I return
Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried,
To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried,
Had I not run away before my time.

James Wright, from “At the Executed Murderer’s Grave”

Your father’s was the first Black face I ever remember seeing. When I was a boy of four thumbing through the pages of my father’s high school yearbook, his face stood out to me among the rest. Not the only Black face, but one of three among the flat tops and crew cuts of 1955 white America. Something seemed off to me when I sat studying the photos twenty years after our fathers graduated, after so much had come to pass in the intervening two decades. I did not, could not know then what I was seeing—what I would only begin to understand much later. But I had come to love stories by then and wondered what your father’s might be.

My father never reveled in prejudices, never draped that dreadful costume over his shoulders, and for that I am grateful. His stories of your father flowed imperceptibly into those of all the other white faces that filled the book. Yet I always lingered on your father’s page, wondering what I was missing. What parts of the story was my father leaving out?

Even now your father is merely a figure of nostalgia in my father’s mind, but only because my father would never be forced to confess what white America does to its people. “The last time I saw him was at our 50th reunion,” he said to me, “with his sister, Ada.” We all turn into mere memories one day, I thought. These two boys from Nelsonville grew up in a world before our time. When they became men they were something else altogether.

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I hate graveyards and old pawn shops
For they always bring me tears
I can’t forgive the way they robbed me
Of my childhood souvenirs.

John Prine, “Souvenirs”

I know that town those kids grew up in, what it was in the 50s, what it was in the 70s, and how it is worse now—broken in the way that many towns small and large across America are also broken. My own hometown has also been bent and broken, just a few miles away, frozen in a time that I had hoped we had moved past. These last few years have proven to me that we haven’t. Both of these Southeastern Ohio towns have tried to lean into new opportunities, new ventures, new chances to turn things around, but with limited success. Like the burned-out, left-behind neighborhoods dotting urban landscapes all across America, my father’s hometown and my own have suffered the high price of a four-decade-long redistribution of wealth from the American people into the hands of the American oligarchy. And yet it has been far easier to turn on one another than to demand a different country, for to do that we would have to find common ground and our missing belief in human dignity—universal human dignity.

Maybe we are doomed to believe in an easier past. Maybe that belief keeps us from imagining an easier future.

In my hometown this time of year, at each of the five downtown intersections on Main, you’ll find the elaborate, lighted Christmas decorations that have been strung there every year since time out of mind—now perhaps from habit more than in celebration of the season. The annual ornamentation of downtown is one of the few things by which the town identifies itself, taking pride in having escaped any legal challenges to the religious imagery adorning the granite courthouse each December. These are not litigious people. Quite the opposite, the people of the town are the sort who don’t believe they are owed anything—except, perhaps, a certain way of life that would keep them firmly moored to their past in a quickly changing and uncertain world.

We are told there is a war on Christmas, yet Christmas marches on. And so the holiday lights remain unchanged, but the same cannot be said of the empty storefronts along Main that reflect their glow. Each has gone through one unsuccessful iteration after another since the days when the downtown bustled with activity day and night. Back then there was Elberfeld’s department store, Risch’s drugstore with a lunch counter, Joe Thomas Party Shop, Leon’s Sundry & News, Sinsel’s hobby store, the Logan Daily News, G.C. Murphy department store (with two levels!), Walsh Bakery, Citizen’s Bank, Little’s Jewelry, The Sportsman Steak House, Saving Hardware (smelling always of sawdust and linseed oil), Scharff’s Fashions for Women, Keith’s Men’s Shop, Arcade Shoes, the Hideaway Lounge in a basement beneath other shops, a garage and Marathon station, the state liquor store, the Shamrock Pub, Chakeres Movie Theater, the Cameo Lounge, and the Hocking Valley Feed Company.

Even now the fallout shelter sign still hangs on the side of the theater building, seven decades after the town, like so many others, had awaited certain atomic doom. In the end, venture capitalists and global enterprises and the Walton family turned out to be far more threatening than Nikita Khrushchev—and they had all been warmly invited in with their minimum wage jobs and ubiquitous plastic goods from China. Keith’s Men’s Shop, where I rented my prom tuxedo as an abjectly terrified teenaged boy, is now the county Republican Party headquarters. On the door that advertised sales on Levi’s 501 jeans thirty-five years ago someone has placed a life-size cardboard cut-out of their candidate for office. He stares out at Main Street with an artificially-white grin on a heavily made-up face beneath a clownish wisp of dyed hair.

Outward from the downtown houses spread in all directions and up the hill that overlooks the town and the river that was once filled with barges carrying grain and coal northward. Beyond the houses a secondary business district has sprung up where, so many decades ago, there had been family-owned restaurants, furniture stores, small grocery stores, barber shops, and a few more bars. But now fast food restaurants and pizza shops have sprouted like fungi, replacing the homestyle cooking of The Colonial Inn with cold french fries, flaccid meat, and bottomless cups of pop. At the very edge of the town a twenty-four-hour-a-day superstore has risen like a pestilence, accelerating the decimation of the downtown businesses.

Businesses have come and gone—a few have survived, but most have not—and no return to the original vibrancy seems imminent. Yet a great deal of credit must be given to those who continue to invent the next iteration of this town. Pizza Crossing still stands where it always has, and the pizza still tastes blissfully the same. The Shamrock is still there, as warm and welcoming and familiar as ever, only in a new location. And that old theater where I first went to see movies has returned to its former name—The Logan Theater—and is being steadily restored into a multi-use space for the school board and other local organizations.

I’m not describing anything unusual. I’ve seen this same place, these same faces, everywhere I’ve gone.

The next iteration of my hometown and of our world often seems to be held hostage by those bent on one form of destruction or another. Small towns can birth as much love or as much hate as a big city. This has always been true. I have lived in both, in the North and the South, in the East and the West. I have seen the people of both disparaging those in the other. I have heard the people in opioid-decimated, copper-pulling rural towns describe the city as a hellscape of drugs and crimes. I have heard the people in segregated cities where black children are gunned down by white cops condescendingly decry the racism of rural America. In both I have seen far too many people applauding themselves way too loudly. Way too proudly. In both I have observed the ones who stand in the way of changing it all for the better.

In “Why are US Rightwingers So Angry? Because They Know Social Change is Coming,” (The Guardian, December 20, 2021) Rebecca Solnit argues that we are living in a time of such significant social change that those holding dearly to the past are driven to anger—and to strategies designed to thwart change—by the realization that the past will not hold (and to be clear, the past has never held). She states,

Solnit suggests that we are riding an immense wave of change in which the values of even the recent past are being replaced by new values focused on dismantling inequality and exclusion. In certain segments of the population this might be called political correctness run amok, and the backlash has been both loud and increasingly violent, but among those of us who are creating this change it is long overdue. We simply no longer have the patience for white male supremacy and the destruction that it so often leaves in its wake. Yet, I can’t seem to rid myself of the feeling that things will get much worse again before they get better. As Wendell Berry wrote, “Each new resort to violence enlarges the argument against our species, and the task of hope becomes harder” (Wendell Berry, from Our Only World: Ten Essays).

It is true that America has changed a great deal since our fathers were children together. But not really. Not in the many important ways. I have seen Black men and women murdered in the streets and in their homes. And I have heard the lies that are told to explain it all away. If I thumb through my own yearbook I will happen upon the face of another boy, just a couple years younger than me, who would grow up to become something far different than your father, than my father, than me—a Louisville police officer who, with two others, burst through the door of Breonna Taylor’s home in March 2020 with guns blazing. I think about my time living in Louisville while getting my MA, and of coming into my own there while being introduced to new people and new ideas and new ways to expand my understanding of the world around me. I eventually moved on to other cities and other opportunities. But this other boy from my hometown? He currently awaits trial for wanton endangerment for shooting indiscriminately into Taylor’s neighbor’s apartment. He is the only one of the three officers to be indicted in the killing. I do not know what to make of this, of how such violence finds its way into some and how others are desperately trying to protect human dignity. I do know I will never be shot to death in my own home by those hired to serve and protect. I do know my white male skin has protected me from that and from much more. These two boys from Logan grew up in a world before our time. When they became men they were something else altogether.

When I was in my teens I began to see the faint outline of a truth that nobody around me was speaking, one that would take decades of work to see clearly: the lessons I most needed to learn were not going to be taught by people who look like me. I needed friends in this life who told me truths that had been withheld from me.

I continue to find and listen to these friends and what they have to say. There is a pain so deep in this country that nothing, nothing, nothing will ever be right until it is healed. It is a pain manifested over and over again as one form of rage or another, set toward one action or another, but too seldom toward the very systems and people determined to hurt us all. Myisha Cherry describes one kind of rage we are witnessing across all races and all classes—a rage that fails to confront actual oppressive forces in our society—in her recent book, A Case for Rage. Evoking the work of bell hooks, she says:

Though she refers here to the narcissistic rage of Black people, it is certainly not unlike the narcissistic rage of white folks who, battered by the same oligarchic forces of white supremacy that batter people of color, turn their rage toward the folks who by all measures should be allies rather than toward those who profit off our anger and division. Why else all the faux outrage being ginned up against Critical Race Theory? After all, nearly every one of us has more in common with a Black woman asleep in her Louisville apartment than we do with Jeff Bezos. There is a pain so deep in this country that nothing will ever be right until it is healed. Unfortunately, we continually turn a blind eye from those most responsible for inflicting it.

I can by no means do justice to Cherry’s full argument here, what she calls the case for “Lordean rage,” but it is without a doubt an important argument to listen to. Our friends are telling us what we need to learn.

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I know that I am happiness and that I am also suffering, that I am understanding and that I am also ignorance.

Thich Nhat Hanh, from True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart

We always say that photographs tell a story, but of course that story requires a great deal of elaboration from the viewer. And we know the cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words, but those words still must pass through the experiential screen of the one uttering them. How many words is a yearbook worth when the students within are just eighteen? When they’re eighty? When they’re children have moved into their own second half-century? How many stories have been born in that time and meticulously or carelessly tended?

In “American Dream” you flipped the time-worn and torn image and wrote,

each story like a photograph
we can look right into

Jacqueline Woodson, from Black Girl Dreaming

Sometimes it feels as though my life has been nothing but a series of stories defined by dreams, mistaken memories, and the geography of movement and of becoming and ceasing to be. Old photographs. Other people’s stories, real but mostly imagined. The house where my father grew up is still perched precariously close to the road on Mason City Hill beside other houses set in carved-out notches in the hillside. The brick retaining wall in front looks much the same as it did nearly seventy years ago when he stood upon it in his cap and gown. I still go to the graves of those family members I’ve lost, including the recently-discovered resting place of my great-great-grandfather, Henry Breeze, a coal miner who made his way here from England in 1869. I revisit the stories I know and imagine new ones where the real history is incomplete. I keep listening until I hear. I keep asking, “What are the ways the world draws us together? What are the ways the world pushes us apart?” I never knew your father at all, of course. I hardly feel I know my own. But we are something more than our fathers. We are something different than black and white photos of children. We are something different than just black and white.

Postscript:

Time has a way of changing everything and of changing nothing at all. Within a few short months of writing this piece my father passed away at the age of eighty-five. His was a challenging life, to be sure, but a long one. A person is here one moment and gone the next—a flashing moment delineates the living from the dead. And only days before my father died, that kid from my hometown who fired indiscriminately into a Louisville apartment where Breonna Taylor was killed? He was found not guilty of any wrongdoing. A few days later, skimming through my Instagram, I saw photos acquaintances had posted of him and his high school friends in what certainly looked like a hometown hero’s welcome in one of the bars in the town where I grew up. His revelry coincided with the second anniversary of Breonna Taylor’s death. More photos telling stories of a boy from southeastern Ohio. More photos revealing, in 1080 x 1080 vibrantly-colored pixels, the black and white truths of America.

At the time of writing this postscript, the Breonna Taylor case is in the hands of federal investigators and, among other systemic failures in the raid, it has been revealed that the search warrant for the raid was issued based on falsified evidence.