50’s.
Thank you!
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