Four years ago, I decided to spend time in the poor southern region of Illinois (“Little Egypt”) where I am from. It was a bit like exploring the ruins of an abandoned civilization. I saw small towns that had once been rich from mining or river commerce. Once sizable towns had been reduced to modest, impoverished rims surrounding once busy squares, once grand theaters, and outsized public buildings. I saw ragged curtains flapping through broken store windows, oasis-like village cafes, and the desolate main street of the town I grew up in. It was haunted by my memories of alluring movie shows, artful coffee shops, and suave clothing stores. I visited libraries which had become like outposts of light and learning in the Merovingian obscurity that seemed to have descended on this once proud and thriving region. One thing surprised me: the tenacious attachment of the poorest to their home region. There were small farmers and a welder who had returned from elsewhere to their meager farmsteads; there was a Black fast-food worker who lived in a decrepit trailer park which he proudly tended and revered for its location on the Shawnee Trail; an older community college auxiliary, also Black, who, despite a personal history of humiliations, declared that she wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. My sense had been that everyone with a strong will and higher aspirations had fled the region. Not so: there were regional patriots, holdouts who networked with others who shared their lore and loyalty. I called my account of this region: Egyptian Darkness and the Diaspora of Light.
I just finished reading a debut novel by a young writer with family roots in Southern Illinois and East Texas: Rachel Cochran’s The Gulf. The main character and narrator Louisa Ward is attached to her no less declining Gulf Coast town of Parson, Texas. Once supported by a slave plantation and a local factory owned by the Parson family, but long since abandoned by the family whose labyrinthine mansion on a seaside promontory is first a town museum and later the property of Kate Darnell, Parson is loved by few. To Louisa it is the only home she has ever known and to a handful of abused women a sanctuary. The women have found protection under the wing of the strong and possessive Peg. Kate and Peg are imposing and mysterious older pillars of the community. Louisa and her composite family, friends, and former friends are a younger generation, held in Parson by their tangled roots, relationships, guilt, and obligations. Kate, a surrogate mother to Louisa, has died under suspicious circumstances. Her daughter Joanna has arrived to renovate, with Louisa’s workmanship, the mansion for sale. The tense plot of The Gulf is the untangling of those roots, the unmasking of the older generation, and the consolidation of the new. Set in the mid 60s, the novel is representative of a major facet of the time’s sea change: the beginning of militant feminism and the related emergence of a queer society within society. The love interests of the novel are almost all lesbian or bisexual; they relate to a restructuring of social relationships which pit the patriarchal rule against an intersectional affinity of the racially or sexually excluded and oppressed.
What compounds and intensifies these elements is, for me, not so much the sexual politics, but rather the evocation of a place symbolic and concrete: the community which is dying and in the tormented process of being reborn. The “gulf” separates and unites its peripheral inhabitants, just as the rivers that make Southern Illinois a landlocked peninsula fix and at the same time undo its identity. From my perspective facing my own end, everything embodies death and transformation.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 