Middled

Carrie, Kerry

2009-04-21T09:45:00.004-05:00

Way back when Middled was just getting on its feet (feet that it soon will find again), my friend, Edan, wrote a great post about some of her more mystifying encounters with the local dialects of eastern Iowa. Edan is from Los Angeles, where people talk like TV and don’t say the word “bag” as if it rhymed with “leg.”

When I first read about Edan’s encounters with this particular Midwestern tongue, I found her observations incredibly funny. I couldn’t believe Iowans said, “can of corn” when they meant, “easy as pie,” or that they scoffed at “supermarket” as an alternative to “grocery store.” By the end of the post, I was quietly cackling at my neighbors just a few hours to the north.

The following January, I met my girlfriend, Danielle, a native Philadelphian, and eventually moved to her city. We got along pretty well and seemed to understand each other, despite some difference in our accents. One of her co-workers pointed out that I looked “very Midwestern” in my plaid shirt and Danielle was disturbed that one of my favorite childhood desserts was something called, “Mother’s Good Stuff,” but she was impressed by my city’s arch and I respected her bell.

We moved into a crappy sublet for the summer with no closets and plywood floors freshly coated with gray latex paint. By August, our bathroom towel racks, toilet paper holder and two IKEA shelves had all torn away from the porridgy drywall and crashed to the floor. We were miserable in the heat, but couldn’t open the front windows because we lived on the first floor. We dreaded going home, even if it was just to pack our swimsuits and a few t-shirts for our weekends in New Jersey. But we were happy.

Looking back, I recognize the early signs of trouble that seemed so innocent at the time, even funny.

The first bump in the road was a preposition. As surprised as I was to discover that Philadelphia is just an hour’s drive from the Atlantic Ocean, I was more confused by the response I got when I told people we were heading “to the shore.”

Danielle kindly corrected me. “Down the shore,” she explained, is the appropriate phrasing.

“Down to the shore?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

For me, this was a time of discovery. One morning, while eating a bagel at our dining room table for two, I found myself mesmerized by the label on a container of cream cheese. The epiphany broke like a levee.

“Philadelphia!” I shouted. “Huh.”

During this period, Danielle was also discovering things about me. For instance, I guess that I say, “proaly,” instead of, “probably,” as if I were drunk. I am also inclined to overuse the word, “booya.” As in, “Booya! This pasta is cooked perfectly.” Or when I give someone a gift that they really like. I’m not sure if there is any cultural explanation for this, but my sister seems to say it even more.

I’ve noticed that Danielle sometimes says “horrible” as if the first syllable rhymed with “bar,” but who isn’t susceptible to the decline of language in our modern age?

In February, we traveled to St. Louis to visit Danielle’s sister, Joanna, who lives in Jefferson City, where I’m sure her pristine eastern speech is constantly assaulted by backwater idioms and inflections. Danielle’s mom, Jean, and another sister, Sarah, went with us, which provided a nice opportunity for them to meet my parents and for us compare the more distinct dialects of the generation before us.

In the end, it was too hard to decide whether my dad’s, “Let me warsh the dishes,” was funnier than Jean’s, “Could I have a glass of wuder?”

This kind of linguistic comparison makes for great conversation and enables florid displays of regional pride, just like laughing at a British person for calling a popsicle an “ice lolly.”

Danielle and I have learned to accept each other’s speech, or to at least live with it until long-term cohabitation brings us into alignment. The one point I’m still stuck on, though, is a pair of names.

In 2004, John Kerry lost the presidential election. In 2005, Carrie Underwood won American Idol. To my ear, Kerry and Carrie and perfect homonyms, meaning that I would say them in exactly the same way. Danielle, on the other hand, who happens to have a friend with the last name Kerry and works with a woman named Carrie, has a different take.

Apparently, I say Kerry correctly, but should try to say the word, “curry,” as if my tongue has just been injected with Novocain when addressing a Carrie.

For love and the purpose of assimilation, I’m willing to try.

Fizz

2009-04-09T08:20:00.007-05:00

If you were recently wondering why Barack Obama, having been elected months ago, still hadn’t taken down his campaign posters, then you noticed Pepsi’s re-branding campaign. With a suspiciously cynical flare, the great cola maker tweaked the sunrise logo and slapped it into the word “HOPE,” promising to “refresh America.”

Other companies were also grasping for presidential coattails. IKEA swiftly proclaimed that “Change starts at home,” while Southwest Airlines introduced its “Yes You Can” sale in late January, which was slightly less endearing than the new Ben and Jerry’s flavor, “Yes Pecan!”

I guess advertisers can’t be blamed for following success, but Pepsi has taken its pandering beyond the bounds of taste. In search of other stimulating words that happen to contain the letter O, Coca-Cola’s syrupy sweet stepsister must’ve really extended its marketing research department to come up with “Ho Ho Ho” and “Wow.”

They even considered regional demographics, navigating the complexities of culture and dialect, which is probably why, on our way to the Wal-Mart superstore in Rolla, Missouri, my grandfather and I spotted the following billboard.

And also why, on my way to work, every day for the past three months, I’m reminded that I live in an urban environment, where urban people are just as easily pegged as any hick from Missouri.

Photos of Fishtown

2009-02-18T12:17:00.014-06:00

My friend, Nick, and I are recent arrivals to a neighborhood in north Philadelphia with a great deal of character. Fishtown, as it's known, has piqued the interests of historians and developers alike, but manages to retain its personality and most of its grit.

Michael Williams, creator of A Continuous Lean, also took an interest in the place and was generous enough to provide some space on his blog for Nick's brief, but excellent tour. Being the nice guy that he is, Nick let me take the photos.

For the full experience, follow this link.

Here are a few images that aren't on the standard tour:

(I don't know what this is.)

(A sad memorial)

(An icon)

(Our neighbors around the corner)

It's a nice place to live.

How do you organize your bookshelf?

2009-02-08T10:12:00.006-06:00

I usually just arrange my books by size with some attention to genre, including “Books I Bought But Still Haven’t Read,” which is one of the largest. A few weeks ago, Danielle came across a more aesthetic approach posted on Design Sponge.

I think in the near future we’ll be assessing the hues and gradations of our spines, but there are other approaches.

While I was out getting coffee recently with my friend Nick, we wandered into an out-of-the-way shop on Frankford Avenue called Germ Books. Germ is an odd place. It appears to be your average dingy retail space turned living room-sized bookstore, but a closer look reveals some unique characteristics.

I found a Literature section with familiar titles, and the overabundance of Sci-Fi and conspiracy theory books didn’t seem all that weird. Then I came across a low shelf with a quirky description.

Nick came out of the art gallery in the back looking pale. He didn’t say anything, so I went to see for myself and discovered a series of unspeakable drawings. I backpedaled into the front of the store, where Nick and I exchanged an ashen look before getting the hell out there.

We may never go back, but out of appreciation for that shelf that made me chuckle, I think I’ll let Germ Books speak for itself.

“GERM Books + Gallery began out of a need for a truly alternative independent bookstore that would provide access to ideologically unpopular books; books that address difficult social topics; books that don't cater to the lockstep mentality of the current counterculture; and books that reveal who our true masters are: The UFO Overlords.”

I see.

P.S. - Organizing a bookshelf can be more perilous than you'd think...

Teaching is Hard

2008-07-29T11:26:00.005-05:00

As I mentioned in the last post, I’m now teaching GED and Adult Basic Education courses at a nonprofit “education and technology center.” The students range in age from their early twenties to their late sixties and come to our center with a variety of academic and work experiences. Some never attended high school or completed a few years, but fell short of earning their diplomas.

Some students are referred through the Move Up program, funded by the Pennsylvania departments of Education and Welfare. Others walk in off the street hoping to improve their reading, writing and math skills or to attain their GED. We teach immigrants who have transitioned out of our center’s English as a Second Language program and a few learners who have been homeless and are currently living in shelters.

Initially, I was surprised by how respectful and engaged the students were in my classes and in the others that I observed. I’ve realized that this is a reflection of the safe and supportive environment that the program directors and other teachers have created. Attendance is pretty inconsistent, but the learners feel comfortable enough to assume their roles as students, despite the obstacles and failures they’ve experienced in the past, and the majority of them are committed to the process.

Before I interviewed for the job in May, my soon-to-be director asked me if I would mind being interviewed by some of the students. He said that one of the teachers wanted to create a lesson around job applications and interview skills, so I agreed to it. He also asked if the teacher could share my cover letter and resume with the students, and I agreed to that too.

When I got to the office that day, I chatted with the administrators for a little while and was then led to one of the classrooms to meet with the students. There were about ten people sitting at tables spread out in a way that seemed more suitable for independent study than classroom instruction and my first thought was, “Okay, adults need a lot more space.”

I sat down at the front of the room and got a nice introduction from the teacher who had organized the lesson. This was a Basic Education class, which means that the students are developing some fundamental skills and aren’t yet ready for a GED prep class. All but one of the learners were African-American, and most of them returned my friendly but uncomfortable smile.

The students asked me a few basic interview questions that they had pulled off the Internet the day before, but I did most of the talking. We went through my resume and I told some stories about teaching ESL in Russia and then Kindergarten as a substitute teacher. They asked where I saw myself in five years and to describe a time when I’d dealt with a conflict at work. Then one student came up with a question that he hadn’t found on a website or even written down. He was probably in his early forties and spoke deliberately to minimize a slight impediment in his speech.

“Well,” he said, “you’ve taught all these kinds of people before, but how you gonna teach us?”

Eight weeks in, that’s the question I’m still trying to answer—particularly in the lower-level reading and writing class. With that group, I’ve found that meeting the students’ learning needs, which in some cases requires phonics instruction and writing basics such as capitalization, while also acknowledging the knowledge and experience that they bring into the classroom as adults is a real challenge. Understandably, they have a pretty low tolerance for materials and tasks that are either too easy or too difficult, and in light of their mixed abilities, the success or failure of a particular lesson can be hard to anticipate.

With attendance inconsistent, my class looks a little different every day, so I’m always making last-minute adjustments, even after class has started, once I see which of the students have shown up. Just when I think the group is ready to take on a more challenging text, a student drops in who requires more support decoding words, for instance, or maybe isn’t a native English speaker, so the needs of the group seem to shift dramatically from class to class.

Needless to say, every day is pretty interesting, if not always successful. I’ve already had moments of getting down on myself about how ineffective the instruction feels at times or how difficult it is to chart any real progress, but I also remind myself that just showing up is a big step for many of the learners and that they are improving.

For me, the process that these adult students are engaged in—of overcoming very personal and long-standing challenges with literacy and academics—is both fascinating and difficult to wrap my head around. I’ve heard a lot of teachers say that they always learn as much as or even more than their students in the classroom and, in my experience, that’s definitely true.

If anyone has any input or resources that might benefit me or these students, I’d be open to and grateful for that, and I’ll keep writing about our efforts, just to keep from losing my mind.

Back in the Saddle

2008-07-05T11:17:00.007-05:00

Hello, Middlers.

As you can see, it’s been a few months since I put any effort into this blog. All of the hype has died down and the recruiters from various publishing houses are leaving fewer and fewer messages on my voicemail. Part of the reason is that I got some articles into a couple of St. Louis publications and started to think that my days of writing for the public for free were over (I mean…I got paid $35 to write some of those stories!).

Another excuse is that a month ago I migrated out of the Midwest. I savored one last bite of gooey butter cake and moved to Philadelphia, PA, where the quality and character of my soul remain landlocked, but the Atlantic undulates less than a hundred miles away.

It was hard to put that physical distance between me and a few of my favorite loved ones, but I’m now lucky enough to live just a few miles from my sister, Katie, and few feet or sometimes inches from my girlfriend, Danielle. I also have a real job, which is a big change. I’m working for a non-profit "education and technology center," teaching Adult Basic Education and GED courses.

Last week, one of my students brought me my first cheese steak. It was cold and the wax paper was eerily transparent, but I knew I had to eat it. The student considered it a crime that after four weeks I hadn’t yet sampled one of these local treasures. Thankfully, I didn’t have to choke it down in front of her, but facing it alone in my office was almost as scary. Some of the orangish grease got on my shirt and the bread seemed pretty soggy, but I was surprised to find that it tasted really good. And I wasn’t even drunk. So maybe I can survive (until Christmas) without Imo’s.

Needless to say, I have arrived, but what am I supposed to do with the thousand or so Middled business cards I still haven’t handed out? For a minute I considered renaming the site “Middled East,” but that seemed like a failed and meaningless pun. I could just let it die a stale death, which is the fate of so many blogs, but I miss the consistency of sitting down to write without any parameters or expectation.

That said, I’m not sure that I’ll continue in the same vein. I’d like to loosen things up, do less interviewing and restaurant critiquing, and try to put forward some more creative efforts. I’m not sure if that will look like story excerpts or self-indulgent journal entries, but I’ll try to keep it readable.

I hope that wherever you are, you are well and that the gap left in your life when this blog went on pause is now filling up with the most savory sense of renewal. Thanks for checking back in.

Right At Home

2008-07-04T09:06:00.006-05:00

In April, I got to attend an incredibly decadent dinner party in a historic St. Louis home. I was on assignment for At Home, the home and garden arm of St. Louis Magazine.

I ended up eating in the kitchen, but that turned out to be the most entertaining room in the house. The semi-celebrity French chef, Marc Felix, his assistant, Elisabeth Ottolini, and the food that they created were all delightful and impressive.

The article appeared in the July/August issue, but you can also find it here.

See the Film

2008-07-03T16:10:00.009-05:00

Back in January, I posted "Canyon Run," a story about Ryan Wylie's documentary on the Raramuri, an indigenous people fighting to retain their land and traditional practices in the Sierra Madre.

Ryan's short film appeared on Current TV in April and can now be seen on the channel's website. Here's the link.

My Sexy Grandfather

2008-04-30T22:30:00.004-05:00

52nd City, the only literary magazine that I've ever seen in St. Louis (and a good one at that), has just published its "Sexy" issue, which features a essay I wrote based on a conversation I had with my grandfather about his own sexiness and related themes.

Unfortunately, if you're interested in perusing this fine publication, you have to buy it. The price is $8. You can purchase it locally at the locations listed here or online if you have a PayPal account.

Thanks as always for the support!

Article on Kirkwood Tragedy

2008-04-18T19:36:00.006-05:00

The St. Louis Beacon, a new online newspaper intent on providing this city with in-depth, investigative reporting has just published an article I wrote related to the shootings that occurred at Kirkwood City Hall on Feb. 7th. The story focuses on the response of the Kirkwood High School administration in the aftermath of the tragedy while highlighting various student perspectives.

If you're not familiar with the Feb. 7th tragedy in Kirkwood, Missouri, I recommend reading this Wikipedia article for background.

More In Print!

2008-04-10T18:02:00.008-05:00

One of St. Louis' venerable community newspapers, the Vital Voice, has published two of my articles, "Muslim St. Louis" and "Everyday Oppression," in its New Americans issue.

The paper is free, so, if you're local, pick up a print copy at most cafes in the city.

My Famous Aunt's Goose

2008-03-29T16:03:00.006-05:00

My article about my Aunt Sally's beautiful cement goose, Lucy, was just published in the April issue of St. Louis Magazine.

Here's the link.

Creative Writing Workshop (4/9 - 5/21)

2008-03-13T10:19:00.005-05:00

I'm teaching a 7-week course for fiction and creative non-fiction writers (sorry, poets).

For the first four meetings, we’ll discuss published work, digging through elements of craft such as characterization, point of view, scene, setting, and voice. We’ll also explore those topics through short in- and out-of-class writing exercises.

The second half of the course will follow a traditional workshop format. Workshop dates will be divvied up and writers will provide copies of their short stories or essays the week before. In class, writers will receive verbal and written feedback and will have a chance to ask questions.

The idea is to provide a supportive and productive environment for writers to share their work and connect with others who are engaged in/struggling with the creative process. I hope to have more laughing than crying (though crying isn’t all bad) and to rouse some energy and motivation within the St. Louis writing community (Could such a thing exist?).

Time: Wednesdays, 7:30 to 9:30
Dates: April 9th to May 21st
Fee: $40 (no books to purchase—readings will be sent by email)
Location: The Gathering United Methodist Church* at 2105 McCausland Avenue in Maplewood

*note: the church has been generous enough to provide a classroom space, but this workshop is not affiliated with The Gathering

About me…

I’m a St. Louis native, but my adult residence only began in August, when I moved back from St. Petersburg, Russia. I’d been living there for two years, teaching English as a Foreign Language. A while ago, I majored in Creative Writing at Oberlin College in Ohio and later earned my secondary teaching credential from Mills College in California.

Back in St. Louis, I’m substitute teaching and working as a freelance writer. To date, I’ve published articles in St. Louis Magazine and the West End Word. In the near future, my work will also appear in 52nd City and the Vital Voice. Other efforts can be found on this very blog.

Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in signing up for the workshop, email me at mryanmiller@hotmail.com.

I really look forward to meeting and working with you!

Response to a Reader's Comment

2008-02-21T09:45:00.012-06:00

Unfortunately, when someone comments on a post well after it was originally published, I'm probably the only person who notices. Yesterday, an anonymous reader responded to an article I wrote in November called, "Muslim St. Louis." One of the people I interviewed for that article was Dr. Khaled Hamid, a physician who has done volunteer work for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). This year, Khaled also created his own blog, Khaled Hamid Forum, addressing issues related to Muslim communities in North America.

Here is the reader's comment:

"There is tremendous ignorance here"

I think that there is a lot of ignorance but Dr. Khaled Hamid is leading the march.

He should be directing his outreach to the huge number of apparently misunderstanding Muslims from Afganistan to Palistine to the Philippines to Britain to most of the Middle East who have shouted "Allah Akbar" before blowing themselves up along with fellow human beings.

Did he personally know any of his fellow CAIR officials which have been convicted of links to terrorism from Palestine to Pakistan?

He should be more concern that a huge number of his fellow participants in Islam have somehow gotten the idea that Allah commands that they should kill non-believers.

I don't know how it happened or really care but they should fix it!

My initial response to this comment is one of frustration and anger. Even in such a limited space, this person manages to present a serious contradiction regarding the issue of ignorance. From, "I think there is a lot of ignorance but Dr. Khaled Hamid is leading the march," to, "I don't know how it happened or really care..." the reader challenges Dr. Hamid's perspective as narrow and misguided, then relieves her or himself of any responsibility to understand or even care why acts of terrorism are being committed throughout the world.

In this case, I don't think that understanding--as in understanding the political and social contexts in which such crimes occur--requires sympathy or even empathy with the perpetrators of violence and cannot be confused as an effort to justify the actions of those individuals.

As Khaled writes in his blog, addressing Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians, "To understand where the anger and rage are coming from is healthy, and helps all of us: Muslims, non-Muslims, Arabs, and non-Arabs, get to the real source of the problem of violence: Injustice, and try to help solve the cycle of violence. But through out all this, we SHOULD NOT ever accept such a deed, or try to justify it. Understand it: Yes. Condone, accept, or justify: Never. Speak against it, and try to stop it from happening: Always" (link to post).

I also don't believe that Dr. Hamid, an American, is more accountable for the actions of a Hamas militant or an Al-Qaeda operative than any other American. Why should he be? Because he's a Muslim? I have trouble understanding a world in which Khaled is responsible for the actions of someone who has grossly misinterpreted the religion that he happens to practice.

At the same time, if I said that Khaled Hamid and other American Muslims should not be compelled to denounce acts of terrorism committed in the name of Islam, I think he would disagree with me. Consider his recent blog post, "Suicidal or not, targeting civilians is immoral and criminal" or that, as I mentioned in my article, he participated in a conference shortly after the June 30th bombing of Glasgow International Airport last year, during which local physicians spoke out against terrorism.

As for this reader's question, "Did he personally know any of his fellow CAIR officials which have been convicted of links to terrorism from Palestine to Pakistan?" I'm not surprised by this attempt to undermine an established and effective civil liberties group.

Honestly, I'm not well enough informed or even compelled to respond to such a vague assertion, but the tactic is familiar. In the face of an organization, such as CAIR, that advocates for civil rights, principally through mediation and education, and seeks to promote a positive image of the communities it serves, critics are left with accusations capable only of conjuring the negative images and associations that the media already provides.

So, that's my initial response. Upon more careful consideration, I acknowledge the basic sentiment that seems to be at the heart of this reader's comment--that horrible atrocities are being committed every day throughout the world and that they will not stop occurring until someone intervenes.

It would be really nice if the global Muslim community (and I don't think such a thing exists) could simply turn to the problem of violence perpetrated in the name of Islam and "fix it," as the reader writes, but that is to deny that the rest of humanity is complicit in the tragedies and injustices suffered in this world. We, as Americans, have been made particularly culpable by the actions of our government, which (to say the least) has done everything in its power to make reconciliation between various ethnic and religious groups as well as widespread stability nearly impossible in the Middle East.

So, in addition to individuals like Dr. Khaled Hamid, non-Muslim Americans should be speaking out against violence and acts of aggression, regardless of the actor's ethnicity, nationality or religion, whether over there or here at home.

I highly recommend that all readers visit Khaled Hamid's blog and contribute their ideas in the open forum that he provides. I will also point out to anyone who wishes to comment on this blog that anonymity is always an option, but that by selecting "other" in the comment posting section, you will be able to provide your name.

*Having just published this post, I found that another person has commented on the "Muslim St. Louis" article. I don't feel the need to dignify that comment by elaborating on what I've already written, but feel free to follow this link back to the article, where you'll find the comments at the bottom of the page.

Real Politiks

2008-01-22T11:04:00.002-06:00

My parents announced that we were moving from Indiana to Colorado when I was in second grade. My best friend’s mom cushioned the blow with tickets to the Michael Jackson concert (Bad Tour, 1987). I only remember that Michael performed Billy Jean in silhouette before claiming the stage in a werewolf mask. I couldn’t dance or hear the music. God pressed his hand to my heart and I felt every rhinestone-studded finger.

At age ten, the greatest moment in my life was behind me. We’d been living in Littleton for three years. My faded concert t-shirt was declared “retarded” at school and my lips were constantly chapped. I had finally learned to ride a bike in an empty parking lot miles from our subdivision, but persisted on my push scooter. I played Nintendo and overate. The opportunity to sing I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy for President George Herbert Walker Bush was a mercy I couldn’t refuse.

My choir teacher at Eagle Ridge Elementary must’ve been a political operative. We were a talentless bunch, but she shoved little flags in our fists and won us the honor of headlining a serious gig. The event was a fundraiser for a prospective state legislator and President Bush was lending some weight. Saddam Hussein hadn’t yet invaded Kuwait and the green specters of Patriot Missiles hadn’t lit up my tractable mind, but the President was obviously an important man.

As the date approached, I spent less and less time in my regular classroom, learning to smile with my eyes and sing from my gut.

I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy
A Yankee Doodle, do or die
A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam
Born on the Fourth of July!

I’ll never forget this refrain, nor will I be as nauseous as I was the morning of the big day. After vomiting in the restroom at school, a teacher’s aide took me to the main office to call my mom. The rest of the kids were already loaded on the bus and my choir teacher showed little patience for a fallen soldier.

“I’m sick,” I told my mom.

“You’re just nervous. I think you should go.”

This was a familiar conversation. When I was in pre-school, my teachers had a note on file that said, If Ryan vomits, don’t send him home. Having already evacuated my breakfast, there was no excuse not to get on the bus.

By the time we arrived at the convention center, I was hungry. I probably snuck a few gummy fruits or traded up for a Lunchable. Our teacher and parent volunteers hustled us off the bus to be organized in gender-segregated lines. We entered a building that looked like an airplane hanger full of red, white and blue balloons. An interminable waiting ensued, measured only by a cycle of bathroom visits in six-person rotations. When we finally mounted the bandstand, I tried to look past the spectating sea and retain the sensation of hunger, which I preferred to its opposite.

The opening bars of You’re a Grand Old Flag cued the waving of our cheap little props and the audience gushed, but my gaze never left the old man in the blue suit. He couldn’t moonwalk or say anything memorable enough to be reproduced eighteen years later, but I sang for him because he was more significant than me or anyone I’d ever met. Actually, I just mouthed the words.

My career in the field of political pomp had been on hold until last Saturday morning. I woke up at six-thirty, put on a casual, but respectable sweater and got into my frozen car.

In a recent tussle with my friend Shannon over presidential predilections, I said something like, “It’s shallow, but if we have the opportunity to elect the first female or the first black president, why would we choose the white guy?” I aspire to more nuanced and substantive political thought, but when I really consider why I’m going to vote for Barack Obama on February 5th, it’s difficult to move beyond personal preference.

The leading candidates for the Democratic nomination are not the same. Their agendas are flecked with different points of emphasis that will have real effects in the world. Some of these differences are spelled out by Glass Booth, a refreshingly meaty website that found my political views in 91% alignment with Denis Kucinich. Huh.

Having waded through the gray waters of strategic messages and distorted attacks, I’ve identified the face that I want for our country, but I can’t sustain a very heated argument with a supporter from another Democratic camp.

So, why was I driving to a John Edwards rally at the Carpenters’ Union of Greater St. Louis? Honest answer: I wanted to be in the same room with someone famous.

I met Shannon and another friend, Lori, in the parking lot. It was too early and cold for ideological exchange, so I quietly shrouded myself in their Edwards love and slipped through the door. In the lobby, we signed in and received bumper stickers. I noted the complete and kind of alarming absence of security and that helium balloons are not a good way to promote an environmental record.

Lori, who had traveled to Iowa to document and participate in the caucuses, knew one of the event organizers. He asked if we, as young people, would be willing to stand on stage behind Edwards.

“Sure!” I said, overcome by that basic human desire to be seen on TV.

Inside the union hall, a huge American flag established a sense of production and Lori showed us the sign that she had made—the loveliest in the room.

I snapped photos of the gathering crowd and worked up the courage to approach two men who actually looked like they belonged at a union-sponsored event. Alex Gromada and Bill Dill were card-carrying members accompanied by Bill’s daughter, Sarah, who said she would be voting for the first time. Both men described themselves as undecided and were interested in getting specific information about Edwards’ platform.

“I’m pretty impressed just reading the flyer he’s got,” Bill said. “He’s not taking PAC [Political Action Committee] money from anybody. He wants the people to back him, not the corporations. So that’s pretty impressive right there.”

“About the NAFTA expansion,” Bill added, “he’s against that, so that’s going to help us out a lot too—keeping jobs here in America.”

When I asked Alex which issues he considered most important, he listed the economy, healthcare reform and ending the Iraq War. He also said that he didn’t think Edwards was getting as much attention in the media as Clinton or Obama.

After a difficult loss in Nevada, where Edwards only captured four percent of the vote, and in the face of South Carolina polls that have him trailing far behind (see the NY Times), that appears to be the case. Nonetheless, a roomful of people had shown up to hear the man speak and the buzz was making me giddy.

Shannon, who had to leave early, took over the camera work as Lori and I ascended to an elevated position. I felt like the least appropriate person in the room to be playing the stage prop. We stood amongst union men, signage bearing children and state legislators representing their various districts. One of the organizers helped us focus our efforts.

“I want to thank you guys for standing up here,” she said. “You are the face of John Edwards!”

“What we're looking for is engagement, so don’t fall asleep standing up. That would be really awkward. When he says something, don’t be afraid to clap, nod, wave your signs, that kind of stuff. And get to know each other. We have a lot of organizing to do to win this thing.”

From there, several speakers would do their part to warm up the crowd, including Alvin Reid, a journalist for The St. Louis American, who I found the most compelling.

“As I’ve spoken on behalf of the senator and the candidate for president of the United States, people have asked me, ‘Alvin, what are you doing up on that stage?’ and I tell them, ‘I’m doing the right thing.’”

“I’m not up here to make history and to try to prove something to somebody other than that the Democrats need somebody in the White House to work with the Democratically controlled Senate and the Democratically controlled House. Then we can get back to helping out people like you and I—people who work for a living, people who just want to raise their kids and be able to send them to college without going broke, be able to fix their car without taking out a loan, be able to do the things that I was able to do as a kid coming up with a father who was a printer and a mother who was a schoolteacher.”

“And if you’re a schoolteacher now or you're a union printer, you’re struggling. You’re trying to get by. And the White House, they’re laughing. They say, ‘Hey, I can send you sixteen hundred dollars and that’ll shut you up.’ Well you know what, we’re not gonna shut up! We’re gonna get John Edwards elected the next president of the United States!”

A few more speakers addressed the audience before a swell of applause brought Mr. Edwards on stage. I can’t say that anything about his appearance surprised me. I had seen plenty of him on television and listened to enough of his North Carolinian cadence that he felt familiar standing just a few feet in front of me.

His speech was broad and the points he made were expected, offering himself as the miner’s son ready for a fight, but I still marveled at the immense task with which he was engaged and his resilience in the face of it. Certainly that could be said about any of the candidates, but I haven’t stood behind them yet, goofing for the cameras.

*The last four photographs were taken by Shannon Connelly.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

2008-01-21T18:58:00.000-06:00

Democracy Now! today broadcast Dr. King's speech, "Beyond Vietnam," delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967. It's incredible.

Here are links to the program site and the audio stream.

Canyon Run

2008-01-17T19:09:00.001-06:00

The Tarahumara are the indigenous people of the Mexican state of Chihuahua. They live primarily in Copper Canyon, a system of six canyons that is larger and, in some areas, deeper than the Grand Canyon. Their population is estimated to be between sixty and eighty thousand, and for many years they have been fighting the encroachment of the mining and timber industries on their remaining ancestral land, which now represents the last one percent of old growth forests in the Sierra Madre Occidental.

Many of the Tarahumara continue to practice a traditional lifestyle—inhabiting natural, open-air shelters, farming subsistence crops, herding livestock across steep canyon terrain, observing religious and social ceremonies accompanied by tesgüino, a mild beer made from fermented corn, and running—they do a lot of running.

The Tarahumara call themselves the Rarámuri, which means runners on foot in their own Uto-Aztecan language. Will Harlan, editor-in-chief of Blue Ridge Outdoor Magazine and himself an ultra-marathon runner, first became interested in the Rarámuri because of their reputation as, in his words, “the world’s greatest distance runners.” Amongst these people, both men and women have been known to travel up to a hundred miles in a single day, sometimes in the process of persistence hunting, the practice of tracking an animal to exhaustion.

In addition to ceremonial athletic competitions, a fifty-mile footrace is held every spring in which members of the indigenous community compete alongside world-class runners in an effort to raise money for clean water initiatives and seeds. In the 2006 race, Scott Jurek, considered one of top distance runners in the world, lost to Arnuflo Quirare, a Tarahumara farmer who was running barefoot.

Hoping to spread awareness about the struggle for indigenous rights, Will invited his cousin and documentary filmmaker, Ryan Wylie, and my friend, Phil Merker, to collaborate on a short film about the Tarahumara. On December 3rd, the three traveled to Chihuahua City and were received by employees of the Sierra Madre Alliance, a non-governmental organization that provides education, legal services and other forms of support to indigenous communities in the region.

Ryan, who co-founded Inner Mission Productions and the Free Form Film Festival, brought his video equipment, initially planning to document the Rarámuri’s efforts to sustain their community in the midst of a twenty-year drought. As it turned out, the rains had finally arrived in 2007 and the December visit placed the film crew in the canyon in the middle of the wet season.

Unfortunately, the much-needed rainfall is only one factor in securing the future of North America’s largest, traditionally practicing indigenous population.

Before traveling six hours to the city of Guachochi, where they would begin their descent into Copper Canyon, the team encountered a group of Rarámuri protesting on the steps of a government building. The demonstrators explained that they were petitioning the Mexican government to take action on a decades-old case for indigenous land rights. The fact that these people had brought their concerns to a state institution, rather than the appropriate federal one, exemplified the challenges they face in navigating a complicated and potentially corrupt bureaucracy.

With two Rarámuri men, Pedro and Santiago, and Valentine, Santiago’s twelve year-old son, as their guides, the Americans would hike for three days into Choreachi, the most traditional of the Rarámuri settlements. The first day’s push brought them to the Sinforosa River at the base of the canyon. On the hike down, they were accompanied by a stray dog that they recognized from town. Her single, protruding tooth gave her away.

The next day, with their donkeys, mules and new mascot, they ascended to the canyon ridge, logging another seven-hour trek.

The guides weren’t following a trail and the terrain was demanding. During the uphill climb, Phil experienced intense cramping in his legs and had to assume a deliberate pace. His frustration may have only been exacerbated by the presence of Valentine, standing by with a concerned look in his traditional footwear—sandals with a rubber sole fashioned from an old tire.

Despite the language barrier, the long hours of hiking established a bond between the filmmakers and their guides. When they arrived at Pedro’s home, a dirt floor structure on the outskirts of Choreachi, he invited them inside. Ryan later learned that this was a significant gesture as the Rarámuri’s shelters are strictly used for cooking and sleeping and are not often shown to outside guests.

This functional relationship to established dwellings was also evident in the center of the Choreachi settlement, which the group reached the following day. Here, a few basic cabins and an abandoned schoolhouse scattered across an open field constituted the heart of the community. During most of the year, the Tarahumara move nomadically throughout the canyon in relative isolation, but encampments like this serve an essential function as sites of congregation.

During their first evening in the camp, Will, Ryan and Phil shared a meal and watched the sunset. As the sky filled with color, Phil began to feel mildly nauseous and decided to boil some garlic water, which he was told would help protect him from parasites. After speaking with the guides, he also drank some tea made from chucaca, an herb native to the canyon. He shared the drink with Ryan, but Will had already retreated to one of the cabins.

The night would be a long one as Will grew violently ill and Ryan was also overcome with intense nausea and stomach pains. The alpine air hovered at freezing and as Will’s body temperature dipped dangerously low, the group had little choice but to place him in the Jeep that Ernesto, the lead attorney for the Sierra Madre Alliance, had driven into camp on the only road connecting Choreachi with the outside world. Gas was limited, but the immediate concern was with Will, who was delirious, shaking and intermittently blacking out.

The original plan was that Ryan and Phil would return to Guachochi by car, while Will ran back, retracing their journey with the guides. The plan would change the following day, but not before Phil, Ryan and even Will, in his desperate state, documented the Rarahippri, a display of athletic prowess during which the Rarámuri gamble lighters, pesos, colorful garments and cassette tapes that they listen to on their runs.

Assisted by Chunel, a university-educated Rarámuri who often works as a translator for his people, Ernesto facilitated a discussion of community matters and asked those present to sign, or at least fingerprint, a petition for the government to suspend logging until the Tarahumara’s land claims could be resolved.

With the formalities out of the way, twelve runners were selected to compete. While the male and female events both involved running and proceeded casually, making it difficult for the film crew to know when the races were starting or finishing, the equipment was different. The men sprinted across the field, kicking a small wooden ball, but the women used a stick to lift a cloth ring and toss it ahead of them.

Having covered the event, attention turned to Will’s condition and the journey out of the canyon. The road back to Guachochi was little more than a pair of tracks. It was dark and raining and the trip would take nearly thirteen hours. For the first two of those hours, the dog, now dubbed Sinforosa after the river, ran behind the Jeep.

Eventually, Will’s delirium seemed to break and he told the group to put the dog in the car. The others were reluctant to welcome a wet, feral animal into an already cramped vehicle, but they agreed to let Will hold her in the back. Never having been in a car, Sinforosa vomited within a few minutes and was released into the rain. She proceeded to chase the Jeep for another hour before being allowed in a second and final time.

With their insanely devoted dog and just enough gas, the beleaguered group reached a paved road and were able to stop for a meal at a local restaurant.

Will (lower right in photo) would be forced to return to the States a few days early and Sinforosa, the fanged stray, would go on to experience other firsts as an adoptee of the Sierra Madre Alliance.

Back in Chihuahua City, just two days before their departure, Ryan and Phil made a final stop. José Iganacio Legarreta Castillo is the federally appointed delegate of SEMARNAT, the Mexican equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency. According to Ryan, Castillo had recently signed off on a fraudulent map, distorting the boundary between Choreachi and Coloradas de los Chávez, a neighboring region.

In Mexico, two major systems of land use and ownership are the ejidos and the agrarian communities. The ejido system was introduced by the Mexican Constitution of 1917, but only formalized in 1934. This involved concessions in the form of cultivation rights to individuals who did not own the land they occupied. The problem was that boundaries were drawn without consideration for unified indigenous communities, such as the Yokivo and the Guapalayna, who were subsequently divided. Agrarian communities were created through recognition and titling of communal lands based on possession.

The Tarahumara’s claim to their ancestral land precedes these systems by centuries and is supported by both international law (ILO Convention 169) and the Mexican Constitution (articles 2 and 27 of section 7). Due to lack of legal knowledge, Choreachi did not apply for its title until 2007, and Castillo’s signature was enough to authorize the self-appointed president of Coloradas de los Chávez, Rumaldo Chavez, to begin logging just under 40,000 acres of Tarahumara land.

Castillo was clearly reluctant to accept responsibility for the falsified maps and, in Ryan’s account, the interview ended with the filmmakers practically chasing the official out of his office.

Recently, two representatives of the Tarahumara traveled to San Carlos to confront Chavez, only to be detained and beaten by his men. Ryan said that the narcotics trade is a major factor in the struggle, considering that growing marijuana and poppy on the cleared land is far more profitable than logging in the depth of the canyon.

In Los Angeles, Ryan is currently editing the video footage he shot during the eleven-day trip to the state of Chihuahua. Current TV has agreed to purchase the ten to twelve minute short. In-depth interviews with members of the Rarámuri community and their advocates, the stunning beauty of Copper Canyon and the heroics of Sinforosa the dog, should be available by the end of February. Middled will do its best to provide a link.

*The fifth, sixth and seventh photos that appear in this article were taken by Alfredo Ramirez Garcia. The rest are courtesy of Phil Merker.

Through Snow and Space

2007-12-18T12:39:00.001-06:00

There may have been something strange in the boiled green beans that I ate at the Tin Can on Saturday. The side dish was more than a bacony compliment to my meal—it was the start of a waking dream.

The evening was lovely and dangerous.

“In fact,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports, “thundersnow was observed in St. Louis County.”

My friend, Shannon, and I drove to the Contemporary Art Museum at speeds in the teens, fishtailing through the turns. The false twilight helped us see.

We parked in fresh snow next to a roofless church. I worried that my car would be buried when we returned. We hadn’t worn boots.

The museum lobby was dark and curious—handmade dolls and simulated waves. Our friend, Lori, later posed in a carnival cutout.

We got some wine and sat in the first of three rows. The stage was set with musical instruments, a giant plastic bubble and a length of red fabric hung from ceiling to floor. Maya Lin’s Systematic Landscapes seemed to breathe in the background.

The production began with Christmas songs, performed by Ceilia’s Yuletide Express. Lyrics were provided in the program, and I noticed a few people mouthing the words.

A woman in a neon green afro and white unitard invited us to release our bellies and observe a brief silence. She washed the makeup from her face in a large wok, pulled off her wig and invoked the memory of her mother singing in her kitchen. Others joined her song, and as the goose pimples spread over my arms, a concept—something about love and transformation—emerged from the weird.

Rebecca Rivas, who facilitated this nearly fifty-person collaboration, explained that the band, Fire Dog, had composed the show’s title track, May These Changes Make Us Light. The dancers and various artists then created their own superheroes or mythical personas. Rebecca, for instance, was “the Hunter.”

With the two other members of the Amazonia Belly Dance Troupe, “Pin Oak” and “Desire,” Rebecca hunted and gyrated all over the stage.

“How can it be,” an unseen narrator asked, “that in our most joyous moments, we let doubt and fear creep in?"

A brief fashion show ensued, demonstrating some stylish uses of muslin, electrical tape and battery-operated lights.

Then a white-haired man, who had seemed out of place during the caroling in his trench coat and lobsterman’s hat, laid three yoga mats on the floor.

“To the people,” the narrator said, “he was the janitor for the museum beneath the St. Louis Arch. But he was truly much more than that, much more than even HE realized. You see, this was his plan: to use the Arch itself, as a gigantic transmitter of a good thought, broadcasted repeatedly day and night, unbeknownst to the officials of this so-called, Gateway to the West.”

“We are all one, and love is all there is. This was the phrase that he had chosen to project.”

According to the story, the message reached a clan of yogis from across the universe, who responded with movement. In fact, they were acro-yogis, and the audience applauded their every feat.

This is the part of the dream that starts to unravel into a series of disjointed images, provoked by the giant plastic bubble that turned out to be a projection screen. I know how the listener’s eyes glaze over during the retelling of any dream, so I’ll skip ahead to the pole dancers.

A portable pole was rolled into view and two women with similarly powerful-looking bodies appeared in their underwear. The music got heavier as they worked through their solo routines before crawling upwards in unison—gravity defied, limbs akimbo.

“We have been sent nothing but angels,” the narrator said, as a woman spilled beads from the vase on her head.

The next act took graceful stunt-making even further, ascending almost thirty feet up the red length of silk.

Fire Dog kept the momentum rolling skyward with the reprise, Ahh, ahh, ahh, ahhhh, achieving a new register with every ahh.

The lights went up as the Yuletide Express finished with It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Happy Christmas (War is Over) and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Reluctant audience members were dragged onto stage, only to discover that Christmas songs are particularly difficult to dance to.

The music ended, photos were taken and people mingled with holiday-charged hearts before trickling out into all that white.

Writing with Rules

2007-12-13T15:46:00.000-06:00

As a writer, I know one thing—writing isn’t very fun. I would rather clean my toilet or snack myself into a coma than write something more taxing than an email.

I’ve started to think that I’m going about this in the wrong way.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with my friend, Molly, about my condition. Molly is a poet living in Maine. She butchers animals on the side, so I consider her an expert on fun.

Molly proposed an exercise. We would come up with a list of requirements to follow in a short piece of writing. She insisted that we generate this list immediately and share our efforts in ten days time.

Molly’s first pronouncement: We must use one noun as a verb.

I know, she’s a nerd, but I decided to play along.

“We must use one infix,” I declared.

Actually, I couldn’t remember the word infix, so I had to search for it on the Internet. It refers to the rare grammatical occasion when one word is inserted inside of another. The only example I could think of was abso-fucking-lutely. Try putting that into a poem.

A day before the exercise was due, I sat down and wrote something. What I discovered wasn’t profound—nothing makes writing fun, but a deadline and some structure help.

That first effort was a little raw, but I’d like to share a subsequent exercise that I did with my friend Edan, a fiction writer living in Los Angeles. The procedure was the same, but we settled on a few less requirements. I’ll include them below the text.

__________________

Run

Pork sausage kisses skillet and I wake up. The smell of frying fat spills into frosted sugar cookie air. I roll across the sleeper sofa for my long underwear in the duffle bag on the floor. My cousins, Kayla and Michael, watch from the kitchen table. It’s nine o’clock and they’re eating candy. I pull on jogging pants, a hooded sweatshirt, a hat and gloves.

“Want a Jolly Rancher?” Kayla asks.

“What flavor?” I ask.

“Persimmon,” she says.

“Bullshit. That’s peach,” Michael says.

Aunt Ruby crosses the living room with an armful of gifts, followed by a gust of cold air and Sally, the inside dog.

“Sleep good?” Ruby asks.

“Yeah.” I double knot my laces. “I’m going for a run.”

“There’s a frozen bird out there,” she says and struggles into the den.

Grandma sets a coffee cake on the table.

“No more candy,” she says. “You gonna eat, Ryan?”

“I’ll eat after.”

“Your mom and dad went to the cemetery, but I told them not to wake you.”

She closes the candy bag with a rubber band and smoothes down Michael’s hair.

“That’s fine,” I say.

I hit the door. The cold punches out my first breath. Spot, the outside dog, hobbles from behind the garage. He follows me to the road, where his invisible leg tells him not to go.

The tire ruts run to the trees at the edge of my grandparents’ property. They sold most of their land after a rolling tractor killed Uncle Jim, the only son, besides Denis, who would've wanted it.

“Melissa Etheridge died,” Uncle Denis once said.

We’d been taking shots at a soda can propped on a fence post. He sipped his beer and I watched him.

“Really?” I asked.

I didn’t listen to her music, but I felt regret. I could remember one of her songs. Come to my window. Crawl inside. Wait by the light of the moon.

“They found her face down in Ricki Lake,” he said and fired his twenty-two.

The dead oak is out of reach. I’ll just run to exhaustion and turn around. In the summer, there would be soybeans on either side. Now the ground looks like it’s been broken up with an axe. My lips are chapped and the sweat on my neck helps the cold find its grip.

Dad’s SUV crosses the creek bridge. I try to run quickly, but my knees aren’t bending right.

I imagine our drive home on Christmas Day. My sister will want to hear the story of how my parents almost bought a farm after they got married, almost changing the course of our lives, and how the loan fell through. Mom will tell it. I’ll look at the freckles on Dad’s hands as he concentrates on the drive.

“You’re crazy!” Mom yells out the passenger window.

“Want a ride back?” Dad asks.

“No,” I say, just loud enough to be heard.

The ice snaps under their tires. I run for heat, but it whips away in the wind.

At the crossroads a half-mile from the house, I turn west. The sky or the ground smells like diesel. The sun is diffuse. A cross stands in the field, twenty yards from the road. There are teddy bears tied to it, wrapped in plastic bags.

This is where a woman was dumped last year. Her family put up a memorial—the fake flowers and wreathes, the photos covered with cellophane. A man had given her a ride from one of the bars and stabbed her, or something. I cross the field, wondering when I will step on the spot where she died.

We loved you for the most ordinary things that you did and for loving us for our ordinary things and for being perfect just as you were.

That’s what one of the notes should say, but there aren’t any notes. I wipe the frost off her name and run home.

__________________

1. Persimmon should appear in the text.
2. There should be one proper noun, aside from any characters' names.
3. A character should wonder about something in the future.
4. Someone should alter his/her physical surroundings.
5. There should be a run on sentence.
6. There should be one joke.

Middled Makes Print

2007-12-12T13:15:00.001-06:00

Today the West End Word is running my article, "Why Am I Afraid of Black People?" as a guest column. Here's the link. I cut it down to about a fourth of the original, so check out what was lost and, perhaps, gained.

Also, take a look at the rest of the Word while you're there. It's a great free paper that's been fighting the good fight in St. Louis City for over thirty years.

A Christian Believer

2007-12-10T12:33:00.002-06:00

At thirteen, I professed my Christian faith through a confirmation ceremony at a United Methodist Church. I had attended weekly classes, spent a night alternately chasing and fleeing girls through church hallways, written hard questions like, “What about homosexuals?” on slips of folded paper and memorized the Apostle’s Creed.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth / And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord...

My parents had become Methodists by consumer method. When we moved to St. Louis the summer before I entered the sixth grade, we treaded the Protestant waters for a few Sundays, weighing factors such as hymn-count and quality of mingling, before declaring a victor by four-person vote in our car.

I remember feeling betrayed by my family’s spotty attendance during my first Sunday school class, as my peers rattled off the books of the Bible like a list of their favorite films.

I may have become a Christian the day that the baptismal water met my screaming infant head, but I haven’t exactly felt like one since. The chubby, pre-teen just showed up and read the provided texts. The almost-adult still hasn’t mustered the conviction for renunciation or embrace.

Before I sat down for coffee with Matt Miofsky, the minister at the United Methodist church that my parents have recently joined, I tried to assess the state of my faith.

I believe in Jesus, but I’m not sure how I believe in him. I don’t know if I believe that he is the Son of God. I don’t know if I believe in him to the exclusion of other prophets and systems of belief. I don’t know if belief in him requires that. I don’t know if he has saved me and I don’t know if I should feel like a fraud, occasionally singing and praying alongside the congregates in my parents’ and grandfather’s churches.

“You’ll hear the cliché that people are spiritual, but they’re just not religious,” Matt said during our second conversation, over gyros. “I think what that’s getting at is that they’re interested in questions. They just don’t know what they believe about it and are uncomfortable tagging themselves as something.”

I guess I’m living that cliché. I sometimes pray in the morning and at night, but I don’t pray to Jesus. I may pray for creative inspiration or for assistance finding a job (I’m still praying for that), but I mostly pray as an expression of gratitude for my family, friends, health and the presence of love in my life.

I also do yoga, limberly toeing the line between exercise and something deeper that I don’t define. I’ve sat with spiritual mediums and I know that those insights and experiences were real. I’ve been inspired by people of various faiths, in person and in writing, particularly Mahatma Gandhi. What a stud.

I met with Matt partly because my mother wanted me to. She never said that, but she was happy when I finally attended Matt’s church, and she spoke about young people, “your age,” that would benefit from such a community. Mom sees that something interesting is happening inside the modest, steepled building on McCausland Avenue, at the edge of St. Louis City, and I see it too.

The Gathering United Methodist Church held its first worship service on September 17, 2006, having exposed the brick and a massive oak frame at the front of its sanctuary, installed outlets for microphones and amplifiers and torn out pews in favor of cushy, but supportive chairs.

The church had been conceived in Matt’s living room. As the associate minister at Webster Hills United Methodist Church in Webster Groves, Matt and his wife, Jessica, hosted study and discussion groups, mostly for people under the age of thirty-five. By the second year, attendance had grown from two to forty and Matt began to recognize a certain demand.

“It was kind of a constellation of events and experiences that led me to want to start a new church in this city,” Matt said. “When I was in college, Jess and I were like, ‘Maybe we’ll try to find a church.’ And we’d kind of shop around a bit and there was just nothing that, this sounds a little selfish, but nothing we were interested in. It seemed like work for us.”

“I remember thinking, ‘God, I’m a person that’s toying with ministry. I actually want to go to church and I can’t find a church. What about people who are just indifferent to neutral about church?’ It just indicated to me that there seemed to be a problem or, at minimum, a need for compelling communities of faith.”

Both the leadership at Webster Hills and the regional United Methodist bishop supported the establishment of The Gathering, but the endeavor contradicted some accepted assumptions.

“The city was seen as sort of a graveyard of churches,” Matt said. “Where we were starting new churches was in O’Fallon and St. Charles County, these fast-growing suburbs. [The city] just wasn’t seen as a place where you’d start something new because so many things were dying.”

“My argument was that they’re dying because these are places that have been around for a hundred and fifty years. They still look like they did fifty years ago. We have a real opportunity to start something new that incorporates and is created for and by people who are living in the city now.”

When I crossed the threshold of The Gathering for the first time, I was met by a greeter’s smile, flanked by coffee and pastries. The original stained glass windows filtered out all but the loveliest light, supporting my impression that the gatherers were disproportionately attractive. More than a few were rocking infants to the live music, following a cascade of projected lyrics that I didn’t recognize from the hymnals of my youth. In combination, all of the freshness and sincerity made me feel a little weird and a little defensive.

On paper, the service was more familiar. The order of events detailed on the bulletin wasn’t much different than the one followed by my grandfather’s church in Cuba, Missouri. There were scripture readings and interpretation, an offering, an invitation to exchange greetings, a communion service, a sermon and a benediction to send the congregants home.

“A lot of people asked, ‘What’s going to be different about it?’” Matt said. “It was almost the assumption that if you started something new, it needed to be wholly innovative, and I didn’t want to feel like, ‘Church is irrelevant and boring. We’re going to create something completely new and call it church.’ I actually had a deep belief that at its core, the practice of what the Church was supposed to be about was a compelling idea.”

What Matt found frustrating was the “social club model,” which came to define Protestant churches in America after World War II.

“The Church was not that different from the Optimist Club or the Elks,” he said. “It was an organization that had meetings, where you could become a member, that did things for the community, and yet, in about the seventies, that was no longer a compelling kind of community. People didn’t want to be involved in that. If you look at a lot of those old social organizations, they had their peak about the same time that churches had their membership peak in the twentieth century.”

In the struggle to defeat the temptations of televised football and sleeping in, Matt believes that many churches have over-invested in appeals to the social interests of their communities.

“When I was at Webster Hills, we had a thousand and one programs,” Matt said. “We tried to be the YMCA, the social club. I mean we had all these classes. The problem was the YMCA did athletics better than us, book clubs at Barnes and Noble were more interesting than our book clubs, and we had a coffee hour, but Starbucks was better.”

“That was really built off a model of the small town American church at the turn of the nineteenth century, where the church was the bookstore, the Starbucks, the YMCA, but it’s not that any more. It doesn’t need to be that. So the Church needs to figure out, ‘Who are we then?’”

“In some ways I think that we lost faith in our core work,” he said. “What I wanted to do was get back to, ‘Okay, where would you go in our community to learn how to pray and meditate?’ We ought to be well-equipped to do that. ‘Where do you go to wrestle with questions about who God is and who God calls you to be, if God works in the world at all?’”

This last question made me set down my fourth cup of coffee. I took it for granted that Matt was serving a community of believers.

“I think the Church has put an overemphasis on belief, to its detriment,” he said. “What we’ve done in the past has been kind of, ‘Believe, belong, behave.’ Meaning you come in, if we can get you to believe the right stuff, then you can become a member, and once you belong, then we’ll get you to start doing the things we think you ought to do.”

“That’s a bad order. It might happen that way for some, but more and more now, and what I want is, people come to a church and they are first going to experience a sense of belonging and then begin to let that community shape the way they behave and that will lead to a shaping a belief. It doesn’t always work that way, but if we put belief up front, as the litmus test of whether or not you belong in a community, that’s a bad choice.”

In addition to worship, service, giving, prayer and meditation, The Gathering United Methodist Church identifies small group learning as a central practice that Matt hopes “would help to shape us into people who experience God, form deeper commitments to God and allow God to shape our lives.”

Matt’s favorite small group is for skeptics. Over the course of seven weeks, participants consider the opinions of both atheists and believers, who each address questions of God and religion from a distinct perspective.

“A true atheist is a very rare thing,” Matt said. “So given the fact that we all cobble together our own worldview about life, whatever’s beyond life, God and our own role in this whole thing, the question is, ‘What’s the something going to be?’”

“There are people who are content with cobbling together their own thing and never placing themselves in a larger stream, but they, in fact, are in a large stream of people who cobble together their thing.”

At this point, he put down his gyro and laughed.

“There’s something attractive about never having to choose,” Matt said. “Some people can never choose one religion because they think that there’s some truth in all of them, so they choose to become this sort of scientific observer of religious life, rather than a participant in religious life. Even though they observe truth in religious life, they never themselves commit because they have a fear of particularity.”

“I’m a big believer, though, in particularity over things general. I think there’s a lot of danger in assuming that the best we can hope to be is an objective observer of all the things around us without ourselves ever diving into something and claiming it as our own.”

“That’s the hardest thing for people,” he said. “They look at Christianity and they say, ‘You know, it’s okay, but I don’t believe in all that. What I think is a little different than that and there’s truth in some of these other religious traditions, so, therefore, I can’t be part of that community of faith.’”

In researching my recent article about Islam and Muslims in St. Louis, I attended a lecture at The Ethical Society and began talking to a Muslim woman who was sitting next to me in the audience. When she asked me about my own religion, I said that I was raised as a Methodist, but no longer identify myself with a particular faith.

“A lot of Americans are like that,” she said and seemed disappointed.

“When having an ecumenical or interfaith conversation,” Matt said, “what you don’t want is a bunch of wishy washy Jews, Muslims and Christians who shed particularity.”

“When you went out and interviewed for your article, my sense is you wanted to find a Muslim. You wanted someone deeply committed to the particularities of Islam so that you could discover what it is that’s compelling about that.”

Matt acknowledged that by accepting any one faith, an individual makes certain claims about the world, life, God and truth that may contradict another’s beliefs.

“We’re having to struggle with a philosophical worldview that’s really shifting away from the notion of one absolute truth that dispels every other possible truth and into some sort of philosophical landscape that says somehow two things can be true that both overlap and contradict. And that’s a weird thing for us to conceptualize, but I find that it meshes well with my experience.”

“What’s liberating about that is it sort of frees us up to claim our story without having to claim exclusive status for our story, so we no longer have to become afraid of who we are and what we believe.”

For me, the fear of claiming beliefs and identity is familiar. In the same way that choosing a career sometimes feels like a negation of all the other possible lives that I could be leading, joining a community of faith might mean accepting one version of myself over another. Non-participation isn’t really an option in the working world, but maybe with religion it’s just not as interesting or instructive.

I find support through my family and friends. I enjoy the intimacy of prayer without wondering too much about its effects. I also have questions, and I don’t know how to claim the answers.

On Tuesday mornings, The Gathering holds a brief prayer service at seven o’clock. This includes a reading from scripture, chanting, prayer, silence and a cup of coffee in a to-go cup. This seemed like an opportunity to step into a vulnerable space and try something different, but I stayed up late the night before and overslept.

Midday Late-Night Eating

2007-11-29T21:20:00.001-06:00

Little did I know, as I entered Tiffany’s Original Diner, passing the jukebox and the pinball machine huddled at the front like they were trying to leave, disappointment awaited me at the counter.

I’m not referring to Janet B. Women with stenciled eyebrows are sometimes hard to read, but Janet was straightforward with her “I value you no more and no less than the thousands upon thousands of customers that I’ve served” attitude, which is really quite a high level of value.

I was dropping in on Tiffany’s during off-hours—that being twelve-thirty in the afternoon. A man named Greg, who seemed to be the owner and was working with Doug to repair the flattop grill, said that the first rush comes as the local bars close, followed by a second rush of bar employees.

Maybe I came at a bad time. Greg was digging years-old grill grime out of the diner’s primary appliance with a butter knife. Janet was waiting for “the new kid” to show up and send her home.

“He’s got one minute,” she said. “Who shows up only one minute before work?”

“I always get to work an hour early,” a customer said.

“He does,” the guy beside him said.

Including me, only two of the seven people engaged with their various tasks (service, repair, patronage and crossword puzzle solving) weren’t smoking. John threw open the door and took a deep breath like he’d just run several blocks.

Variations on “Just made it!” and “Close call!” arose from all sides of the rectangular box of a restaurant.

“I heard you guys put grits in your pancakes,” I said to Janet.

“No, we don’t,” she said.

Disappointment can be crushing. I had believed that my information was reliable. With my only reason for visiting this appetite-smothering eatery flipped like gristle into the void, I was suddenly disoriented. The yellowed menu board offered little direction.

“What’s the Tibey?” I asked.

“It’s gravy all over your breakfast,” Janet said.

“What’s the Slinger?”

“It’s chili all over your breakfast.”

Like so many heroes, I was faced with a choice between greatness and survival.

“I’ll just have the biscuits and gravy,” I said.

“Is that all?” Janet asked.

“And a coffee,” I said.

“Don’t make me beg for a refill,” the crossword lady said.

“No woman begs to me with clothes on,” Greg said.

“Is that it?” Janet asked me.

“And a egg,” I said.

“Biscuits and gravy, John!” she yelled.

John, who was still sweating and could not access the temporary grill station due to the repair work, thrust himself against the laminate.

“I don’t know if my ass is supposed to be on the counter,” he said.

“It’s not like you’re going to shit on it,” Doug said.

John’s legs managed to clear the condiments and napkin dispensers, and he even made a show of spritzing some sanitizer for my benefit.

“This gravy is a little watery,” he said, looking into a bucket.

“It don’t make any difference,” Janet said.

“Zap it,” Greg said.

“Pitch it?” John asked.

“No!” Janet said.

“I could combine it with this fresh one,” John said.

“Don’t mix ‘em together!” Greg said.

A knowing look circulated the room like, “The new guy.”

“How long have you worked here?” I asked John.

“Four months,” he said.

“What about Janet?”

“Decades, man,” he said. “Her whole freakin’ life. I couldn’t do it. I want out already.”

Having topped off everyone’s coffee, Janet put on her coat and found her duffle bag-sized purse. On her way to the door, she leaned across the counter and kissed Greg on the lips. It was a sweet, mother-son kind of kiss.

“What, no French?” Doug asked.

“Not today, ma chérie,” Greg said, with a seemingly accurate French accent.

“See you guys tomorrow,” Janet said.

“Bye, Janet,” I said, feeling like a member of the family.

Muslim St. Louis

2007-11-26T17:49:00.002-06:00

Since setting up a phone line in my apartment, I have received several calls, but none of them for me. A woman named “Betty” is slightly more popular than a man named “Jeffrey.” Some callers are more voice-perceptive than others, contributing just half an explicative to our conversations.

On Saturday morning, the phone rang when I was still in bed. I made a barefoot dash, trusting that the first call that I didn’t answer would be for me.

“As-salamu alaykum,” a woman said.

“I think you have the wrong number,” I said.

“Oh.” Click.

Before listening to St. Louis on the Air (90.7 KWMU) on September 26th, I hadn’t thought about Muslims in St. Louis. I knew about the large number of Bosnian-Americans living in the city, but I hadn’t met anyone from that community or considered their religious background.

Don Marsh’s program that day was called “Islamic Religion,” suggesting a religious genre rather than a singular faith.

“What’s the Islamic equivalent of a Catholic?” I wondered. “Or a Quaker?”

Marsh introduced the program with statistical data released on September 25th by The Pew Research Center. The results indicated that fifty-eight percent of Americans (actually, fifty-eight percent of the 3,002 individuals who participated in the poll) know little or nothing about the practices of Islam, a percentage that has changed very little since 2001.

A few weeks later, when I met with Melissa Matos, director of the St. Louis chapter of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a civil rights advocacy group for Muslims in North America, I started the conversation with questions that I hoped were basic, but not misguided.

“Can you clarify the terms ‘Islamic’ and ‘Muslim?’” I asked.

“Islam—that’s the religion,” she said. “A Muslim is the believer, equivalent to a Christian or a Jew. Islamic is what you would probably call an object or an action, but Muslim is just a person.”

“What’s your ethnicity?” I asked.

Melissa is Dominican-American. She was born in New York City and grew up in what she described as a “pretty religious” Protestant family, “which is unusual in itself for being Hispanic.”

“When I say ‘religious family,’ people might get the idea that my parents drove me out of Christianity or something,” she said, “but I was happy growing up in the Church.”

Melissa attended a private Christian high school, where she assumed leadership roles as class chaplain and student body president.

“When I got to college, though, I studied history and there were just some things that made me question [certain aspects of] Christianity and I became an atheist. I just felt like maybe everything was sort of made up and we’re here on this big blue ball and nothing really matters.”

“I started to study the Qur’an because I was interested in what other people believed. You grow up in a world, or at least I did, where you’re in your little ethnic enclave and you don’t really know anything outside of that.”

“When reading the Qur’an, I just didn’t think it could’ve been written by a person. And it made me believe that, ‘Wow, there’s a higher power, and I believe that this higher power chose to explain itself to us through several different prophets.’ I believed that and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m a Muslim.’”

I asked Melissa how her parents felt about her conversion.

“It was difficult for them,” she said. “I think a lot of their understanding of Islam was nine eleven. That’s it. But over the past three and a half years, my parents have been extremely resilient. I have a very close relationship with them. I talk with them almost every day.”

Again, I needed clarification. Over four years into the United States military occupation of Iraq, I’m still struggling to grasp the superficial differences between the Sunni and Shia denominations of Islam.

Ziauddin Sardar’s new book, What Do Muslims Believe?, explains that the schism occurred in 632 AD as the result of a succession conflict after the death of the prophet, Muhammad. Shia Muslims (or Shiites) believe in hereditary spiritual leadership, adhering to a lineage drawn from Prophet Muhammad’s extended family, and acknowledge the supreme authority of individual leaders, whereas Sunni communities are more autonomous in recognizing their own religious leadership.

A crude map illustrates the simple point that the majority of Muslims (eighty-five percent) are Sunni. Iran is unique for being overwhelmingly Shia (ninety percent) and having a theocratically Shia constitution. Iraq also has a Shia majority of about sixty-five percent, which suffered under the persecution of Saddam Hussein. The current government in Iraq is Shia-dominated and when the U.S. government and media talk about “insurgents,” they are referring to Sunni-Arabs, though the military focus appears to have shifted to Shia militias, such as the Mahdi Army under Muqtada al-Sadr, and their connections to Iran.

See Mother Jones for “Iraq 101.”

“I don’t identify with one [denomination],” Melissa said. “I do recognize that there are people who classify themselves as a Sunni or Shia or Sufi or something like this. The differences that they have are usually based on legal interpretation or who should be a leader, but the basics of the religion are all sort of the same.”

“I wouldn’t identify myself as any particular thing, and a lot of Muslims feel that way. You ask them, ‘Are you Shia or Sunni?’ They say, ‘I’m Muslim,’ but in other places it’s different.”

Sitting across from Melissa at a small Starbucks table, I realized that I had never spoken at any length with a Muslim woman. Feeling more comfortable after our introduction, I asked Melissa about her headscarf and she taught me the correct pronunciation of the term hijab. Basically, it’s he-jab, except that the j sounds like the s in confusion.

Melissa has, as she says, “covered” since converting to Islam three and a half years ago.

“The majority of Muslim women do not wear the head cover,” she said. “The idea in general is modesty for both men and women. So you have some women who don’t cover but dress modestly, and then some women who cover like I do. It’s a personal choice for every woman.”

Randa Kuziez, who had been a guest on St. Louis on the Air and is the treasurer of the national Muslim Student’s Association, started wearing the hijab outside of her mosque on her first day of high school. She said many people would approach her with questions, particularly when she joined the track team.

At one meet, a coach from a different high school approached her and said, “Hey, it looks like you’re wearing a big Band-Aid on your head. Did you just get out of the hospital?”

“It is frustrating sometimes,” Randa said. “Some friends I know that used to cover their hair took off their scarf because they felt like they were not being looked at as regular people. They felt they were just being looked at for the scarf, as Muslims.”

“With the increasing sentiments against Islam, it was difficult for them to know that everyone was staring at them, using their actions as an example for Islam, and this pressure unfortunately led some women to take off their hijab.”

“I often remind myself that this is our role in life—to please God, to practice our religion freely and it is nice to prove that just because I wear hijab doesn’t mean I don't have a personality. If someone thinks that, so what?”

Melissa, who describes the hijab as a “conversation starter,” is also familiar with the questions and occasional stares. Broadening non-Muslims’ understanding of Islam is part of her job. With thirty-three offices in the U.S. and one in Canada, CAIR promotes a balanced image of Muslims and their religion through inter-faith programs and supports victims of civil rights abuse, more often employing intervention and education strategies than legal action.

“[Our mission], first, is to educate Muslims about their rights—that they are here, that they have just as much right as anyone else to fair and equal treatment, to not feeling afraid, being able to do what they want, say what they want to say, just like anyone else has the right.”

“On the other side of that, we work with the St. Louis community at large to demonstrate that Muslims are part and parcel of this state, of this city, of this country, and are hardworking Americans that love America just like everyone else.”

According to Sardar’s book, there are an estimated 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, approximately seven million of who live in this country.

“It’s funny,” Melissa said. “When people hear the statistics of Muslims in the U.S., they are usually really surprised.”

Melissa told me about an incident that occurred in Florida when she was working for the Miami chapter of CAIR, in which a Muslim family’s home was vandalized and set on fire. When the family surveyed the damage, they were perplexed to find anti-Arab epithets spray-painted on their walls, despite the fact that they were Bosnian.

“The majority of Muslims living in the United States are not Arab,” Melissa said. “The majority of Arabs in the United States are not Muslim. More than sixty percent are Christian.”

The Muslim population of St. Louis is composed of Bosnians, African-Americans, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Afghanis, Arabs, recent refugees from Somalia and people of various ethnic backgrounds who have converted to Islam.

Until I met Dr. Mark Chmiel, professor of Social Justice at St. Louis University, I was using the phrase, “the Muslim community,” to describe this population.

“Communities,” he said. “It’s really the Muslim communities.”

Melissa invited me to attend the Friday service with her the following day at the Daar-Ul Islam mosque on Weidman Road, across from Queeny Park. Located in St. Louis County, this is the area’s largest mosque, serving a predominately Indian sub-continental population of Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi-Americans. Depending on the time of year, the services begin at around one or one-thirty in the afternoon and constitute the week’s most formal gathering for worship.

I arrived at one-fifteen and took my time crossing the parking lot. Daar-Ul Islam is an off-white building with a bronze dome and a tall minaret, traditionally providing a high platform for the call to prayer. I sat on a small bench next to a fountain near the entrance. Many people, people that I had never imagined lived in St. Louis, walked past me looking more diverse in their dress and appearance than the members of my parents’ church. Some men had beards, others were clean-shaven. Many women wore head covers, others did not. I saw robes and business suits, kids in school uniforms and one teenager in a t-shirt.

“Would you like to come inside?” a man asked me.

“Oh, I’m waiting for a friend,” I said. “Thanks.”

Melissa arrived and introduced me to Aftab Ahmad, who teaches tenth-grade Sunday school at the Islamic center within the mosque and conducts trainings for local law enforcement on Islam and Muslim communities. Aftab would be directing me into the sanctuary, as women congregate on an upstairs balcony, separate from the men.

“Not because they are less than us,” Aftab later explained. “Of course not. In the eyes of religion, in the eyes of God, men and women are equal. But, even in the house of God, there is an uninvited guest, which is Satan. If there was a woman praying in front of me, then she would be uncomfortable. If there was a woman praying behind me, then I would be uncomfortable. So it’s best to keep us separate when we are here to worship.”

Aftab estimated that a thousand people were in attendance that day, which I could believe, standing before the expanse of footwear in the lobby. Having removed our shoes, Aftab and I entered the carpeted sanctuary. There were a few supporting columns throughout the room and the walls were bare, except for the Arabic script ringing the inside of the dome.

Hafiz Majid conducted the service from a simple podium. Hafiz is a title given to someone who has memorized the Qur’an. Every mosque community designates its own religious leader, or Imam, considered the most learned in regard to the laws and teachings of Islam, but anyone with sufficient knowledge and experience can deliver the sermon, which shifts fluidly between Arabic and English.

The congregation sat on the floor, except for a few elderly men who were provided chairs. At the back of the room, I was surrounded by a group of boys, probably between ages five and eleven, who restlessly poked and nudged each other in silence throughout the service.

After the sermon, the congregation stood in line formation, facing the pulpit, which is oriented to the Ka’bah, the holy site in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca. Verses of the Qur’an were recited and the congregation knelt.

“The Qur’an is the absolute word of God,” Aftab would tell me, “from His lips to mankind. From His lips to Gabriel to Prophet Mohammad and then to mankind. So much so that not even a period, a verse, a chapter has changed from the day it was delivered to the end of time, because God says in the Qur’an, ‘I myself will protect this book.’”

“How he chose to protect it is not in the physical books, but in the hearts and minds of millions of people, generation after generation, that memorized this book from cover to cover, 114 chapters, over 6,000 verses.”

As Aftab later explained, the Qur’an instructs Muslims to pray, but it is in the Hadith, the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad, a document of his words and deeds, that practices such as the five daily prayers are explicated.

Although I was in the last line, near the exit, I felt like an eyesore as everyone prostrated their heads to the floor and I was left standing. The experience was similar to Christmas services in my grandparents’ Catholic church, as the congregation made the Sign of the Cross and the desire to seek inclusion through mimicry tingled in my hand.

Another finding in The Pew Research Center’s poll was that seventy percent of non-Muslim Americans believe that their own religions are “very different” from Islam.

“From the Muslim perspective,” Aftab said as we sat together, away from the post-service mingling and the putting on of shoes, “we will say that Islam really comes from the time of Adam because the word ‘Islam’ means, ‘submission of your will to that of God’s through peace.’”

“So, from that perspective, all of the prophets submitted to the will of God through peace and are therefore, by definition, Muslim. Except that, of course, the Qur’an was revealed to Prophet Mohammad, being the last of the messengers of God in a line of 124,000 prophets, Adam being the first and then you know the names—Moses, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, David, Jesus, and so on.”

“Jesus is a prophet of God, not a son of God. We believe that he was born to Mary without any human intervention and that he did all of the miracles that the Qur’an says and similar things are mentioned in the Bible as well, but we don’t believe he was crucified and we don’t believe that he died on the cross. We believe that at the time when they came in search of him, God lifted him to himself. So he is alive in heaven and he will return towards the end of time and he will fulfill his mission then and he will die a natural death.”

“From the Muslim perspective, if we don’t believe in Jesus, then we’re not Muslim.”

Walking across the emptied parking lot to my car, I wanted to identify the elements that felt familiar in my experience at the mosque—a message of tolerance in the sermon or the atmosphere of excitement and, possibly, relief following the service as people greeted their relatives and friends, though I didn’t see donuts.

For Dr. Khaled Hamid, who had also been interviewed on St. Louis on the Air, the perception of difference expressed in the Pew Poll and the American public’s misconceptions of Islam are the result of willful deception.

“Do you think there are any terms or vocabulary that are essentially misunderstood?” I asked.

“Uh, yeah. A lot,” he said and laughed. “There is tremendous ignorance here, and you add to the ignorance all of the very heated and emotional issues of wars and terrorism, and all the weird exotic things that non-Muslims in the United States think they know about us that we actually don’t know about ourselves.”

“It’s very difficult to have a comprehensive discussion about this. It would take forever.”

Khaled did address the vocabulary that many Americans associate with Islam.

“The phrase ‘holy war’ has no root in Islamic culture,” he said. “The word ‘infidels’ has no root in Islamic culture. These two terms actually evolved and appeared for the first time as Christian terminology during the time of the Crusades and even later amongst fighting factions within Christianity itself.”

“The Qur’an uses a term for Christians and Jews collectively and it’s not ‘the infidels’ or anything that would translate close to that. It’s ‘the people of the book,’ referring to people who believe in divine revelation that came before the Qur’an was revealed to Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him.”

Beyond language, I know from watching CNN and Fox News that images of violence have been linked with images of Muslims engaged in prayer, through visual montage.

“All the evils that we either know for a fact or are sometimes led to believe is done by Muslims, is it done because of the way they fulfill the religion or is it done because of something else?” Khaled asked.

“It’s not the religion issue. Whether it’s, ‘We want the Americans out of Iraq because they are occupiers,’ or, ‘We don’t like Israelis because we’ve been living in refugee camps forever,’ it is something else that’s motivating them.”

“I’m not condoning these things,” he said. “Civilians are definitely protected in the Qur’an and should not be a part of any war. Actually, even fighters at war, once they drop their weapon, you are obliged as a Muslim to protect them. Somebody can do very evil things against you and yet you cannot reply in kind. That is part of the commitment of any truly religious person.”

“That’s the part that is very mysterious for most people in the Western world.”

Less than a week after the June 30th bombing at Glasgow International Airport, reportedly perpetrated by medical professionals, Khaled participated in a panel discussion featuring local physicians in order to address the concerns of non-Muslim communities. Journalists from The New York Times, Public Radio International, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other local media outlets covered the event.

“One of the people there, a reporter, kept saying, ‘Muslims are not speaking up. Why aren’t you talking? Where are the moderates?’ and this is something echoed everywhere,” Khaled said.

The Muslim visibility campaign continued with a demonstration at the Daar-Ul Islam mosque a few weeks later, clarifying the stance of the Muslim community and its religious leadership on issues of terrorism. Though the press had been notified, the only journalist in attendance was Tim Townsend of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who Khaled described as a friend.

“This is a fight that we unfortunately cannot win as a Muslim community or, for that purpose, any community that ends up in our situation,” Khaled said. “If there isn’t a hot issue, nobody wants to listen.”

Having met with four people who attend the same West County mosque, I wanted to speak with individuals from other Muslim communities.

Imam Muhamed Hasic moved to St. Louis from Canada in 1997, at the invitation of the Islamic Foundation, to help create a cultural and linguistic bridge between the established Muslim community and the newly arrived Bosnian refugees. Hasic had originally traveled to Canada for a three-month vacation, but had been unable to return to his country due to the outbreak of the Bosnian War. In 2001 he and a group of volunteers opened the Medina Masjid (or mosque) on the south side of St. Louis City.

“We didn’t get any grants,” Hasic said. “It was basically the local community—those people who work very hard, like jobs with seven or eight bucks an hour, and some of them were giving ten bucks, others two hundred. So we collected, at that time, around two hundred thousand for this place.”

When I arrived on a weekday afternoon, Imam Hasic welcomed me into an empty mosque. His desk and the shelves behind him were overwhelmed with books and paperwork.

“We don’t have many employees,” he said. “We don’t have many volunteers. We’re just struggling to keep the basic things.”

“How many employees do you have?” I asked.

“It’s only me,” he said. “I do the religious services. I do the administration. I do the social services.”

Citing education and employment opportunities as the main issues of concern for the community that he serves, Hasic explained that he hopes to provide more than just a setting for religious observance.

“They get the comfort,” he said, “the feeling like at home, but at the same time, they learn the [English] language and how the society around them works. They don’t lose their identity. You can learn and understand as a Bosnian or a Bosnian Muslim, but you can also be a decent and good American. Nothing is contradictory between these two. If you are a good Muslim, you are definitely a good American.”

Just before the entrance to the unmarked, single-story building, three men were in the process of constructing a massive minaret. The structure will become a prominent landmark along South Kingshighway Boulevard.

“It’s very exciting,” Hasic said. “It’s kind of symbolizing the freedom of religious expression in America, which is very important for the refugees. At the same time, giving people the pride for what they are. They’re building this identity and they feel they are part of the society.”

For the last stop on this many-week journey, I drove north on Kingshighway, past Forest Park and the Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, past the affluent neighborhoods of the Central West End, to an area in North St. Louis that I had never visited before. I noticed that the pedestrians and the drivers around me were mostly African-American. I parked in front of Better Bakery and met Imam Samuel Ansari just inside the door.

Imam Ansari serves a predominately African-American Muslim community that congregates at the Masjid Al-Mu-Minun Islamic Center on Grand Avenue. This community was originally established in the mid-1950’s as part of the Nation of Islam, but has functioned autonomously since the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975, when his son, Imam Warith Deen Muhammad, shifted the organization into alignment with mainstream Islam.

“Certainly we recognize the good that Elijah Muhammad did as a social reformer, trying to look at the conditions that African-Americans were subjected to,” Ansari said. “He used more of a reverse psychology to address that situation. I feel that it was very effective. It was not something that was designed to be continued on, in terms of the rhetoric of the Nation of Islam, in terms of the white man being the devil and that kind of thing.”

“The majority of the community there, on Grand, stayed and accepted the leadership of the son. The criteria is the Qur’an and the thing to be emulated is the example of Prophet Muhammad.”

As it was past five o’clock, the Better Bakery had already closed and I sat with Imam Ansari in the dining area as the sun set, dimming the room. He was still wearing his apron and explained that the bakery has been in business and associated with the Muslim community for over thirty years.

We talked about the divisions within the larger St. Louis Muslim community.

“You’ll find that there’s an agreement in language and principles,” he said, “but I think each community has their own unique situation and concerns.”

“The main thing that brings the community together across ethnic lines and language barriers would be the two Eids. Eid ul-Fitr, which is the celebration of the ending of Ramadan and Eid ul-Adha, which is connected with the Hajj [the annual pilgrimage to Mecca].”

“Other than that, the communities pretty much work on whatever their goals and objectives are. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that. That’s the way life is.”

“As a country, we still haven’t been able to break down barriers that allow people to respectfully and genuinely mix. You find areas that have a diversity of people, but I don’t think there’s a real mixing of people, where they really feel that they’re interacting as people.”

In light of the ideological divisions that distinguish the major religions, Ansari sympathizes with individuals who may be more concerned with their financial stability than religious maxims. He believes that recognizing common principles and experiences is essential for any kind of social progress.

“My understanding is that all of the religious scriptures say that God rewards any good that people do. Any good. I mean, if you don’t even believe in God and you do good, you treat people respectfully and you try to help them to the best of your ability, God is going to reward that.”

“To me, Islam says that there is one humanity, and if what I believe does not recognize your freedom to believe what you choose, then I need to question my belief. God gives us this freedom.”

“I think we just have to come to grips with the reality that whatever we want to believe in or practice should enhance the decency and the integrity of every human being.”

Before leaving Better Bakery, I purchased two pies—sweet potato and bean. The bean pie consists of a sweet custard made from navy beans, sugar, butter and milk, and is associated with the Nation of Islam as Elijah Muhammad encouraged its consumption in lieu of richer foods. I drove home with the pair sitting heavy in my passenger seat and sampled both in my kitchen, struggling to remember what life had been like before tasting bean pie and meeting all of these people.

These Middling Masses – Nato Caliph

2007-11-07T09:39:00.000-06:00

This is / Nato Caliph and I still love hip-hop

Shedrick Kelley created Nato Caliph for seven dollars. He registered the fictitious name at the office of the Missouri Secretary of State, enabling Nato to apply for credit cards, open a bank account, sign a contract with a record label and release his first album, Cipher Inside.

“Nato Caliph is just me. I didn’t want to come out with my real name and then have a record company own the rights to it. There’s no difference. The way I think is the way Nato thinks."

I met Nato at his apartment where he lives with his wife, Dana, their two year-old daughter, Ayana, and their five month-old son, Hasani. The name Ayana is Ethiopian for “beautiful flower.” Hasani, also East African, means “handsome.”

They live on the east side of University City, on a one-way street that doesn’t see much traffic. Removing my shoes just inside their door, I could smell incense and hear Hasani responding to Dana in the kitchen. Ayana peaked around a corner with a hand puppet.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“My fingers,” she said.

Nato and I had been introduced at the KDHX studio a few weeks before, when he was interviewed on The Remedy. We had spoken briefly, but I had been struck by the sincerity with which he addressed me and the calm that he carried into an environment frenetic with discussion.

We sat down in his living room in front of a television turned to Nickelodeon with the volume low.

“Yana,” Nato said, “could you get Daddy the cocoa butter out of the bathroom on the sink?”

“On the sink?” she asked.

“Yes, the cocoa butter on the sink in the bathroom,” he said and she ran out of the room.

“I try to give her things to do that challenge her to think,” he said. “I know she’s only two.”

This is the story of a lesser man turned equal

“Where were you born?” I asked.

“Right here,” he said. “St. Louis, Missouri.”

Nato’s mother was seventeen and attending University City High School when she had him. I asked about his father.

“I know he exists,” Nato said, “but do we have a relationship? No. The last time I saw him I was eleven.”

“That was his choice to get out of the picture. I know he lives in St. Louis or at least he used to. It’s like one of those things.”

For the first few months of his life, Nato and his mother lived with his grandparents before his mother found an apartment and married a man with whom she would have two more children, though they soon divorced.

“I won’t lie,” Nato said. “It was some hardships. We had times where it was just enough for one meal. Like I remember coming home from school, and for some kind of afternoon snack, we would open up a jar of peanut butter and sit together eating peanut butter off the butter knife.”

“My mom was a single parent and here she is, by the age of twenty-one, with three children, doing what she could. Of course there were occasions when the lights would get turned off here and there. They wouldn’t stay off, but that kind of stuff.”

“I’m not trying to give you the impression that I grew up in the hood or the ghetto, but at the same time, it wasn’t easy living.”

Nato encountered hip-hop at a young age.

“My mom wasn’t one of those people that liked to shelter us from everything,” he said. “I mean, we went to rated R movies. She just told us right from wrong. This is something you do. This is something you don’t do. And we learned. Period.”

“She didn’t turn off the radio when hip-hop came on. She would listen to it and we listened to it. We knew what to say and what not to say.”

Nato first heard Rakim, an influential MC from New York, in 1987, and believes that the artist’s style and the sound of his voice over the beat affected him profoundly.

“When [Ronald] Reagan spoke on TV,” Nato said, “I would listen to it. I was always into politics, the economy, money, stuff like that. My mom has a picture of me reading the business section of the [St. Louis Post-Dispatch] when I was four.”

“I remember looking at Reagan and he was just talking and I was like, ‘This is whack.’ But when I heard Rakim, it was cool. It was something I wanted to hear, something that kept me in tune.”

“I was seven years old and I was like, ‘That’s something I want to do in my life. I want to be an orator of sorts. Something with words that has people come together and listen and have time a good time and learn some things.'”

Much like hearing LL Cool J’s single, “I’m Bad,” listening to Rakim was more than an aural experience for Nato. He believes it awakened something encoded in his physical make up.

“A lot of people want to debate this and argue that it’s not true,” Nato said, “but being a black person, we inherit what they call the Boom Bap, which is the African drum, the rhythm, the beat that’s in you.”

“When you hear a nice beat, you can’t help but move. You get addicted, but then of course you start to listen to the words and start to realize that they’re saying something. Not only does it sound good, but it means something.”

This is for aunts, mothers and sisters that’s out there hoing / and uncles, fathers and brothers that’s love not knowing

Nato was recorded freestyling at a family reunion when he was nine. He started writing poetry in school and would read his work over his mother’s old Anita Baker and Gladys Knight tapes. When record companies started releasing instrumental tracks along with popular singles, Nato began noticing the beat measures and composing his rhymes to fit. By age fifteen, he was writing complete songs, but another passion had monopolized his time and efforts.

“Football for me then is what hip-hop is to me now,” he said “It was all about football. I played seven years straight of football. That’s all I thought about. It was everything.”

By his senior year, Nato was the captain of University City High School’s varsity squad. Describing this experience in the armchair across from me reminded Nato that he needed to switch channels from Nickelodeon to the Sunday NFL game. Nato’s talents on the field earned him scholarship offers from several universities, but the $19,000 a year that he finally accepted from Bradley University in Illinois was strictly academic.

“Somebody told me, ‘You have a better chance of being a brain surgeon than being in the NFL.’ I was like, ‘Okay, I need to go ahead and focus on academics and music and that’s that.’ That’s what I did. I made those choices.”

Nato’s roommate during his freshman year at Bradley was a young man named Stewart, who produced fake IDs for thousands of minors with his computer. At two o’clock one morning, when Nato was studying for finals, the FBI broke down their door and confiscated Stewart’s computer. The files they found included a headshot of Nato that Stewart had cut from an old identification card. Nato, who has abstained from drinking alcohol since he was seventeen, was questioned by the authorities and subsequently stripped of his scholarship for refusing to detail Stewart’s activities.

Stewart’s family hired a lawyer who won him a reduced sentence, enabling Stewart to complete his education at Bradley, while Nato was forced to return home, later enrolling at the University of Missouri St. Louis, where he was unable to pursue his intended major in civil engineering.

“I was already a loner anyway,” Nato said. “I didn’t have too many friends just because you can’t trust a lot of people, but that really put me in a tight circle.”

I keep building / and hate love that loves hate

During his second year at UMSL, Nato met Dana Williams.

“I told her then that we were going to be together,” he said. “She didn’t believe me of course.”

He also created the name by which I and most people outside of his family address him.

“When I was little,” he said, “I’d always hear about a NATO air strike here, a NATO air strike there. I thought, ‘Man, NATO is always blowing stuff up.’ I found out that it was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so this was a group of people coming together to blow things up. That was at a time in hip-hop when it was popular to say, ‘I drop bombs on the mic.’”

He discovered Caliph through a Western Philosophy class at UMSL where he learned that the word is Arabic for “successor,” referring to the figure intended to succeed the Iman, or high priest.

“A successful bombing mission is kind of how I put those two together,” Nato said. “That’s why I rap about knowledge and revolution and the greater good.”

Nato now works for Express Scripts, one of the nation’s largest pharmacy benefit managers, as a national scheduling business analyst in resource management. He helps create schedules for thousands people working at call centers located throughout the country. This requires an understanding of what Nato describes as, “call center math,” dealing with intervals down to the half hour. This type of logistical analysis seems to appeal to Nato, who applies a similar process to his writing.

“I love information,” he said. “I’m an information geek.”

“I take my rhymes from things I see. I watch a lot of news. I watch a lot of financial reports. I look at CSPAN. I look at the quote unquote boring stuff. I consider myself a translator for the people that do not understand or watch that. Basically, I try to decipher.”

Nato told me about the discovery, announced that morning, that Indian manufacturers had been employing a system of child slavery to produce clothing for The Gap.

“Something similar to that will pop up in a rhyme later,” he said. “Not necessarily that particular instance, but just about, once again, the clothes we wear on our backs. And it’s funny, I had already put on this little Gap jacket and I read that and I was like, ‘Man, that’s messed up.’ It’s always way worse than what they’re telling you.”

For several years, Nato was a member of Soul Tyde, a collective of emcees and singers once dubbed the “the Wu-Tang of the Midwest.” In 2004, Nato, another MC named Lyfestile and DJ Fly D-Ex formed Plan B, in collaboration with DJ Crucial, who would later produce the majority of Cipher Inside. Nato has created his own record label, Cipher Music Group, but is now affiliated with F5 Records.

“F5 is a real wholesome label in the sense that there’s no paperwork. It’s an agreement. It’s artists working with artists. They’ve been in St. Louis on the hip-hop scene and they’ve been doing it right—really working and doing the vinyl, and doing shows.”

Since the October 9th release of Cipher Inside, Nato has reinvested all of his personal sale earnings into promotion.

A bunch of words to a beat mean nothin’ if they’re only helping you / What about the homeless community, shelter and food?

I could see the connections between the perspective that Nato was expressing and the lyrics that I had heard on his album, but another element remained unaccounted for.

“Are you religious?” I asked.

“No, not religious,” he said. “Religion comes from a Greek word, ‘religio,’ which means to split, conquer and divide. There’s been more bloodshed in the name of God than any other thing on the planet. It’s caused the most destruction, the most heartache, the most pain.”

Nato has received and practices the teachings of the Five Percent through the Nation of Gods and Earths, founded in Harlem in 1964 by Father Allah, a former member of the Nation of Islam.

“Some people who don’t understand it try to see it as a black supremacy group or whatever you want to say, but one of the founding principles is peace.”

The Nation’s membership has included such hip-hop heavyweights as Rakim, the Wu-Tang Clan, Busta Rhymes, Gang Starr and Digable Planets. Men within the organization are referred to as “gods,” women as “earths.”

“We’re not atheists in the sense that we don’t think that God does not exist,” Nato said. “We believe in God. We know that God is in us. I see God in more than one person. When I see a man that knows who he is and he uses that to his advantage to help his people, to me, that’s an attribute of God.”

The Nation has schools in ten cities, running programs focused on youth education.

“It’s not just teaching them that the black man is the original man,” Nato said. “We teach them how to look past the initial message that people put out there.”

“The best way to lie to somebody is not to just tell them a lie. It’s to give them the truth and then tell them it’s not real. We question everything.”

The Nation of Gods and Earths claims math and science as a foundation for its teachings and its members communicate through a series of signifying letters and numbers.

“If you understood what we call ‘God knowledge,’” Nato said, “you could go back and listen to my album. It’s a whole other album inside of what people hear.”

I write for my threes / and I love my twos / and I’ll die for my four, God, how ‘bout you?

“I write for my children,” Nato explained, “and I love my women. Four is freedom. I said, ‘I’ll die for my freedom, God, how ‘bout you?’ I’m talking to other black men that consider themselves knowledgeable of who they are.”

How could you…

I attempted to stage a family portrait in the backyard, with Nato and Dana balancing their bundled children on their laps, having just wiped lunch from Hasani’s face and a smear of makeup from Ayana’s. I asked Nato how much babysitting help they receive from relatives, to which he replied, “I like to be around my children. When I’m not at work or doing music, I like to be around.”

He also likes playing video games with DJ Crucial, himself a father of twins, listening to Coldplay, responding to emails through his cell phone and moving crowds.

I’m the guy atop the Himalayas with the morning yell / and I’m the supervisor / at opening bell / and I’m the best thing that happened to anything good / and I say and feel / what the whole world should

Cipher Inside can be purchased on iTunes, emusic, locally at Vintage Vinyl or directly off the F5 website.

Get a Free CD!

2007-11-07T09:34:00.000-06:00

Be one of the first three people to email me at mryanmiller@hotmail.com and receive a free copy of Nato Caliph's Cipher Inside.

Just make "Nato" the subject. You don't even have to write anything else, though feedback and personal anecdotes are always welcome.

Good luck!

Mr. Smith For President

2007-11-04T20:41:00.000-06:00

In the year 2000, then-governor Mel Carnahan posthumously defeated John Ashcroft in his bid for reelection to the United States Senate. It was the first time that a deceased person had ever claimed victory in a Senatorial race. A month later, Ashcroft was nominated as U.S. Attorney General by president-elect George W. Bush and Missouri Governor Roger Wilson appointed Jean Carnahan, Mel Carnahan’s widow, to serve in her husband’s place.

Four years later, Congressman Dick Gephardt retired from the U.S. House of Representatives after two unsuccessful runs at a Democratic presidential nomination. A leading contender for the seat arose in the person of Russ Carnahan, a member of the Missouri State Legislature and the son of Mel and Jean.

“The Carnahan name in Missouri is like the Kennedy name in Massachusetts,” political analyst Kenneth F. Warren said.

Despite his family’s reputation, Russ Carnahan was considered a weak candidate due to his flat-footed delivery during speeches and debates and the fact that he had missed fifty-six votes on the Missouri House floor in 2004, ranking 132nd out of 150 state representatives in vote attendance. Nonetheless, there was an overwhelming public consensus that he would win.

Nine other candidates entered the Democratic primary, including Jeff Smith, a twenty-nine year-old adjunct political science professor at Washington University and founder of the Confluence Academies, a group of charter schools in North St. Louis focused on science and math.

“He’s short, looks like he’s twelve and sounds like he’s castrated,” Jeff’s campaign communications director, Artie Harris, said.

“You’re not running for anything,” Jeff’s mother told him. “You’re just running away from a stable job.”

Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? tells the story of an impossibly determined individual, attempting to disprove fundamental assumptions about the system of electoral politics in the United States. Jeff is about five-five but dribbles a basketball like a Globetrotter. He believes in universal healthcare and that the recovery of urban areas begins with schools.

“No child’s future should be determined by something as arbitrary as the neighborhood in which he or she was born,” he said in a speech before an African-American congregation.

Although Jeff promises to revitalize the core values of the progressive movement, his politics seem secondary to the demonstration of pure idealism and personal will. This labor of love has Jeff juggling cell phones, knocking on hundreds of doors, delivering heart-wrenching pep talks to his campaign staff and changing his pants in the middle of a parking lot.

Frank Popper’s film, made on a budget smaller than that of Jeff’s bare bones campaign, is a compelling study for anyone interested in the day-in, day-out struggle of a hopeless grass roots movement that threatens to actually succeed. It’s also funny.

Upon meeting Jeff Smith for the first time and observing all of his disqualifying faults, Artie Harris talked to Jeff for ten minutes and arrived at a conclusion.

“This motherfucker just might do it.”

Candy For Lunch

2007-11-02T22:09:00.001-05:00

Crown Candy Kitchen does not believe that a human being should be able to consume five malts in less than thirty minutes. That’s why the freaks that can get their names on a plaque and their malts for free. Five malts finished in thirty minutes and one second cost nineteen dollars and fifty cents. Extras include malt, nuts, topping, whipped cream and “thick.”

If your name isn’t Doug “The Dude” Rowley or Joey Chestnut, you’ll probably seize up before the end of the second round. Migraine-caliber brain freeze may or may not subside.

I ordered a marshmallow malt because, I was informed, seemingly gross can be surprisingly good. It was good—not too goopy or arrestingly sweet. Although my soda fountain glass stood nearly as tall as the metal cup that my malt arrived in, that single serving filled the glass three times.

To be honest, I couldn’t finish it. I pulled up short of organ failure and worked on my Reuben.

My dad said that I should’ve ordered the BLT because the bacon is thicker than the bread. My theory is that savory items should only refresh the palate, enabling more intake of sweet, though that Siren on the menu board (see item five) certainly seduces.

This one-stop sucrose shop was opened by Harry Karandzie and his best friend, Pete Jugaloff, in 1913. Crown Candy Kitchen is the anchor attached to a sunken ship ready to slip off the continental shelf. The pedestrian mall across the street looks like an abandoned studio lot that has been attacked by elephants.

Though Headhunters Unisex (that’s a beauty salon) may lament bygone days of customers and structural integrity, the corner confectioner is thriving. If this family-owned operation is the life support machine that has been sustaining Old North St. Louis in its vegetable state, a few developers may be the defibrillator pads that force a pulse.

I’m not sure who the other customers were or where they came from. Almost all of them were white, which contradicted my unsubstantiated assumptions about the area. There were some cops, families and a few guys in suits pounding malted butterscotch and Lovers’ Delight sundaes in their rush back to work. My friend, Shannon, and I appeared to be the only novelty seekers.

We said, “Maybe next time,” to the candy as I focused on placing one foot in front of the other. I think that if you mixed some malt powder in water and spread that on your hand and placed your hand on a wall, you’d probably be screwed.

Racist Art

2007-10-30T12:15:00.001-05:00

Craig Norton is white. That's the answer to the million dollar question.

Whether they ask or not, I would guess that most people who visit the White Flag Projects gallery (flag color here unrelated to Craig and his show) are urgently compelled to identify the artist.

Craig would prefer to live in a society where people no longer require this answer or pose slightly more probing questions like, Is he Jewish? and Is he gay?

Craig mentioned attending a church, so I don’t think he’s Jewish and I did meet his wife and their baby. I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from that information, but my experience of One Hundred Twenty Seven Racists Drawings would be stifled without the knowledge that the artist is white.

To the left of the entrance, three members of the Ku Klux Klan stand over a tormented black family as a house and two crosses burn in the background.

On the east wall, a black man is being sold at auction, a white girl appears to glare at a stunned black face and a black child hides behind his father.

Ahead, in the largest gathering, figures desegregate a school, threaten children with placards and clubs, restrain police dogs and scream out of madness.

All of these images seem merciful in contrast with the west wall’s presentation. Here are the images of lynching.

The festivity and approval of the mob denies the humanity of newly dead faces, but the deeper horror is in the text. Narratives penciled directly on the wall, outlined in speech bubbles detail methods of murder that stick to the psyche longer than a bloated face and a broken neck.

Craig inserted the first person into each of the texts and attached them to his figures, but cites books such as Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America as their source.

Maybe my need to know that Craig is white signifies a dysfunction in my analytical abilities. Once this basic information is revealed, the door opens for conclusions that arrive intact.

For instance—Craig seeks to reconcile his white male guilt as he feels complicit in these acts; Craig is capable of addressing overt racial violence, but shies from racism in its systemic form, for which he is culpable; Craig wants me, a white man, to acknowledge my shame.

So, what if I couldn’t know that Craig is white?

The craft is remarkable. Each photo-like face was rendered with a Bic pen. The bodies were collaged from wallpaper samples. The texts reflect documented narratives. The characters and their expressions were inspired by photographs that are, in some cases, less than fifty years old, and recent headlines deny that these histories have been resolved.

Before he developed this exhibition, Craig had created work addressing genocide in ten distinct historical contexts. He had made oil paintings depicting a St. Louis community in its struggle to cope with seven murders in one summer on Etzel Avenue. Also, no quantitative figures related to the number of black people killed in the American South over the last two centuries appear in the current show because Craig won’t allow statistical comparisons between one human tragedy and another.

“This awful history that has happened to another human being has happened,” Craig said during his artist’s talk yesterday evening. “I would hope that as a human being, I would step up and say, ‘This is happening and this is an injustice.’”

When Craig is confronted with the varied responses that his work inspires, he is inclined to share a personal story, rather than reach for abstraction. He told the small audience that had gathered for his lecture (three out of about twenty being African-American) an anecdote about overcoming his own ignorance.

One time Craig was riding the subway in New York City and noticed a man of Middle Eastern descent dressed in a long robe and a turban. A few minutes later, the man removed his turban, which Craig found surprising.

“I didn’t know you guys could do that,” Craig said.

The man laughed and they continued talking until they parted ways at a street-level intersection. Craig seemed to be saying that sincere inquiry could strike down prejudice at its foundation.

Generosity and open-heartedness are the other weapons in Craig’s arsenal. He talked about presenting a cake to a young man in his neighborhood who was celebrating his nineteenth birthday, bringing the teenager to tears. Craig also said that young people have knocked on his front door, asking for a place to stay and though Craig didn’t feel he could invite these individuals into his family’s home, he let them sleep in his car.

I asked Craig why he labeled his drawings racist in the title of his show. Craig said he wanted the question, Is he racist? to draw people to the work.

“People didn’t know,” he said, “but I was hoping that when they would come, they would look at it and realize that this is about history, hopefully forming a dialogue about things that people didn’t know about.”

An element of the work that no viewer knew about, until an informed audience member mentioned it, is what Craig has started writing on the back of each figure.

“After I complete the figure, I have a little process,” Craig said. “I don’t know if it’s an [Obsessive Compulsive Disorder] process, but it’s a process. What I do is, first of all, thank God for the opportunity and the talent to do the work. Then I sign my name. I do a signature and then a print. I sign the time that it’s finished, but then what I’ll do is write down what I did that day. I write about what my daughter and I did or my wife and I. I don’t really know why I started doing that.”

As difficult as Craig’s work is to look at and as complicated as a reading of these images becomes with the knowledge that Craig is white, I appreciate his willingness to address these issues and histories directly, even though he doesn’t seem fully reconciled with the implications.

By the end of his talk, Craig hadn’t resolved all of my doubts about his role as the transmitter of these narratives, but he had presented an incredibly powerful body of work and stood in front of a microphone stand for an hour, enabling a dialogue.

I still need to know that Craig is white because, without that information, I wouldn't have a clear view of his vulnerability or his courage.

One Hundred Twenty Seven Racist Drawings will be on display at White Flag Projects until November 10th.

City Seedling

2007-10-27T21:11:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I woke up to the rain and a cold hardwood floor. My feet seemed to say, “Why’s it always gotta be us? You do yoga. Make the hands go first.” The hands retreated to my chin with the comforter. “You lived in Russia,” a rational lump of brain tissue said. “It’s only October.”

I eventually got up, admittedly later than the working world, and dug through a few drawers for the kind of socks that induce foot perspiration in any weather. My friend, Shannon, had given me an address, but I typed the wrong one into my Internet machine and proceeded to drive around Downtown St. Louis for fifty-five jaw-tightening minutes. Maybe these sluggish missteps reflected not my incompetence, but the need for a personal paradigm adjustment.

If I were playing the associations game during a road trip and someone said, “concrete,” I would not say, “harvest.” Serve me “urban” and I will not shout, “rutabaga!”

For a nation that appreciates the opportunity to unload its baby mandarins and flaccid pears, canned food and homelessness are wedded by forces of excess and need. City Seeds Urban Farm is trying to confuse us by introducing organic abundance to a plot of land two blocks from Union Station and fresh food to people who need it.

Established two years ago with the support of a three-year USDA grant, City Seeds is a food security project. According to 2003 statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 852 million people worldwide are chronically hungry due to extreme poverty and up to 2 billion intermittently lack food security, meaning consistent access to food. The City Seeds project is the result of collaboration between ten St. Louis organizations, led by Gateway Greening, a nonprofit “dedicated to community development through community gardening.”

Parker Smith holds a degree in horticulture from Illinois State University and is one of the farm’s co-founders. She believes that lower income communities in the City of St. Louis often lack access to grocery stores and fresh produce. Two of the grant’s stated goals are to promote healthier lifestyles amongst these populations and to offer job skills training and horticulture therapy to individuals with varied histories that may include homelessness, mental disabilities, emotional disorders, alcoholism, drug abuse and non-violent crime.

“We’ve had a number of clients this season go on to get jobs in the horticulture field because of their experience here,” Parker said. “Many people, whether they’ve struggled with issues in their past or not, find gardening therapeutic. Horticulture therapy is just incorporating that into what the St. Patrick Center does, whether it be physical therapy or dealing with substance abuse. It just helps.”

The St. Patrick Center, according to its website, is the largest provider of homeless services in Missouri, with twenty-two programs annually serving more than nine thousand people. The organization provides shelter through the Rosati Transitional Living Center on North Grand Avenue and serves a hot lunch to as many as 250 people 364 days a year at its main facility.

The clients, who earn minimum wage, are only eligible to work on the City Seeds Farm if they are actively participating in a second St. Patrick Center program, such as drug or alcohol rehabilitation, employment placement or prisoner re-entry, have been referred by their counselor and passed a physical exam. About fifty individuals have worked on the site since the program broke ground in the spring of 2006 and twenty-five to thirty clients are currently involved. The farm consists of thirty vegetable beds, a fruit tree orchard and a pumpkin patch.

The developing horticulturalists work from 7:30 to 11:30 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, though most clients are limited to two weekly shifts. On Fridays, the group prepares their produce for sale at the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market the following day, in partnership with New Roots Urban Farm. Local Harvest Grocery Store also buys some of the fruits and vegetables and donations are made to Operation Food Search, a St. Louis food bank that distributes free food to three hundred food pantries and soup kitchens. The remainder of the produce is available to both clients and volunteers to take home for their soups, salads and sweet potato pies.

I talked to Christian Sparks, the St. Patrick Center program coordinator, as I palmed my voice recorder to protect it from the soaking rain. Christian works alongside the clients every farm day, and didn't seem bothered by the drizzle.

“Other than days like this,” he said, “well even on days like this, I just love being out here.”

As this was the final harvest of the season, the washing and packaging stations were overflowing with Swiss chard and other greens.

“We have to be real picky about how it looks,” he said, “because we’re essentially in competition with other people who are selling produce [at the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market] and we want ours to look the best.”

Christian explained that, as part of the pre-employment program, clients rotate Saturday shifts at the New Roots Urban Farm booth, selling the goods that they have produced. Participants must attend two classes that review procedures for handling money and interacting with the public. Operation Food Search also visits the farm three or four times a season to provide instruction on food preparation, recipes and nutritional information. During the last session, they served butternut squash and black bean chili.

“I’m a meat eater,” Christian said, “but it may have been the best chili I’ve ever eaten.”

A few months ago, Christian informally surveyed the clients to see what they valued the most about their experience on the farm.

“For some folks, it’s an important part of their ongoing recovery process—it’s good just to be out here with other people who are trying to do the same things, trying to turn their lives around. For other people it’s a matter of doing things they didn’t know they could.”

In addition to maintaining the farm’s vegetable beds, the clients have the option of establishing their own plots.

“We have one young lady out here that has some partial paralysis,” Christian said. “One day she was just showing me her bed and she said, ‘I didn’t know I could do this!’ and her whole face was lit up. She’s really come a long way.”

“I think my favorite crop that we raised out here is hope and change, and the green stuff just happens to be a by-product.”

The first client I spoke with was Derrick, who has been working on the farm since April. I asked him what he liked best about the experience.

“Everything is good, but mostly washing, weighing, and getting the stuff ready for the market,” he said. “That’s what I prefer to do, but I do it all. I’ll put it like this, that’s what they say is my specialty. This right here.”

“What do you consider or think about when you’re preparing the produce for market?” I asked.

“I’m not thinking,” he said “I’m in a meditation mode. I just look at ‘em and boom! Just go through it and don’t think about what I’m doing.”

“You might be mad the morning you came in here and this right here helps take all the worries off your mind.”

Annie has been with in program since late March and tends individual beds established by clients who have left the farm, in addition to her own.

“It’s interesting for me to rekindle the flame,” she said. “In the olden days, you [gardened] with your grandparents and now you’re grandparents are gone on, so it’s quite interesting to start all over again. I’ve learnt a lot since I’ve been here. We’ve planted a lot of things that I knew nothing about. And now I know something about them.”

“It’s relaxation. It’s educational. It’s experimental. It’s adventurous.”

We both laughed.

“I like to aerate the vegetables,” she said. “You know, break up the soil around the bottom of the vegetables and then make sure that the water goes all the way down to the bottom of the plant, where the root grows.”

She led me into the rain for a tour of her individual bed. On the way over, we passed James, who had remained unsheltered, washing and sorting greens since I arrived. I found out that he was the most veteran client horticulturalist, having worked on the farm from its inception.

"It was just clear land," he said.

“What do you like about this work?” I asked.

“The money!” he said.

James didn't want to be photographed, but he was willing to display his product.

When I approached Annie’s bed, I saw that most of her crop had been harvested and that some insects had attacked her collard greens, but a few string bean plants, chard and tomatoes continued to grow.

She described her plan to take a floral arrangement class and learn more about soil during the break between growing seasons. Except for James, the clients I spoke with expressed interest in returning next year. There are no limits on an individual’s participation in the program, as long as the client’s counselor approves. Nonetheless, the end of the season was a difficult topic for Annie.

“I’m kinda okay with it, but I’m kinda not okay because now I’m like, ‘Okay, so what am I gonna do now?’” she said. “But I’ll find something to do. I’ll find something to do.”

“When the okra gets this big,” she said, redirecting my attention, “I usually take them home and let them dry out and then I open them up and take the seeds out and put them in an envelope and save them for next year to replant. And you’re stepping on one of them.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Okay,” she said.

The last person I talked to was Dennis. He had only entered the program four weeks earlier, but could already attest to its rewards.

“This is great for me,” he said. “It’s a therapeutic situation. I can really get in tune and in touch with nature and myself, if that’s not sounding too philosophical or ignorant or whatever.”

“I’m just saying, I’m urban, so the only thing I knew was concrete, you know. I go to the grocery store and look at [the produce], but to sit here and watch it grow. I didn’t know okra grew up tall.”

“I didn’t either,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

This morning I woke up a bit warmer and rode my bike to the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market. The City Seeds farmers had sent me home with a bag of tasty radishes, but I stopped by the New Roots Urban Farm booth for few green peppers and an eggplant.

I’m happy to know the source.

The Donut Doughdown

2007-10-20T16:09:00.001-05:00

A “doughdown” is a showdown, head-to-head, but with alliteration. It’s a good way to occupy oneself on a Saturday morning and a better way to cripple any activity planned for the afternoon.

I first rode my bike to Dunaway Books on South Grand Boulevard, the only great used bookshop I’ve found in St. Louis (so far!). I almost bought the largest unabridged dictionary I had ever seen, but couldn’t justify transporting its immense weight, what with the existence of the Internet, which isn’t as charming on my coffee table.

I rode from there to an antique furniture store, bought nothing and continued hampering traffic down Chippewa Street. Just past the Bancroft Avenue intersection stands the Donut Drive-In. The named confused me at first because it got me thinking drive-thru, but it might as well be called “Donut Park and Get Out of Your Car.”

I leaned my bike against a window without locking it so that I could run outside just in time to see it peddled away.

“Do you have a signature donut?” I asked.

“No,” the woman said.

“I’ll take a glazed.”

In a head-to-head doughdown, it’s better to eliminate complicating variables like sprinkles and custard. That doesn’t mean it was easy to pass up the seasonal varieties at their peak.

Like its unrevealed competitor, Donut Drive-In offers no seating and does its donut making where anyone can see. A single donut costs fifty-nine cents. I took mine outside and sat on the sidewalk.

Before the first bite, I was experiencing buyer’s remorse. Who orders glazed? I wanted a Long John with orange frosting, but I ate my donut anyway, and it was really good. Very moist, glazey.

I mounted my bike, put on my dumb helmet and rode up Kingshighway Boulevard to Vandeventer Avenue, where I met the challenger.

Or maybe World’s Fair Donuts is the incumbent. The shop opened in the seventies, but its name, employees and indiscernible pun seem like allusions to an age long passed.

World’s Fair has a superior atmosphere, with less boxes threatening to topple on its customers. It also opens at four o’clock in the morning, which probably solidifies its credibility with patrons of the Casino Queen, “Home of the Loosest Slots.”

Again, I took my donut to the parking lot. A World’s Fair glazed donut costs seven cents less, but it’s a good inch smaller in diameter than its Drive-In counterpart and has a bigger hole. I tried to suppress my American lust for quantity and conduct my assessment on the basis of texture, flavor and density.

The World’s Fair donut pretty much lost in every category. It was sweeter and firmer and emptier, but still a good donut. What a great breakfast.

The real doughdown took place on the 1.6 mile ride home as the glaze seemed to harden in my bloodstream.

If others would like to share their own doughdown experiences, we at Middled would to love to share in them. Thank you.

The Remedy

2007-10-19T18:23:00.001-05:00

What is The Remedy?

A hip-hop radio program broadcast on community-sponsored KDHX St. Louis FM 88.1 every Monday night from eight to ten o’clock, co-created by DJ G.Wiz and DJ Needles, collaboratively hosted by D Hoya, Wallstreet, Tiffany and Honiee.

Who is The Remedy for?

“The people that can’t afford to go to the hospital to get fixed,” G.Wiz said. “So we’re like that midwife.”

So, what is The Remedy?

“The Solution,” he said. “If you’re sick and tired of hearing what you hear on the regular stations or anywhere else and you just want to be healed, then we have the remedy. It’s that medicine, that miracle drug, which is the music that we play.”

“The music is the drug, but it’s a positive drug. It ain’t crack.”

I arranged to meet G.Wiz an hour before the show at the KDHX station on Magnolia Avenue. I arrived first and waited in the storefront lobby, organizing a sheet of questions while listening to the rain and the voice of Amy Goodman wrapping up Democracy Now! G.Wiz came in laughing with four or five records and a laptop under his arm. We went into Studio A, the smaller of two studios, equipped with a program computer, four microphones and a set of turntables

I wasn’t a radio listener until I moved to Oakland, California out of college and encountered KPFA 94.1, the first listener-supported station in the United States that is part of the larger Pacifica Radio network. Their programming comes from a progressive perspective and, in the words of their mission statement, seeks to promote “pluralistic community expression.” I found some of the programs unappealing, but Democracy Now! gutted my ignorance of global issues and events and Hard Knock Radio, hosted by Davey D, taught me a lot about hip-hop.

I’m still not particularly well-educated on the subject, but I like some of the music and the cultural movement it represents. My listening preferences gravitate toward a genre of hip-hop that has been classified, accurately or not, as “conscious.” That has led me to artists such as Dead Prez and The Coup who spit lines like, “The cops stop you just because you black / that’s war,” and “Raise your hands in the air like you’re born again / but make a fist for the struggle we was born to win.”

Clearly, I’m not the “you” and I’m not inclined to execute the Black Panthers’ signature gesture. I’m also not the only young white male who can recite all of the lyrics to certain songs, but stops short at “nigger” unless I’m comfortably isolated in my car, doing seventy down the highway.

A week ago, I didn’t know the name of one St. Louis hip-hop artist outside of Nelly and his crew, the St. Lunatics, and wouldn’t have expected to encounter anything worthwhile on that long, barren radio dial. When I randomly tuned in to The Remedy a month ago, it sounded like hope.

“The Remedy, to me,” D Hoya said, “is basically just refreshing. You know what I’m saying? It’s somethin’ that I needed. A weekly dose of hip-hop and it’s injected. Because you go throughout that week, man, and whatever life you lead, whatever it is…hip-hop just puts me in a place of calm peace.”

G.Wiz is forty-seven years old and has a full-time construction job. Needles is thirty-one and supports himself as a DJ. It would be impossible to summarize either of their music catalogues, but a few artists played on the October 15th show included MC Lyte, Diamond D, The Pharcyde, Grand Puba, Dudley Perkins, LL Cool J and J Dilla.

As a self-described “Old School” DJ, G.Wiz says his music spans an era from the birth of hip-hop to 1998. His selections overlap with those of his counterpart, starting somewhere in the late eighties, but Needles is also charged with providing hip-hop in its current forms.

“That way we got the whole spectrum,” G.Wiz said.

Neither the DJs nor the hosts are paid for the time and effort they put into the show, so I asked G.Wiz what makes it worthwhile.

“The enjoyment of playing stuff for people that I think would get a kick out of it,” he said. “When people call and request something, then you know they’re listening. Just the fact to be back on the air doing something you love to do and nobody tells you how to do it. The freedom part.”

G.Wiz has been spinning records since 1978 when he started carrying crates and amplifiers for Sylvester the Cat, currently a radio personality on Majic 104.9 and mayor of Pine Lawn, Missouri. Wiz grew up in St. Louis city, with his family living on six different streets that he could remember to name.

“Your moms and pops be like, ‘We movin’,” he said. “‘Aww, man!’ Just when you get new friends.”

“Kids was out of grownups business those days.”

Wiz acknowledged that “those days” signified his age, but embraces his station in life with the self-assigned moniker—the “godpops” of hip-hop.

“I’m happy to be able to reach this particular age,” he said, “first, being a black man, you know. Some people, people my age more so, used to say ten years ago, ‘You still listen to rap? You still play rap music?’”

“I’m like, ‘Yeah. Why?’”

“And then I play some stuff for ‘em, to change their opinion because they would come up with this information that all rap is crap and it’s gangster rap, talking this and this and that. And then I throw on some stuff, certain songs for ‘em, just to jog they whole mindset. Whether it’s some Common or some Public Enemy, some Poor Righteous Teachers or something, and they’d be like, ‘Oh, I never heard that before.’”

“Of course not. Because you listen to commercial radio.”

G.Wiz does a mix for Sylvester the Cat’s Saturday show on Majic 104.9, but the majority of his radio work has been for KDHX. In 1987, Russell Giraud and John Teller introduced St. Louis’ first hip-hop program called African Alert that was broadcast on 88.1. A year later, G.Wiz created his own record label, putting out albums by local artists, and was asked by Giraud to do mixes for the show.

Wiz later took over the program, renaming it Street Vibes, and continued broadcasting for ten more years. In 1998, he passed the show to DJ Alejan and Fly D-Ex, who moved to a live venue at Blueberry Hill. G.Wiz retired “at the time when the radio and music industry was bombarded by Master P,” and he remained off the air, living and deejaying in Tulsa, Oklahoma until he returned, met Needles and established The Remedy in October of last year.

At a quarter to eight, Needles and the other hosts plus St. Louis MC, Nato Caliph, and DJ Crucial, who would appear on the show to promote Nato’s new album, Cipher Inside, piled into the studio. DJ Alejan was also in attendance as a guest interviewer, bringing the total number of participants to nine, not including me. The energy was high as Needles and Honiee discussed Janet Jackson’s new film, Why Did I Get Married?, but no one appeared nervous or particularly occupied with the business of the show, except for Wiz who was organizing his set.

The Remedy is unscripted and G.Wiz often announces his Old School interview guests, people like DJ Red Alert, Grandmaster Kaz and female MC, Sha Rock of Funky Four Plus One, to the rest of the crew a few minutes before the show or even on the air. This spontaneity makes the program very funny at times and often enables listeners to influence its direction and focus.

“The Remedy is everything,” Wiz said. “The Remedy is whichever way we feel when we come in here.”

“[The program] gives [our listeners] a chance to have something for themselves,” D Hoya said, “where you can actually request a song. There’s interaction. I think people can connect with us because…it’s just a friendly show.”

(DJ Needles)

“Literally, the other stations are almost cookie cutter,” Wallstreet said. “Like I can tell you what time something’s gonna come on, on what day.”

“I really hate when you listening to one station,” D Hoya said, “‘Aw, I don’t want to hear that,’ then you turn to the next station—same song is on that station and I’m like, ‘Aw, shit, I’m trapped! Where do I go?’ 102.5—Let me go easy listening.”

Although there are several radio stations in St. Louis that play hip-hop music, the contributors to The Remedy are reasserting their definition of that broad genre.

“Hip-hop was the younger people’s soul music,” G.Wiz said. “In all actuality, singing is rhyming too. Every other line is rhymes, they just singing. But hip-hop was using breaks from James Brown, Parliament-Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone, you know, and it’s like, that’s the music we grew up on.”

“As far as the people that’s doing it on a major level,” Needles said, “they’re doing what they believe is hip-hop. I can’t really knock one man’s perception or interpretation, but I can’t really honor a lot of that stuff because I don’t agree.”

“I kinda came to the realization that for one group of people to dictate what is and what’s not hip-hop, it’s sort of like how a lot of people in the conservative and Republican party dictate to everybody what is and what’s not American.”

“To me it’s more of a movement,” he said. “It’s a culture that you live and hip-hop gets mixed up with a lot of things that come out of what’s considered a very negative, quote unquote ghetto experience, and that’s pretty separate from hip-hop.”

“Hip-hop came from the ghetto, but it’s not a thing to glorify what keeps people down in the ghetto and that’s what a lot of people associate it with. Hip-hop is about the four elements that make it up. And people who understand it, they know what I’m talking about. And those are positive things. You know, that’s deejaying, emceeing, graffiti writing and B-boying, break dancing and stuff.”

“So, if you’re not really promoting that, and if you can’t acknowledge that and don’t appreciate that genuinely, I don’t really look at you as hip-hop. If all you can do is promote what’s negative in urban communities and poverty stricken areas, then I can’t say you’re hip-hop. You’re just what you are. I don’t know what you are.”

G.Wiz’s “if I won the lottery” dream is to open a lounge that would play music spanning generations and genres, but he believes it would be a gamble in St. Louis.

“I remember when we was growin’ up,” he said, “you would listen to the black radio stations, you would hear, I mean, from Parliament-Funkadelic to Elton John, ‘Bennie and the Jets.’ Same station, you know. You’d dance off of that in basement parties. I mean, black basement parties. You know, we were teenagers. We didn’t have a boundary line.”

“But then the change came with radio and it started helping separate the people. This is your music. This is their music.”

The music that The Remedy plays reaches a diverse community of listeners. Though the demographics have not been charted, the phone calls indicate the range.

“We know we have people fourteen and black, female,” G.Wiz said, “and on top of that we have a fifty-five year-old white school teacher, female, listening, because she actually called and asked me if I could make her a CD or two of some of the music that we play so that she could let her kids at school listen to it.”

Sitting in the studio for the duration of the two hour program, I was amazed at the conversations taking place when the red light was off. I had prompted some discussion about hip-hop and The Remedy’s mission, but it was clear that debates about the direction of the music and the larger cultural movement are conducted whether the microphones are on or not.

The willingness to engage with one another in an honest, opinionated manner seems to enable the group’s family-like dynamic, an approach to relating that G.Wiz perceives in the larger hip-hop community.

“Cats, female and male,” he said, “will come up to you and embrace you, and you don’t really know who they are, and you embrace them because they embracing you.”

“And it’s like, ‘Man, I grew up listening to you. You saved my life,’ you know, ‘You inspired me to want to DJ,’ or, ‘You inspired me to rap.’ And that’s some family-type stuff.”

“To be still in it and to be embraced by the different generations—that’s lovely.”

After my Monday evening experience, I can only agree with D Hoya's comment that, “Hip-hop is well in St. Louis.”

To listen to The Remedy online, just visit KDHX.org to access streaming audio files. Requests and comments can also be made at the program’s MySpace page. In addition, check out Deep Krate Radio with Fly D-Ex and DJ Iceman on Fridays at 10 PM on 88.1 and get a copy of Nato Caliph’s album at F5 Records.

Men's Bowling

2007-10-16T12:38:00.000-05:00

Every Friday afternoon my ninety-four year-old grandfather, John Schwartz, meets some of his friends at Coach Lite Lanes in Rolla, Missouri for three games of bowling. He says by the start of the third game, he’s ready to be home in bed, but the group of four women and sometimes as many men is social and entertaining. When he remembers to bring it, Grandpa wears a yellow thrift store button-down that my sister brought to life with a felt bowling ball and the nickname, “Love Tap,” spelled across his muscled back.

The first time I joined them, Grandpa and I were ten minutes late and the seven other, seventy-plus year-old bowlers were waiting with shoes laced, ready to roll. The group usually gets lunch together at Long John Silver’s or another fast-food establishment before the one o’clock start time, but had eaten at the alley that day because of Jeanne’s doctor’s appointment. Jeanne is ninety-one and bowled with a cotton ball Scotch taped to her arm, but that didn’t stop her from defeating me in the first game by twenty-seven pins.

I asked Ann how lunch was, to which she screwed up her face, indicating sub-gourmet. I was also a bit disoriented by the beverage situation.

“Do you have iced tea?” I asked Harold Fite, the alley manager.

“Maybe,” he said.

He returned with an inch-deep sample of tea in a paper cup.

“See if you can stand it,” he said.

“It tastes like tea,” I said.

“Alright.”

In the men’s restroom, laid at the foot of the urinal, is the most direct and practical bathroom mat I have ever seen.

When I mentioned it to my grandfather he said, “Really? I never noticed it.”

“Really?” I asked.

Coach Lite Lanes, thanks in part (perhaps) to that mat, is a clean facility offering an excellent deal to senior bowlers on Friday afternoons at a dollar twenty-five a game. Unfortunately, last Friday morning Jeanne was taken to the hospital with pneumonia, so most of the group was unable to attend. We heard from Nadine at Church on Sunday that Jeanne was now back home, recovering well.

Despite our concern and intentions to act respectfully, Grandpa, Bob Mottin and I went bowling anyway.

“What do you like about bowling?” I asked them from the back seat of Bob’s Taurus as we drove to Long John.

“Just the company, I guess,” Grandpa said. “There’s also a certain amount of satisfaction in letting loose of that ball if it hits, you know. If it hits. If it doesn’t, you wonder why.”

“We have a lot of fun,” Bob said. “A lot of laughs.”

“Who’s got the best victory dance?” I asked.

“I get a kick out of Nadine,” Grandpa said. “She does a little skip, a little turn on her foot.”

“You know,” Bob said, “for no harder than she throws, she gets more pin action. I can’t believe it.”

Bob started bowling in 1950 when he worked at the Ford Motor Company assembly plant in Hazelwood, Missouri. At that time he participated in an employee league, but Bob hadn’t donned his bowling shoes for thirty years before Bill Knight, the Rolla group’s highest average scorer, invited him along.

“Bill wanted to get me out of the house,” Bob said. “That was two years ago, after [my wife] Rita passed away. He thought I was spending too much time in the house.”

“We bowl in the Tuesday league up there and on Fridays, you know, and it kinda breaks up the week.”

Bob was particularly proud of a fundraiser he had participated in to benefit Miranda Blattel, a nine year-old girl living with Epidermolysis Bullosa, a rare genetic skin disease characterized by extremely fragile skin. The event was held at Coach Lite Lanes in September and Bob was photographed with Miranda by a journalist from the Rolla Daily News as the oldest participant at age eighty-four.

“Boy you want to see something sad,” Bob said. “And that little girl is so nice, you can’t believe it. You can’t even touch her cause she blisters. Her mom’s got to grease her complete body with Vaseline every morning and wrap with gauze. I don’t know how she could be that nice and be in all that pain she’s in.”

“We raised sixty five hundred dollars," he said. "The alley didn’t charge nothing for the bowling and we all paid twenty dollars a piece to be in it. And they had all these hearts that they stuck up all over the hall and they were a dollar apiece.”

“The little girls’ mother is a very good bowler,” Grandpa said.

“She teaches bowling to all the young girls up there,” Bob said. “Boy, you want to see strikes. Criminelly.”

Bob, whose average currently hovers at 109, has also experienced health problems that have challenged his game. On November 11th of last year, he dozed off while watching TV early in the morning and woke up to discover an absence of feeling in his right hand.

“I thought I had sat on it,” Bob said. “So I took my arm and I swung it around and around. It didn’t help at all. So I called Bill and I said, ‘Bill, I think I’m having a light stroke.’ And he said, ‘Bob, take two aspirins and I’ll be over there in five minutes.’”

Bill drove Bob to the hospital, where the medical staff administered an injection that returned the majority of sensation and mobility to Bob’s hand within two hours.

“Bill saved me,” Bob said.

Bob, Bill and my grandfather live in Indian Hills, a private residential community set on a 355 acre man-made lake. Bob designed and built the original teepee that stands just outside of the entrance gate and recently crafted a ship's wheel and anchors to adorn a twelve-foot lighthouse that has, to date, received only one complaint about its powerful spotlight. He became a permanent resident in 1980, the same year that he retired from Ford, where he worked for fifteen years on the assembly line before transferring to the stock department.

“That working on the line is miserable,” Bob said. “When they’re running forty cars an hour, which is usually about the lowest point you go, you’ve got to keep doing the same thing over and over, every minute and a half.”

Bob was much happier driving a tow motor out of the pre-delivery department.

“I had one time, Ryan, I worked eleven and a half hours a day, seven days a week and I worked like that for nine months without a day off.”

“Nobody could learn that job of mine because I had to go all over that plant to get parts. Even to get to the right department was a challenge. They had four repair lines and I’d keep all them going. It kept me busy, but I liked it because I never had no two days alike.”

Bob worked at Ford for thirty-one and a half years, having gotten a job when the factory opened in 1948.

“Were you in the War?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Bob said. “You ain’t gonna believe what I did.”

Bob was a Motor Machinist Second Class in the Navy and served on PT (Patrol Torpedo) boat three fifty in squadron twenty-five, operating in the Pacific. PT boat squadrons were nicknamed “the mosquito fleet” because they were small, fast vessels used to attack larger surface ships. Though they carried torpedoes, mounted machine guns and eventually five-inch rockets, PT boats were built with wooden hulls susceptible to damage.

“That was strictly volunteer,” Bob said. “They couldn’t assign anybody to those boats.”

“Because it was so dangerous?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “They had to all be volunteer. You had three thousand gallons of gasoline on them and if they hit that, you didn’t have to worry about swimming. A Jap twenty-five would go in one side and out the other. It was just so dangerous.”

“One time it took them two months to repair [our boat]. The carpenters, after they got done fixing it, put a nameplate on the front of it—El Patcho.”

Twelve enlisted men and two officers were assigned to each boat, and Bob, in addition to his responsibilities as a machinist, operated the number four torpedo and loaded the forty millimeter guns during air attacks. His squadron started in New Guinea and conducted combat operations throughout the Philippines.

Over hush puppies and fish fillets, Bob described the threat of suicide attacks posed by the Japanese Air Force.

“Well, you just never knew,” he said. “I still couldn’t believe it. Every time I’d keep waiting for them, when they’d actually make a dive, waiting for them to pull up.

“One time we wasn’t far at all from this big ship. It was a cargo ship and it had gasoline and torpedoes and they suicide dived it, and when that thing blew up, there was pieces coming down out of the sky that were the size of a railroad car.”

“We were putting heaters in the boats and everything, getting ready to invade Japan when they dropped that [atomic] bomb.”

“We didn’t know nothing. We couldn’t believe it when we heard it. We were dreading that invasion. We knew what was gonna happen. We didn’t have a chance of getting ashore.”

Bob’s high school girlfriend, Rita, had been waiting two and half years for him. They were married three months after he returned from the War, had two children, Robert and Susan, and were together for fifty-seven and a half years before she died on December 6, 2003.

“Yep, she was a good one,” Bob said.

After bowling, Bob waited in his car while Grandpa and I shopped at the local supermarket. As we left the parking lot, Grandpa and Bob got into a discussion about foreign automobiles.

“They tried twenty months to kill me and couldn’t do it,” Bob said. “The only way I’ll be in a Jap automobile, I’ll be in a pine box going feet first.”

“And, you know, a lot of people don’t figure this out. They’re doing with automobiles what they couldn’t do with the War. Taking over this country. A lot of people think, cause they’re made here in the United States…that ain’t the thing of it. The thing of it is that the main part of the money is going to Japan.

“But a lot of the parts from American cars are being made all over the world,” Grandpa said.

“Well,” Bob said, “that was part of these new contracts, John. With General Motors and all of them.”

“Yea, but it isn’t complete,” Grandpa said.

“Well, they’re trying to,” Bob said.

Bob told us about an acquaintance of his named Bill (not Bill Knight) who asked Bob’s permission to fish off of his dock.

“And he come down to the house and he was in a Nissan,” Bob said. “I asked him, ‘Bill, have you got any other car?’ He says, ‘Yea, I got a Dodge pickup.’ I said, ‘Well, the next time you come down, you drive that pickup, cause I don’t want that Nissan in my driveway.”

“Oh my gosh,” Grandpa said.

“He never came back,” Bob said. “That’s up to him.”

“Does any one you know have a…” I started to ask Bob. “Well, I guess you have a Japanese car, don’t you?” I asked Grandpa.

“Yeah, I do,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “you’re not driving the carpool, I guess.”

“Yeah, I don’t have to drive at all,” Grandpa said. “It works out well.”

The following day, Grandpa and I drove over to Bob’s house in my Volkswagen. Bob had offered to show me a book put together by PT Boats Incorporated that features photographs from the War and yearbook-style biographies of the men who served in those squadrons.

“I think there’s a lot of them gone since this book come out,” he said.

He also showed me a photograph that his daughter had framed alongside a medal she had purchased.

“When that was made,” Bob said. “I was nineteen years old.”

“You’re older than that now, Bob,” Grandpa said.

“Just a little bit, John,” Bob said.

Climbing the stairs to the second floor of Bob’s house, we passed a shelf full of miniature models of Ford automobiles. Halfway up the staircase, Bob had me turn around to look at the model PT boat he had spent four months constructing.

“Boy it took a long time,” he said. “Oh, man. It’s not just a block of wood. I made it like a real one. I put all the ribs in it and planked the outside of it. I made the case and everything. I made everything but the guns and the torpedo racks. I ordered them from a model company.”

“I had a set of plans to make the hull and that, but mostly it’s just what I remembered from being on it so long.”

Bob gave us a tour of the rest of his house, much of which he had worked on himself, including the upstairs fireplace. As we were leaving he showed us another model ship he had built inside of a palm-sized bottle and told us the story of celebrating the end of the War with beer cooled on the ship’s deck with fire extinguishers.

In the entry that Bob contributed to the PT servicemen book, he wrote, “I stayed with the PT 350 right to the end when they stripped her down, ran her up on the beach and set her on fire. This was a sad day because it was like losing one of your shipmates.”

We invited him to Grandpa’s house for a meal, but Bob said, “No, thanks. I’m okay over here.”

Journey to the Arch

2007-10-11T15:28:00.001-05:00

When I applied to write a guidebook for St. Louis two months ago, in response to which I’m still awaiting even cursory acknowledgement, I tried to make myself appear interesting by saying I wouldn’t put the city’s six hundred and thirty foot icon, The Arch, on the cover. I didn’t offer anything to stand in its place—a cardinal foraging for winter or a cup of frozen custard, to name the candidates.

As the publisher seems to really be mulling my suggestion over, maybe there is something novel or very dense about trying to separate St. Louis from its singular symbol. I guess I don’t like that many people wouldn’t know or recognize the city without the Arch, but if it were removed, Downtown would look a lot like Cleveland.

Before yesterday, I had probably been inside the Arch twice. I remembered the elevators that simultaneously reference 2001: A Space Odyssey and a coal mine, the underground museum and the small windows at the top, easy to miss on the postcard. I decided to get on my bike and reexperience this black hole of our city’s national identity.

On the way down, where Chouteau Avenue meets South Leonor K. Sullivan Boulevard (that was Missouri’s first woman in Congress), less than two hundred feet from the brown and swift Mississippi, there is a twelve-foot concrete flood wall that runs for more than a mile along the railroad tracks.

The wall opens for gravel drives leading to whatever riverside industrial complexes lie behind it, but the graffiti covering nearly every gray inch picks up again after each of the gaps.

The dedication in the wall’s top corner, where the artwork starts and the admirer can look left under a freight bridge to acknowledge the Arch, states that this project was sanctioned.

Over the Labor Day weekend in 1999, hundreds of graffiti artists, roused by Internet chat, gathered for the first annual Paint Louis festival.

As I’d rather not pay the St. Louis Post-Dispatch $2.95 for access to an article in its archive that should be free, I don’t know how many years the event officially ran. As recently as last year, organizers battled with Mayor Clarence Harmon for approval, in conflict with residents who decried the unauthorized vandalism of previous years.

None of the paint I saw looked fresh, but the wall gave me hope for alternative book covers.

Riding from the wall to the foot of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (that’s the Arch), I passed the Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher riverboats and a “Bike St. Louis” sign that had been hit by a car.

I had to carry my Schwinn up a lot of steps, but this, I felt, benefited my sense of scale.

The Arch is as tall as it is wide. It’s made of rebar and 25,000 tons of concrete, encased in nine hundred tons of stainless steel. The cross-sections of its legs are equilateral triangles that narrow from fifty-four feet at the base to seventeen feet at the top. In one hundred and fifty mile per hour winds, it sways no more than eighteen inches.

Every national monument is probably a target for publicity-seeking stuntmen, if not terrorists, so the National Park Service has blocked the only point of street access with a humvee. Eleven light aircraft have successfully flown under the structure and two men have attempted to scale it by means of suction cup. In 1980, Kenneth Swyers died when he tried to parachute onto the Arch, only to slide down the length of one leg.

I locked my bike to a lamppost and descended an inconspicuous ramp. Unlike my first visit in the eighties, my bag was subjected to a security inspection and I had to pass through a metal detector. While I was waiting, I read a warning sign addressing the types of knives that are not permitted inside the memorial. These included Kershaw knives, switchblades, butterfly knives, double-edged knives and concealed sheathed knives, leaving me to wonder what knives might’ve been left off the list.

I spent eleven dollars on tickets for the “Trip to the Top” and the film, “Monument to the Dream,” which documents the construction of the Arch between 1962 and 1965. I also bought a coffee and some taffy from a shop selling “historically-inspired food” because I’d forgotten to eat lunch.

To kill the forty minutes before the next film screening, I wandered into the Museum of Westward Expansion, a dramatically lit exhibition of artifacts, taxidermy and robots.

I didn’t do much reading because helpful individuals like Indian Agent William Clark and Chief Red Cloud were right there, spilling the history from their mouths.

The only thing I found strange about my visit up to this point was the number of people free to tour the Arch grounds on a Wednesday afternoon. Some even appeared to be foreign tourists, but maybe they had a long layover at the airport.

“Monument to the Dream” was excellent. I learned that Eero Saarinen, a Finnish-American architect, beat out more than a hundred and fifty competitors in 1947 with his design.

“Across time a simple shape has given the great memorials their dignity,” Paul Richards narrates, but points out that nothing about the Arch was simple beyond its shape.

Each of the legs had to be self-supporting, as the connecting bridge wouldn’t be set in place until they were over five hundred feet tall. Both the lifts and men were held by the structure they were building and five hundred tons of pressure were required to jack the legs four feet apart in order, on October 28, 1965, to position the final piece.

The film summarizes eighteen years of planning and effort with, “By strength and skill and valor, they unrolled the unknown before them.”

I left the theater feeling electrified by the will of men, then stood in line for an elevator that had malfunctioned just two months before, leaving people stranded at the top.

I only spent three minutes observing the city through the airplane-like windows, but it’s the best view of St. Louis and the visible poverty on the east side of the river.

I left the memorial site shaky with hunger and rode back to Chouteau Avenue, where a kind of utopia awaited me.

The Eat-Rite Diner at the intersection of South Sixth Street is one of the few remaining links in a larger restaurant chain.

This establishment has been flipping patties and serving breakfast since the 1940’s and is an official Route 66 Roadside Attraction.

I order coleslaw and a cheeseburger and would’ve tried the raisin pie if I hadn’t been staring down a few more miles on the bike.

I love the Arch and I love St. Louis.

Why am I afraid of black people?

2007-10-06T17:03:00.001-05:00

Last week I moved into a new apartment in the Shaw Garden District in the City of St. Louis. In my new zip code there are 20,351 residents, fifty-three percent of whom are African-American, reporting a median income of $28,604. These figures are almost eight years old and are certainly shifting as more white people (like me) have been buying and renting homes or apartments in the area in response to rising property values, retail development and the various charms of living in a historic urban district.

My parents’ current home and the one we lived in during my middle and high school years are both located in St. Louis County, in the cities of Des Peres and Kirkwood respectively. The demographic there is, on average, more than twice as wealthy and predominately more freckled and susceptible to sunburn. According to the 2000 census, these communities are over ninety percent white.

When I first considered writing this post, I felt a gripping in my lower abdomen, the way the back of the throat responds to a pungent drink. I was already exhausted by the thought of all the qualifications I would feel obliged to make before letting go of a single unguarded thought or feeling.

One of these modifying statements is that St. Louis is not a black and white city. There are Latinos, Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders, American Indians, Arab-Americans, West Indians and immigrant groups from Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics (notably, over 50,000 Bosnians).

For the past two years, with the exception of situations in which I was required to speak or if someone bothered to take a good look at me, the sense of ethnic anonymity that comes with sharing the majority’s skin color was available to me and often comforting. Over eighty-four percent of St. Petersburg’s population is ethnically Russian. The few black people I saw were almost entirely African university students, who were clearly the objects of curiosity if not hate and violence—the extremes being a young African man paid to wear a white wig and Victorian costume while welcoming visitors into the Museum of Chocolate and the two (at least that I heard of) racially motivated murders that occurred during my stay.

If I, as with the majority of white people, were asked, “Are you racist?” I would respond, “No.” At the same time, three truths seem to complicate this answer: I have never been close friends with a black person. Many of the privileges and opportunities I enjoy in my life are enabled, either in part or directly, by my inclusion in the dominant majority. When I encounter African-Americans in public contexts, usually on the street and particularly with young black males, before I have the chance to consider or correct, my body expresses fear.

Rather than ascribe this feeling to the influence of media or an isolated experience in sixth grade when two black kids extorted my lunch money in the school’s bathroom without even touching me and then offered to return it as I was leaving to which I replied, “That’s cool. You can have it,” I decided to first consult with people either living or working in and around my neighborhood.

The first person I saw was a young black man, probably seventeen years old. He was walking toward me, then turned at the intersection I was approaching. I hesitated, then followed him quickly until I was about ten paces back and said, “Hey man. Excuse me.” I had never approached someone for a man-on-the-street interview, and he looked at me as if I was a lost tourist salesman.

“I’m a writer, but not for a newspaper or magazine. I’m writing an article about racism,” I said, though I’d planned to say “internalized racism.” “Could I ask you a question?”

“Naw,” he said and walked away.

After that, every person or group of people agreed to talk to me and have their statements recorded. Some people provided their full names and humored me by slowly spelling them into my microphone. Others gave me a first name or pseudonym and after three people said they didn’t want their picture taken, I stopped asking. I talked to seventeen people (five white, twelve black) of different ages.

My first conversation was with a white man in his forties named “Red” and Charles Cousins, a black man in his mid-twenties. They work together at hardware store nearby and were waiting for their ride home.

I asked them, as I would with everyone else I talked to, “Do you think white people are generally afraid of black people?”

“Hell yeah they are!” Red said. “If you ain’t raised around black people, you come from a different town or something, hell yeah you’re scared of them black people.”

“There’s black people scared of black peoples,” Cousins added.

“It depends on what you’ve been brung up around,” Red said. “I was raised in North St. Louis. I was raised around black people, went to school with them. I ain’t scared of none of them.”

“It’s definitely taught to you,” Cousins said. “You don’t just wake up one day and you’re that way. Racism is taught to you.”

I asked Cousins, who is a big man, if he’d experienced white people responding to him with fear.

“Once I walked down the street where an older lady was coming this way and as I got closer, she kind of moved over. So I guess she’s got this fixation in her mind that I’m gonna try to take something from her. All black people are not that way, regardless of what you see on the news.”

“She’s probably just scared,” Red said. “She don’t know who to trust. And maybe she is racist, so she don’t trust black people. There’s some people that’s not racist, but they’re just scared of black people. They ain’t hating them, but they’re just scared of them.”

The next people I talked to were eighteen year old African-American identical twins named Randle and Randell. I approached them as I’d approached the first guy, like a store clerk trying to return a forgotten wallet, and they agreed to talk to me, even though I’d managed to stop them in the middle of a drive-thru ATM lane.

“Sometimes I would say [white people] are afraid of black people because of the way they act,” Randle said. “They cross the street or tend to look away from you. I don’t mind it too much. I just look past it and keep going, you know what I’m saying, just move on with myself. I just say forget it, that’s just how they feel.”

“I don’t take it as they’re racist or anything,” Randell said, “but they are somewhat cautious of us. Sometimes I look cautious at people too.”

I then asked Randell where that response on the part of some white people might come from if he doesn’t ascribe it to racism.

“The way black people portray theyselves to be. You know, thugs, gangsters and all that. Doing all that stuff, you know what I’m saying. Being in trouble all the time. I mean us being the majority of people going to prison. Basically it’s black people giving a bad name for ourselves by the way we act.”

To my follow up question, “Do you think black people are accurately portrayed by the media?” Randle responded, “Yeah, we are.”

“It’s up to us to change it,” Randell said. “We’re the people doing it, so we can change it ourselves. We just have to build on that and our self-esteem instead of looking at ourselves and saying, ‘Aw, we ain’t got this and we ain’t got that.’ Well, we go to school, we’ve got schools."

"I mean I’m not one to say. I dropped out, but I go back to GED classes trying to do something with myself. I can get myself out of this situation just like you all can. I know a lot of people who’s in this situation who’s white and they pulling theyself out of it just like I can, living in the same neighborhood I’m in. There’s just more of us in this neighborhood. That’s all that is.”

In the middle of Randell’s comment, two young white men in their twenties pulled up to the drive-thru ATM. The passenger leaned out of his window and asked, “Are you guys selling something?”

“We ain’t even good, though, man,” Randle said.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“That wasn’t nothing,” he said. “Just people passing.”

I walked down Grand Avenue and crossed the Arsenal intersection to a bus stop where several people were waiting. I chose to approach three black men probably in their early to mid-thirties, one of whom was dressed in hospital scrubs. I told them that I was writing about internalized racism and, specifically, how white people respond to black people. Their names were Mr. Stacey Horner, Busy Bee and Antoine Roberts.

“Racism is alive and well,” Busy Bee said. “You know, we don’t have to deal with each other per se, but if we see a person in need—black, white or whatever color you are—we quick to help.”

“But we experience a whole lot of racism,” he said, “just walking down the street, who you are. You black, let’s go the other way. Lock your doors. Everybody ain’t crooks. I get a lot of it. They can pull up right here at the traffic stop. You can hear them doors clickin’. Clack, clack, clack. I know. I experienced it.”

“Even our own kind act funny towards each other,” Roberts said. “So it don’t matter. It all depends on where you’re at, where you go. It’s really how you carry yourself, how you present yourself.”

“I think the only reason you walked up to us is that our clothes ain’t sagging off our ass,” Horner said, “so you didn’t feel afraid. You know what I mean. Because you see a little maturity in all of us, you know. I don’t think you would ask a bunch of twenty year olds what you’re asking us now. I don’t think you would approach three twenty year old black boys, because they scare me and I’m a black man.”

“But we know, from our experience,” Horner said, “that white people teach they kids to hate black people just because we black. That’s some shit ya’ll been doing for years. We can’t fix ya’ll issues. Those are ya’ll issues.”

“You think it’s about parents specifically telling their children black people are bad?” I asked.

“That’s where it all starts,” Horner said. “You take a white baby and a black baby and let they ass go play, I bet you they don’t give a fuck.”

“I’ve got some neighbors,” Busy Bee said, “some Mexicans, whites and I’m black and there’s a black family over there and they’ve got three little girls. They playing with each other, and a little white boy, Mexican boy. Aw, they having a ball. But as they get older, that’s gonna end. I asked my wife, ‘How long you think that will last?’”

I tried to make a distinction between white people who are consciously and willfully racist and those who do not identify themselves as racist.

“Them the ones I’m most afraid of,” Busy Bee said.

“They smile in your face and got a knife at your neck,” Horner said. “That’s the scary thing about you white people. We don’t know how to trust ya’ll. I don’t think all white people are bad. I just hate the ones who’ve been taught that bullshit. It’s not ya’ll young ones’ fault. That’s what ya’ll parents teach you.”

Busy Bee also asserted an inequality of acceptance between the white and black communities in the example of interracial relationships, as well as other boundaries white people maintain in their social interactions.

“All day at work you see me, you know me by name. ‘Hey, how you doing, Byron? How you doing, Sarah?’ Come across outside that job. ‘Hey, how you doing?’ Shit. They don’t know me.”

“I work in a hospital,” Horner said. “I deal with white people every day. And no matter how nice of a demeanor you practice, in my subconscious I know you hate me. Just because I’m black. No matter how good a gold I am. You don’t see me. All you see is my exterior. My interior is beautiful.”

“Our biggest question is, ‘How come when racism pop up, it’s always got to be black people and white people?’ Don’t nobody ever talk about the Chinese. Them foreign motherfuckers they keep letting over here, blowing our shit up. They penalize us for every motherfucking thing in the world. You know what I mean?”

“All we want to do is be economically viable. That’s all we trying to do. A black man want to fucking be able to go the bank and get a loan. Get a house. Fucking live. Like ya’ll.”

“There go my chariot,” he said. “You see a black man catching the damn bus. I’ve been working all my life, can’t even afford a car.”

I understood that my investigation was incomplete. I needed to talk to more white people to find our how they think about and experience manifestations of racism or potentially doubt its significance.

I met Ashley Murphy, a white woman in her early twenties, outside a coffee shop. She allowed me to speak with her as she walked to the local library where she works.

“What are you doing this for?” she asked. “Am I going to come off really bad or something?”

I explained my purpose and described some of the interviews I had already conducted.

To the question about white fear she responded, “I guess it depends on where you go. Generally I don’t think [white people] are afraid of [black people]. Without realizing it, you might like... I think it’s more of like a… I don’t know. That’s hard. I’m sorry.”

“I live around here and I work at the library up there. So I guess it’s like, if you’re not in a place where you have interactions with people, I think you’re more aware that someone is of a different race, so you’re trying to give the appropriate response. I think you notice it more.”

“There’s times when if I’m walking down the street and there’s a big teenage kid and he’s coming down the street, I might go to the other side, but that’s mostly because I’m kind of shy. I do that with other people too, though, so it’s hard for me to think it’s because…”

“So it’s not always dependent upon race,” I said.

“I guess,” she said.

I tried to clarify if she saw a connection between the aversion a white person might demonstrate towards a black person on the street and racism.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess people are kind of suspicious. Maybe if you were in a different neighborhood or maybe like in the Central West End or something, maybe you wouldn’t think about it as much, because you think most of the people around here, whatever race that they are, are probably of a certain type of person and so am I since I’m down here and we’re all in the same neighborhood together."

"But then with a place like this where, I mean, from block to block it’s so different, like the socio-economic lines are so blurred wherever you go, I think you all get thrown into something together and everybody’s kind of different, so you don’t really know if like, ‘Well, is this person just some kid or is he somebody from a few blocks over who’s trying to come over here and maybe see?’ So I think that might be possibly unique to this neighborhood. I don’t know really.”

“I guess people don’t want to be naïve, maybe. If you are kind of like, ‘Oh, maybe this person is gonna have something to say to me or want something from me.’ Regardless of whether they do or not, if you’re uptight, then you don’t even open that window up to have yourself be taken advantage of. Maybe it’s like that. Or if you’re like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ and people are like, ‘Oh yeah, this person is a sucker, or whatever.’”

“Sometimes I’ll be walking and be like, ‘Dude, don’t ask me for change,’ and then that’s not even what they’ll want. They’ll just be like, ‘Do you have a light?’ or something and then I’ll feel like an asshole.”

Further down the street, I met two white men and a white woman, probably in their forties or early fifties, standing outside a pawn shop, looking through the viewfinders of two antique box cameras. At the end of the interview, I would ask them for their names to which one of the men responded, “I’d rather be anonymous,” before providing me with his first name, John. The other two were Chris and Angie.

“Do you think that white people are generally afraid of black people?” I asked.

Five seconds ticked by before John said, “You know, I’d actually say, probably yeah.”

“I’d say, yeah,” Chris said.

“Believe it or not, even in this day and age,” John said. “You wouldn’t think so anymore. We like to think we’re all modern and enlightened, but human nature being what it is, in general, and it’s hard to speak in generalities. There’s always acceptance and, in effect, it may not even be true in the majority, but maybe a significant minority of whites probably consider themselves reticent.”

“I live in Kirkwood,” Chris said, “and I recently bought a flat down here, a couple blocks over. You know there’s blacks in Kirkwood and I got along with them great cause they’re affluent, but I rented to a bunch of blacks and when I bought the building it was all full of blacks. There were four black families in there and these people were desperate. And they were on drugs, they were selling drugs and I was threatened by them, by one of them, anyway. So, yeah, it put fear into me about people that are desperate. I don’t know if they had to be black or not.”

“It’s a combination of economic and race,” he said.

“I lived in other cities with large black populations,” Angie said, “and I definitely get a different impression here.”

“St. Louis is very unique, I feel. I think it’s got a ways to come. I know that a Sixty Minutes-type, investigative show did a piece on racism and it was in St. Louis. I think they sent a white guy in to buy some shoes or something, followed by a black guy and they watched how the merchant treated color, and it was kind of eye opening. And that was St. Louis. My impression of St. Louis is that it’s a little behind.”

In light of Chris’ negative personal experience, I again asked what factors might explain the fear that some whites demonstrate in their public interactions with African-Americans.

“Well, there’s a lot of young male blacks that are in prison because of crime they commit,” Chris said. “I think about black men forming gangs and being in activities where they sell drugs or whatever and claim territory and defend territory to do that and turn to violent activities to make money. I mean rappers sing about it all the time.”

“Do you think that these expressions of fear and apprehension on the part of white people…do you think that white people should be more accountable for that, or should the black community be accountable for that because of these examples?” I asked.

“They should be more conscious of it,” John said.

“Who should?” I asked.

“Everyone, black or white,” he said. “When it happens unconsciously, then I think it’s always more dangerous than if it happens consciously. I think what drives that kind of behavior is just basic fear and fear of the unknown, fear of what’s not known. Often, what’s thought of as not known is actually made worse in the mind of someone who thinks they’re afraid of what it is they don’t know or don’t understand.

“When something like that happens completely unconsciously, then it’s so deeply rooted that it can lead to…I mean, that’s the wellspring of prejudice. That’s the wellspring of behaviors that don’t have any basis in reality any more. And that’s what leads to trouble.”

“I suspect that any human being is susceptible. The key to the whole thing is consciousness. I would say that lack of consciousness about the motives of our behavior is the greatest threat. It’s a greater threat than violence or crime or anything else you could think of.”

On my walk home, I passed a car parked in Tower Grove Park, inside of which Doc Mayberry, a middle-aged black man, was reclined in the driver’s seat. During our conversation, he brought up his experiences growing up in South Mississippi. He was once refused service at the front of an ice cream parlor, but Doc also cited examples of how racism continues today.

“As long as different races exist, people are gonna flock to their own kind,” he said.

“You know I used to raise chickens. Certain kind of chickens, they stuck together. You know what I’m saying. The Domino hens, they stayed together. The red hens stayed together. I never really seen them intermingle like that. The rooster didn’t care of course.”

“But I think that as long as the races exist, until we develop as a human race, develop our mentality to the point where we can accept another person for what he is, how he treats you, rather than the color of the skin…until we do that as a whole, I don’t know how many years it’s gonna take, then we’re going to continue having those kind of incidents [referring to the case of the “Jena Six,” which we had been discussing]. You can believe that.”

Before I left, he cited the “I Have a Dream” speech that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered forty-four years ago: “…a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Obviously the people I spoke to were only representing themselves and their own opinions. I’m grateful that they were willing speak with me.

As I walked the rest of the way home, I passed a black man who was probably about my age (twenty-seven). He was dressed athletically and was wearing glasses. In the mixture of feelings I experienced as our shoulders brushed—apathy, curiosity, self-consciousness—I know there was fear.

A note about commenting

2007-10-06T16:56:00.000-05:00

If you'd like to make a comment, click the comment link at the bottom of any post. Obviously type your comment under "Leave your comment." Then, under "Choose an identity," you can either register with Google/Blogger or select "Anonymous." If you'd like to leave your name, but avoid registering, select "Other." Then you can type any name you'd like and publish your comment.

Writing Home

2007-09-19T16:15:00.001-05:00

If he had been born eleven years later, I might’ve seen Jonathan Franzen across a football field on a brisk Thanksgiving morning. He would’ve been difficult to detect amongst the orange and black pompoms and face paint, but maybe the readable expression of distaste teasing his features would’ve distinguished him.

I’m being presumptive, but I don’t think Franzen attended the Webster Groves/Kirkwood High School Turkey Day Game in 1998, a yearly standoff between suburban rivals drawing generations of Statesmen and Pioneers. His fictional character, Martin Probst, did and took pleasuring in feeling both “anonymous and secure.” That’s not how I felt. I was adorned from waist to neck in red and white paint. I was the P and I knew where to stand, but, maybe like Franzen, I felt less certain about myself than my spirit.

I didn’t know that Jonathan Franzen grew up no more than ten miles from my parent’s home until a few years after I read The Corrections, a novel about a family in distress, for which he won the 2001 National Book Award. The book had come to me recommended and had gained an allure of controversy when Oprah Winfrey cut it from her cannon in response to the author’s disparagement of her club members. The story shifts its close third-person perspective between each uniquely funny and dependably tragic Lambert, cultivating enough entertainment and insight to make for an excellent read.

Franzen wasn’t much more than another impressive figure in a long lineup of writers whose work seems to inspire and dishearten my own ambitions in equal measure, until I read his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City.

As is often the case when I’m bookshop browsing without a title in my sights, I bought the book because of its cover. There it was—that glorious monument that seems to overshadow all other aspects of our city’s identity: the Arch. Reading that novel was like discovering that the first eighteen years of my life had been secretly filmed, then spliced with visions of car bombs, civic unrest, surveillance and sex. It was awesome.

After Franzen finished reading from his most recent work, The Discomfort Zone, at the St. Louis County Library last Saturday, I asked him (nauseous with public speaking anxiety) if he thought the premise of his first novel, that an Indian woman could assume a politically powerful role as police chief of St. Louis City, was absurd. I wanted him to admit to a personally gratifying fantasy exploration or deep suspicions and elaborate theories regarding the St. Louis underworld. To my momentary disappointment, he said it was the former.

“Back then I was lucky enough to not know what I was doing, which makes it so much easier to write books. To not be able to see why you’re attracted to a subject.”

“It’s about somebody from the East going back to St. Louis and invading the place and trying to wrench some kind of story out of it.”

“I had a quiet childhood here in many ways. You know my parents did not hurt me. They had their problems as people, but they tried their best as parents and they were pretty good. And one of the reasons we were where we were was to protect me from anything really interesting. The whole premise of living at Webster Woods was—make sure nothing you would want to write a novel about will ever happen here.”

But as a setting and even a subject, St. Louis provided Franzen with a compelling framework, larger than his own relationship to the landscape of home. In the novel, he addresses the city’s disastrous succession from St. Louis Country and the brokering of power illustrated in a fictional real estate scandal that bears resemblance to a controversy embattling Northside neighborhoods today.

“I thought it was an interesting place and I thought it was, the city itself, a tragic city in many ways; that it had fallen harder, in a more humiliating fashion than a lot of other big American cities.”

The Discomfort Zone seems to have provided Franzen with an opportunity to again consider the world he grew up in without the posture and distance of fiction. The book riffs a bit oddly on his appreciation for the comic strip, Peanuts, and a consuming obsession with birding (as in he has identified 590 species of birds all over North America), but it does so with candor that is both ugly and stunning, funny and familiar.

The first line of the book, “There’d been a storm that evening in St. Louis,” and later moments like, “I grew up in the middle of the country in the middle of the golden age of the American middle class,” resonate with me for obvious reasons, but I wonder how enthralling or relevant it feels for other readers. The issues of family, the writer’s favorite playing field, are probably universally stirring and the quality of his craft is enough reason to read.

Another library attendee on Saturday asked, “How does your family feel about all of this?” I don’t really like it when fiction writers are pushed to reveal connections between their work and their personal lives, but here it was appropriate.

“How do they feel? I think a certain resignation sets in at some point when you have a writer in the family. It’s like, okay, we’re never going to get that basement dry. And you just kind of learn to live with it. They’ve actually been wonderful.”

His brother, Bob, who has apparently campaigned for a cameo in the film version of The Corrections, has been a more tolerant sibling, Franzen said, than those of most writers who choose to dredge their personal histories for content. When sections of the novel first appeared in The New Yorker, Bob and other family members had to endure fact checkers clarifying the details of intimate and even humiliating experiences.

“There are certain aspects of the book, particularly the portrait of the parents that cuts sort of close to home. My dad had an illness related to what the main character, the father character, in The Corrections had. And I said [to Bob], ‘You know, you may hate the book. You may even hate me…’ on the phone to him one time and he interrupted me to say, ‘Hating you is not an option.’”

“And that’s actually one of the two or three nicest things anyone has ever said to me.”

St. Louis doesn’t seem to hate Jonathan Franzen either, despite some embarrassing portraits and his choice to live in New York City. At least the room I was sitting in with a hundred or more people appeared happy to claim him.

The Discomfort Zone is now available in paperback. If familial strife doesn’t appeal, Franzen also recommends the following novels: A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oë, The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, and Independent People by Halldor Laxness.

I’m attempting to form my own list of favorites in the “personal profile” section at the top of your screen. I love to know what people read, so I thought, in the spirit of contest, I would give my hardback copy of The Corrections (a collectable as it bears the now rescinded Oprah seal of approval) to the first person who posts a comment declaring a few of their favorites.

Let the fun begin.

The Gooiest

2007-09-17T15:48:00.001-05:00

Nothing lightens up a blog like a heavy breakfast pastry. After losing myself to visions of colonial atrocities and the exploitation of my fellow humans, butter seems a salve for the soul, powdered sugar a celestial pollen. I choose to believe that heaven, as it concerns earth-bound beings, resides within. After a few days of intensive research, I understand that it also lives beside me on Saturday mornings, riding shotgun in a white bakery box.

If you’ve ever found yourself interned for a period at Lambert St. Louis International Airport, a sanctuary for underprivileged carpet and disheveled business travelers, you may have slipped, out of boredom, into a heated argument with a local resident over the merits and significance of your home metropolis or rural settlement as it compares with that minor civilization just beyond the tarmac.

You might’ve struck first with an award-winning contemporary art gallery or national archive, to which any St. Louisan, regardless of gender or age, would’ve replied, “We’ve got Pujols!” You could’ve countered with an affordable and extensive mass transit system, only to be interrupted mid-sentence by, “Provel cheese!” Just when you thought you were sweeping the debate, you might’ve attacked mercilessly with an excellent bagel or temperate climate conditions. The fallen local would’ve looked up at you from that sullen excuse for floor covering with what you might’ve assumed to be an expression of surrender. Then she or he would’ve pronounced three words—gooey, butter, cake—before you boarded your plane in defeat.

According to a local legend that I have made no effort to verify, this miracle of modern baking was just a mistake. I’m not sure how anyone, particularly a professional baker, mistakenly adds an entire box of powdered sugar and several extra sticks of butter to a basic cake recipe, but God bless that supposedly German-American baker, supposedly living in St. Louis in the 1930’s.

My mother says the best gooey butter cake used to be found at the Lake Forest Bakery in Clayton, but apparently her support wasn’t enough to keep their business afloat. Last Saturday I dropped by the Clayton Bakery, which is actually in Des Peres, to claim my family’s breakfast.

A traditional gooey butter cake starts with a foundation of yellow, bready cake. That’s the part you start discarding once you’ve moved beyond your third or fourth helping. The goo is what earned St. Louis its widely unrecognized distinction as the greatest baking city on the continent. In my grandmother’s recipe, it’s made of cream cheese, eggs and confectioner’s sugar (one freakin’ pound!).

If you’re worried that you’ve sprinkled on too much powdered sugar, take note that extended coughing fits are a natural consequence of accidentally breathing too close to the product.

For gooey butter purist, what I’m about to reveal may alarm and offend beyond all capacity for open-minded tolerance, but there is a café in proximity to Lafayette Square that serves fifty-seven flavors of our city’s holy weekend sustenance. Forbid!

The place is called Park Avenue Coffee and is located on Park Avenue. So as not to overwhelm, they offer eight variants daily, with a cake in traditional form keeping them respectable. My mother, Aunt Sally and I shared only two pieces as it was the middle of the afternoon and we were inappropriately dressed in non-pajama clothing.

The triple chocolate chip was very tasty, but had shed its principal gooey traits in the evolutionary process.

The white chocolate raspberry, on the other hand, rocked, blending novel expressions of flavor with the essential viscous delirium.

Braver souls might choose to ford wider, more harrowing streams by sampling exotic riffs like banana split, root beer float, chocolate chip cookie dough (consult a physician first) or the thankfully seasonal, eggnog.

Regardless, if you're out of bacon and feeling famished, St. Louis provides.

Middle History – Pygmies in St. Louis

2007-09-15T19:56:00.000-05:00

For eighteen days in the year 1906, a pygmy tribesman from the Congo Free State named Ota Benga, a person, was caged in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo. When people saw him in his loincloth with his handmade arrows and chimpanzee, they laughed and applauded. A week after opening day, forty thousand attended.

According to Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, authors of Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, “He didn’t have to do much. He just had to be short and black.” The complexity of the act lied in the construction of the stage, a collaboration between Darwinism and Barnumism. The frame was built by King Leopold II of Belgium. St. Louis, Missouri paid the first commission.

In my initial lunge at history, I wrote about the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, an event I had never once heard mention of in my fifteen plus years of residence. After writing the piece I talked to my father’s colleague, Rich, who said, “You know about the pygmy, right?”

Pygmy? I knew that the World’s Fair Committee had concocted the Aboriginal Games to parallel the display of world-class athleticism, thereby securing the trusses of an established racial hierarchy. I didn’t know that after the plaster of paris towers and fountains of the Ivory City were torn down and carted to an Illinois landfill, that after every other African representative/specimen was returned home with the double task of explaining what they saw and how they were seen, the story continued. I also didn’t fully grasp how that narrative spiraled backward, entangling itself in the jungles of colonialism and genocide.

Phillips Verner Bradford is the grandson of Samuel Phillips Verner, missionary, explorer, anthropologist and the man who bought Ota Benga out of slavery and ushered him west. Bradford’s grandfather told him, “No one, including you, gets to choose their parents.”

“Perhaps,” Bradford writes, “it was a reminder that I was bonded to him, whether I liked it or not.”

When he visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the curator presented him with a letter addressed to the museum from his grandfather, dated before Bradford’s parents were even married. “It stated that someday a descendent of his would come to the American Museum to set the record straight.”

With this task, Bradford was also bound to his grandfather’s trophy, the man Verner might even have called his friend. Bradford describes his book as “a memorial to one of the bravest men of this twentieth century.” He is referring to the pygmy.

At the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, fourteen European countries and the United States granted King Leopold II a portion of the African continent seventy-six times larger than his own country. This was not a gift to the Belgian people or their parliament, it was the area of land that Leopold had hired the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to help him claim, and it was his.

Assisted by the chicotte, a whip made from hippopotamus hide, and a militia known as the Force Publique, infamous for its collection of victims’ hands, the king would tax the natives of his Congo Free State for a personal fortune in rubber and ivory. In 1908, he conceded his private colony to the Belgian state, largely in response to the century’s first international protest movement led by Edmund Morel, but not before approximately three million people had been killed (other estimates place that number higher).

Ota Benga stood four feet, eleven inches tall. He weighed about a hundred pounds. His teeth were sharpened to points. He hunted elephants, sometimes alone.

After succeeding in one of these solo pursuits in either 1903 or early 1904, Benga returned to his camp to find nearly every member of his tribe slaughtered, including his wife and children. He was captured by the Force Publique and placed in the possession of the Baschilele tribe, one known for its slave trade success.

That is where Special Agent Doctor Verner procured his first pygmy for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth. He had an order to fill and a deadline. W.J. McGee, president of the American Anthropological Association, had given Verner eight thousand five hundred dollars and a shopping list that included a pygmy chief, a priestess, two infants and a medicine man. They were to be delivered before the opening ceremonies of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in April 1904.

Verner ended up with Benga and four young adult males from the Batwa tribe, related but culturally distinct from Benga’s people. The men were offered the opportunity to travel to the land of the muzungus (westerners) and they accepted, but only in response to the enthusiasm of Benga himself.

Benga had joined Verner because his world and the worldview that framed it had been destroyed. As Bernard writes, “Atrocity brings with it the added anguish of disbelief, the shattering of faith,” and Benga assumed this white man was leading him to the land of the dead. It turned out he was also curious.

Between the territory of King Ndombe and a stop on the Mississippi, the pygmies experienced many firsts—an ocean liner, a train, a city, and men who ate meat three times a day. Verner arrived in New Orleans on a stretcher, cut down by malaria. His living exhibition traveled ahead of him to their destination—a fair that dwarfed all previous fairs, spread out over nearly two square miles. They resided alongside Eskimos, inhabitants of the conquered Philippines, the indigenous people of Japan (the Ainu), natives of South America, Zulus and representatives of fifty North American tribes.

Geromino, the Apache leader and United States prisoner of war, who had become a regular on the exhibition circuit, presented Benga with a stone arrowhead. The twenty-six year old African learned quickly that American crowds were often aggressive and to demand a nickel before bearing his teeth.

Verner won a grand prize for his presentation of the pygmies and the tribesmen received eight dollars and thirty-five cents worth of gifts that included a barrel of salt for King Ndombe and a fake pearl necklace. Verner also honored an unprecedented promise. He had taken indigenous people to the land into which so many Africans had disappeared, and he brought them back.

For the spectators and Batwas alike, the World’s Fair experience, a social movement to be negated by world war, showed them something they would never see again.

“It was as if the high point of their lives had already elapsed while they were still teenagers or children. Never again would they experience so many lights, hundreds of thousands of them, concentrated to such effect. Never again would mere electricity bear down upon their imaginations like a magical force.”

Ota Benga wasn’t finished. He threatened to drown himself in the Kasai River if Verner didn’t facilitate his return to the West. He wanted to read and speak English and continue his own study of the muzungus. Though the journalists, spectators and scientists were “impervious to the fact that their attention was returned. Ota wanted to know with equal intensity and a greater necessity what a Westerner was.”

They arrived in New York in 1906 with a monkey, a deadly snake and crates packed with tribal artifacts. Verner intended to sell his goods to the Smithsonian or the American Museum of Natural History for the highest bid and secure himself a well-paid position within one of those institutions. Transactions were made, but Verner’s reputation as a man unhinged by the ravages of tropical disease was dismissed. With his funds depleted, he set out on a lecture tour, arranging a deal with Director Herman C. Bumpus to have Benga sheltered amongst the exhibits at the Natural History Museum.

At first Benga enjoyed interacting with the guards and stealing away to his favorite spot atop a giant meteor that had plummeted to Earth hundreds of years before. He became restless, though, as life inside the building “deepened an impression he had formed at the fair; the muzungus swallowed other beings whole. What they couldn’t digest they deposited in fairs and museums.” His anxiety led to mischief and eventually revolt, culminating in the form of a chair sent whizzing inches from Florence Guggenheim’s head.

Hounded by the Guardian Trust Company for a two hundred and sixty-two dollar check, with his animals sick and the sheriff having confiscated half of his crates, Verner contacted William Temple Hornaday at the Bronx Zoological Gardens and transferred his snake, monkey and man into Hornaday’s care.

For two weeks, Benga wandered freely in western clothes, occasionally helping the keepers with their chores. He displayed interest and affection toward an orangutan named Dohong and was permitted to visit the animal at any time. Hornaday encouraged Benga to string up his hammock in an empty Monkey House cage that opened to an enclosure shared by Dohong and the chimpanzees. On September 8th, a target was constructed out of straw and Benga was cheered into demonstrating his skills with the bow.

Although this turn of events seemed to occur circumstantially, in response to Benga’s need for supervision and shelter, the result satisfied an initial intention. In 1899, Fairfield Osborn, President of the American Museum of Natural History and zoo trustee, had promised in his opening-day remarks that Bronx Zoo visitors would soon find New York’s original inhabitants, including elk, moose, deer and beaver, restored to “their old haunts” along with “all other noble aborigines of Manhattan.” Benga was not a member of the Delaware, Erie or Iroquois tribes, but, again, he became a spectacle.

One man who took interest in the zoo’s newest exhibit was Reverend R.S. MacArthur of the Calvary Baptist Church. He brought a delegation of African-American church leaders to visit Benga and assess the conditions in which he lived. MacArthur declared that, “The person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as he does the African,” but Benga appeared neither upset nor angry. It was only when Benga’s behavior again grew unpredictable that Hornaday wrote to Verner, expressing concern about the situation. The man responsible for Benga’s presence in American society suggested a sedative.

When Verner finally made his first appearance at zoo he said, “I heard you had a little trouble, Ota.” Benga responded, “Noise, Fwela, noise.”

On September 27th, Benga moved to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in New York, a black-run institution directed by Reverend James Gordon, wearing a pair of canvas shoes that the Bronx Zoo crowds had believed was his first and the white duck suit he had been given at the Museum of Natural History. Benga’s teeth were capped and he studied English while working on local farms to earn his board. He remained at Howard for three years, but Reverend Gordon, unable to fully convert Benga to the culture of his institution, ceded his mission.

“Ota was willing to learn English; he was not willing to unlearn the ways of the forest. He was willing to study the beliefs of the muzungu; he was not engaged in forgetting his own. What it came down to was a test of wills, or rather forest stealth versus a four-square Baptist approach.”

In 1909, Benga went south to Lynchburg, Virginia to continue his studies at a local seminary. He lived mostly outdoors, but integrated himself partially into the African-American community that knew him as Otto Bingo, teaching children as young as four to hunt and gather food in the forests.

After seven years, Benga was ready to go home. He inquired about the price of a trans-Atlantic ticket and realized he would never have the money. By this time, Verner was working as a medical officer on the Isthmus of Panama and had long fallen out of contact.

Bradford writes, “Ota never intended to remain abroad,” but what he hoped to return to remained unclear. Benga’s family and tribe were gone and, though Leopold II no longer held claim over the region, much of the brutality and exploitation persisted under the Belgian state.

On March 20, 1916 at five o’clock in the afternoon, Benga built a fire. He removed the caps from his teeth, danced, sang and shot himself in the heart with a revolver.

It would be difficult to argue that Ota Benga’s life suffered from his journey into America. He had escaped slavery and torture, and he remained inquisitive and open toward the westerners he encountered. Maybe, as Reverend MacArthur insisted, it was the men who displayed him as well as the admission-paying public who were truly degraded.

“Something about the boundary condition of being human was exemplified in that cage. Somewhere man shaded into non-man. Perhaps if they looked hard enough the moment of transition might be seen.”

The hunger for spectacle that placed Ota on his stage was and remains a powerful cultural force—humanity, a condition both stolen and fought for.

Principal source: Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, St. Martin’s Press (New York, 1992).

Related texts: King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild and In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo by Michela Wrong.

B.J. Leimgrubler (August 7, 1949 – August 27, 2007)

2007-09-11T00:27:00.001-05:00

B.J. is my friend Nick’s mother. She is also Erich’s mother. She is a mother to Jeremy. She is Tim’s wife. She is many things to many people, over a hundred and fifty of whom attended her memorial service at Eliot Unitarian Chapel last Saturday, but that is how I knew her.

Betty Jeanne Leimgrubler, was born in Los Angeles, California, the second of four children and the only girl. The family moved several times during her childhood, living in both Michigan and Texas. Her mother, Catherine Griswold Donnelly, suffered from manic depression and was institutionalized before B.J. entered the eighth grade. Her parents divorced that year and she started the fall semester in California, living with her Uncle Bud. Her father, Michael Edward Donnelly, remarried shortly after and took B.J. and his other children to live with his new wife’s family in Houston, Texas.

B.J. attended the University of North Texas in Denton, but transferred to Tulane University to be with John Thomas Leimgrubler, who she would marry. She graduated with a B.A. in Art History and the couple moved to St. Louis, where she got a job teaching art in the Parkway School District. Tom was a chemist.

In 1975, B.J. gave birth to her first son, Erich Leimgrubler. A year later, Tom died suddenly of a brain tumor. Months after her husband’s death, B.J.’s friends brought her to Eliot Unitarian Chapel.

Tim Gardner, also a member of the congregation, noticed B.J. on the first Sunday that she attended. He asked a friend about the “beautiful brunette with the childbearing hips” and how to pronounce her last name. They went on a few dates and Tim visited her when she was admitted to the hospital for mononucleosis and a bladder condition on separate occasions. He brought her daffodils, which became their flower.

B.J. and Tim got married two and half years after their introduction, in 1979. B.J. gave birth to her second son, Nicholas Gardner, in 1980. She began working at Community School, an independent elementary school in Ladue, a St. Louis County suburb. She liked working with young learners who seemed open to the creative process.

Shortly after she was hired, B.J. began experiencing the initial symptoms of multiple sclerosis in 1984. She continued teaching, but her speech became increasingly difficult for others to understand and the school eventually asked her to retire. Within three or four years of onset symptoms, B.J. demonstrated cognitive losses, an extremely advanced development in such a short period of time.

On July 11th, 1998, she was hospitalized with complications and on August 7th, her forty-ninth birthday, she was transferred to a skilled nursing care facility. She lived at the West County Care Center in Ballwin, Missouri for four years, then moved to the Lutheran Convalescent Home in Webster Groves for five more. There she received excellent services from a dedicated and compassionate staff.

On August 27, 2007 she died of complications related to multiple sclerosis in the presence of her husband, Tim. She was fifty-eight years old.

I had never been to a Unitarian Universalists’ church before Saturday. With the help of Wikipedia and Tim, I’ve learned that these Unitarians make up a theologically liberal community that champions a “creedless, non-dogmatic approach to spirituality and faith development.” They believe in the universality of salvation for all people. They trace their roots to Protestantism, but do not necessarily identify themselves as Christian.

This is, perhaps, one reason that the sanctuary at Eliot Chapel is striking and beautiful. There are no crosses or icons. The walls are white and the arched supports are darkly stained. Behind the pulpit, a set of windows frame a large pine.

My family and I arrived on time, but took seats in the last three rows as the sanctuary was already full. Others settled in the balcony or stood in the aisles. B.J.’s family entered and sat in the first row. A quiet piece was performed by flautist, Robert Charles Howard, who had played at B.J. and Tim’s wedding, and pianist, Sue Goldford. There were readings from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (49-52). Members of Tim’s former a capella ensemble, Random Access, sang Bobby McFerrin’s arrangement of the 23rd Psalm, which he arranged in the feminine declension in honor of his mother. Reverend Khleber Van Zandt also performed a song by Steve Key with Kathleen Mead and Sarah Reutter on backup.

“If my wheels skid in the rain / and you’re left alone to consol and explain, / tell ‘em that I / didn’t really die.”

“Don’t buy a grave, a box or a stone / Just buy everybody an ice cream cone / and tell ‘em that I / didn’t really die.”

Tim spoke after Nick, but I’ll share some of what he said first.

He began by describing B.J.’s commitment to life and her determination not to let go. He said he started singing gospel songs to her, like “Crossing Over” and “The River Jordan.” He said she finally succumbed out of self-defense. This inspired cathartic and much needed laughter throughout the chapel.

Tim went on to illustrate how B.J. had struggled and demonstrated her resolve even before developing M.S. She was diagnosed with dyslexia at the end of her college career. She confronted police officers in Texas who pulled over and detained her and her friends because she was the only white person in the car. She guided a stubborn Tim on a float trip down the Meramec River Basin. She communicated gracefully and compassionately with the children she taught, including Tim’s four-year-old son, Jeremy, who initially fled from her, screaming.

B.J. and Tim were married on a Super Bowl Sunday, and their minister, Reverend John Robinson, allowed them to write their own vows. Tim described John as a tolerant man, perhaps overly in this case as Tim chose to balance his composition on a metaphor about soup.

“What does that mean?” Tim asked. “‘I have tasted the soup, and it is good.’ What kind of a vow is that?”

“To have and to hold. For richer or poorer. For better or worse. In sickness or in health. That is a vow.”

“And thankfully, I believe, I’ve always believed, John was prayerfully chanting those vows as I droned on about tasting the soup. Because I kept her and she kept me. She is daughter and sister, aunt and cousin, mother and lover and dear dear friend. I have tasted the soup, and it is good.”

I didn’t know B.J. until I sat through this service. I only spoke with her a handful of times, and the majority of those interactions occurred when her disease prevented her from responding. I knew her as my friend Nick’s mom. I knew that she defined Nick, both in the way that she struggled and the way that she thrived.

I am grateful to know B.J. through the people that loved her and to have been present for a service as exquisite and loving as she.

I’d like to share what Nick said on Saturday about his mom. You should consider that he was addressing a packed sanctuary and that he was fighting to hold his composure. There is no need to qualify his words, though. His eloquence was with him.

This is what he said:

There’s a lot of people here. It’s really nice.

A lot of you knew my mom a lot longer than I did. And I just want to share a little bit…maybe. I just want to share a little bit about what I know, what I learned from her in her living and in her dying.

A few years ago, my grandfather, Martin Gardner Jr. (I’m sure many of you knew him) passed away in the same facility my mom lived in these past few years. He was ninety-six, and it was the most I could’ve imagined a person dying on his own terms. He was ready. He decided he was ready and we allowed him that opportunity. And it was powerful to see a person so ready and so able to embrace the next step.

During that time, just a floor away, was my mom, living in the same building he lived in. Fighting to live.

I think it’s easy for many of us to be really happy for my mom because she’s free. What’s harder is to consider her fight. Her unequivocal kindness, the whole time. The way that she lived and the way that she died. Her absolute defiance of what was happening to her. Unlike my grandfather just a floor away, she never accepted what was going on.

But coupled with that fight, that defiance, she had a tender, giving spirit. Anybody could walk by and say, “Hi B.J.” and she’d say “Hi” and smile. Just always smile and people loved her for that where she was because it was so rare. So many people there just wanted to go, you know. Just wanted to let go. She didn’t want to let go, but she never made people deal with that. That was hers. She just wanted people to be happy around her and for them to share her spirit.

And so, while I, as much as any of you, might be relieved that my mom is no longer suffering, I think that what might be better for us and what I think would be better for me is to learn from the way that she lived and the way that she died. And that might be more appropriate than to be happy for her that she’s no longer going through what she went through for the last twenty or so years. I think it might be more an honor to her to fight harder for what we all deserve in life and to not accept what’s just given to us. And to expect more for us and for everybody around us. And constantly, constantly give. More than you have or that you owe or anybody deserves. To the people around you. Because that’s what she did. She never wanted to die. No matter how hard it was. How bad. She wanted to live. And she lived with kindness. Every day.

Donations can be made in B.J.’s honor to the Lutheran Convalescent Home at 723 South Laclede Station Road, 63116, Gateway Area Multiple Sclerosis Society at 1867 Lackland Hill Parkway, 63146, or the Women’s Alliance of Eliot Unitarian Chapel at 216 East Argonne, 63122.

These Middling Masses – Eric Saitta, L.Ac MSTCM

2007-09-07T14:31:00.000-05:00

Eric began with ten questions.

“How’s your appetite?” he asked.

“Fierce,” I said.

“Any bloating or discomfort?”

“No.”

“Do you ever experience loose bowel movements, diarrhea or constipation?”

His line of questioning was less surprising than the experience of entering his office. At the penthouse level of an eleven-story building in the center of Clayton, a St. Louis County suburb not far from Downtown, Eric’s clients are treated to what must be a health-enhancing view of maple-lined neighborhoods and the city’s infant light rail system. Past the gurgling fountain, a Buddha and the black leather chairs at reception, three treatment rooms outfitted with new massage tables and rolls of sanitary parchment invite sufferers from every camp.

I know Eric from high school. He’s no longer eighteen or uncertain about his life’s trajectory. He’s a licensed acupuncturist and Chinese herbologist. Having earned a master’s degree from the American Academy of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine in St. Paul, Minnesota last January, he opened Upper Star, a Traditional Chinese Medicine clinic, less than two months ago.

“You’re tongue is kind of pale and your pulse is a little weak, but, generally, you seem to be pretty healthy.”

I was wasting his time.

When I first contacted Eric, I thought I’d play the guinea pig (or “sea pig” as they called them in Russia) and also ask him how it felt to leap from the ledge of dreams. I didn’t realize that without an ache or disorderly organ, acupuncture wasn’t for me.

“Traditional Chinese Medicine does work very well as a preventive medicine,” Eric said. “In ancient times, the doctors were only paid if their patients remained healthy.”

He didn’t charge me for non-services, but did offer to help my sister, Katie, a fiber artist of the finest stitch. She’s been suffering from chronic back and shoulder pain for the past eight years. It started when she was running cross-country in high school and has been compounded by two or three car accidents and a very poor massage recently administered in Savannah, Georgia.

Eric indicated that a series of acupuncture treatments would be most effective in addressing her pain, but, as she was scheduled to leave St. Louis in less than a week, a Chinese-style massage would provide temporary relief.

He asked her to rate the pain on a scale of one to ten, so Katie, with her middled heart, said five. Eric led her into one of the treatment rooms and asked her to lie down. She didn’t have to remove any clothing and massage oils were not involved.

I hovered for a few minutes, taking photos until I felt weird, then returned to the reception area to chat with Eric’s girlfriend and head receptionist, Sunisa, about life in the St. Louis suburbs. She’s originally from Nakhonsawan, Thailand and is currently working towards a master’s in Advertising and Market Communications at Webster University. The suburbs are, “okay.”

After the treatment, Katie looked like she’d plunged eight stories into a large down pillow. Eric had worked with an acupressure point just below her ankle and Katie said that some kind of energetic response had traveled all the way to her head. Her shoulder felt righteous.

Eric and I left Katie melting in reception and went into a corner office where he conducts consultations at a glass table. I asked him how he discovered acupuncture and the steps that led him to his own practice.

At age nineteen, Eric met a chiropractor who introduced him to natural medicine. Though Eric took an interest in the profession, he eventually wanted to pursue a “more holistic” approach to medicine and health. While living in Columbia, Missouri, he checked out a book documenting a series of clinical studies in acupuncture that he described as “boring.”

“I just fell in love with it, right then.”

Having completed his four-year study, Eric has treated patients with conditions as serious as cancer and advanced mental disorders stemming from brain damage. Though he is currently working with a patient who suffered a stroke five weeks ago in an effort to overcome the resulting motor impairment, the majority of cases, like Katie’s, are related to chronic pain.

With, according to Eric’s estimation, only ten to fifteen practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine currently serving the St. Louis Metropolitan area, he believes that bringing his skills home was the right decision.

“It’s a really good time to get started here. As the trend towards natural medicine continues in St. Louis, as it has in other cities, I’ll have more opportunity to expand and help as many people as I can.”

Eric is scheduled to speak at a forum in October hosted by the Arthritis Foundation of Eastern Missouri, which could attract more clients, though Eric puts most of his faith in the word of mouth.

“It just takes the right patient to come in and have success and then they’ll tell everyone they know.”

Though Traditional Chinese Medicine continues to be practiced in an alternative market, Eric believes it’s just a matter of time before its potential is acknowledged as an important component of the healthcare industry.

“Right now, Western science and medicine are having a hard time recognizing why acupuncture works. They see that it does work because of controlled clinical trials, but they can’t explain why.”

“So,” you might ask, “what have you really learned from your visit to Eric Saitta’s ultra sleek and professional office?”

I’ll let Eric field that one.

“In Chinese Medicine, the kidney is the most important organ in the whole body. That’s very strange from a Western perspective, but the kidneys regulate growth and development. They also regulate sexual function and the body’s yin and yang. By treating the kidney, you can treat every other organ.”

Cool.

If you’d like to visit Eric for consultation and treatment, he’s located at 200 South Hanley Road, Suite 1103. He’s also got a website and a phone (314 727-2463).

Language Lessons

2007-09-06T13:22:00.000-05:00

My friend Edan Lepucki isn’t from here, but she has invested several key developmental years in two “heartland” states, Ohio and Iowa. Out of all the people I know, Edan is the best fiction writer. Out of the whole world, she’s like number five. She teaches Creative Writing in her living room and is working on her first novel. She lives with her husband, Patrick, and Omar Little, a dog.

In this installment, Edan examines the disparities in dialect that keep people from recognizing the “me” in “you.”

Once, after poking fun at my friend Molly’s Kalamazoo, Michigan accent, she said, “At least I don’t sound like a speech therapist.” Perhaps she had a point—maybe growing up in Los Angeles leaves one sounding like a bland newscaster. Maybe, just maybe, I have a non-accent, and I should shut my mouth.

But, how can I not share with you the strange speech patterns and word choices of the residents of Iowa City? This Angeleno spent two years in that fair city, and, boy, did I hear a lot of nutty stuff.

For one, at the Hy-vee on Dodge (that’s the local supermarket, people), the check-out girl in braces will ask if you want your milk in a sack. “A sack?” you might ask. She means bag.

Once when I asked, “Why do you always ask specifically about the milk?” my cashier gave me a shy smile, straightened her yellow and black Hawkeye tie (ties being part of the unfortunate uniform) and said, “Because the container already has a handle.” Oh. Of course.

Also: If you’re a native Iowan, you probably giggled at my use of the word supermarket. My students fell into a roar when I dropped that bomb. I remember one kid saying, “Supermarket? What’s so super about it?” Apparently, the word is grocery store, or just plain “market”.

Once, during office hours, one of my favorite students came to see me about her nonfiction piece she was working on. We discussed various revision possibilities, her nodding all the way through, and at the end, she said, “Can of corn, cool, can of corn!” What? Apparently, that means something along the lines of, “Easy as pie.” My husband Patrick tells me this is a somewhat common phrase in sports, but it was news to me.

On my last day of teaching at the University of Iowa, my students and I threw a class party. It was a potluck, and I brought bagels and cream cheese, always a crowd pleaser. One student brought Puppy Chow…that is, Puppy Chow, Iowa style, a party snack made with Crispix cereal, chocolate chips, and other sweet and sugary ingredients. It’s not bad, actually. But get this: One of my students had never tried a bagel! (Also, he pronounced the first syllable as if it rhymed with “hag” but with a more nasally, flatter “a”). I couldn’t believe it; I mean, hasn’t everyone eaten a bagel, even a crappy Lenders one? When I expressed my surprise, another kid piped up, “You should talk, Edan, you’ve never had Puppy Chow!” True, so true.

Now that I’m back in California, I miss Iowa, and its Iowans, with their big smiles and their game of Bags (pronounced like “begs”, and rhyming with the second syllable in “nutmeg”), a spring and summer past time of tossing beanbags into a box with holes. A good people, for sure. I look forward to living and teaching in Ohio next spring, to see what new Midwestern speech patterns puzzle and awe me.

Tinned Eats

2007-09-04T21:48:00.000-05:00

In 2006, Hawaii BBQ on Olive Boulevard claimed an uncontested victory in the “Best Use of Worst Meat” category in the Riverfront Times’ “Best of St. Louis” competition. The blue ribbon dish was “Spam Musubi.” According to our local free weekly (though “local” here meaning “owned by a New York-based media company”), “Hawaii leads all states in per-capita SPAM consumption.”

Upon reading this statement, I went straight to the official SPAM website for confirmation. What I found was some of the most disturbing web content on the Internet. The main page apparently over-taxed my wireless connection, breaking down the opening montage into a David Lynchian horror show. The “What is SPAM?” question and answer section features the voice of an actor playing God who fields tough ones like, “What does SPAM taste like?” and “Is SPAM only for emergencies?”

This aimless research started with my own query, “What can a restaurant legitimately include on its menu?”

At the Tin Can Tavern and Grille, located south of Tower Grove Park, the answer lies between the rosemary gravy-covered pot roast and the grilled cheese served with sweet tomato bisque. For $5.25 diners can either relive frugal childhood years or sail into uncharted waters with the fried bologna sandwich presented on Texas toast with American cheese.

When I checked out “The Can” last weekend with my friends, Tim and Beth, I opted for the “Bottom Dweller,” a cornmeal-encrusted, fried catfish sandwich. It was good. Tim said his pork steak was a little dry and Beth guessed that the salad dressing was bottled. I was more taken with the ambiance. Despite some dodgy outdoor seating, the place pulls off a well-lit medium between diner and bar.

To the right of the entrance, personalized can cozies await several hundred regulars who I assume are not drinking draft.

This may seem excessively odd, but, then again, nothing offends the sensitive palate more than a tepid wine cooler.

Concept Check

2007-09-03T20:59:00.000-05:00

A number of Middled readers do not live in the Midwest. By birth or calling, they identify themselves with what locals here might consider the outlying regions. You know—New York, Hollywood and the like. While these dispersed peoples understandably crave insight into Midwestern culture, they may find themselves distracted by local issues or trends completely irrelevant to the Central States. Possibly, the decline of the subprime mortgage market or a recent splurge on affordable children’s toys has kept that St. Louis or Dubuque getaway weekend just out of reach. Between dips in the Hudson and cruising the Orlando strip, these readers might feel crunched for Internet time and therefore pestered by the question, “What does Middled do for me?”

Think of this blog as an armless emergency poncho. In this comparison, the filmy plastic represents Middled’s thematic capacity. Though, reasonably, only one head can utilize the head hole at a time, there’s plenty of room for several bodies under the poncho’s minimal shelter.

One theme is that I live in St. Louis and need to eat. I also need to have conversations with interesting people and probably exercise. This theme has geographic parameters.

Another theme is that I’m twenty-seven and troubled by the inkling that generations of twenty-seven year olds before me had a firmer hold on those purpose/identity-forming tools used to rig up the suspension lines of adulthood (mysterious things, those). My own meandering has been enabled by privilege and opportunity and I’m thankful for it, but I sense that I’m not the only one in this radar-less boat. This theme is willing to cross the state line.

Regardless of age, professional talents, convictions or race, people get middled. Some more seriously than others, but the stickiness has a familiar pull. It’s hard to know how to move or where to move to. That’s what I’d like to explore—how people get moving.

What I do know is that if you get a flat tire on the highway during a thunderstorm, you need you’re poncho. Once you take it out, it’s really hard to repack into tiny pillow form, so you might as well wear it all the time.