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North and South: Thirty Years in Illinois, Or
How I Learned to Become a Midwesterner
It was the era of bloated sedans, clownish ties, big collars,
clunky shoes, and exaggerated sideburns—the early seventies,
a time when sixties hip was slowly being institutionalized, and
the Imperial Presidency was on the verge of self-destruction.
I moved to the Midwest during the very week of the Watergate Burglary
(June 17, 1972), when five men were arrested at two in the morning
in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington,
D. C. The other event that bracketed my initial summer in the
Midwest was the kidnapping and murder of eleven Israeli athletes
by the Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization
(September 5, 1972). Meanwhile, in Vietnam, the American military
had begun its long, implacable slide down the grim slope of ignominious
defeat. Elton John was buying more and more frivolous pairs of
eyeglasses as he pounded his piano down the Yellow Brick Road.
The sixties were fading into the purple haze of oblivion, and
soon Steely Dan (originally a Boston bar band) would alert the
ill-named Baby Boomers that they had begun the process of "reeling
in the years." The Watergate hearings, psychobabble, ecotopia,
Jerry Ford, disco, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Yuppies, and personal
computers were all waiting for us at the edge of the blue highway
where Ronald Reagan would guarantee a New Morning in America.
If all these cultural tilts, bumps, and whirls were difficult
to assess and comprehend at a national level, consider the greater
shock (or shokku, a newly imported word that arrived with the
little Toyotas, Hondas, and Datsuns now dotting the highways and
parking lots) in trying to encode all these leaps and quantum
leaps from my perspective of a "liberated" southerner,
albeit one who had grown up during the sorriest days of the segregationist
South. Improbably, I found myself planted like a stalk of hybrid
corn in the fertile black soil of the Illinois prairie, the land
of Lincoln, home of the Great Emancipator.
Although I hailed from the relatively enlightened and cosmopolitan
city of New Orleans, my head hung in shame at the mention of Selma,
Little Rock, or Birmingham. The memory of Dr. Martin Luther King,
assassinated in a Memphis motel was still poignant in our minds.
As a teeny bopper, I had thrilled to the music of Muddy Waters,
Fats Domino, Irma Thomas, Little Richard, and other "race"
musicians whose upbeat rhythm and blues was almost drowned out
by the cosmic voice-over of Boss Leander Perez, virtual dictator
of Placquemines Parish, Louisiana who fulminated like Goebbels
or Hitler about the imminent dangers of allowing "burrheads"
into our schools in 1957. I was then serving as an altar boy at
Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in the suburbs of New Orleans.
I vividly remember a hot Sunday morning after Pentecost when the
pastor solemnly announced that the parish school would be integrated
that coming fall. The good parishioners wept openly at the prospect
of this seemingly apocalyptic event. So I grew up with the strain
of sacred Church music, the raucous chants of rock and roll, and
the rhetorical hyperbole of segregationist rhetoric—the surreal
melodies that haunted my brain. During my first year of college—in
Ohio—I read Black Like Me and dwelt on the depth of our collective
cruelty. It was also in Ohio that I first encountered the complicated
attitude of northerners toward African Americans, a strange amalgam
of distancing and intellectual—but not necessarily emotional—acceptance.
Whether I liked it or not, living in the North would force me
to analyze black-white relations on a daily basis at the same
time that I tried to understand the effects of the Civil War and
the period of Reconstruction on contemporary American life. That
was a lot of baggage to drag to Illinois, much more than I could
cram into the big U-Haul truck I rented for the journey.
One of the most telling images of my childhood is the tableau
of my two closest friends armed with colored pencils, sixty-four-crayon
boxes of Crayolas, leaky ballpoint pens (those low-tech instruments
of the fifties), all the while hunched over massive sheets of
butcher paper, recreating the battle of Gettysburg, down to the
tiniest detail. They knew the full names of all the Confederate
and Union generals, the exact placement of artillery batteries,
even the location of boulders and outcroppings leading up to the
bloody ground of Little Round Top. They debated the tactics used
to retard Grant’s advance at Shiloh and Vicksburg. They argued
the merits of J. E. B. Stuart and "Stonewall" Jackson
as field commanders. And they could never decide whether Sherman
or Sheridan was the greater devil. While I waited patiently to
play ping pong or go swimming, they regaled me with Civil War
lore of a kind and complexity I didn’t encounter again until
1990 and the airing of Ken Burns’ twelve-part Civil War documentary.
At a time when Elvis was gyrating his pelvis on The Ed Sullivan
Show and Charlton Heston was parting the waves of the Red Sea
in The Ten Commandments, there must have been other attractions
for these eager young minds.
Yet this southern preoccupation with the Civil War era was the
heavy subtext of our lives. In many ways, Reconstruction still
persisted in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The South was the
last region to hook up with the Interstate System, and it was
the last to receive telephone area codes. Even McDonald’s
(a convenient cultural marker) did not erect its famous Golden
Arches in New Orleans until 1964, some nine years after the company
was founded in Des Plaines, Illinois. My closest friend’s
Irish grandfather, a certain Mr. John Lucas, then in his eighties,
would commence to cursing and flailing his cane spasmodically
at the mere mention of the word Yankee. During my first year of
high school, m y English teacher (a lover of Kafka and Picasso,
who came from Mobile, Alabama) drilled us mercilessly in elocution
so that we did not sound like "poor white trash." To
him I owe my gift of speech since he bullied his students into
speaking proper, idiomatic English. The ultimate station in life,
he confided, was to be paid a northern salary while residing in
the South, enjoying warm weather, a bountiful table, and a "decent
cup of coffee."
How many times in the past three decades have I stood dumbfounded
as some northern interlocutor exclaimed, "Where is your accent?
You don’t sound like a Southerner. I have also been told,
on more than one occasion, "You don’t look like a Southerner."
That latter comment must rank as the nadir of cultural stereotyping.
Even when I foolishly assume that all this cultural baggage is
safely stored in the basement of my unconscious, I am suddenly
brought up short by an unexpected remark. While I was finishing
this very essay, I was interviewed by a reporter from a regional
magazine which had planned a feature on local writers. I was naturally
pleased and flattered, and the reporter caught me unawares with
the inevitable, "So what ever happened to your Southern accent?"
Was I involved in some kind of linguistic subterfuge, or a new
form of cultural terrorism? No—I talk now as I did then,
perhaps a bit faster and perhaps with crisper consonants. In Britain
I am often identified as Canadian. But I do take some small delight
in pronouncing roof to rhyme with spoof—unlike my midwestern
pals who sound it out ruff, as if descending into canine growl.
Besides, there are numerous residents of southern and central
Illinois whose ancestors immigrated from Kentucky and Tennessee,
bringing with them the "good old boy" drawl of backwoods
and "hollers." So these questions of accent and regionalism
do become a tad dicey, as the Brits might say.
Linguists claim that at the end of the nineteenth century, a
person’s point of geographical origin could be pinpointed
down to the county by the sound of the speech alone. Northerners
commit a colossal faux pas by assuming that all southern speech
amounts to a giant generic drawl, even allowing for the homogenizing
effect of radio and television. As a teenager I enjoyed summer
vacations in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee,
and to my ears that accent had a distinctly mellow ring, not unlike
that of my college roommate who came from Newport ("Newp’t)
News, Virginia. My family had a few friends from Mississippi—a
dialectal lift I would never have confused with the scratchier
tones of Texas, Georgia, or Arkansas, linguistic terrains I inhabited
during the first five years of my life as an itinerant Army brat.
But those accents represent the outermost skin of my linguistic
cocoon because my parents spoke English as a second language and
doled it out to me with a syrupy Cajun coating. Their first language
was the eighteenth-century French patois still spoken openly in
the Cajun Triangle of Louisiana as recently as the 1950’s.
We owned a cotton farm briefly in Avoyelles Parish before moving
to New Orleans, and I recall church sermons, fishing expeditions,
grocery shopping, and even horse-racing conducted in du bon français
de la campagne. My maternal grandfather, Landry Desselles, always
drove his old green pick-up truck, loaded with nets and fishing
gear, down to le pays bas, the swampy areas in the bottomlands
of the Red River, where he would fish, shoot rabbits and ducks,
and trap turtles as big as washtubs. My paternal grandfather,
Marcellus Guillory, was a farmer. Je fais l’agricole, he
would explain softly. Every Saturday of his adult life, he went
to town, attired in his best shirt, suit, and hat. He drank until
he became roaring drunk. Then he played bourré, a sort
of Cajun canasta, until his luck or his money ran out. Landry
played guitar in a Cajun fais do-do band, and Marcellus stuffed
superb Cajun boudin and andouilh sausage at the open-air boucheries
where Cajun families gathered to roast suckling pigs (cochon au
lait) and slaughter the bigger hogs for ham, sausage, and bacon.
When people ask me, "Where do you come from?" I smile
wryly at the absurdity of the question. Usually, I respond by
answering "Decatur," which is where I actually work
in Macon County, Illinois, in the territory that William Gass
once described as "the heart of the heart of the country."
My roots, however, are deeper and more intricately entwined. My
surname is the third most frequently occurring French family name
in Louisiana, although when preceded by my Christian name, Daniel,
it appears Irish to many midwesterners. So sometimes I pass for
Irish. My ultimate ancestor, however, was a certain Grégoire
Guillory, who was stationed at the French fort of Mobile in the
1750’s when, as they say, he took French leave, eventually
landing in Louisiana and marrying a woman named Marie, who had
emigrated from Berne, Switzerland via Montreal and New Orleans.
Some of my ancestors were voyageurs, paddling oversized canoes
across Lake Michigan and down the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers.
While I was working on a book about the great flood of 1993, I
spent a considerable amount of time in the old French settlements
on both sides of the Mississippi below St. Louis, places like
Sainte Genevieve and Prairie du Rocher. In my interviews and historical
research, I discovered many of the same family names, like Picou
and Leblanc, that populated the roster of my childhood friends
in Louisiana. My other distant relatives were courreurs de bois,
trailblazing their way through the eastern woodlands in search
of fox, beaver, and muskrat pelts. In truth, my home is the Mississippi
Valley, a rather broad swath of land as Thomas Jefferson came
to appreciate after the Louisiana Purchase—and after his
hired hands (Lewis and Clark) had mapped and described the lesser-known
upper reaches. Having said that, I am now prepared to admit how
utterly naked and impotent I felt on encountering the anti-culture
of Decatur, Illinois in the weeks following Watergate in that
hot summer of 1972.
Watergate was a non-event when it first occurred in 1972, and
on June 17, 2002 the print and visual media had little success
in evoking all the historic drama and mythic overtones that have
since become attached to the name. In a post-9/11 world, it’s
hard to snag anyone’s attention, and one of the most important
political events of the century became mere filler in the trivial
news of the day. I do remember George McGovern visiting Decatur,
Illinois in that fateful summer of Watergate, speaking briefly
at the airport on a warm August afternoon to about fifty of the
faithful who had assembled near the runway. I was one of the loyal
volunteers who helped put up posters and banners for the event.
Democrats seemed rare in this vicinity, and rock-ribbed Republicans
abounded. Here, in May of 1865, in what is now Decatur’s
Central Park, the fledgling Illinois State Republican Party first
nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency of the United States.
Here party stalwarts shouldered newly-split fence rails to dramatize
the motto, "Lincoln the railsplitter for president."
My office window in a small liberal arts college overlooks an
oversized bronze statue of Lincoln, dressed in homespun and leaning
on his trusty axe. The legend at the base of the statue reads
plainly, "At twenty-one I came to Illinois." The Grand
Army of the Republic, the social organization for veterans of
the Union Army, was founded in Decatur. And five Union generals
came from the surrounding communities in Macon County, including
the Quartermaster General. Bronze statues of Lincoln stood at
strategic locations in downtown Decatur and in nearby Springfield,
the state capital, site of Lincoln’s home—and tomb.
This idolatry of Lincoln was the first major hurdle for a displaced
southerner like me, especially one who had grown up with bronze
effigies from the opposing side—Andrew Jackson, Robert E.
Lee, and P. T. Beauregard. Jackson, astride a rearing bronze steed
in Jackson Square in the heart of the Vieux Carré, embodied
all the ideals of the Democratic Party, the antithesis of Henry
Clay and the Whig Party (which claimed Lincoln’s total devotion
until it was dissolved at the formation of the Republican Party).
Lee, of course, was the principal strategist of the Civil War,
and Lincoln never quite forgave General Meade for allowing Lee’s
defeated Army of Northern Virginia to cross the Potomac and sneak
back into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia after the devastating
defeat of Gettysburg. General P. T. Beauregard was part of the
brilliant second line of Confederate generals—and also the
most distinguished Creole officer to serve the South. In Decatur,
I was once again surrounded by bonze reminders of the Civil War,
and I had seemingly landed in the historical mother-lode.
Actually, I was trapped in several historical envelopes, including
a recent time-warp or minor tweak which had pulled me back into
the fashions of the 1950’s. When I arrived in central Illinois
in 1972, many women still wore beehive hair styles, print calico
dresses, and Peter Pan collars (all this at a time when Ms. Magazine
was just hitting the newsstands). Men sported flat-top haircuts,
western boots and shirts, and those large, rodeo-style belt-buckles.
Country music in the form of southern pop and the Nashville Sound
could be heard twanging and jangling across the AM dial. I was
likewise stupefied by the daily spectacle of my professional colleagues
all gussied up in boxy, solid-colored (forest green, cranberry
red, burnt orange) polyester suits with the inevitable wide ties
and gargantuan shirt collars—the style that John Travolta
would shortly update in the disco classic Saturday Night Fever.
Besides sly references to my "hippie" clothing (bell-bottoms)
and hairstyle (sideburns and a few curls on the neck, nothing
extreme), besides the endless questions about my accent (or lack
thereof), I was also forced to endure video torture in the form
of endless agricultural commercials. The television screen was
filled with graphic pitches for pesticides and herbicides, vividly
illustrated with gigantic weeds, chomping beetles, and voracious
caterpillars. Every night a sad and misshapen lot of porkers paraded
across the screen, displaying the purple bruises and bloody patches
that marked them as victims of a mysterious ailment called "bloody
scours." These messages inevitably appeared during the peak
of the dinner hour. In addition to these torments, local police
actually pulled me over because I was displaying Louisiana plates,
and my Louisiana driver’s license was useless for cashing
checks. Until I transferred plates, title, and license to Illinois
I wasn’t merely a persona non grata. I was a non-person.
Eventually I exchanged the icon of the Louisiana pelican for the
icon of Lincoln, "Sportsmen’s Paradise" for "Land
of Lincoln." Until I had completed this vital paperwork,
I was wandering in a haze of xenophobia as thick and toxic as
the acrid fog of crop-dusters. My sense of cultural shock and
alienation persisted for the better part of a year. How I survived,
how I became a midwesterner, how I came to call this place home,
are perhaps the only miracles in my otherwise ordinary life.
* * *
On a preternaturally sunny day in the early summer of 1974, I
visited a one hundred twenty-five-year-old Illinois farmstead,
owned by one of my senior colleagues, a fellow who had helped
to farm this rich bottom land near the Illinois River during the
grim days of the Depression. He volunteered for the Marines in
1942, entering college and the academic life after the War. Ted
Barton, as I shall call him, had inherited this land from his
great-grandfather who had served in the Mexican-American War of
1848 and was awarded this parcel of farmland as part of his "mustering
out." Ted and I were bent studiously over our fishing poles,
trying to hook bluegill in the deep green pond on what had once
been the Military Tract of the Illinois Territory, land originally
set aside as payment in kind for Army veterans. We fried the fish,
we picked ripe blackberries, we waded through sandy-bottomed creeks
where silver-backed shad flashed in the shallows. The day began
to compose itself with the neatness of a poem. I met Ted’s
brothers, sisters-in-law, and numerous cousins. We fired up an
ancient John Deere tractor and cleared thick brush on the crown
of the hill. At evening we stood overlooking the Illinois River
Valley and watched the sun go down on Dickson Mounds, site of
a state museum and one of the largest burial sites of the Mound
Builders, whose culture stretched up the Ohio and down the Mississippi
all the way to Louisiana.
A small college creates its own bubble-like environment, and
I had made little real contact with the people or the land of
Illinois until that day with Ted and Muriel, his schoolteacher
wife. As we walked through the woods, I spied a strange plant
on the forest floor. "Jack-in-the-pulpit," exclaimed
Muriel. And what was that odd little assemblage of twisted leaves?
"Dutchman’s breeches," she explained. Growing up
on a rural farm, she had pressed countless leaves and flowers
into scrapbooks, memorizing the names, especially the folk names,
of the plants that grew on the prairie, including big bluestem,
little bluestem, coneflower, prairie dock, mayapple, wild carrot,
chicory, and rattlesnake master.
She and Ted could point out honey locust, black locust, post
oak, river birch, bush pine, red oak, white oak, burr oak, shagbark
hickory, and all the common trees of prairie groves and river
courses. They loved the environment on a first-name basis, including
the avian realm of brown and green hummingbirds, scarlet tanagers,
flickers, indigo buntings, purple finches, red-tailed hawks, Canada
geese, and even the odd bald eagle soaring over the willows and
sycamores of the bottomland in late fall and winter. In medieval
culture, schoolmen and churchmen used the Latin term plenitudo
to describe the abundant richness of the created world. Since
the time of my arrival in Illinois, I had craved a certain fullness,
something to compensate for the agoraphobia induced by the dizzying
360-degree horizons. In the ecosystem of the prairie, Ted and
Muriel helped me discover an analog to the ecologically dense
world of the bayou. They were my guides and gurus to "prairieland,"
the quaint term used by early visitors to describe this vast and
rolling terrain.
Many of my eastern peers in the groves of academe also suffered
agoraphobia on first encountering the vaulted skies and long horizons
of central Illinois. I actually ached under that openness since
I had grown up in a world of tropical vines and canopies of live
oak and Spanish moss. After several visits to the Barton Farm,
and after hiking along the banks of the Sangamon River, I began
to have a sense of the land. I returned again and again to a bluff
outside Decatur where the Lincolns cleared space for a one-room
cabin in the summer of 1830. One of my good friends from Louisiana
actually described the spot as "beautiful," a term I
had previously reserved for every locale except Illinois. By precious
increments my personal prairie space was becoming populated with
living things. I was beginning to hear the faint murmuring of
history and the softer whispering of prehistory. Without realizing
it, I was succumbing to the blandishments and seductions of middle
American culture. Today, when I hear the Midwest dismissed as
flat, dull, boring—or "flyover country"—I
am profoundly offended because I had to study the landscape and
learn to love it. This process may have been a survival tactic,
or it may have sprung from the deepest of all American needs:
a craving for a sense of place. In the Midwest, place seeps into
your bones and being. A few years ago, I spent part of a pleasant
autumn in the Lake District of northern England. After weeks of
stone cottages, picturesque lanes, hills, and lakes, I found myself
scanning the horizon, like a submarine captain at his periscope,
searching at dusk for the archetypal red barns, spindly windmills,
and silver-capped silos of the prairie, the fundamental icons
that have been wired to my consciousness.
I am not the first outlander to fall prey to the siren song of
the prairie—nor the first to write about this curious process.
In the 1830’s many English, Scottish, and eastern American
travelers trooped through Illinois, marveling at the giant sunflowers,
the swaying prairie grass, and the majestic Indian mounds, still
untouched by farmers, looters, or road-builders. In the same decade,
poet William Cullen Bryant left Massachusetts to visit his two
brothers In Jacksonville, Illinois. During the visit he had ample
time to explore the Illinois prairie at his leisure, and in 1833
he published "The Prairies," calling them "the
gardens of the Desert." He noted the uniqueness of the place
"for which the speech of England has no name." Eliza
Farnham, an upstate New Yorker with transcendentalist and progressive
leanings, was also taking copious notes on Illinois life and culture
at the same time, a little farther north near Peoria. She did
not publish her work until 1846 when her classic Life in Prairie
Land appeared. Farnham was remarkably candid about the hardships
and beauties of frontier life. She catalogued the pains (malaria,
wild fires, blizzards, frostbite) and the pleasures (wide prairie
vistas, the cornucopia of fruits and flowers, and the joys of
rural hospitality). So contemporary writers, I suppose, must likewise
take the good with the bad, the broad green bands of corn and
beans, the meandering creeks and streams, the flaming autumn foliage—and
the hideous strip malls, ugly landfills or slag heaps, and the
urban blight of boarded-up houses and rusted-out factories. The
urban sprawl of Chicago now extends ninety miles westward from
the Loop. But there is still much to savor in the transparency
and regularity of everyday prairie life, a social and personal
richness still accessible in hundreds of towns, counties, villages,
and townships across the Midwest. The overwhelming impression
one receives—when flying overhead in spring and summer—is
that of a broad expanse of green fields, rich, fertile, and beautifully
organized.
The orderliness of things is palpable—not merely the mathematical
precision of fields, the angularity of barns and outbuildings,
or the neatly platted grids of typical midwestern towns. There
is a reassuring sobriety and decency in human relations, a sense
of moderation and social optimism that sustains even the smallest
transactions and accounts for generosity on a heroic scale, especially
during natural disasters like the great flood of 1993. There is
a kind of social gyroscope that keeps things upright. Aberrations
like the Springfield race riot of 1908 (witnessed by poet Vachel
Lindsay) become models of shame, and the perpetrators are forever
anathema. In his masterful study of early Illinois culture, Frontier
Illinois, James Davis makes the point that, alone among the midwestern
states, Illinois had no early history of internal conflict on
a major scale because social consensus was always the goal. Ray
Bial, a personal friend and distinguished midwestern author-photographer,
once shared with me his belief that the essence of the midwestern
personality is moderation. Outsiders may understandably mistake
that quality as evidence of apathy or inertia. But the cultural
evidence shows otherwise. This same region became the cradle for
Frank Lloyd Wright’s revolutionary Prairie Style of architecture
as well as the Chicago Renaissance, including the University of
Chicago, the Art Institute, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the poetry
of Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg--and the
novels of Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser.
The harvests of Illinois have always included cultural and agricultural
productions, poetry and red barns, skyscrapers and hybrid corn.
American poetry and architecture, both dependent on strong, simple
lines and honesty of expression, owe their modernist beginnings
to prairie culture. Filmmakers routinely evoke midwestern icons
as symbols of the heartland and basic American goodness, as in
the recent Road to Perdition, where young William Sullivan is
rescued by an anonymous Illinois couple whose poor farm is located
in a beautiful montage of straight highways and neatly demarcated
fields. Young Michael’s experience echoes that of another
fictional character, Huckleberry Finn, who is treated wisely and
humanely by Mrs. Judith Loftus when he crosses over to the Illinois
side of the Mississippi River in the improbable disguise of a
girl.
* * *
All the values of midwestern life, the unflappable attitude,
the strong work ethic, and the quiet commitment to reason and
learning, were considerably shaken and partially eroded by the
events of the Reagan Years, and the decade of the eighties as
a whole. From my perspective, no decade of the twentieth century
(including the roaring twenties and psychedelic sixties) accomplished
such a dramatic rearrangement in the furniture of our cultural
lives. Even the tectonic plates groaned and cracked under the
stress of change. During the eighties, American greed and conspicuous
consumption were made manifest in the familiar forms of Yuppies,
stock indexing, money market funds, corporate mergers, globalization,
downsizing, and the ubiquitous bottles of Perrier. Luxury and
over-the-top glitziness became the norm. AIDS and HIV entered
the lexicon of everyday life. The common anti-intellectualism
of American high schools became the norm at college campuses as
well. Grunge thought presumably preceded grunge rock. Suddenly
everyone developed "attitude." In 1989 and 1990, at
the close of the decade, I served as a Fulbright Lecturer in Gabon,
West Africa. My first sight on returning to the country in 1990
was that of a small boy wearing a T-shirt bearing the likeness
of Bart Simpson and the legend, "Eat my shorts."
A certain coarseness, as in the humor of Joan Rivers and Ford
Fairlane, had come to the forefront of American life, as if everyone
had been given a walk-on part in a national film version of Animal
House. Urban jazz, jazz fusion, and the last chords of unsynthesized
rock were being drowned out by the monotonous thumping of Jamaican
Dub, Hip Hop, and Gangsta Rap, the three styles that became the
basis for all pop music in the new millenium. And as if all those
external changes weren’t sufficiently disorienting, by the
mid-1980’s the personal computer was on the scene, setting
the stage for a another cultural shift, one that privileged privacy,
self-gratification, and instant acquisition. The age of point-and-click
and "You’ve got mail" were right around the corner.
Midwestern culture might have weathered the battering effects
of this cultural hurricane had it not been for a fundamental change
in the economic structure of the region. The midwestern crash
was part of a larger scenario of global wheeling and dealing,
sleazy entrepreneurs, junk bonds, crooked CEO’s, multinational
corporations, and fraudulent earning reports that pushed the Dow-Jones
average over the ten thousand mark until the cascade of 2002,
when the paper empires of Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, and others began
to blow away. But the damage had already been done; the basic
wealth and industrial plant of the United States never really
recovered from the decade of the eighties, in spite of the successes
in Silicon Valley. Detroit and its midwestern allies in auto production
continued to downsize as they fired trained workers and lost more
and more market share. The automobile industry had always been
concentrated in the midwest, so the heartland was naturally hit
the hardest. Steel-producing plants and other forms of old technology
were also concentrated in the midwest, and the closing of plant
after plant gave the region a new nickname—the "rustbelt."
Many of the petrodollars accumulated during the 1970’s and
1980’s were being used by OPEC investors to buy farmland
in the midwest, often on a large scale. In central Illinois, for
example, foreign and domestic speculators drove up the price of
prime land from around $700 to $5,000 per acre. At the same time,
the Reagan Administration, through the Department of Agriculture
and the Production Credit Association, encouraged farmers to buy
additional acreage, oversized tractors, combines, and other agricultural
technology, like high-tech hog farms. Most of these purchases
were in the six- or seven-figure range. By the mid-1980’s
the combined effect of global economics and over-investment at
the local level resulted in a catastrophic decline in the number
of family farms, especially in Iowa and Illinois. In spite of
the heroic efforts and populist idealism of John Mellencamp and
Willy Nelson through their Farm Aid concerts, the process seemed
inexorable. The nineties were as disastrous as the eighties in
this respect, and the decline continued, part of a larger historical
shift that has been occurring since the 1920’s and the advent
of the modern highway system. But the loss of the family farm
is the single biggest blow to midwestern culture, because it is
the physical and psychological seat of the defining values, like
the family, the work ethic, the land itself, and a certain kind
of stoicism.
All of these values naturally suffered during the accelerated
decline in the number of family farms during the 1980’s and
1990’s. The first signal change in attitude was a marked
preference for the "sun belt" as opposed to the "rust
belt.’ Many of the aging factories in places like Clinton,
Iowa, or Flint, Michigan, or Anderson, Indiana, or Decatur, Illinois
closed their doors or abruptly gained new owners whose headquarters
were perhaps in London or Osaka. And the new owners often renamed,
sold, consolidated, or downsized their American operations, a
trend quite visible in Decatur as shown by the fate of Borg-Warner,
Firestone, and A. E. Staley, taken over respectively by Zexel,
Bridgestone, and Tate and Lyle. Off-season and supplementary factory
jobs that had silently kept the family farms afloat began to vanish.
Farm children, who in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s,
armed only with a high school diploma, could land high-paying
factory jobs in nearby towns now found themselves out of work
and out of luck. Hence, they began the exodus to the sun belt,
especially the counties clustered around metropolitan centers
like Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Denver, and Phoenix.
In the 1980’s the population of Decatur, Illinois actually
declined, while an eerie scenario of real-estate and consumer-goods
deflation began to play out. A house that would have cost at least
a half-million dollars in the hyperactive southern California
market would go for a tenth of that in central Illinois. When
I first moved to Decatur, all of the following everyday items
cost significantly more than they did in my hometown of New Orleans:
a quart of milk, a gallon of gasoline, a new washing machine,
a visit to the dentist, or even a ticket to the Roxy. By the 1980’s
that ratio was diametrically reversed, and I was shocked to discover
how expensive New Orleans had become. Even today Chicago and St.
Louis appear to be bargains by comparison to Boston, say, or New
York, or San Francisco.
Economic changes always have far-reaching cultural consequences.
Midwesterners became poorer in dollars but poorer in spirit, too.
A certain sense of inferiority began to express itself. The work
ethic suddenly seemed a lot less chic in the era of Blue light
Specials. By bumper-sticker, billboard, T-shirt, and the yadda-yadda
(an eighties coinage) of daily conversation, midwesterners joined
the national chorus of complaint about the drag of working. Closely
linked to what Robert Hughes calls the "culture of complaint"
was a radical change in attitude towards the weather. Generations
of midwesterners were conditioned by working in freezing weather,
driving wagons and cars through blinding "white outs,"
and generally trying to keep warm. Swedes and Norwegians chose
to settle in the upper Midwest precisely because of its freezing
winters. Now midwesterners who couldn’t physically participate
in the migration to the sun belt began to openly repudiate their
defining blizzards and ice storms. This new attitude amounted
to a kind of cultural treason because if anything separated northerners
and southerners, it was the weather. Temperature and temperament
seemed closely linked, at least in the popular mind.
During the late 1970’s I lived through a series of apocalyptic
winters when people bragged about their natural ability to withstand
the cold. "Give me the cold because I can’t stand the
heat!" was the mantra of the day. In 1978, snow accumulated
on the ground for six weeks in southern Illinois, and at the other
end of the state in Chicago (where I was trying to work on a fellowship
at the University of Chicago), eighty-one inches of snow fell,
making that the worst winter on record, temporarily forcing the
closure of O’Hare Airport and Lakeshore Drive. I walked through
trenches and tunnels of ice to reach my office on Fifty-Eighth
Street. Today, I often observe students who have lived all their
lives in the glow of planetary warming. In their preferred style
of dress they have symbolically moved to the sun belt, making
no distinction between winter and summer wardrobes. And they are
usually decked out in T-shirts, shorts, and sandals at the first
hint of spring. Many of these hot bloods do not seem to own anything
heavier than a sweatshirt. One day in late March of 2002, I watched
Frisbees being tossed in the air as a late snowstorm zoomed in
from Iowa and dumped six soggy inches of white stuff on the incredulous
athletes, burying the Frisbees and all vernal exuberance for the
rest of the afternoon.
Of course, global warming and unpredicted meteorological quirks
only contribute to these skewed perceptions of weather. Although
Americans posess critically short memories, some may recall that,
in 1993, a once-in-a-thousand-year flood engulfed eleven states
of the Midwest, including every single county in Iowa, a state
which had already lost the largest number of family farms. The
most visible archetypes of the culture seem to be slowly disappearing,
the snowy fields beloved by poets like Robert Bly, the ship-like
barns, and the little white farmhouses with "gingerbread"
trimming on porches and gables. Can the Midwest thus maintain
its identity as its loses its weather and its most trusted images
of itself?
A deeply-rooted sense of place has always characterized midwestern
life, and at a certain point culture is place. What happens when
the place is being systematically reconfigured because the weather
waffles or invisible corporations bulldoze family farms to create
giant green factories that profit from the much-lauded "economies
of scale"? Ironically, I find myself worrying about the loss
of midwestern identity at the same time that I have belatedly
found it. In spite of county fairs and active local history organizations
(many of which raise funds to save old barns and preserve other
historical sites), the younger folk seem to have missed all the
poetry of the place. Two of my brightest graduates (both from
farm families) were delighted to be "getting out," having
found good jobs in San Antonio and Denver. The exodus continues.
Having largely forsaken or lost their familiar weather patterns
and some of their heritage, midwesterners obviously changed their
mind about the South, too. In the last five years especially,
I have been steadily pestered by students, peers, and neighbors
with requests for maps, brochures, and general tourist tips on
the City of New Orleans, which they can now pronounce reasonably
well, having lost the New Or-leens of Tin Pan Alley and popular
speech and replaced it with a fairly serviceable "New Orlins,"
which is close to the "Nawlins" I actually hear in the
creolized speech of the Crescent City itself. Fastidious old-timers
realize the name is French, and they pronounce all four syllables,
New Or-le-ans.
"How could you leave?" the returning tourists typically
demand. Paradoxically, I am being asked to justify the good time
spent with my northern hosts and—indirectly—how I became
a midwesterner. This dramatic show of incredulity at my abandonment
of the land of mint juleps and ante-bellum plantations stands
in sharp contrast to the typical comments I used to hear about
the good old southland. Here are some samples: "How did you
ever stand all that heat and humidity?" or "You mean
those people actually eat crayfish?" or "Did you know
they invented jazz down there?" or "I don’t think
I could live in a place that didn’t have four seasons!"
or "I’ve tried rattlesnake and eel, but you won’t
catch me eating alligator!" I honestly don’t try to
make much of a response anymore. What’s the use of pointing
out that the City has become a caricature of itself, "New
Orleans Land," as my brother-in-law calls it? For the City
has devolved into a three-dimensional fantasy world that meets
all the expectations of midwesterners, well-behaved and well-mannered
tourists, who sample it in small bites as they dash from one air-conditioned
building to another.
* * *
While I was writing this essay, squadrons of green and gold Japanese
beetles landed to digest the leaves of my elm trees, blackberry
bushes, redbuds, crabapple, apricot, and tea roses, free-standing
evidence of my midwestern love of gardening. Of course, people
garden all over the world, and admittedly the English, French,
and Japanese do so with a special verve and artistry. But in the
midwest gardening is a common and general practice, occupying
a good deal of the population’s free time between Easter,
say, and Halloween. Gardening was the first behavioral clue to
my changing identity in this part of the world. Although I don’t
aim for champion, blue-ribbon pumpkins or giant ears of corn,
I do grow organic tomatoes, beans, peppers, herbs, okra (a concession
to my southern roots), and blackberries, as well as marigolds,
tulips, irises, tea roses, gladiolus, coneflowers, and wisteria.
My acre of good black Illinois soil is populated with numerous
trees and lilac bushes, and the seasons follow a more finely-tuned
clock now that I am surrounded by hundreds of planted bulbs and
flowering trees that bloom in succeeding weeks of the springtime.
Winter whiteness sharpens the eye and makes one appreciate the
tiniest show of green. My first winter in Illinois seemed so melancholy
and gray that I treasured every blade that pushed up through the
crust of ice—spears of crocus and snowdrop, and the tiny
emerald shoots of bluegrass and rye. Gardening is a passport to
social acceptance—at least in rural Illinois—and it
offers an instant topic or icebreaker for neighborly chitchat.
When I first moved to rural Shelby County, where I now live in
a one hundred-seven-year-old farmhouse, my retired farmer-neighbor
came over to supervise, inquiring suspiciously, "Are you
doing that there or-ganic gardening?" He and his wife have
been gone for years, but he gave me a stand of deep pink hollyhocks.
And this summer they are in splendid bloom, in spite of near-drought
conditions.
To garden is to monitor the climate and the weather, and there
is an abundance of both on the prairies. I have experienced drought,
flood, tornado, blizzard, ice storm, and earthquake, each one
several times, in my tenure on the prairie. Here, weather-talk
is richly nuanced and endlessly varied, the midwestern equivalent
of all the good old boy yarns, the verbal winks and nods of southern
tall tales. Like my neighbors, I find myself spinning endless
variations on weather topics, especially the actuality or probability
of rainfall. "What we need about now is a good general rain,"
the old farmers will utter with oracular certitude, and usually
they are right. Or they will offer highly specific coordinates
for a rainstorm or tornado: "They got about two-tenths of
an inch at Pruitt’s Farm, and we ain’t got nothing."
Or, "Twister followed the hard road all the way from Chatham
to Springfield." I think Illinois farmers and woodsmen should
go on "walkabout," like the Australian aborigines who
identify distinctive landforms and sing the land back into being.
Rain talk and weather talk are perhaps popular and profane examples
of the same sacred urge.
The grandfather of all weather clichés in Illinois must
be this old saw: "If you don’t like the weather, just
hang around because it’s bound to change." And so it
does. The mercury can plunge forty-five degrees in a single afternoon.
At this latitude, we’ve experienced one hundred and ten degrees
Fahrenheit in high summer and twenty-five below in the dead of
winter. I speak of actual temperatures here without all the folderol
of the "misery index" or "wind chill factor."
Perhaps I have grown abnormally sensitive to variations in light,
wind, temperature, and the pressure gradients that build like
a palpable wall as a new front inevitably moves in. I read clouds.
I adore space—the same cavernous skies that terrified a bayou
boy used to the small-scale snugness of bayous and lagoons. I
cannot imagine the midwest without that sense of space, and it
is always a relief to return to the middle world after the mountains
and deserts of New Mexico, the swamps and bayous of Louisiana,
or the glass and steel megalopolis of the eastern seaboard. Rightly
of wrongly I feel the midwest occupies the physical and spiritual
center of the country. It is a great, breathing organ to which
everything else is attached, like a series of appendages.
I have mastered the small rituals which organize the pleasures
of life on the prairie, like raising the index finger from the
steering wheel to salute and greet oncoming motorists without
unseemly waving or shouting. Dressing for my part, I now own work
boots, field coats, and a dozen or so baseball caps, some bearing
the logos of hybrid seed companies. I have even learned to listen,
not an easy skill for a Cajun to acquire, especially one who grew
up in a household where everyone talked a lot and everyone was
always right. Like a Japanese host at tea ceremony, where the
object of the ritual is to make the other person feel comfortable,
I have patiently introduced subjects that would allow my guest
to speak confidently. Talking purely for the sake of talking seems
to come naturally to southerners, but midwesterners engage in
the practice hesitantly and with some obvious twinges of guilt:
"I better stop gabbing and let you get back to work."
One of my village friends is Shelburn, the local mechanic and
handyman. He is an excellent, dedicated craftsman, and I love
to watch him work. Actually, I love to hear him talk while he’s
working. He can ramble on endlessly about cars, contraptions which
he’s worked on for over five decades. He’ll point to
the leaking gasket, the snaggle-toothed gear, the frayed wire
and deliver a homily on failed transmissions and short-circuited
headlamps. In between the automotive talk, he gives short elegies
on departed friends, or rhapsodizes about the golden days when
the village had three cinemas and two car dealerships. I hear
the cadences of Kentucky in his speech, but I also hear the precise
diction of the automotive engineer. One day he stunned me with
a little digression on the temples of Japan, which he visited
during his Korean War service. As one of my eastern friends is
fond of saying, "Midwesterners may be slow to open up, but
once the dam breaks, look out!" I still miss the saltiness,
puns, and hyperbole of southern speech—to say nothing of
its torrential flow. But I have also come to savor the trickles
of midwestern speech, especially its habitual indirection. Rather
than tell a penny-pinching farmer that he must install a new transmission
on his farm truck, Shelburn might say, "A fellow could still
get a whole lot more use out of this truck with maybe a little
work, like a new gearbox."
* * *
Shelburn is one of valuable pieces in the puzzle of my life.
I have learned to appreciate him, and all the people and places
that framed my existence. By trying to provide a context for my
own life, I have a better understanding of the changes in three
formative decades—the seventies, eighties, and nineties—in
two utterly different places—the north and the south. I have
meditated on the mysteries of time and culture and their various
intersections at key points in my life. The changes I experienced
over the last thirty years, north and south,, are emblematic of
the larger permutations in the national culture. And the midwest
is a fairly reliable barometer for changes in the surrounding
culture.
Presumably, contemporary Americans have now all become electronic
citizens, escaping the clinging gravity of local time and regional
culture, as they slip into hyperdrive, cruise down the Information
Highway, and leave Marshall McLuhan’s "Gutenberg Galaxy"
forever. It is not surprising, then, that journalists had such
poor success in their recent attempts to summon interest in Watergate,
even on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary. Maybe we’re
all too busy pointing and clicking to examine the ground under
our feet. We all seem to possess user-names now but only a virtual
country in which to use them. I learned that studying culture,
no matter how briefly, returns us to the real land whence we came.
In a world that is constantly reified on the computer screen,
we are all in danger of becoming cultural refugees, not knowing
our own stories, or even how to tell them, because, as electronic
citizens, we are strangely franchised and disenfranchised, all
in a nanosecond. I passionately hope that we will find ways to
use the new technology as a way of enhancing our fleeting sense
of place, so that we all find a home, which is the one value Americans
place above all others.
Home can become a tricky concept, as I recently discovered when
somehow my old home of New Orleans began to feel distinctly more
foreign than my adopted home of Illinois. Further reflection on
this paradox made me also cope with the fact that I have actually
lived longer in Illinois than anywhere else on the planet. Thirty
years can dramatically alter cities—and lives. Now I pass
for midwestern, even though the Midwest itself is changing under
my feet. And the home I made here is not merely physical but phenomenological,
a place of the mind. I have lived in any number of prosperous
American cities without experiencing what Gaston Bachelard loved
to call the "poetics of space," or what Martin Heidegger
liked to refer to as "the ground of being." But my home
is precisely that sense of grounded space, here on the prairie.
I cherish certain defining midwestern moments. After a few days
of blustery snow, when the world is locked in ice, the glaring
sun hangs in a postcard-blue sky. Everything has been turned to
whiteness, save the vertical order of things, telephone poles,
weathered boards, rusted-out water-pumps, and the fragile vanes
of windmills. The light is acetylene, blistering the eyes, and
every image is cut sharply into the consciousness, as if by laser
scalpel. In such moments I am always fully alive, redeemed, and
awakened. Tonight, I am reading under the ash tree, and the heat
of July is retreating in slowly moving waves. A gold and magenta
sunset is simmering along the horizon. High above, a crescent
moon rises over the little ember of Mars. Suddenly, the cicadas
erupt in a deafening cacophony, and I gaze slowly over the rows
and rows of hybrid corn, undulating as the ground gently falls
and rises, as far as the eye can see.
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