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.įriends in cities have long asked me how I do it-spending year after years in these small towns that are so inhospitable to blackness. 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.
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“People from Chicago,” they say, which is code for black people. In the local newspaper, residents write angry letters about a new criminal element in town. There are no bad parts of town here, not really. My dental hygienist thinks I live in a bad part of town. There is a man who drives around in an imposing black pickup truck with white supremacist flags flying from the rear. The confederacy is, inexplicably, alive and well here. 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. In the first weeks, I was racially profiled in an electronics store. 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.įour years later, I moved to Central Indiana, a much bigger town, a small city really. In the local newspaper, residents wrote angry letters about a new criminal element-the scourge of youthful black ambition, black joy. And there were the black students on campus, the nerve of them, daring to pursue higher education. We were three hours from Chicago so my blackness was less of a curiosity, more of a threat. There were a few very, very unsuitable men who made everything ugly. There was a Starbucks, though not much else. 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. I stood on my balcony and watched as he worked, methodically, making the land useful.
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At the end of every summer, a farmer threshed the meadow and hauled the hay away. There was more to it, but there was also that. The man didn’t understand why I would not, could not raise brown children in the only place he had ever called home. 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. In the fall, I often saw a family of deer galloping across the field. The meadow was wide and green, bordered by trees. 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. 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. There was a man who made everything beautiful. There were my friends, who made the isolation bearable. The winters were endless, snow in unfathomable quantities, the aching whine of snowmobiles. During fall, deer hunting, so much venison. There were the abandoned copper mines and the vast majesty of Lake Superior and so much forest cloaking everything. I was a woman out of place but I did not always feel unsafe. We were so far north that my blackness was more curiosity than threat. In my town, the street signs were in both English and Finnish because the town had the highest concentration of Finns outside of Finland. The next town over, over the portage bridge, had seven thousand people. I lived in a town of four thousand people. 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.